The roof of a mine collapsed in Chile on the 5th of August, 2010, just outside of the town of Copiapó. It trapped thirty-three men. The sign below says “We pray for our brothers who are trapped in the San Jose Mine”

[Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images. The Guardian]

It was not known until yesterday whether they were alive or dead. The company did not have adequate maps of the mine, so the first bore hole missed the refuge where the believed the survivors to be. It was the second bore hole that found them, allowed contact for the first time. Finally, after 17 days there is now more than a tenuous hope.

It will be four months, however, before an escape shaft will reach them. Four months trapped underground with only each other. They have created a canal of freshwater with a bulldozer, however. They have rigged up light using electricity from a truck engine. Makes me wonder what I myself could manage if I were trapped in the darkness far underground. Probably not that, but I’d hope to surprise myself. Still, I am full of respect.

I come from a mining town, if it’s not grown it’s mined people say. That’s true of your car, your computer, your refrigerator, your phone, your radio, pieces of your shoes and your clothes…the list is infinite really. So much of what we take for granted comes from a mine or an oil well, a steel making plant, factory or refinery. These are the jobs that make the refined distance of our modern world possible. More and more of them are confined to less developed countries, far from those of us who primarily benefit from the resources extracted and the brutal work of their processing. It allows us the luxury of not seeing, of not knowing the risks involved.

Workingman’s Death begins to change that. Its incredible cinematographic scope draws us deep inside a kind of work few of us in the developed world could imagine. Coal mining in the Ukraine. Gathering sulphur from an Indonesian volcano. Working steel in China. This film brings you inside the work itself, as close as you can come to an experience without physically being there. You bring your own ethics along with you, they are not provided.

Of course, the lack of ethics involved in running an unsafe mine are clear. This is only one accident in a long line of them at the San Jose Mine run by the San Esteban Mining Company. Reuters reports thirteen previous fatalities on site. This mine has also long been a site of worker struggle. But the international spotlight generated by the scale of the current tragedy has forced the Chilean government to at least verbally say that they are committed to an overhauling of mining safety regulations and inspections. We should hold them to that. After all, it is partly Chilean copper that makes our world work for us the way it does. That, and the hard physical labour of thousands of people around the world.