Introduction

Pollution from coal mining has deleterious effects on land, water, and air quality, and contributes to climate change. Coal mining is also dangerous, consistently ranking among the top ten occupations in days lost due to injury.³ Every few years, the public is reminded of coal hazards by yet another mine disaster. Since the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (hereafter, the Coal Act), there have been 26 such disasters in the United States, for a total of 479 fatalities.⁴ The severe environmental and human consequences of coal mining have galvanized advocacy for more potent regulations. These efforts have generally been successful, although some note that only under exceptional media scrutiny following disasters has the U.S. government been truly responsive (Wallace 1987; Smith 2020).

Even more devastating are the consequences of coal for miners’ respiratory health. Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), commonly known as black lung disease, kills far more than mining disasters. CWP’s prevalence has surged to alarming levels since the 1990s (Almberg et al. 2023), and between 1999 and 2016 alone, at least 4,334 U.S. miners died from the disease (Mazurek et al. 2018). To this day, one-tenth to one-fourth of long-term miners are affected by black lung. Beyond activist calls to “keeping it in the ground,” there are few voices advocating for the phase-out of coal mining due to health concerns. Chowkwanyun (2022) suggests that, from the 1970s, coal mining risks have been evacuated from public discourse, replaced by an ever-growing consensus on the necessity of coal mining for achieving energy sovereignty. How did this consensus come about, and how is it sustained? Why is coal still mined?

Reasons for this might seem obvious. Coal has long been an essential building block of industrial development in the United States and elsewhere. In some regions, coal mining is a key source of economic output. Additionally, the coal industry has assembled a powerful lobbying apparatus that exerts national political influence against stringent regulations. These factors make it seem almost inevitable that coal mining has not faded out in the United States. However, other economically essential but hazardous industries backed by powerful lobbies have disappeared. Take the case of asbestos. Throughout the 20^th century, asbestos was an economically essential resource with over 3,000 industrial applications. Like coal, its production was geographically concentrated, with the Canadian province of Quebec consistently accounting for more than half of world production (Van Horssen 2016, 7). As asbestos use became widespread, though, more and more research highlighted the toll it took on miners. Asbestosis (or white lung) and mesothelioma were then identified as major occupational risks. Like the coal industry, asbestos producers developed a powerful lobbying apparatus to defend their interests. Yet unlike the coal industry, after decades of controversy, asbestos mining was banned in Quebec in 2013.⁵ The asbestos comparison challenges the explanatory power of economic factors, such as economic dependence, industrial policy, or corporate power, to explain the coal case.

In similar circumstances and under similar regulatory crises, why, then, did asbestos fade out in Quebec, while coal remained unchallenged in the United States? In this paper, I argue that coal risks in the United States became invisibilized to a greater extent than asbestos risks were in Quebec for three reasons. First, a different relationship between organized labor and health activist groups, one of confrontation in the asbestos case and one of cooptation in the coal case, contributed to divergent trajectories. The cooptation of black lung activism by labor in the coal case eventually led to marginalizing health-related grievances in favor of economistic concerns related to wages, pensions, and welfare. Meanwhile, the confrontational attitude of labor toward health activism in the asbestos case enabled the emergence of a radical discourse within public health circles on the future of the asbestos industry. Second, the bottom-up formulation of the Coal Act paved the way for an enduring consensus around solutions to the black lung problem. The top-down formulation of asbestos policy in Quebec led, instead, to a persistent challenge to regulatory solutions. Third, the perception of coal risks as a local issue with little resonance beyond mining communities prevented it from reaching national salience. In the asbestos case, inversely, the eventual discovery of environmental health hazards of asbestos extended the realm of perceived risk beyond mining communities. As international anti-asbestos legislation spread, political elites in Quebec felt pressured to act.

This comparative study investigates the mechanisms that inhibit regulatory change to address health and environmental crises. I advance a novel argument about how macro-level factors shape the social construction of downstream risks. This allows me to specify conditions under which certain regulatory issues can become visible and lead to reforms, while others remain on the margins of the political agenda. Analytically, this paper explores new avenues in the study of risk by situating social construction in long-term, macro-level processes. Empirically, it challenges the mainstream understanding of labor as the primary force behind occupational health reforms, extends knowledge on the consequences of policies for mobilizations, and highlights the role of international pressures in conditioning domestic regulatory debates.

The paper proceeds as follows. I first detail the similarities between the U.S. coal and the Quebec asbestos cases. Next, I critically review economic explanations for cross-case divergence. After discussing methods and data, I introduce a theory of risk invisibilization that focuses on macro-level structures. I then delve into how three specific structures of risk invisibilization affected the coal and the asbestos trajectories. Finally, I discuss the challenges of making regulatory health and environmental problems visible.

