As West Virginians watched for news of the trapped foreman of a mining crew in an Alpha Metallurgical Resources mine in Nicholas County, just days after learning of the death of another miner in an accident at a Mettiki Coal mine in Tucker County, the health and safety of our coal miners was brought back into our collective minds.

For the miners themselves, a renewed fight over their health has been brewing for months, as an Associated Press report over the weekend delved into the fight to get the Trump administration and the U.S. Department of Labor to stop rolling back or delaying health and safety measures. At issue most recently is the delay in implementation of a rule that should have gone into effect in April.

The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration approved a rule last year that would have cut the federal limit for allowable respirable crystalline silica dust exposure by half. It’s another attempt to protect miners from black lung and other illnesses.

Coal industry groups wanted to block the rule, and sued. The Trump administration did not fight the lawsuit.

For the administration’s part, its representatives insist they are protecting coal miners by focusing on energy industry dominance, and therefore protecting jobs. It doesn’t feel that way to the men and women who are doing the dirty, potentially dangerous (deadly) jobs that keep that industry humming.

“They’re doing everything they can to hurt the working man,” Randy Lawrence, president of the Kanawha County Black Lung Association, told the Associated Press. “They ain’t worried about the miners or people in West Virginia or coal miners anywhere. All they’re worried about is the almighty dollar in D.C. They don’t care about the little people that put them there.”

We know our miners will fight. They’ve done so for generations. But West Virginia’s lawmakers and those who purportedly represent us in Washington, D.C., must join them.

Those same politicians have no problem leaning on miners and the Mountain State’s coal industry when they believe it will score them political points. It’s time now to get to work showing they truly are friends — not of coal, but of its miners.