Covered in Coal: Examining Workplace Injury, Illness, and Fatality in the Film Blood on the Mountain
Venue: New solutions a journal of environmental and occupational health policy NS
Year: 2020

Documentary films, like other media such as big budget movies, newsprint, television, or social media, can influence public perceptions about political, economic, and cultural issues and help mobilize people to action. As "claimsmakers," documentarians help define social issues, persuade audiences of their importance, and propose solutions. Some documentaries achieve these goals with international and longstanding impact: the films are released at opportune times when their intended messages generate, and resonate with, public opinion. Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) or Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth (2006) are two examples of how documentaries about the degradation of work and environment, respectively, achieved national and international impacts with their legacies sealed by their inspirations for further thought, investigation, and calls to action. Blood on the Mountain (2016) directed by Mari Lynn C. Evans and Jordan Freeman, is a documentary about coal extraction, in its different modes, over the course of approximately 120 years in West Virginia from the discovery of coal as a "miracle fuel" to the industry's decline in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But it is more than that: it wants to share with the world what happens when human health and the environment are subordinated to profit. It critiques industrial capital and its supporting political institutions for their contributions to occupational peril, workplace indignity, and environmental blight in an economically peripheral region of the United States. The documentary is particularly salient following debates about the coal industry during the 2016U.S. Presidential election campaigns, with 2017 legislation that proposed regressive changes to West Virginia mining safety and health regulations, and the U.S. Congress' cutting of the coal excise tax by 50 percent in the fiscal year 2018 2019: the tax supports the federal Black Lung Disability Trust Fund that pays medical expenses and certain living expenses for miners diagnosed with black lung. While there is a great deal of information in the documentary about how occupational health, safety, and public health intersect and how mining operations lead to environmental and human degradation, we focus on how this documentary represents occupational health and safety (OHS) workplace injury and illness, and industrial disaster. This film is not only a documentary about the extraction of a fossil fuel and its environmental consequences, but it is about the extraction of wealth and health from a regionally isolated people and the consequences of it for individuals, families, and communities. We examine the documentary's ability to enhance viewers' knowledge of how occupational injuries and fatalities occur and the possible solutions for their prevention. In this article, we begin with the premise that OHS is socially produced. From this stance, we examine how the documentary (a) portrays worker injury, illness, and disaster, (b) identifies the role that political economy plays in understanding OHS, and (c) exposes the exploitative relationship between the peripheral resourceextracting coal regions and the American economic core that further reinforced the industry's power to control health and safety regulations.