Comparing Coal and Asbestos

Some could argue that U.S. coal and Quebec asbestos are not comparable due to fundamental differences in their health risks or political-economic trajectories. Against common assumptions, however, the gap between those cases is quite narrow. First and foremost, available evidence suggests that coal occupational diseases in the United States are found in similar rates to asbestos-induced diseases in Quebec. In the present era of black lung resurgence, 10% of all long-tenured coal miners in the United States have CWP, and that number surpasses 20% in Central Appalachia (Blackley, Halldin, and Laney 2018).⁶ Asbestosis rates among ex-Quebec miners was also in the 10 to 20% range per existing estimates at the turn of the century (De Guire and Provencher 2009). This parallel stands for the most severe ailment associated with these substances, as rates of progressive massive fibrosis among coal miners in Central Appalachia and rates of pleural mesothelioma among Quebec asbestos miners were both in the 5% range for the last available data points (De Guire 2003; Almberg et al. 2018).

Both materials also generate important risks for the broader population. Coal burning is a key driver of greenhouse gas emissions, thus contributing to the burden of environmental and health risks induced by climate change. Coal extraction significantly contributes to air pollution, water contamination, and land depletion in mining areas and beyond (Bell and York 2012). Emissions from coal power plants are also associated with detrimental environmental health outcomes, such as increased asthma rates among nearby residents (Cohen et al. 1972). Asbestos products in the home and the workplace, notably in the form of insulation, are a major health risk (Goldberg and Luce 2009; DeBono et al. 2021). Environmental exposure in communities near asbestos treatment facilities is found to increase the risk of mesothelioma (Tarrés et al. 2013; Ramos-Bonilla et al. 2019). The impact of asbestos mining residues on air, water, and land quality are less clear, but are nonetheless surveilled by the scientific community (Jacques and Pienitz 2022).

U.S. coal and Quebec asbestos also follow remarkably similar political-economic trajectories. In both the United States and Canada, the development of mining hubs shaped landscapes by spatially concentrating production in a few key mining areas. In the United States, the history of the Appalachian region is intimately tied to its position as the longest-standing underground coal mining hub. The region still accounts for a third of total U.S. coal production and about half of coal employment.⁷ In Canada, asbestos mines were almost exclusively situated in the “Amiante region” in Quebec. The province consistently produced around half of the world’s asbestos and, at its peak in the 1960s, accounted for around 80% of world production (Van Horssen 2016, 7).

Moreover, in both nations, these industries were symbols and drivers of economic nationalism. In the United States, coal became associated with energy sovereignty and freedom from “foreign” fuels from the Cold War era onward. In Quebec, the 1949 asbestos strike played a fundamental part in springboarding the social transformation of French Canadian society that eventually grew into the Quiet Revolution (Trudeau 1970). Issues such as ownership of the mines became tied to the broader question of the autonomy and agency of the Québécois people. As the secessionist movement expanded in the 1970s, asbestos became perceived as both an economic lever and a symbol of political affirmation (Lévesque 2021). The nationalist connotations of both U.S. coal and Quebec asbestos strengthened sentiments of pride and belonging in mining communities (Bell and Braun 2010; Van Horssen 2016). In both cases, the political meanings and implications of these industries far surpassed their sheer economic importance.

Such parallels are echoed in similar paths to regulatory development. From the 1941 Mine Inspection Act, U.S. federal institutions have been in charge of the bulk of coal regulations. In Canada, provinces have preeminence over most aspects of mining regulations, from the allocation of land claims to occupational health. As a result, the federal trajectory of U.S. coal most closely mirrors the provincial trajectory of Quebec asbestos. Respectively, coal and asbestos mining have preceded and laid ground for the overarching occupational health and safety regulatory framework of the United States and Quebec. The 1969 Coal Act inspired the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, which created two correlate agencies, the enforcing Occupational and Health Safety Administration (OSHA), and the expertise-making National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). In Quebec, regulatory developments around asbestos mining and health in the mid-1970s led to the bill on occupational health and safety in 1979 and the creation of the Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (Occupational Health and Safety Commission, or CSST), responsible for the bill’s implementation. As a result, both are strategic cases for studying the broader development of regulatory health in the United States and Canada.

Limits to Economic Explanations

Given these parallels, one should expect similar outcomes in the U.S. coal and Quebec asbestos cases. However, while Quebec ceased asbestos mining in 2013, U.S. coal remains largely unchallenged on the basis of health concerns. Existing understandings of regulatory politics point to economic solutions to this puzzle. In this section, I review three of these explanations and underline their shortcomings in a comparative setting.

