Crystalline silica is an abundant mineral, serving as the basis of a 124 billion dollar market in 2024 alone. Coal miners in the United States Appalachian Region face a high risk of exposure to respirable silica because of the necessity of digging and grinding through “high-silica-content rock” to reach coal seams, and they are consequently developing respiratory diseases faster and at higher rates than in prior eras. The Sorptive Minerals Institute (“SMI”), a trade association representing companies worth billions of dollars, filed a lawsuit a mere 18 days after the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (“MSHA”) published the administrative Silica Rule, aimed at creating limits on the amount of silica that workers can be exposed to. SMI demanded the court block the rule’s enforcement, citing excessive implementation costs. Appalachian coal miners are suffering, once again, from the exorbitant cost of human rights.

What is the basis for SMI’s litigation? SMI argues that the type of silica used in sorptive mineral mining is not as harmful as that used in other mines and, therefore, they should not be subject to the same regulation. Some believe this argument, cloaked in scientific language and administrative regulations, to be largely pretextual. Instead, the answer is simple and one that has long been a core justification for the degradation of workers’ human rights: It is supposedly just too costly to industry profits. The mining industry, once again, refuses to allow workers’ human rights to “stand in the way of prosperity.” Currently, under the Trump Administration, MSHA has willingly decided to indefinitely stop fighting for miners pending “limited rulemaking to reconsider and seek comments on portions of the Silica Rule impacted by” the SMI litigation.

Reliance on “cost” as justification for shirking human rights is not a new phenomenon. The industry used this argument over a century ago in opposition to mining safety laws in 1903. Savings costs on mining, or “Run[ing] Coal,” was a cause of the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster that stole the lives of 29 miners in West Virginia in 2010. A previous challenge to an Obama Era silica rule in 2017 was challenged in part because it was not “economically feasible.” Now, the industry is turning once again to one of its favorite arguments over the years in its challenge to the Biden Era Silica Rule: the “exorbitant[] cost[]” of workers’ rights.

At its core, therefore, the recent litigation is the latest iteration of the perennial struggle of economic gain versus workers’ dignity, of profit versus human rights. Many in this struggle remember the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which statutorily established that “the first priority and concern of all in the coal or other mining industry must be the health and safety of its most precious resource–the miner.” Nonetheless, the suit against the Silica Rule illustrates that the tension between the prioritization of worker safety and economic profit is far from settled. And the industry has proven it is willing to spend money, and the lives of workers, to win the fight.

As one-in-five coal miners in the US Appalachian region who suffer from black lung contemporarily might argue, the cost of the Silica Rule is well worth what it buys: human rights, that is, the health and safety of coal miners in Appalachia. And as many coal miners in Appalachia also know, “[t]he only thing that mining companies understand is money.” But coal miners have paid with their breath and suffering.

The litigation over the Silica Rule is not just a battle between lawyers—it is a struggle over human rights, who deserves them, and how much we are willing to sacrifice to bring them about. Miners across the US, and specifically in Appalachia, are desperate for government actors that have consistently failed to protect them to take action.