# The Diary of Industrial Risk. Miners' Safety Delegates and their Work Environment (1890 – c. 1980)

Charles-Antoine Wanecq, Bastien Cabot

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Charles-Antoine Wanecq, Bastien Cabot. The Diary of Industrial Risk. Miners' Safety Delegates and their Work Environment (1890 – c. 1980). World Economic History Congress, Jul 2025, Lund (Sweden), Sweden. hal-05444464

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« The Diary of Industrial Risk.
Miners’ Safety Delegates and their Work Environment (1890-c. 1980) ».

On July 8, 1890, the French government passed a bill that would create a new institution in the mines: miners’ safety delegates (MDs). MDs were elected by their peers every three years. They were in charge of a mining district (or *circonscription*) whose location was decided by State engineers. The law would grant them two main purposes: first, to visit underground galleries in order to identify any potential danger; second, to lead an inquiry in case of an accident. The overall ambition was to point out the dangers that State and company engineers were not able to *see* or to *detect*. In this respect, MDs provided what we would now call a counter-expertise to that of State and company engineers.

MDs had to report their observations on a record that had to be read both by the employer and the State engineer. As a result, a single safety delegate could write more than 300 reports every year, where he provided a first-person account of his working environment: it was a *diary of industrial risk* in the mines. Yet, although these documents are incredibly valuable for historians of mining, historians of work, and even historians dealing with the environmental history of work, the existing literature on the French mining industry since the 1960s has not paid much attention to this source. It was only a couple of years ago that Charles and I realized that these archives constituted a hidden continent of thousands and thousands of reports that had been written since 1890 to the very end of the mining industry in France in the 2000s.

Based on the study of 5 cases (Bassin du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 1890-1914; 1970-1980; Bassin de la Loire, 1890-1914; Bassin de Salsigne, 1966-1973; Bassin de la Mure, 1960-1970; Bassin de Lorraine, 1970), the ambition of this paper is to put this source into dialogue with the existing literature on mining safety. As many historians have shown, mining safety has increased all along the 19th and 20th century: the rate of fatalities, accidents and death has been declining almost constantly, as can be seen in figures showing a flattening curve. The main reasons for the securitisation of mines are generally twofold: on the one hand, economic investments in safety improvements (such as the so-called “small-scale technologies”, see: Silvestre & Murray, 2015); on the other hand, better workforce training and education (see: Escudier & Conus, 1997). But what was the impact of MDs in mining safety and securitisation? Is it even possible to calculate this impact? Did they have any impact at all? These are among the questions that we would like to examine in this paper.

1. The work of counter-expertise. What do MDs write about?

Despite the great diversity in the form, the MDs' reports nevertheless share certain common features across the period and the basins. Firstly, they describe the day-to-day working conditions in the mines, through routine inspections to check compliance with working hours, the main safety standards, the equipment used by the workers and the hygiene of the workings, which became their responsibility in 1907 after the hookworm epidemic. Their role was also to draw up reports after every accident in their district. Another constant feature was the reference to general regulations and labour law standards: this enabled the miners' representatives to develop a common language with the engineers. On the other hand, these reports also testify to a form of adaptability and inventiveness on the part of the workers, to the operating context, to new risks and to the technical and economic evolution of the companies.

The case of coaldust is a fascinating example to understand how the perception and interpretation of hazards evolved with time, and how it challenged, anticipated or followed up the
existing safety rules. From 1890 to the early 1910s', coaldust was barely mentioned in MDs'
reports. It all changed after the 1906 Courrières' disaster, where the role of coaldust into the
explosion that made 1099 victims was highlighted by the administration. In 1907, the French
government ordered a number of studies to the existing "Firedamp Committee" (*Commission du
grisou*, created in 1877), in order to prevent this hazard. The work of the Committee resulted in a
1911 General Regulation (*Règlement général*) that settled the rules for the use of lamps according
to the dustiness of galleries, imposed the collection of dust samples and their chemical analysis,
and eventually prescribed safety measures such as the watering of galleries. As a result, MDs
began paying attention to coaldust just around 1910-1911. For example, on September 5, 1912,
safety delegate Mottaz, in the Loire mining district, noted that the "Marseille" pit lacked
ventilation, and that this was contrary to the General Regulation which ordered that "there had to
be a constant airstream, enough to determine the sanitation of the pit, avoid any rise in
temperatures, and prevent against the dangers of noxious gases, smokes and dusts, which hardly
escape this area". As we can understand here, the attention paid towards dust was mostly related
to the prevention of explosion.