Economic dependence

Coal mining is a foundational building block of the U.S. economy and remains a sizeable source of employment and economic output in mining-heavy regions like Central Appalachia. Therefore, a common answer to why coal is still mined relies on economic dependence: market forces curtail the emergence of anti-coal discourse. Extant scholarship on occupational and environmental risk indeed looks to economic dependence as a determining factor in shaping the distribution of political power and policy outcomes. Research within the treadmill of production framework in environmental sociology advances the idea that economic concerns supersede regulatory projects when they are irreconcilable with the necessities of capitalist production (Jorgensen et al. 2023). The output of select industries is often prioritized over the health of at-risk communities (Lerner 2012).

Following this literature, one might identify economic dependence as the primary reason coal mining goes unchallenged on health grounds. This view, though, is severely limited given existing data, which support a diminishing role for coal in the U.S. economy. As shown in Figure 1, U.S. coal employment has trended down for the past eight decades. While technological advances explain some of the decrease occurring in the 1950s (Navarro 1983, 220), the ongoing downturn, which originates in the 1980s, is tied to a decrease in domestic demand. From 1990 to 2018, U.S. coal consumption decreased by 72%. In parallel, from 1980 to 2022, coal employment decreased by around 75%.

Figure 1: Employment in U.S. coal mining. Data: Mine Safety and Health Administration. 2021. “Coal Fatalities for 1900 Through 2023.” https://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp. From 1973, employees include office workers.

Moreover, as shown in Figure 2, coal production has declined in the United States since the early 2010s, reaching pre-1970s levels by 2020. This decline is all the more telling given a concurrent uptick in global coal consumption.⁸ The story of asbestos production is similar but reflects a different context—one of declining global demand. This industry’s growth reached almost 300% between 1945 and 1973, then steeply declined from 1980 onward. The same goes for asbestos industry employment, which fell considerably in the same period (Van Horssen 2016, 77). The province of Quebec remained one of asbestos’s largest producers and exporters into the 21^st century (Virta 2006).

Figure 2: U.S. total and underground coal production, 1949–2022, and Canadian asbestos production, 1949–2003.

Coal data: U.S. Energy Information Agency. 2023. “Annual Coal Report, Table ES1. Coal Production, 1949–2022.” https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/pdf/acr.pdf. Asbestos data: Virta, Robert L. 2006. “Worldwide Asbestos Supply and Consumption Trends from 1900 through 2003.” Circular 1298. U.S. Department of the Interior/U.S. Geological Survey. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2006/1298/c1298.pdf.

Coal’s fall from prominence is also reflected at the regional level. As Figure 3 suggests, Appalachian coal production experienced a stark downturn in the 21^st century while sectors such as healthcare, services, and administration grew faster in this region than they did, on average, in the United States as a whole.⁹ Over the past two decades, the coal industry has accounted for just about 1% of employment in Appalachia. Even in the Central Appalachian subregion, it only accounted for 3 to 4% of employment over that period.¹⁰ In short, Appalachia is moving on from its legacy as a mining-dependent region.

Figure 3: Appalachian coal production, 2000–2022. Data: Appalachian Regional Commission. 2023. “Coal Production and Employment in Appalachia, 2023.” https://www.arc.gov/report/coal-production-and-employment-in-appalachia-2023/.

Overall, available evidence runs against mainstream understandings of coal as an immovable pillar of the United States and Appalachian economies. The transition away from coal is an already occurring process, its effects currently felt in mining-heavy counties.¹¹ The downturn of the Quebec asbestos industry in the 1980s gave way to public challenges to its legitimacy due to rising health concerns. This forecasted the end of asbestos mining in the following decades. The same has not happened with coal in the United States.

Methods and Data

In this paper, I contrast the trajectories of Quebec asbestos and U.S. coal. I focus on the Appalachian region, the center of both underground coal production and black lung, for the U.S. case. This allows me to better address the relationship between regional and national dynamics. I rely on a mechanistic comparison (Lange 2013, 101–4) to delineate causal pathways, or generative processes, paying specific attention to the factors that condition their likelihood in each case (Ermakoff 2019, 591). I deploy a most-similar comparative strategy to investigate what led to cross-case divergence, accounting for factors that are broadly conducive to divergence, such as fundamental political-economic differences. The analysis is grounded upon a nominal strategy, wherein I extract key characteristics from each case that I can qualify through case matching or contrasting. This strategy yields the most explanatory power when, as I do here, one attempts to isolate a few causal factors for theory-building purposes (Mahoney 1999, 1157–60). From the analysis of those characteristics, I identify mechanisms through which cases have diverged over time. Because temporally ordered factors mattered, I also rely on narrative analysis.

