Assistant Secretary Of Labor for Mine Safety And Health Joe Main, In An Exclusive Three-Part Interview With Rock Products, Talks About MSHA Initiatives, Aggregates Industry Enforcement, Inspector Consistency And What He Sees in The Future.

ROCK PRODUCTS: How do you see your role as head of MSHA?

MAIN: When I took the job as assistant secretary, I came here with a straightforward purpose, and that was to implement the Mine Act, enforce the law and improve health and safety in the nation’s mines, so miners have a chance to go home at the end of the shift every day. I started out as a miner myself and I’ve worked with miners in mining operations all my life. So I understand the importance of that.

When I came to MSHA, I came here with the purpose of looking at how we could make this a better agency, how we could improve overall mine safety and the mining industry. A lot of the initiatives that we have launched have improved overall health and safety level in mining.

ROCK PRODUCTS: What are some of those keynote initiatives that impact the aggregates industry?

MAIN: We looked at where all the mining deaths had taken place over the years, and decided we really needed to take a step back and look at what was causing those deaths, and come up with a plan to change the way that we do business in the mining industry. We created a program called “Rules to Live By,” where we went back and looked at mining deaths over the last several years and identified both the cause of those and the regulations that contributed to those. Then we developed a program that we first rolled out with other stakeholders in the mining industry. We went through an education, outreach and training program for inspectors and for the first time that I know of in history, we shared that training program with the entire mining industry. This way, the industry would know how they were going to enforce the standards, and we followed up with enforcement of those standards.

Also, we developed best practices that were sent to all of the people who do training under the Mine Act, and also the state grantees that receive funds from us to do training to have that included in their training programs. I’m a firm believer that if a miner needs to know anything, they need to know the things that are most likely to kill them in the mining industry, and we need to make sure we include those in the training program. I think that effort has been very successful. We’ve got quite a bit of feedback from the mining industry, and I think they appreciated the fact that we sat down with them, walked them through the program, and provided education before we began enforcement approach.

Another similar program that we launched was our 5002 program, which deals with making sure miners are not breathing contaminants that could harm them. We did this in conjunction with the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association (NSSGA), the Industrial Minerals Association of North America (IMA-NA), and other stakeholders, and walked them through what our objective was. That was done to get the industry to pay quicker attention to this, to beef up the operators’ surveillance of the workplace and to provide some support behind that. We had NSSGA and IMA-NA come and do presentations on best practices, to help lead, to show people what kind of programs they needed to have in place. And we also kicked that off with the involvement of the state aggregate associations.

ROCK PRODUCTS: Talk about your outreach into the aggregates industry.

MAIN: Since I came to MSHA, I’ve probably had more meetings with the aggregates industry than any assistant secretary before me. I think I’ve had, with the mining industry now, a bit over 20 meetings, and a lot of them have been with the state aggregates associations. I think I’ve met with at least 15 different state aggregate associations, where we have actually sat down with each other and had good discussions about how we’re enforcing the law, and areas that we can improve our consistency in enforcement, because I know that’s a big issue with the mining industry and it’s a big issue with me.

Despite some of the criticisms I have read, we are doing things to improve our consistency, to listen to what the stakeholders have to say, and really to react to that where we can, because it’s our objective to improve mine safety. At the end of the day, if we reduce accidents, injuries in mines, and reduce violations, citations and orders that we issue, it’s a win-win situation for all of us. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.

ROCK PRODUCTS: When I travel to different aggregates operations around the country and talk to stone producers, I hear a couple of common themes when the topic of MSHA comes up. One is, aggregates operations are much different than coal or metal-mining operations, yet aggregates operations seem to be subject to “big-stick enforcement” that ought to be reserved for coal and metal. Aggregates mining appears to be paying for the sins of coal and metal. How would you address that?

MAIN: When I came here as assistant secretary, it was on the heels of the increased enforcement that came after the disasters at Sago, Darby and Aracoma. And there was a view by some in Congress that MSHA wasn’t being tough enough in terms of enforcing the law. Part of what happened as a result of that is there was a change in the Mine Act that put in place a higher level of accountability for MSHA to make sure that it was enforcing the law. The agency issued a new penalty rule in 2007 that dramatically increased the penalties imposed across the board, because one penalty standard applies to all the mining segments. MSHA also found that there was a shortage in the number of inspectors on the job, and beefed up the inspection rolls. All those things happened on the heels of those mining disasters.

Having said that, we still all have to understand there’s a separate set of standards that apply to coal mines and to metal/nonmetal mines, and those are not the same standards. There are also different standards that apply to surface coal mines and surface-preparation facilities in underground coal mines, and there are standards that apply to underground metal/nonmetal mines, and to surface metal/nonmetal mines, and these standards have been around for quite some time.

Now having said all that, I came in with a couple of challenges. One is to look at ways that we could improve the overall application of law and make the mining industry safer, and two is to look at ways that we could be more consistent and more effective in what we do. As I said, we have spent a lot of time sitting down face-to-face with the aggregates industry. I’ve been to the Midwest, the Southeast, been into the Carolinas, been out west to Oregon, Washington, California, I’ve been up into Pennsylvania. The law is the law, regulations are the regulations, but we’re talking through how we can work together better.

We’ve made progress overall. There has been a reduction in the overall citations and orders issued, and I think that’s because we are spending a lot of time letting them know what the real expectations are, and giving them a chance to sit back and figure out where it is that we can improve consistency and give them a better understanding of what the law is.

There’s also another difference. The coal standard regulations are more specific. The metal/nonmetal standards are less prescriptive and more general, they’re performance-type standards, which leaves a bit more room to interpret with the specific standard itself. We’ve taken a look at a number of those, to try to figure out how we can improve them, and that’s part of what these alliances are doing.

As an example, we launched a program dealing with guarding. When I first came here, I sat down with metal/nonmetal stakeholders, and I asked them what the most commonly cited violation was. It was guarding violations. So we put together an educational program that defined what kind of guarding needed to be in place for belt-conveyor systems. We took that program out to some of the state aggregates associations. I think we were up in Oregon, California, some of the Midwest, to pilot that, to make sure that we had a model that was going to work. We launched that last year and we looked at the first six months after the full implementation of the program and we found that we had about a 30 percent reduction in guarding violations issued by us – a highly successful program.

In the second part of this three-part interview, Main addresses inspector consistency and the Small Mine Office.