WATERLOO - Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO national secretary-treasurer and former president of the United Mine Workers of America, called the federal mining safety regulatory agency a cadaver Wednesday and accused President Bush's administration of inattentiveness to all worker safety issues in the wake of a Utah mine collapse.

Trumka, UMWA president from 1982 to 1995, when he was elected to his current post with the AFL-CIO, made his comments following a keynote address to the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO state convention in Waterloo Wednesday.

"You know, honestly, MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, has become basically a cadaver under George Bush," said Trumka, who mined alongside his father in Pennsylvania before becoming a labor leader. "It's not about enforcing the laws or making them better, how they can get by. MSHA inspectors are good quality people, but they don't get the support from the leadership in MSHA. They put people in who have no identity with miners."

"We were strengthening the laws under (President Bill) Clinton, getting some regulations passed" Trumka said, but those initiatives died or fell by the wayside when Bush took office.

Of the Aug. 6 Huntington, Utah mine collapse, where the search continues for six trapped miners, Trumka said, "Here's one thing: It wasn't an act of God. It was an act of man. One of two things are inevitably true. Either they weren't following the laws or the laws weren't strong enough to protect them. In either case, there's got to be changes made to protect workers.

"Now here's the real travesty," Trumka continued. "Workers in this country die in ones and twos every day. Miners die in ones and twos every day. And no one pays any attention. Thousands and thousands of workers are injured and crippled every day and no one pays attention. It's only when there's a mass major disaster that it gets the attention. Each day is a tragedy when you lose a worker or cripple a worker or rob a worker of his or her health.

"This administration is not enforcing the mining laws in this country as they should. I think it applies to every area of workers' safety," Trumka said. "I think it applies to OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) as well as MSHA."

Trumka was raised in southwestern Pennsylvania and started mining there in 1968. He and his father were both members of the Miners for Democracy movement, which successfully helped fight to democratize the once-autocratic union.

"It's the most democratic organization on the face the earth right now," Trumka said of the UMWA. He was the union's longest serving president except for John L. Lewis.

On other matters, Trumka also said none of the announced Republican presidential candidates responded to a questionnaire in preparation for a recent AFL-CIO forum at Chicago's Soldier Field; consequently, none were invited. "We invited them in. We wanted them to be at that forum," he said. Only Democrat candidates appeared. "The real tragedy is that the Republican Party has migrated so far away from working families," Trumka said.

He said the national AFL-CIO has not endorsed a presidential candidate yet, but its individual AFL-CIO member unions may if they so choose.

Contact Pat Kinney at (319) 291-1484 or pat.kinney@wcfcourier.com.