I collected archival data in the United States and Canada and used case-specific historiography as a complement. I began collecting data on the asbestos case in 2019 and conducted subsequent archival visits in the United States and Quebec in 2023 and 2024. Archival sources include local and national newsclips, private correspondence, notes and briefs, meeting minutes, finances and newsletters, governmental reports, corporate documents, and technical briefs. In total, I surveyed approximately 30,000 pages of documents located in six archival sites as well as online. I focused on records related to the evolving relationships between local mining communities and corporations; unions, corporations, policymakers, and public administrations; and activist groups and unions. The Appendix reports on my archival sources.

Why are Risks Invisibilized?

The occupational health risks of coal and asbestos have both been invisible in the 20^th century. However, in this paper, I argue that the structural factors that enabled invisibility of risks in the coal case were sustained throughout the controversy, while they eventually broke down in the asbestos case. If greater risk invisibilization in the U.S. coal case explains its divergence from the Quebec asbestos case, then how can we theorize contrasting degrees of invisibilization? Risk, defined as the “likelihood or possibility of a future, typically negative, outcome” (DeSoucey and Waggoner 2022, 53), has drawn sizeable attention from social scientists in recent decades. Early scholarship on risk offers a realist perspective, chiefly concerned with the role of technical experts in measuring and mitigating risk (Mendeloff 1979; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Harrison and Hoberg 1994). These works advance our understanding of the role knowledge plays in the regulation of risk, but obscure the facts that both risk assessment and risk management are conducted under considerable uncertainty (Murphy 2006; Brown 2007) and that they thereby reflect political and economic considerations just as much as scientific ones (Habermas 1990; Corn 1992; Castleman and Ziem 1994; Irwin et al. 1997; Rosner and Markowitz 2006, Appendix).

In response to these works, the bulk of sociological work on risk has built on constructionist approaches to uncover the relationship between technical assessments, risk perceptions, and social change (Tierney 1999). This attention helps to “unmask appearances of objectivity” in risk regulations (Clarke and Short 1993, 380). There is fair heterogeneity in these approaches (Lupton 2013, 41–48), with some scholars drawing on the risk society thesis (Beck 1992; Alario and Freudenburg 2003; Cable, Shriver, and Mix 2008), others on governmentality perspectives (Lupton 1995; Petersen 1997; Rose 2001), and yet others emphasizing cultural and cognitive aspects (Tulloch 2008). Recent research builds more forcefully on the latter and highlights that risk construction is the result of micro-level negotiations (Urena 2022), that it mirrors meso-level conflict (Auyero, Hernandez, and Stitt 2019), and that it is framed differently depending on contexts of exposure (DeSoucey and Waggoner 2022). These works conceptualize social construction processes from the bottom-up, showing how interactions between individuals and groups, often within affected communities (Auyero and Swistun 2008; Hart 2023), lead to the consolidation of shared risk perceptions.

While they solve issues with the realist framework, current works in the constructionist vein run into a counterfactual problem; they delineate pathways through which risk perceptions consolidate, but fall short of explaining why certain constructions emerge instead of others (see Eyal 2013, 867). In the study of risk, extant scholarship does not sufficiently probe the mechanisms that influence the selection of constructions, nor potential shifts between them. In this study, it is insufficient to explain the divergence in trajectories by arguing that coal in the United States has been constructed as less dangerous than asbestos in Quebec. Rather, the analysis must focus on what led to different ideas about risk over the long term (see Krippner 2023) and specify the key power dynamics driving risk construction (Clarke and Short 1993, 381). To achieve this, I depart from bottom-up constructionist frameworks that view risk perceptions as the result of micro-level processes. I instead opt for a top-down view of construction processes, through which I investigate the macro-level processes that shape downstream possibilities.

Health Activist Cooptation and Decline

Economistic grievances—those related to wages, pensions, and welfare—are historically at the forefront of union demands in both cases. Thus health risks were often a peripheral element in labor discourse. Yet, from the 1980s, concerns over worker exposition to asbestos dust became salient in Quebec, while exposure to coal dust faded from public discourse in the United States. What, if not a distinct hierarchy of labor grievances, accounts for this divergence? As suggested in Figure 4, this was the by-product of a different relationship between organized labor and health activist groups, one of cooptation in the coal case and one of confrontation in the asbestos case.

Figure 4: Short- and long-term outcomes of different relationships between health activists and labor.

Coal: Cooptation of health activism

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) is bound to a legacy of economism that was built off wage and pension gains during John L. Lewis’s tenure as president (1920–1960).¹⁴ Two issues historically complicated the UMWA’s relationship with black lung. First, whereas healthcare is nationalized in Canada, projects of national health insurance never succeeded in the United States (see Maioni 1997). This gap in welfare coverage was consequential for labor strategy. From the 1940s, the UMWA dedicated important resources to developing a company-funded health insurance program and succeeded in establishing the Welfare and Retirement Fund as part of the 1943 collective bargaining agreement. Industry-funded hospitals in Appalachia were also established in 1956 as part of an effort to provide healthcare in underserved areas.¹⁵ Second, union concern over mine safety historically centered on the risks tied to explosions, not on respirable dust. Federal and state administrations have collected data on mining disasters in the United States since 1839. Of the 726 disasters reported, 86% are attributable to coal mines.¹⁶ Overall, efforts around mine explosions and healthcare hindered the ability of black lung concerns to become a central union grievance.