But that was not the only dimension, for, at the same moment, the National Federation of Miners was also beginning to put the fight against occupational diseases - above all, black lung disease (anthracosis) and silicosis - at its agenda. As most MDs were also members of unions, they were definitely aware of the dangers of coaldust for laboring bodies. For example, the next year in 1913, Mottaz wrote again: "The Ondaine pit is being holed with mechanical jackhammers, there is a lack of hygiene, the health of miners is being compromised in an indisputable way. (...) I call for the intervention of engineers, so that they realize how exhausting this work is, moreover when two jackhammers operate in the same gallery, making the atmosphere filled with dust that (...) harms the breathing of miners". In this respect, miners' delegates truly anticipated the legal recognition of dust-related diseases that would only happen thirty years later in 1945.

The issue of coaldust became central in the 1930s, when a transnational definition of
silicosis as an occupational disease was developed. MDs gradually took up the subject, which
became a major political issue in the post-war period. The implementation of preventive
measures, which were the responsibility of engineers, received particular attention from the MDs,
whose reports were full of comments on the shortcomings of dust control. The expression
'nothing abnormal apart from the dust' in a report published in the Dauphiné on 21 January 1969
suggests that dust nuisance was the norm. Between a third and a half of the comments in the
register of the mining delegate at La Mure between 1967 and 1970 referred to nuisances
associated with dust or ventilation. These reports bear witness to an expertise that highlights the
company's lack of investment in worker protection, as in this observation: "Pay attention to dust
neutralisation. 1) run all the sprinklers, 2) repair damaged sprinklers and tighten the fittings on
them, 3) put a tap on the water ramp to turn off the water during stoppages, thus avoiding
unnecessary wetting of ground". The placement of hoovers or dust sprinklers was the subject of
frequent and often very precise comments, enabling MDs to assert his expertise.

The trade unions also drew on the records of the MDs to demonstrate the limitations of the
prevention measures introduced by *Charbonnages de France*. For example, the secretary of the
CGT underground workers' federation Léon Delfosse wrote to the Department for Industry in
1964, citing several reports: in the Nord department, he emphasised the malfunctioning of water
sprayers on cutting machines, which meant that 'in such a case, the whole site is plunged into a
thick fog, where the miner suffocates and vomits'. In the Dauphiné, the 1963 annual report stated
that 'dust control has been abandoned, on the grounds that water injections in the districts are
ineffective and cause landslides'. These examples reveal the decisive role played by the MDs in implementing a silicosis prevention policy. Some reports also noted the presence of silicosis workers on building sites, while others referred to the 1956 instruction on dust control. In the 1980s, the CFDT also asked the Department to increase the role of MDs and health and safety committees.

## 2. The relationship between MDs, engineers and employers. A fractured dialogue?

Although the existence of MDs was supposed to institutionalise dialogue on safety within companies, a form of mutual distrust with engineers and operators characterised their relationships. The difficulty of dialogue therefore characterised these exchanges between the main safety actors. This can be seen firstly in the form of the source itself: observations were supposed to be followed by a response from the engineer and the operator. However, there is very little evidence of this. Generally, when engineers responded to delegates' comments, they minimized their significance. As a result, MDs regularly complained that they were not listened to, either in trade unions or when they wrote to the prefect directly about operating anomalies. When companies or engineers intervened, it was primarily to re-establish order in the company.

