Monday, November 25, 1996
OVERSIGHT:
Recent proposals to change OSHA favor employers, do little to
discourage infractionsBy Richard Trumka
Shirley Smith is a single mother from Spring Lake, N.C. A couple
of years ago, Shirley took a job at a poultry processing factory.
Moving at a blistering pace, she used a knife to cut through the
flesh and bone of chicken breasts. She did this eight or nine hours
a day, five days a week, every week of the year. Her hands
performed the same task over and over again.
One day, her hand started to go numb. She reported it to her
supervisor, but was ordered to go back to work. After a few days,
her finger locked, and she was unable to move her arm.
Shirley was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. Her doctor
told her to take some time off from work to recuperate. She tried,
but after a few days of restricted activity, she was fired.
Shirley wakes up every day in wrenching pain. She can’t fix big
meals like she used to. She can’t hang clothes or do yard work. She
can’t go to the grocery store by herself because she can’t push the
cart. She’s been forced onto welfare in order to feed her
children.
Shirley is disabled because her workplace was unsafe. Her life
has been taken away by carpal tunnel syndrome. She is just one
example of why we need strong workplace safety laws. Every year,
more than 700,000 workers suffer from crippling strain and sprain
injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. Many of them end up disabled,
their lives torn apart, their finances wrecked, their families
stressed out.
But carpal tunnel syndrome isn’t the only job safety problem we
need to worry about. Every year, more than 7 million men and women
go to work in the morning only to come home with missing fingers,
broken bones or other work related injuries. Even worse, an
estimated 55,000 workers die yearly either as a result of traumatic
job injuries or from diseases caused by exposure to toxic
substances.
During the past two years, Republican leaders in Congress and
many business groups have tried to fundamentally change the
government’s role in protecting the safety and health of American
workers. Republican Occupational Safety and Health Act "reformers"
wanted a new safety and health compact, one between business and
government that would shut workers out. They proposed legislation
which would have drastically limited worker rights and restricted
the government’s ability to take action to get hazards
corrected.
The proposals sought to make OSHA an advisor to employers rather
than an enforcer of the law. The legislation would have exempted
nine out of 10 employers from routine safety inspections based on
an employer’s own assertion that it had established a minimal level
of safety and health performance. Citations and penalties would
have been replaced with toothless warnings. At the same time, these
proposals would have taken away a fundamental right granted to
workers  the right to request a government inspection to
investigate serious workplace hazards.
These legislative proposals occurred despite more than two
decades of experience showing that the OSHA law has worked. Since
the act’s passage in 1970, workplace fatality rates have been cut
in half and over 140,000 lives have been saved. Injury rates have
also decreased significantly, particularly in those industries
where OSHA has focused its efforts. OSHA standards have
dramatically reduced exposure to toxic substances like asbestos and
lead. Worker participation in safety and health activities has
increased and widespread employer efforts to address workplace
hazards have been undertaken in large part due to the act’s
requirements.
My own experience tells me that a strong government enforcement
program can make a huge difference in the lives of working
Americans. Working in Pennsylvania’s coal mines, I saw the terrors
of unsafe working conditions  lives shattered forever by
explosions, cave-ins and black-lung disease.
Conditions in mines are so treacherous that a special law
regulates safety in the mining industry. The mine safety law is
much stronger than OSHA. It requires that every mine in the country
be inspected one to four times a year depending on the nature of
the operation. Inspectors have the power to shut down unsafe jobs.
Strong enforcement and adequate funding have made a real
difference. Since 1970, mine fatalities have dropped by 73 percent
and injuries by 50 percent, the largest decline in any industrial
sector.
All workers in this country need what miners have  more
safety and health protections, not less.
I’d like to have House Speaker Newt Gingrich or Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott sit down for a few minutes with Shirley Smith or
a group of mine workers and explain why Washington’s safety and
health agenda is focused solely on weakening job safety
protections.
We need to refocus this agenda to tackle the serious job safety
problems workers still face today and to get on with the job of
reducing injuries and eliminating on-the-job deaths.
We absolutely must address the problem of ergonomic hazards and
the crippling strain and sprain injuries like carpal tunnel
syndrome that they cause. It’s time to stop talking about how much
addressing this problem might cost business and time to start
taking action to keep workers from being crippled and maimed. The
state of California recently moved to adopt the nation’s first
ergonomics standard. But unfortunately, the Cal/OSHA Standards
Board bowed to industry and political pressure and issued a rule so
weak it provides little real protection to workers.
Workers need stronger health and safety rights. In particular,
the law needs to provide workers a greater voice in safety and
health matters on the job as well as protect workers who raise job
safety concerns against retaliation by employers.
We need to extend coverage of the OSHA law to all workers.
Almost 8 million workers don’t have the protection of OSHA simply
because they work for state or local governments. Thankfully,
California is one of 23 states where public sector workers are
covered by a state OSHA law.
We need more job safety inspectors so that when workers file a
complaint with OSHA they can get an inspection quickly. Right now
it would take OSHA 144 years to inspect all of the worksites in the
United States just once.
We need penalties that act as real deterrents. The current
average penalty imposed on companies for a serious violation is
$645. That’s not a deterrent, it’s just a petty cost of doing
business.
We’ve come a long way in the last 25 years, but there is still
much work to be done. There must be a renewed commitment to
protecting American workers. Only then can the promise of safe jobs
really be fulfilled.
Richard Trumka is secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.