Health activism around coal dust was born in Appalachia and was mainly organized around the activist group Black Lung Association (BLA). Its membership was diverse and included individuals from academia, local government, the media, charities, healthcare, and religious organizations. It also gained an “uncharacteristic support” from UMWA members compared to other similar occupational health activist groups (Fox and Stone 1980, 52). In the late 1960s, despite being led by only a handful of organizers (Judkins 1986, 80), efforts by local BLA chapters led to tremendous regulatory gains in mining states and drew national attention in the run-up to the 1969 Coal Act. By 1971, the BLA had almost 20 local chapters in Appalachia (Nyden 2009, 473). Early on, it was independent from the UMWA, to the point that central union officials reportedly did not engage at all with the Association.¹⁷ Indeed, central UMWA leadership opposed mobilizations for state-level black lung compensation laws in 1968 and 1969 (Derickson 1998, 143–61). The union’s lack of involvement regarding health risks was harshly criticized by the BLA and other activists.¹⁸ In its infancy, then, one of the BLA’s central battles was against the UMWA.

After Arnold Miller’s election as UMWA president in 1972, however, central leadership drastically shifted its stance on black lung. As the candidate of the Miners for Democracy reform movement and an ex-BLA organizer in West Virginia, Miller created favorable conditions for the expression of health concerns within the union. From that point on, BLA-affiliated miners were able to influence UMWA’s agenda by proposing policies at national conventions under a new, more democratic union organization. The integration of BLA proposals and actions into mainstream UMWA activities led to the institutionalization of a distinctive black lung agenda within the union.¹⁹ In 1972, this new UMWA-BLA coalition gained a seat at the table to help design the Black Lung Benefits amendments led by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. These amendments, as eventually implemented, drew from the position of the BLA, notably by liberalizing eligibility requirements and providing measures to ensure inter-generational equality between members.²⁰

In the early 1970s, the BLA was incrementally coopted by the UMWA. By 1973, the UMWA had become the BLA’s primary funder, replacing grassroots Appalachian organizations like the Council of Southern Mountains in that role. In return, black lung became a core legislative concern of the UMWA’s political action committee (UMWA-COMPAC).²¹ The union was vocal in the struggle for the passage of the federal H.B. 3333 in 1975–1976, which would have automatically entitled miners to black lung benefits after a career in the mines. When the bill was killed in the Senate in 1976, the UMWA subsequently threw itself into the struggle for the 1977 Black Lung Benefits amendments. Although less ambitious than H.B. 3333, these amendments transformed the management of compensation, most notably by creating a compensation program partially funded by industry for ex-miners affected by the disease. These legislative fights were, at every step, informed by the expertise of the BLA. Virtually complete cooptation was achieved around 1979, with archival evidence suggesting that BLA’s independent organizing had become marginal: membership was union-based, meetings were tied to those of the UMWA, and the BLA had lost a strong associational life of its own.

UMWA-BLA activism culminated in the protest against the 1981 Black Lung Benefits amendments of the Reagan Administration; these reduced governmental funding for the compensation program, increased black lung-directed taxes on coal producers, and established targets for reducing the share of approved benefit claims. The Reagan Administration successfully took advantage of a program viewed by fiscal conservatives as plagued by scandals over fraud and overpayments, and an automatic pension plan to miners and their families.²² The passage of this reform was an emphatic defeat for UMWA-BLA mobilization. From there, mobilization around the black lung issue progressively faded, and the BLA lost its distinctive voice inside the union. Black lung never reemerged as a central issue for labor mobilization on the national stage. Local BLA chapters were dismantled throughout the 1980s, and attempts at their revival in the 1990s failed.²³ By the late 1990s, a National Black Lung Association remained, but its meetings were sparse at best, and its action was restricted to logistical (e.g., helping disability claimants) rather than political terrain.²⁴

Asbestos: Confrontation of health activism

During the 1949 asbestos miners’ strike, grievances related to dust levels and exposure were put aside by unions to maximize their chance of gaining the Rand formula, a mechanism for compulsory unions dues and higher wages. Unions succeeded in obtaining the former, but were unable to make significant progress on the latter (David 1969; Van Horssen 2016, 90). Their commitment to economism is thus not explained by a legacy of successive victories like in the UMWA case, but by one of defeat.

