The Diary of Industrial Risk. Miners’ Safety Delegates and their Work Environment (1890 – c. 1980)

Overview & Synopsis

On July 8, 1890, the French government passed a bill that would create a new institution in the mines: miners’ safety delegates (MDs). MDs were elected by their peers every three years. They were in charge of a mining district (or circonscription) whose location was decided by State engineers. The law would grant them two main purposes: first, to visit underground galleries in order to identify any potential danger; second, to lead an inquiry in case of an accident. The overall ambition was to point out the dangers that State and company engineers were not able to see or to detect. In this respect, MDs provided what we would now call a counter-expertise to that of State and company engineers. MDs had to report their observations on a record that had to be read both by the employer and the State engineer. As a result, a single safety delegate could write more than 300 reports every year, where he provided a first-person account of his working environment: it was a diary of industrial risk in the mines. Yet, although these documents are incredibly valuable for historians of mining, historians of work, and even historians dealing with the environmental history of work, the existing literature on the French mining industry since the 1960s has not paid much attention to this source. It was only a couple of years ago that Charles and I realized that these archives constituted a hidden continent of thousands and thousands of reports that had been written since 1890 to the very end of the mining industry in France in the 2000s. Based on the study of 5 cases (Bassin du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 1890-1914; 1970-1980; Bassin de la Loire, 1890-1914; Bassin de Salsigne, 1966-1973; Bassin de la Mure, 1960-1970; Bassin de Lorraine, 1970), the ambition of this paper is to put this source into dialogue with the existing literature on mining safety. As many historians have shown, mining safety has increased all along the 19th and 20th century: the rate of fatalities, accidents and death has been declining almost constantly, as can be seen in figures showing a flattening curve. The main reasons for the securitisation of mines are generally twofold: on the one hand, economic investments in safety improvements (such as the so-called “small-scale technologies”, see: Silvestre & Murray, 2015); on the other hand, better workforce training and education (see: Escudier & Conus, 1997). But what was the impact of MDs in mining safety and securitisation? Is it even possible to calculate this impact? Did they have any impact at all? These are among the questions that we would like to examine in this paper.