Chapter 14 Miners: Poverty is Worse Than Mining Disasters

This is a miner's dormitory in a coal mine. In the worker's dormitory built with bricks and stones of more than 20 square meters, there are more than a dozen simple beds built with bricks and wooden boards. Glossy quilts were rolled up on the pit, and two damp cloth insoles were baked on the stovetop emitting residual heat. The surrounding walls are covered with miners' hard hats and kiln clothes. In order to prevent rats from making trouble, the workers also hang half a bag of flour and leftover cornbread on the walls. When answering the multiple-choice question of "money or life", a miner gave a philosophical answer: "If you don't want money, how can we survive? Therefore, we can only ask for money."

Between life and money, they choose money first, because if they have money, they can buy food that lasts their lives and change their current embarrassing life. Money, only those who have really experienced poverty can have a heart-to-heart feeling for this thing. "The most lethal weapon of mass destruction in the world is poverty." This is the heartfelt words of Brazilian President Lula da Silva when he gave a speech at the United Nations special conference on "hunger and poverty" in 1965. For the coal miners in the coal mines in Shanxi, poverty seems to be more terrifying than mine disasters.

Living in poverty is undoubtedly terrible, otherwise coal miners would not be willing to sacrifice their lives to improve their living conditions.The poverty in terms of rights is even more fatal to Shanxi coal miners. In fact, in this world, as long as there is poverty, the strong party will naturally adopt more convenient means to exert influence on the other party, and poverty has become a fate that the weak party cannot escape.This forms a terrible cycle: some people experience the trap of "rights being kidnapped" because of poverty, and become poorer because of "rights being kidnapped", and so on, forming a vicious circle...

For these underground coal miners, "poverty" is an extremely sharp knife, which is always hung high on the necks of coal miners. So far, when they are asked to answer the seemingly dilemma of "money or life" in the dark underground place where their lives are always hanging by a thread, they will instinctively say the "truth" that the so-called experts and scholars could never dream of in their lifetime. In fact, we believe that what they lack is not the feeling (for poverty and money), but the ability to express this feeling. Just imagine, if they have this kind of "ability", then before them, there are countless other ways to survive besides digging coal; if they have this kind of "ability", they will be "dangerous" in today's world. The "safety guarantee" obtained in the industry with the highest index" may be better than a thin "hard hat".

The prerequisite for obtaining this "ability" is precisely their most deadly and lacking "culture". A person in the industry believes that under certain circumstances, the level of education has an extremely important impact on the self-security of these coal miners in the pit.He further pointed out that, based on the analysis of the factors of accidents in domestic coal mines, workers with a high education level have a significantly better sense of security than workers with a low education level. In fact, the lower the education level of the miners, the more limited their ability to understand the problem, the more difficult it is for the relevant departments to provide them with underground construction safety training, and the worse the training effect is, which makes it more difficult to "implement" safety awareness.

"Actually, mining coal is more risky than other jobs, but as long as the safety production work is truly implemented, our miners' rational answer should be 'money, and even more death'!" An "old coal mine" with many years of experience in underground mining Not without emotion.The implication is that when the miners in the pit have a certain sense of safety, "money or life" may no longer be a multiple-choice question for the miners.