Despite historical progress under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, current workplace safety efforts face significant challenges due to stagnant regulations, insufficient inspection resources, and evolving labor structures.
Page B1From§Eachthe matinee edition — 7 September 2026
Fired mine safety commissioner surrenders legal fight four days before Labor Day celebrates it
As it ran on the front
On Wednesday, the mine safety commissioner Moshe Marvit stopped fighting. Trump had fired him from the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission; Marvit sued to get his seat back; this week the Supreme Court settled the underlying question of presidential firing power in a way that, he says, leaves the commission no longer independent of the man who fired him. So he withdrew his own case. He told The Hill he still disagrees with the ruling. He simply stopped seeing the point of arguing with an agency that no longer answers to anyone but the President.
Four days later, the country marked Labor Day — the holiday that exists because a fight over the days off and the safety underground once had to be won, not granted. Randy Korgan of Teamsters Local 1932 spent it commenting on the history of that fight and what comes next for it, which is a generous way to describe a week that had already answered him before he finished the sentence.…
…(cont) The same week, The Hill ran its own eulogy in everything but name: workplace safety was a governing priority once, the op-ed said, and could be again — if the regulations weren't stagnant, if the inspectors weren't spread too thin to cover the sites they're assigned, if labor itself hadn't kept changing shape faster than the rules written to protect it. That's the mildest possible way to describe a body chartered in 1970 to referee the fight between a paycheck and a lung, left short-staffed and short of independence in the same season. That's shit stewardship of a law that is still, technically, on the books.
This was not repealed by a vote. It was not struck down in a hearing anyone had to sit through. A man simply decided the fight wasn't his to keep having, four days before the holiday arrived to ask what, exactly, it's still commemorating. That's not malarkey. That's the paperwork.
OSHA'S OLD MANDATE — the notion that the referee answers to the statute and not to the boss — born 1970, died sometime this week without a headline of its own. Survived by a holiday named after the fight it used to enforce. Preceded in death by the appetite of the man appointed to keep having it.
In lieu of flowers, ask your own workplace inspector who signs their paycheck now.
“You strip the guy's independence in a court ruling, he quits suing four days before the holiday, and then they run an op-ed asking why nobody prioritizes safety anymore — that's not a mystery, that's a timeline. The referee doesn't work for the law this week, he works for whoever fired him, and the only people who don't notice are the ones who never had to breathe a mine shaft. Your kid's school nurse and your dad's old union hall run on the same math.”
“You have to look at the separation-of-powers question here, not the labor politics. The Supreme Court simply confirmed the President's removal authority over commission members — that's a structural, constitutional matter, it's not about mine safety at all. Marvit himself conceded the point, he withdrew the suit, nobody forced him — well, the ruling kind of forced him. Did I say that? That's not what I meant. Look, the commission still exists, the paperwork still gets filed, and if inspectors are stretched thin that's a budget conversation for another day, not today, not this column.”
The receipts
· Mine safety commissioner fired by Trump gives up legal fight, citing Supreme Court from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Remembering those who fought for days off and workplace safety on Labor Day from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.