CHARLESTON – A Kanawha County coal miner has sued the federal government over recent layoffs at the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health in Morgantown.
Harry Wiley filed his complaint April 7 in federal court against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the complaint, Wiley says he is personally affected by layoffs at the NIOSH facility.
He also says Kennedy, without notice, terminated most of the critical employees there, including the chief medical officer who handled a coal mine dust lung disease screening and job transfer program. Wiley says that puts his health and safety as well as that of other miners in jeopardy.
Wiley says he learned he might be developing coal workers’ pneumococcus in November and applied for a program known as Part 90, which provides coal miners a medical screening and epidemiological surveillance program as well as a right to transfer to a non-dusty job if they begin developing early signs of occupational lung disease.
Wiley, who still is working in underground mines, says he mailed the Part 90 form and radiological imaging of his chest as required and has received no response. That’s because without the Respiratory Health Division, he says NIOSH is unable to process all the incoming and pending applications.
“Coal miners face some of the greatest hazards of all American workers, including a recent epidemic of advanced coal mine dust lung disease as miners cut sandstone to reach the heavily depleted thin-seam coal reserves that remain after a hundred years of mining in Appalachia,” the amended complaint states. “In order to prevent black lung from developing into totally-disabling progressive massive fibrosis, the federal mine safety statutes since 1969 have afforded American coal miners a medical screening and epidemiological surveillance program, along with a unique right to transfer to a non-dusty job if they begin developing early signs of occupational lung disease.”
The suit wants Kennedy to restore all personnel in the Respiratory Health Division of NIOSH “who are integral to carrying out the epidemiological surveillance and job transfer provisions of the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977.”
On April 22, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) asked Kennedy to bring back the NIOSH employees to support West Virginia miners.
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Irene Berger. The defendants have until May 1 to file a response. A hearing is scheduled for May 7.
Wiley is being represented by Samuel B. Petsonk of Petsonk PLLC in Beckley and by Bren Pomponio of Mountain State Justice in Charleston.
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia case number 2:25-cv-00227