Prayers or revolution ?

Pope Benedict XVI says he is praying constantly for the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground. The men have been trapped in a mine below the Atacama Desert since August 5. Chilean officials say it could take months to drill an escape tunnel to free them.That must be a comfort to them. They have already described their conditions as living in Hell.

The Chilean mining accident was the result of a race for profits by mine owners – who may face criminal charges – at a boom time in the price of two metals, combined with a scandalous disregard for safety, according to trade unionists.Despite a spate of fatalities union efforts to permanently close San Jose and the neighbouring San Antonio mine had failed. The government ordered the closure of the San Jose mine after deaths in 2006 and 2007, but a year later a junior official, allegedly exceeding his powers, authorised its reopening without the owners having installed a stairway in the ventilation passages. This stairway would have saved the 33 men this month. Instead, employees were sacked and non-unionised labour taken on.

Despite a legal requirement, there were no alternative exits from the San Jose copper and gold mine, which has left the 33 miners imprisoned 700 metres underground.The neglect of such elementary safety precautions is the legacy of decades of anti-union activity by General Augusto Pinochet, whose Western-backed dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 did its best to crush the unions. Subsequent governments have failed to abolish his repressive legislation. Chile, where vast fortunes have been made from mining, has only 16 mine inspectors to look after 4,500 mines. There have been 31 fatal mining accidents this year alone , (eight other Chilean miners were killed at operations nearby last year . Their deaths were not exceptional enough to merit mention beyond the mining industry press and local media). These trapped men are more fortunate than other cave-in victims in the third world countries, where mining accidents occur often and deaths are common. Last year an estimated 67 occurred in India, 29 in Kazakhstan and 25 in South Africa.Even a list of disasters, however, says nothing about the many more whose lives have been crippled and shortened by diseases resulting from working in a mine.

Jorge Pavletic, a board member with the national mining society and leading industrialist in the mineral-rich Antofagasta region, accused authorities are "overreacting" over safety.Said Pavletic, "We are not sending people to the slaughterhouse." When mine-owners neglect to keep their mines ventilated, and blow them into eternity in underground explosions , or brick them up in the pit to be entombed alive, it's a lamentable occurrence but quite an accident, and there's an end to it. Focussing and concentrating attention and resources to health and safety of the miners would lead to a loss of competitiveness that would mean a significant loss of profits, and since profits are capitalism's priority, the fact is ensuring maximum safety in the mining industry would turn into a commercial disaster. It is capitalism's profits-before-people unavoidability. Business profit-making and cost savings has pre-eminence, thereby keeping going the conditions that will give rise to further money-related disasters.

But it is the miners who are paying the price. As always, it is the miners and their families who suffer while the owners, whether private capitalists or those who control the government, are those who benefit.