They also represent combat crew, not miners.
I know.
Still, I wanted to make the values similar, because it comes from the same source
When you buy crew in a station, you deplete the "crew" stock, based on the crew you bought, the "green" crew is valued 0.5, the "veteran" 2, and the "elite" 4 (and "regular" 1, of course).
So on Vanilla each mining business (and each mining station can have several) need 500 crew, also a mining station make 5 crew stock get depleted every month (example: killed, left the station, got disabled, whatever...)
So, suppose a pure mining station has 10 mines, it will need 5000 crew, plus 50 will be missing every update (default is a month).
Now suppose in a month of bad luck, the station can't import any crew... also suppose you left lots of "elite" crew there previously for whatever reason, then you come back, and buy 200 elite crew.
The effective crew population in the station (ie: taking account veterancy) will become 5000 - 50 - 200*4 thus 4150
The 10 mines, that needed 500 crew each, now has 4150 available to them, and thus will produce only 83% of the ore they could mine.
Thus, there IS a connection, a very real one, between combat crew and mining crew, if you dump crew on a planet, it can hit max production (on vanilla) or even increase production (on my mod), if you take too much crew from a planet, you reduce its goods output (vanilla).
But I just asked a number, aiming to make my mod work better with SS+, if you don't want that, no problem.