### 2.1. *A class-based antagonism.*

In order to explain the difficulties that MDs faced when reporting the hazards they observed, it is important to understand that this institution was, since the very beginning, fully rooted into class relationships. The institution was a long standing claim of the miners' labour movement, raised at least since 1848. It was part of a bigger ideal of industrial democracy – sometimes with radical implications: miners thought of themselves as more qualified for running the mines than the entrepreneurs and the engineers, so that these latter could legitimately be expelled. This is the reason why employers and engineers were so reluctant to it: as parliamentary debates between 1882 and 1890 show, they feared that MDs' positions would be occupied by union representatives undercover, with the main purpose of bringing politics into the pits. Nevertheless, between the first version of the bill in 1882 and its official vote in 1890, these hidden intentions were somehow mitigated. To appease employers and engineers, the 1890 law punished any form of political expression from part MDs. But it did not succeed in avoiding a politicization of the institution: MDs were, most of the time, union members, union representatives, and even endorsed local political responsibilities in left-leaning parties. For example, in Carmaux, between 1891 and 1913, only 7 out of 27 MDs did not belong to the "red" (socialist) local union.

One of the many expressions of this class-based antagonism were the concerns about the cost of this counter-expertise. Of course, the payment of MDs represented a burden for mining companies, since they had to pay back the State after it had initially covered the visiting rounds of MDs every month. But even heavier was the economic burden of their expertise *per se*, for MDs would constantly push for a better record of accidents, which meant increasing the compensation that companies had to offer to wounded workers. For example, in the Loire mining district, one company engineer complained that the number of accidents resulting in more than 20 days of unemployment rose from 87 in 1911 to 264 in 1913, therefore that the average unemployment length went from 13 days to 17.5 days, and eventually that the overall company expenses in compensations had come from ten thousand French francs in 1911 to forty thousand in 1913. Similarly, in Anzin, the company pharmacist complained that the overall drugs expenses had risen from seventeen thousand French francs in 1899 to nearly sixty thousand in 1900 - a rise
he attributed to the “ever-increasing needs of workers, caused and nurtured by the ongoing excitation of political activists”.

The question of the boundaries of the districts was also the subject of debate and negotiation between miners' representatives, mining engineers and operators. For financial reasons, it was in the operator's interest to reduce the number of districts, and therefore the number of visits and MDs. While the companies developed work rationalisation in the North, which resulted in a reduction in the number of workers, the decision to abolish the Trou-Martin district and merge it with the Vieux-Condé district provoked a reaction from the miners' delegates: they denounced the threat to safety and called on the prefect, pointing out 'how little regard the operator paid to the miners' delegate's many reports'. After the merger, the Communist MP wrote to the Prefect in support of the miners' representatives' request, pointing out that they had to ensure the safety of more than 870 workers at the two pits, including more than 270 at Trou-Martin. However, the accounting logic of the mining engineers did not go in the same direction: they considered that, for a roughly equivalent number of accidents before and after the merger, a single miners' representative would be sufficient for all the sites.

## 2.2. *Lay expertise* VS *scientific knowledge*.

MDs also had to face another type of opposition, related to the legitimacy of their own expertise. This opposition came mainly from mining engineers who had been trained in prestigious State schools (École des Mines, École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures), and who sought to preserve the prevalence of their scientific knowledge, as opposed to the empirical (or “lay”) expertise of MDs. For example, in most MDs reports we have read so far, State mining engineers had a poor appreciation of their work, and considered the role of MDs to be marginal. Some reports, particularly after accidents, emphasise the deafness of the engineers and operators to the warnings issued by the MDs: in a report dated 17 February 1984 after a fatal accident, the mines delegate cited the 12 observations he had made over several months to point out the risks. The steward then invoked the law of 23 December 1982 on the right of withdrawal: ‘I request the right of the MD to stop a worksite in the event of danger to the life and health of staff’. Additionally, as MDs only had an advisory function, State engineers always had the last word - and this word was frequently different from those of MDs. For example, on March 18, 1969, in La Mure, when the MDs said that the work sites were ‘always very dusty’ and asked for permission to water more, the engineer replied that ‘this statement is strictly inaccurate’ and said that he was fighting against watering that he considered excessive, sometimes ‘without dust or even coal’.