Unions briefly engaged in pro-regulatory action in the 1970s. In 1971, the new research service of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) took on the question of miners’ health. This interest materialized in 1974 around a research project undertaken in close conjunction with renowned Mount Sinai researcher Irving Selikoff and his team. The publication of their study’s early results cast a shadow over existing safety practices and drew widespread attention to asbestos diseases.²⁵ The 1975 miners’ strike provided another opportunity to make health and safety in the industry more salient. The sheer magnitude of this strike, which involved more than 3,000 miners from the CSN and the FTQ-Métallos unions (that is, about half of the entire asbestos workforce) and lasted 7 months (Marier 2016, 59–60), succeeded in making asbestos exposure a key industrial health problem in Quebec—one that begged for state involvement. Media reports on the inadequacies of asbestos regulations increased, and political parties came under pressure to take a clear stance on the issue.²⁶ Nonetheless, throughout the strike, there was a tension between the CSN and the other two asbestos unions, the FTQ-Métallos and the Centrale des syndicats démocratiques (CSD), over the soundness of focusing on health. While the CSN had been working on that front for several years, the other unions had considered wages the most critical issue of the strike.²⁷ In its aftermath, unions moved back to an economistic focus and distanced themselves from health critiques of the asbestos industry.

In the 1980s and 1990s, unions drifted even further from health activism as they showed support to the increasingly scrutinized asbestos industry. As a result of labor’s approach, health activists were forced to organize independently. Local regional women’s groups such as the Comité de femmes d’appui aux mineurs de Thetford Mines (1975–1979), Regroupement des femmes dont les maris sont décédés d’accident du travail ou de maladies professionnelles (1979–1997), and the Association des veuves des victimes d’amiantose et d’accidents de travail (mid-1980s) emerged. In the long term, however, these groups were unable to maintain a strong political presence and eventually split up.²⁸ From the 1990s, new groups like Mining Watch and Ban Asbestos were able to gather support across Canada. These groups were better able to institutionalize, despite lacking support from the asbestos unions.²⁹

In 1998, the newly created Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), an independent expert agency funded by the state, became a central vehicle for the sharing and diffusion of knowledge on asbestos risks. It especially was able to do so after the publication of a report on the presence of asbestos in schools by the Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail in 2000.³⁰ In December 2001, the INSPQ conveyed a conference on asbestos exposure in Montreal, providing a platform for coalition-building among academics, public health officers, public administrators, and some media outlets. A parallel opportunity for coalition-building, this time among activists and concerned citizens, emerged at the International Ban Asbestos conference in Ottawa in 2003. That same year, the Asbestos Victims Association of Quebec (AVAQ) was founded. In the early 2000s, members of the AVAQ conducted a citizen-led study on the presence of asbestos dust in homes in the mining town of Thetford Mines, the results of which painted a dire picture (Marier et al. 2007).³¹

Around the turn of the century, media reports on asbestos risks in the workplace and in the environment dramatically increased, and interventions from public health experts and physicians against asbestos mining became commonplace. When, in 2011, the Liberal government of Quebec promised a CAD $58 million investment for the renewal of the asbestos industry at the Jeffrey Mine, it was met with firm opposition from lay and expert organizations.³² This time around, even the CSN was against it, as most of its unionized mines had already been closed (Marier 2016, 137–38). These loosely coalesced groups mobilized once again on the Canadian legislation to ban asbestos use in 2018. In the end, most anti-asbestos health activism in Quebec unfolded independently from—even in opposition to—labor organizing.

The autonomy-effectiveness trade-off

Both BLA’s rise to prominence during the 1970s and its downfall in the 1980s are attributable to its close relationship with the UMWA. From the 1970s, and especially from the inauguration of the Carter Administration in 1977, conditions were favorable to the advancement of occupational health. In that short period, because of its inclusion within the UMWA’s political activities, the BLA secured a degree of policy influence unrivaled by health activist organizations in the Quebec asbestos case.

The story changed in the late 1970s, a period characterized by rising uncertainty for the coal industry. The UMWA helped further the Inland Energy Development Impact Assistance Act of 1977 and the National Energy Act of 1978, which, respectively, included fiscal and regulatory incentives to increase domestic coal demand and reduce competition from foreign oil. The UMWA Trumka leadership (1982–1995) responded to uncertainty in the coal industry by emphasizing job security and retirement provisions. The UMWA by then framed its approach to contract bargaining as a display of its new “pragmatic” and “cooperative” approach to industrial relations.³³ There was ever-less room for the expression of non-economistic grievances, and the BLA eventually faded out.

Ultimately, from an ideational standpoint, the BLA’s lack of autonomy hindered its ability to develop an ambitious program when its goals undermined labor priorities. In the asbestos case, civic and expert associations became convinced that asbestos should not be mined anymore in Quebec, but the BLA was never in a position to transcend the UMWA’s focus on economistic grievances in the coal case.

