Today in Labor History March 30, 1930: Three thousand workers, mostly African-American, began construction on the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. The employer cut costs by failing to provide safety equipment. Additionally, bosses forced the men to work 10-15-hour days, often at gunpoint, without breaks and without masks to protect themselves from the silicon dust. Consequently, hundreds of workers died of silicosis. Possibly over 1,000 people, one-third of the entire workforce, died from silicosis, in one of America’s worst cases of mass workplace mortality.
@MikeDunnAuthor Even in trying to memorialize the victims, theoretically well meaning historians parrot so much of the language that allows the oligarchs to oppress us all with complicity from many. It was an “accident” and then their graves “had to be moved…” to widen a highway.