Nevertheless, State engineers were not always opposed to MDs. As soon as in the first decade of its existence, safety delegates began to be granted legitimacy and recognition. For example, in the Nord department, archives have kept the record of the judgment cast by State engineers over MDs observations between 1891 and 1901, whether they were said to be “founded” or “unfounded”. Our calculations show that, over 943 reports, the part of “founded” observations lagged around 50% in 1891-1892, but rose to nearly 70% in 1900-1901. Meanwhile, at the 1900 international conference on occupational hazards, State mining engineer and social reformer Arthur Fontaine stated: “The institution of miners’ delegates has not helped reducing significantly the number of severe accidents, but the role of miners’ delegates has been to present a series of observations that have helped improve hygiene in the mines, and reduce the number of minor accidents”. Three years later, French lawyer Paul Pic noted that the proportion of killed miners had shifted from 19.2 out of 10,000 in 1883-1890, to 11.2 in 1890-1898. He wondered: could this shift be attributed to MDs? According to Pic, the reduction of death in French mining
was mostly the result of the struggle against firedamp explosions, led by State engineers since
1877: their efforts brought the proportion of killed miners (due to firedamp explosion) from 7 out
of 10,000 in 1883-1890 to 0.7 in 1890-1898. Nevertheless, he concluded: "it would be excessive
to attribute the credit for this significant improvement exclusively to the action of the miners'
delegates. However, it cannot be denied that the zeal shown by the delegates in exercising their
mission of trust played a large part in the result obtained".

All in all, there is no doubt that the gaze towards the institution of MDs was shifting in the 20th century. But shall we conclude that the expertise of MDs was slowly being considered equal to that of engineers? In fact, all these statements and figures shouldn't hide the fact that despite the recognition MDs won, when it came to small, or minor, or individual accidents (such as landslides accidents), their expertise still suffered suspicion in case of disasters, or collective accidents - for it remained the reserved sphere of State engineers. This also helps understand why their language, and the work of counter-expertise, evolved over the course of the century. While they had a global vision of the working environment at the beginning of the period, their expertise was gradually refocused on devices, which enabled them to share the language of the engineers. While engineers generally did not respond to the MSDs' observations, the frequency of the engineer's responses is surprising in the register of the mining delegate at La Mure between 1967 and 1970 – an anomaly that also gives the impression of a desire to demonstrate control over the activity and a certain zeal in terms of safety. Lastly, the drafting of annual reports by the MDs also introduced a new form of assessment in the 1970s. This type of document gave the MDs the opportunity to offer a global and synthetic view of the situation of the worksites. Forwarded to the prefectural administration, it provided MDs with a new point of contact.

### 3. How to assess the impact of MDs on mining safety?

Between the 1830s and the 1980s, the number of miners killed while working underground in French mining has declined significantly. In coal mines for example, the number of killed workers per million tons of coal has been divided by fifty, from ±60 deaths per million tons in the 1820s to ±1 in the 1980s. But how to assess the impact of MDs on this long-term trend? In fact, it is almost impossible to answer this question. The reasons are manyfold, but they are mostly related to methodological issues. Processing the source from a comparative perspective is a challenge for historians. Firstly, the form of the registers is very heterogeneous, as is the way in which they are filled in, which is an obstacle to serial analysis. Secondly, this source needs to be systematically cross-referenced with documents produced by the bodies responsible for safety especially from the 1950s, such as engineers' meetings, or with the creation of health and safety committees in the mines from 1976 onwards. Nevertheless, this quantitative dead-end shouldn't make us lose sight of the qualitative aspects of this institution in the long run. In other words, it is the MDs as an institution rooted in labour relations that is of interest for us. We aim to understand how MDs have changed labour relations, how they implemented a "culture" of occupational risks, and therefore how they probably led to a better account taken of safety, both by employers and by miners themselves. To that end, we highlight three significant features of this institution.

