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News :: Labor |
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Bush White House Rolling Back Job Safety |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ricky Baldwin
Email: baldwinricky (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!)
Phone: 217-356-2205
Address: 606 W White St Champaign, IL 61820 |
06 May 2003
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A trend of job safety improvement continued until 2001, when the present administration took office. |
Organized labor blasted the Bush Administration's record on job safety at the end of April at Workers' Memorial Day celebrations around the country. "The Bush Administration has demonstrated clearly that is has no commitment to addressing the major safety and health problems faced by American workers," noted the AFL-CIO's annual report on workplace death, illness and injury.
"Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect," runs 21 pages and is available at www.aflcio.org. The report cites a downward trend in the number of work-related illness and injury and a "plateau" in the number of deaths, at least until the Bush Administration took office in 2001, the latest year for which US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures were available.
Even before Bush, the numbers were still too high, at 5900 deaths due to traumatic injuries on the job. Alaska led the nation with 22.6 deaths per 100,000. Massachusetts was at the other end with 1.6 per 100,000. The most dangerous jobs, according to on-the-job fatality rates, were fishers, hunters and trappers, timber cutters and mining machine operators.
These rates do not reflect the deaths from occupational diseases, the report cautions, estimated at between 50,000 and 60,000 per year. Another 5.2 million injuries and illnesses were reported in private sector workplaces in 2001. Injury and illness increased by 7,900 cases among state and local government employees in 2001, climbing to 639,500 cases.
Ergonomic hazards were still the biggest health and safety threat in the US workplace, with over 522,000 new cases involving missed work in 2001. The highest concentrations of these injuries were in hospitals (35,227), nursing and personal care facilities (28,027), air transportation (24,997), trucking and courier services (21,395), and grocery stores (17,636).
Deaths on the job also increased among certain groups in 2001, including miners, Latino and agricultural workers. But once the compassionate conservatives hit the Beltway in 2001, the situation described by these numbers began to look like the good ole days.
The Bush Effect
"After two and a half years under the Bush Administration, rulemaking at OSHA and MSHA has virtually ground to a halt," says the AFL-CIO's report. In 2001, the report says, the White House withdrew 16 pending OSHA regulations and 13 pending MSHA regulations. In 2002, the Administration withdrew four more from each agency.
Under Bush, "OSHA has taken no action on two important standards that have been through the rulemaking process and are ready for final action," the report says, referring to Tuberculosis and Employer Payment for Personal Protective Equipment. Other job safety activities have been stymied or blocked, including long-needed revisions to OSHA's recordkeeping standard.
These delayed revisions include a definition of musculoskeletal disorder (ergonomic injury), a requirement to note musculoskeletal disorders on employer logs of illness and injury, and a requirement to record a shift of ten decibels or more as hearing loss. Though the US Department of Labor has announced that the hearing loss revisions will be released in 2004, employer groups have lobbied hard against inclusion of ergonomic information ever since organized labor began fighting for a standard almost fifteen years ago. OSHA had issued an ergonomics standard at the end of the Clinton Administration, but the incoming Republican-controlled Congress revoked the rule immediately.
And since the Bush Administration took office in 2001, unions and community organizations have been forced to sue OSHA over permissible exposure limits on hexavalent chromium, a recognized hazard for a decade. A federal court found "unreasonable delay" on OSHA's part in finalizing the new exposure limits.
The Administration's budgets for the last two years have also cut funding for enforcement of existing regulations. The proposed fiscal year 2004 budget slashes OSHA by $3.2 million and 77 jobs. Especially hard hit, the AFL-CIO report notes, are safety and health standards and worker training and education, while increases are proposed for federal "compliance assistance". In other words, there's less money for the workers, more for the bosses.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates US job fatalities for 2002 at 6,821 -- an increase of 921 deaths over the 2001 figures included in the AFL-CIO report.
What Works, What Doesn't
Congress established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1970. Since that time job safety has improved dramatically; an estimated 271,704 lives had been saved by 2001. That's the number of workers who would have died if pre-1970 job fatality rates had continued.
