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Vol. 79/No. 31      September 7, 2015

 
Don Rasmussen: stalwart
of miners’ fight for safety

 
BY NED MEASEL  
For more than 50 years, Dr. Donald Rasmussen was a stalwart and firm ally in the fight by miners for improved safety in the nation’s coal mines. His work in diagnosing and educating about black lung disease contributed to battles that strengthened the United Mine Workers of America. Rasmussen continued treating miners and speaking out on black lung — a disease caused by the mine bosses’ greed — until just a couple months before his death July 23 at age 87.

“You might not believe it,” Debbie Wills told the Militant, in a phone interview Aug. 10, “but folks used to be told that coal dust was good for you.” Wills has been active in the National Black Lung Association in West Virginia for decades. “Rasmussen was a pioneer in the diagnosis of black lung disease. He proved it in a scientifically conclusive way.”

Black lung disease, or coal miners’ pneumoconiosis, is caused by inhaling coal dust particles. It is incurable. It is also completely preventable with the use of ventilation, water sprays and respirators.

After serving as a doctor in the Army, Rasmussen moved to Beckley, West Virginia, in 1962 to work at the Miners Memorial Hospital. Many of his patients were miners with respiratory illness.

Coal mine operators long argued that only an X-ray could prove a miner had black lung. Rasmussen developed testing that showed the disease could be present even though it wasn’t visible in an X-ray.

Rasmussen took this knowledge public. Along with doctors Isadore Erwin Buff and Hawey Wells, Rasmussen created Physicians for Miners’ Health and Safety in 1968. Jeanne Rasmussen, a photo-journalist who was married to Rasmussen at the time, was their press representative.

The doctors traveled the coalfields speaking at UMWA union halls, churches and schools about the causes, progression and diagnosis of black lung.

His expert testimony when the coal operators challenged claims for compensation won thousands of miners and their survivors the benefits they deserved, and their respect and admiration. This reporter witnessed this when I attended a big meeting of miners and their families to discuss black lung in Pursglove, West Virginia, around 1980. When Rasmussen entered everyone stood. Men removed their caps and waited silently till the doctor took his seat on the podium.

Backed revolution in miners union

In November 1968 Consolidation Coal’s Number 9 mine exploded in Farmington, West Virginia, killing 78 miners. The blast was caused by an entirely preventable buildup of methane gas and coal dust. When UMWA President Tony Boyle praised the company as a safe employer, it spurred those organizing to fight for safety and democracy in the union. The activities of Rasmussen and the other doctors became part of a broader social movement.

In January 1969 working miners in southern West Virginia formed the West Virginia Black Lung Association to campaign for government action on the disease. A large rally was held in Charleston that month. In February a bill was introduced in the West Virginia legislature that would force coal companies to pay compensation for black lung. When it looked like it might not pass, 40,000 of the state’s 43,000 miners went on strike.

Thousands marched on the state Capitol, saying, “No law, no coal.” The doctors were with them. Miners returned to work three weeks later, the morning after Gov. Arch Moore signed the first black lung legislation into law.

When President Richard Nixon threatened to veto the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which established standards for dust limits and air flow in mines, 1,200 miners at four mines struck in West Virginia. Nixon signed the act Dec. 30, 1969.

In response to the ferment in the union and the coalfields, Jock Yablonski in 1969 ran against Boyle for union president. In a 2002 interview with Betty Dotson-Lewis, Rasmussen said, “I was with Yablonski at every rally he had between Fairmont, West Virginia, and Pikeville, Kentucky, at every single rally. I would do it again.”

Yablonski was assassinated along with his wife and their daughter on New Year’s Eve in 1969, at the direction of Boyle. At Yablonski’s funeral, Miners for Democracy was founded. A revolution inside the union followed. Miners made their union the most democratic and powerful union nationwide over the following decade.

Although Rasmussen was in the thick of all this, he told the Beckley Register-Herald in 2013, “I never saw myself as a crusader or advocate. I saw the coal miners who needed help and I just told what I had learned while working with them. … I was just a physician performing my duty.”

Fight continues today

The use of union power to enforce safety led to a 90 percent drop in incidents of black lung from the 1970s to the mid-90s. But the bosses’ anti-labor offensive and weakening of the union have led to a resurgence.

“We’re seeing a very distinct increase in advanced cases that we hadn’t seen in quite a long time,” Rasmussen told the Militant last year, including among much younger workers. Bosses have ramped up production using machines that cut through rock, he said, creating “silica dust, which is more toxic than coal dust itself.”

“Nonunion operators hire fewer workers and work them 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week,” said Wills, who works at a clinic in Cedar Grove, West Virginia. “Miners respected Dr. Rasmussen because he respected them.”

Wills said what so many who met Donald Rasmussen say, “He was the most kind and gentle person I ever met, but when he believed in something he never gave up.”
 
 
Related articles:
Steelworkers fight bosses’ demands for concessions
Solidarity actions set when contracts expire Sept. 1
Mineworkers protest Patriot’s attack on union
Nonunion construction deaths on rise in New York
On the Picket Line
How coal miners’ struggles transformed union
 
 
 
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