Bottom-Up Technocratic Solutions

The development of technocratic solutions to manage occupational disease contributed to risk invisibilization in both cases. These solutions were developed at moments when state action on occupational health was perceived as insufficient. Yet, the use of technocratic solutions did not resorb the political crisis to the same extent in the Quebec asbestos case as it did in the U.S. coal case. What accounts for the difference? As suggested in Figure 5, it depended on the degree of consensus that these solutions were able to achieve. Early black lung policies were initiated from the bottom-up and built consensus that furthered invisibilization, while the top-down passage of asbestos policies laid the ground for continued contestation. This fueled more stable technocratization in the coal case than in the asbestos case. As a result, technocratic solutions were self-sustaining in the former case while they needed to be actively legitimated by industry and the state in the latter.

Figure 5: Outcomes of different technocratic processes.

Concentration of Risks

Workers are the most affected by coal and asbestos risks, and mines are often located away from large urban centers. This concentrates risk in remote places and, by the same token, creates a spatial barrier against widespread visibility. In addition, it can lead to the normalization of disease within mining communities (Bell and Braun 2010; Van Horssen 2016). As suggested in Figure 6, two factors contributed to breaking down this barrier in the asbestos case: the extension of the perceived realm of risks, and international pressures that reinforced domestic legitimacy threats. In the U.S. coal case, risks were never perceived as extending beyond mining communities.

Figure 6: Outcomes of different perceived scales of risks.

In the 1970s, asbestos started to be viewed as dangerous not only as a primary resource, but also as a final product. Earlier studies had shown a relationship between exposure to fibers and adverse health outcomes at the extraction and transformation stages, suggesting that only workers were at risk. However, emerging research started to highlight that the general public was also exposed to asbestos in buildings, cars, and the environment (McCulloch and Tweedale 2008). Since asbestos was by then widely used, these findings transformed an occupational and circumscribed issue into a broader public health crisis. In turn, the visibility of widespread risks of asbestos favored a recognition of the disproportionate burden of risks assumed by miners and their communities. Fear and uncertainty around asbestos use also fueled an unfavorable business context. The downturn of the industry in the 1980s, that is, is attributable to the public recognition of risk beyond the mines and correlate fear from investors (Van Horssen 2016). Quebec media started to report regularly on the issue in the 1990s. The 2001 INSPQ symposium and ensuing 2003 report only enhanced public scrutiny and media enquiry into the matter. And starting in the mid-2000s, health activist groups and prominent public figures began calling for an asbestos ban.⁵³ This loosely structured coalition of voices united in the fight against asbestos-related diseases was instrumental in challenging preexisting risk perceptions.

In the coal case, such a turning point never occurred. In the mid-1970s, the environmental impacts of coal mining drew increasing attention amid debates about the impacts of surface mining on air, water, and land quality.⁵⁴ Successive reports from state agencies such as the Bureau of Mines and the Appalachian Regional Commission testified to the seriousness of environmental problems, especially those related to water contamination, flooding, and land depletion.⁵⁵ In an era of rising environmental consciousness (Taylor 2009), these issues were taken up by regional activist groups like Appalachia: Science for the Public Interest (Chowkwanyun 2022, 189). This created a unique opportunity for extending the realm of perceived risks from miners to entire mining communities and beyond. Pressures from activists and their allies in state, regional, and federal policy circles led to the passage of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.⁵⁶ This legislation reflected a compromise between environmental concerns and the growing political consensus around coal as a dominant energy source in the United States (Chowkwanyun 2022, 183–93). In the end, the Surface Mining Act appeased political tensions and addressed the legitimacy crisis the industry faced in the region.