In many other nations without such protections, job fatality rates are much higher. The ILO estimates that two million workers worldwide die every year because of their jobs. This means that every day more workers die from their jobs than the number of people killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Government regulation has worked, not as well as workers and their unions would like, but it is hard to argue with results. Still, unions point to the millions of US workers not covered by OSHA, and job safety activists say OSHA regulations only really work where there are strong unions to act as watchdogs. And ILO reports would seem to bear this out internationally, where work-related death rates closely correspond to low regulation and union activity.
In Turkey alone, over 4000 workers died at work in 2002, out of a working population of just over 22 million. That's 18.48 deaths per 100,000 workers, more than three times the US rate. Work-related death rates were almost as bad in Mexico (15.56), El Salvador (13.33) and Chile (13.56), all countries where independent unions have been brutally repressed and neoliberal market reforms have eliminated or prevented government job safety regulations.
In countries with strong unions and governmental regulations, like Sweden, France and Germany, job fatality rates tend to be much lower than in the US. Only 77 Swedish workers died at work in 2002, a rate of 1.8 per 100,000 workers, compared to the US rate of 4.9 per 100,000. French and German job fatalities were 2.5 and 3.25 per 100,000 workers.
Certainly there are other differences among these countries, ranging from poverty-stricken police states in Latin America to wealthy European democracies. But even within regions like Eastern Europe, there is a marked difference between countries where unions are not strong and free market reforms have eliminated much of the previous controls -- like Russia, where the job fatality rate is 10.22, and Ukraine, where it's 17.86 -- compared to Poland, ruled by a labor party for many years, where the job fatality rate is 1.5 per 100,000 workers.
And in state-run economies with strong worker rights on paper, but no independent unions to fight for workers on the shop floor, job fatality rates also tend to be high, as in China (10.4) and Cuba (17.8). Both these countries have also been experimenting with market reforms in recent years.
What's Needed
Far from just another occasion to whine and complain, Workers' Memorial Day events typically feature a theme paraphrased from a famous quote by labor hero Mary Harris "Mother" Jones: "Mourn for the Dead, Fight for the Living." In soapbox speeches around the US, and in 100 other countries where the day is commemorated, workers called for specific action.
"The Occupational Safety and Health Act needs to be strengthened to make it easier to issue safety and health standards," says the AFL-CIO's report, "and to make the penalties for violating the law tougher." The statement calls for "a real voice in the workplace" for workers and "real rights to participate in safety and health as part of a comprehensive safety program to identify and correct hazards."
Unions called for extending OSHA coverage to the millions of workers who fall outside the OSHAct's protection, a strong ergonomics standard, and additional funding for OSHA to "develop and enforce" new standards and to expand worker safety and health training.
State workers' compensation programs have also been a target of much derision and call for reform -- especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the federal government took over 90 percent of costs for workers killed in the attacks. But federal actions did nothing for rescue workers and other "first responders", many of whom suffered severe injuries and illnesses as a result of hazards in and around ground zero. They discovered firsthand the inadequacies and even roadblocks in New York State's comp system.
"Massive changes instituted by state legislatures have both reduced benefits and made them harder to collect," notes the AFL-CIO report. "Workers' compensation laws need to be reformed to expand coverage and eligibility, to increase benefit levels and to permit workers their choice of physician."
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See also:
http://www.aflcio.org
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Comments
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Re: Bush White House Rolling Back Job Safety |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 1
10 May 2003
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Dear Ricky,
No one's commented on your article, so let me help you. I think it's because you and I are the only one's on this site who are actually employed or are employers themselves.
Let me tell you Ricky, the Bush Administration is trying minimize the potential damage to employers from the harmful and oppressive laws inacted to assist trial lawyers from getting a huge payday. Workers Compensation laws were enacted in an effort to fairly compensate workers who were injured on the job and prevent extensive litigation. Unfortunately, trial attorneys have infiltrated the system to the degree, that fraud and theft is now actively encouraged. Do workers who get injured deserve a fair and proper settlement? Absolutely, however, the system should not be rigged to favor the fraud and his ambulance chaser.
Jack |
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