> You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for. The ones that

> You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for. The ones that work for you now will die out and the new batch will see the death rate and go do something else, flip burgers or fix cars or whatever. Mining towns are not places where there are lots of jobs available. Frequently, mine jobs were the only jobs. Even taking a job supporting the miners often meant working for the mine; if the miners are paid in scrip that's only redeemable at the company store (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store), say, you're not going to be able to get a job in retail working anywhere else. So the mine owners felt they could afford to view workers as disposable resources. If the mine owns your whole community, where else are you going to work? > Not to mention, you'll get the worse publicity possible, as an industry, that of uncaring, selfish assholes who kill your own workers. They just didn't care about this. Many still don't! Don Blankenship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Blankenship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Blankenship), for instance, got 29 of his miners killed in 2010, and had the nerve to run for a Senate seat in the same state eight years later. > And then the suits will start coming in But you can afford the best lawyers, which a bunch of poor miners certainly cannot. And probably the judges in the state are all members of your country club, and your money funded the campaigns of all the people who wrote the laws. Not to mention that you own the only newspaper in town. And if you want to hire a bunch of thugs to come in and beat any worker who complains within an inch of his life, local law enforcement isn't going to stop you. Heck, they might even join in to make an extra buck. The system in these communities was rigged against the interests of labor in a dozen different ways. In lots of them, it still is.