TV you're better off not watching
Apr. 10th, 2012 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI've been watching Coal, which Netflix told me was a documentary series when it is, in fact, a reality show. It's basically a Deadliest Catch knock-off set in a coal mine. For reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, I'm interested in mines--I've read about coal mines and went to Kiruna specifically to tour the largest iron mine in the world. So I've continued watching despite all the cheesy reality-ness just for a chance to see a working coal mine.
The show is about a start-up coal mine, and it becomes very clear very quickly why these two prospectors could get the mineral rights for this seam. Because all the big coal companies concluded--correctly--that it would cost more to mine the coal than the coal is worth.
In the first few episodes, you see that the amount of coal that has to be mined each shift to break even--that is, just to cover the cost of the mine running for a day, not even to recoup the initial investment--is the very most that has ever been mined in a single shift. When your peak performance (which you almost never reach) is your break even point, you're doing it wrong.
And when they actually once manage to exceed the minimum, just by a little, they discover that the company they contract to truck the coal away from the mine isn't capable of hauling that much coal. The trucks have to go over a bridge with a weight limit to leave the mine, which means they can only be half full.
So, to reiterate, in order to turn a profit, this mine would have to:
a) Mine as much as they have on their best day every single day and
b) Truck more coal than they are capable of trucking.
Not to mention, lots of shit goes wrong in a coal mine. And not just of the life-threatening variety. The most common injury for these miners is actually back injuries, since the mine is only three and a half feet tall. You spend your whole day bent double hauling heavy things, you're going to injure your back. Clearly related to this, pain killer abuse is rampant.
And there's the fact that this mine only has one of every piece of equipment and is running all of it twenty hours a day with no maintenance scheduled in. They need absolutely every piece of equipment to run for the mine to work, and they're not maintaining any of it. So shit breaks down. CONSTANTLY. Plus, their generator isn't actually big enough to power all that equipment, so if they run the miner any more than gingerly, it trips the circuit breaker. And every time that happens, it takes fifteen minutes to reset. Not because the machine takes that long to reset, but because somebody has to walk up a hill to the generator. Given that they trip the circuit breaker fifteen times a shift, you would think it would be logical to make the guy stay next to the generator, rather than waste almost four hours of a ten hour shift waiting for him to walk up a hill.
And we also find out that they are underpaying the miners by calling them temporary workers who just happen to be operating whatever piece of equipment, rather than calling them equipment operators and paying them appropriately. And they don't pay benefits. Coal miners. With no health insurance.
Which means management spends all its time yelling at the miners for being crap when a) anyone who could get a job at any other mine would take it rather than staying in this shit hole and b) it's not the miners that are making the production so low, it's the incredibly crap equipment held together with gaffer tape and barely powered.
The big drama of the season is building up to a fight between the miners and the owners and I'm sorry, but that's self-inflicted. There's bad management everywhere, but there's something especially morally repugnant about watching terrible management of a company where the employees are literally risking their lives, both in the short and long term, every shift.
As a side note, have you ever paid attention to subtitles in reality TV? A lot of the time they use subtitles because the recording conditions aren't optimal, but there also seems to be a degree off of standard American accent that automatically gets subtitled. As these miners all have thick Appalachian accents, they are almost always subtitled, though I almost never have trouble understanding them. There's something vaguely...I don't know...offensive about how and when producers choose to subtitle.
The show is about a start-up coal mine, and it becomes very clear very quickly why these two prospectors could get the mineral rights for this seam. Because all the big coal companies concluded--correctly--that it would cost more to mine the coal than the coal is worth.
In the first few episodes, you see that the amount of coal that has to be mined each shift to break even--that is, just to cover the cost of the mine running for a day, not even to recoup the initial investment--is the very most that has ever been mined in a single shift. When your peak performance (which you almost never reach) is your break even point, you're doing it wrong.
And when they actually once manage to exceed the minimum, just by a little, they discover that the company they contract to truck the coal away from the mine isn't capable of hauling that much coal. The trucks have to go over a bridge with a weight limit to leave the mine, which means they can only be half full.
So, to reiterate, in order to turn a profit, this mine would have to:
a) Mine as much as they have on their best day every single day and
b) Truck more coal than they are capable of trucking.
Not to mention, lots of shit goes wrong in a coal mine. And not just of the life-threatening variety. The most common injury for these miners is actually back injuries, since the mine is only three and a half feet tall. You spend your whole day bent double hauling heavy things, you're going to injure your back. Clearly related to this, pain killer abuse is rampant.
And there's the fact that this mine only has one of every piece of equipment and is running all of it twenty hours a day with no maintenance scheduled in. They need absolutely every piece of equipment to run for the mine to work, and they're not maintaining any of it. So shit breaks down. CONSTANTLY. Plus, their generator isn't actually big enough to power all that equipment, so if they run the miner any more than gingerly, it trips the circuit breaker. And every time that happens, it takes fifteen minutes to reset. Not because the machine takes that long to reset, but because somebody has to walk up a hill to the generator. Given that they trip the circuit breaker fifteen times a shift, you would think it would be logical to make the guy stay next to the generator, rather than waste almost four hours of a ten hour shift waiting for him to walk up a hill.
And we also find out that they are underpaying the miners by calling them temporary workers who just happen to be operating whatever piece of equipment, rather than calling them equipment operators and paying them appropriately. And they don't pay benefits. Coal miners. With no health insurance.
Which means management spends all its time yelling at the miners for being crap when a) anyone who could get a job at any other mine would take it rather than staying in this shit hole and b) it's not the miners that are making the production so low, it's the incredibly crap equipment held together with gaffer tape and barely powered.
The big drama of the season is building up to a fight between the miners and the owners and I'm sorry, but that's self-inflicted. There's bad management everywhere, but there's something especially morally repugnant about watching terrible management of a company where the employees are literally risking their lives, both in the short and long term, every shift.
As a side note, have you ever paid attention to subtitles in reality TV? A lot of the time they use subtitles because the recording conditions aren't optimal, but there also seems to be a degree off of standard American accent that automatically gets subtitled. As these miners all have thick Appalachian accents, they are almost always subtitled, though I almost never have trouble understanding them. There's something vaguely...I don't know...offensive about how and when producers choose to subtitle.