As the weekend’s Labor Day festivities begin across the United States, the news comes that the search for six entombed Utah miners has been suspended indefinitely. I suppose they’ll be planting another flag in the interactive map of workplace deaths that the House Education and Labor committee has been compiling. In 2006, 5,703 workers died on the job in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news makes the question Ken Ward asked earlier this month in an article for Nieman Watchdog all the more poignant: “First and foremost, why is it acceptable for the coal industry to break the law?”