#### 3.1. MDs as safety and institutional experts

The creation of health and safety committees in the 1970s led to a change in the role of MDs: while their duties remained the same, they were called upon to intervene on these committees and sometimes to justify their expertise, which could be called into question depending in particular on the trade union affiliations of the various workers' representatives. This raises the question of the loss of centrality of the MDs: generally their expertise was
recognised, but increasingly challenged by a wide range of actors who are developing their own views on health and safety. During the 1970s and 1980s, the institution itself evolved: foreign workers were granted the right to vote in 1975, while the standardisation of pay between pools was introduced in the early 1980s. The surface MDs finally asked to be treated in the same way as the underground MDs.

## 3.2. *MDs as political and economic experts*

It is difficult to write an economic history, but it is possible to write a political history of the MDs' action on safety: they became central figures in making mines safe, and their expertise was central to joint bodies. The recession and the context of mechanisation changed the way MDs' expertise was viewed. For example, a note from an engineer in the Lorraine iron mines shows how rarely MDs and engineers actually interacted, apart from visiting each other when there was an accident at work. He suggested regular meetings: "Apart from these effective contacts, we can't expect to see any serious progress in safety and hygiene as a result of the role of MDs under the current regulations and environment, apart from the small, very small everyday issues".

The economic context of the recession, causing a sharp rise in the number of accidents, finally helped to politicise the comments made by the MDs, as in the case of an accident on December 9, 1981, in the North of France: "The coal policy, the mining recession with its pit closures, these transfers (which lengthen working hours and increase the fatigue and recovery difficulties of these workers), the shortage of staff (with no recruitment for a long period), the average age, which means that older workers are still employed in jobs that no longer match their skills, all contribute to the deplorable number of accidents". In many observations, the lack of investment in safety in this period of recession is even becoming a leitmotif of the denunciation of the deterioration in working conditions.

## 3.3. *MDs as environmental experts?*

Since its very origin in 1890, MD institution was designed to examine underground activities. Safety delegates therefore focused much more on the *working environment* underground, than on environmental consequences of mining, such as ground subsidence. Nevertheless, from 1946 onwards, a new category of MDs was created in order to visit surface activities - the so-called "délégués du jour" (day-light, or surface delegates). Surface activities comprised many operations, but one of the most important was the chemical transformation of extracted ore. These were seriously contaminating processes, both for workers and the environment. They therefore raise the question of to what extent were MDs concerned not only by occupational hazards, but also by environmental ones.

The case of arsenic extraction and transformation in Salsigne, a small mining district in the south of France, offers some answers to this question. Pollution of the surrounding area by arsenical and sulphuric smoke had been a contentious issue between residents and the mining company since the early 20th century. It became a matter of concern for surface MDs only in the late 1960s. Reports show how much the surface MD was concerned about occupational diseases caused by arsenic dust that was spilled all over the working place, with no respect to safety rules. But he also warned against the dangers that these toxic spillovers could have on the immediate surroundings. For example, on November 3, 1970, he wrote: "I'd like to point out that a large number of residents of the workers' housing are complaining about the density of arsenic dust and the gases that pollute the atmosphere." Later, on April 3, 1973, he stated: "During my visit, I noted the same observations as in previous reports: gas leaks, defective cleaning, roofs in poor
condition (...). I would like to point out that the cleaning is done with a lot of water, which risks polluting the Orbiel river.”

These are only but a few examples of references to environmental contamination. However, this attention paid towards toxic spillovers did not necessarily led to a form of working-class environmentalism. It was rather a way to add weight to the charge against the mining company - and to stress the need for the implementation of technical improvements.