Debates on surface mining made more room for critical views on coal in public discourse, though they rarely included concern for miners’ health. Sparse media reports about coal in the 1970s and 1980s implied that black lung would eventually disappear. A true renewal of public interest in dust exposure at work had to wait until the early 1990s. From 1993 to 2002, regional and national media outlets published major stories denouncing the surge in black lung rates, the ineffectiveness of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, routine falsification of dust samples by company officials, and the lack of resources for screening miners, among other problems.⁵⁷ From then on, the media framing of black lung as a soon-to-be-extinct disease was replaced by a more inquisitive attitude toward existing safeguards. In 2016–2018, an NPR series about black lung in Appalachia reinserted the debate onto the national agenda.⁵⁸ Contrary to the asbestos case, however, these reports never had a substantial impact on policy debates. The regulatory framework for addressing black lung remained essentially unchanged.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, I sought to explain why U.S. coal is not challenged on the basis of health concerns in light of the Quebec asbestos case. Against explanations that emphasize economic dependence, industrial policy, or corporate interference, I argued that risk invisibilization is the primary factor accounting for coal’s persistence. I articulated this argument around three structures of risk invisibilization. First, while the UMWA-BLA coalition promoted the black lung issue in the 1970s, the cooptation of the BLA by labor contributed to its demise when the UMWA returned to a more economistic agenda in the 1980s. Meanwhile, continued confrontation between asbestos unions and activists enabled a pro-regulatory discourse independent from labor concerns and the emergence of anti-asbestos activism in Quebec. Second, the bottom-up formulation of the Coal Act made it consensual and legitimated its repeated use in amendments, as many believed the Coal Act would eventually eradicate black lung without shutting down the coal industry. Conversely, the top-down formulation of asbestos policy in Quebec made it contested and required the state to actively sustain legitimacy in the public sphere. Third, the perception of coal risks as a local issue without much resonance beyond mining communities prevented health activists from getting consistent national attention. In the asbestos case, the discovery of environmental risks extended the realm of perceived threats beyond mining communities. As international anti-asbestos legislation spread, legislators in Quebec were pressured to act. I found that, in the U.S. coal case, invisibilization was stable, consensual, deeply institutionalized, and only rarely pressured. In the Quebec asbestos case, invisibilization was built on shaky foundations, characterized by confrontation, and eventually faced insurmountable domestic and international pressures. As risks became highly visible in Quebec, a viable path to ending asbestos mining took form. Such paths never emerged in the coal case.

Findings from this paper contribute to the study of regulatory power in three ways. Labor proved to be an obstacle to health activism in both cases, albeit to different degrees. This challenges labor-centered explanations of occupational health controversies, dominant in existing historiography. By its structural position, labor could in neither case consistently support the expression of health grievances.⁶⁸ While this paper does not discard the importance of labor, in part given its important mobilization resources, it highlights when and how labor plays a central role in advancing regulatory reforms. Further, the emphasis on technocratic solutions proposed in this paper extends insights from social policy studies of how governmental programs not only structure the militant strategies of beneficiaries, but also shape how they conceptualize the problems they face (Skocpol 1992, 41). Future work on regulatory power would benefit from studies that investigate the micro-level impacts of technocratic processes and regulatory reform on activist strategies. Last, international pressures are often assumed to play a key role in toxic substance regulations at the national level (e.g., Lanier-Christensen 2021; Vogel 2012). This paper contributes to the delineation of specific mechanisms through which these pressures condition domestic debates and shape the behavior of local political elites.

The construction of risk is the end result of multi-layered processes, where actors cannot be broken down into simple categories of workers as victims, industries as perpetrators, and states as arbitrators. The framework proposed here contributes to understanding the role of macro-level actor configurations in shaping possibilities for downstream construction. Recent public health crises, the aggravation of the climate crisis, and the proliferation of industrial residues in the 21^st century (Boudia et al. 2022) all urge new research in the study of regulatory power. Accelerated globalization has led to the emergence of new problems which increasingly appear out of states’ reach, while increasingly resting on their shoulders (Campbell and Hall 2021). Future studies ought to investigate how international politics affects the design and implementation of domestic regulations (Perlman and Toenshoff 2024) and how the process might lead to the restructuring, strengthening, or weakening of regulatory systems operated by the environmental state (Rea and Frickel 2023).

As for coal mining, the current climate crisis provides a new opportunity to question its relevance. Clean energy transitions have gained some traction on the American left, embodied as of late by the coalition for a Green New Deal. Miners have historically been those with the most to lose from environmental regulations (Obach 2004, 103). Without assurance that their livelihood is compatible with the nation’s energy future, coal miners may resist forthcoming reforms (Bolet, Green, and González-Eguino 2024), and willingly continue “digging their own graves” (Smith 2020).

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Barry Eidlin, Axel van den Berg, Shai M. Dromi, Amanda McMillian Lequieu, Tom Juravich, Andrew Patterson, Antonia Maioni, as well as reviewers and editors at Theory and Social Inquiry for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this work. This paper greatly benefited from comments of attendees at the Sociology Department Workshop at McGill University, the Structural Determinants of Health session at the 2023 Canadian Sociological Association meeting, the Morality, Salvation and Race at Work session at the 2023 American Sociological Association meeting, the Rural, Agricultural, and Environmental sociology session at the 2023 Social Science History Association meeting, and the Weatherhead Center Canada Seminar at Harvard University. The author thanks Micheline Marier for her time and generosity throughout the research process. Last, the author acknowledges the work of numerous archivists, and especially Tim Binckley, Peter Morphew, Sarah Coblentz, and Hyacinthe Munger, who made data collection possible.

Funding information

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture, and the Graduate Research Enhancement Travel Awards at McGill University.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.