Bush OSHA Tries to Scapegoat Scientist for Doing His Job

by James Parks, Nov 21, 2006

Officials in the Bush Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are trying to make a scapegoat of a longtime federal employee to deflect heat from the auto industry over an Internet safety bulletin about asbestos in brakes, according to a report in the The Baltimore Sun.

Sun reporter Andrew Schneider reports that OSHA officials are threatening to suspend Ira Wainless, an OSHA scientist, for what they say was his failure to study the full scope of scientific evidence on the dangers of asbestos in a safety and health bulletin. The AFGE, which represents Wainless, says the scientist, who has worked at OSHA for 32 years, did gather the arguments for and against publishing the safety bulletin to justify his conclusions. The union has presented documents that show he had given all this material to his boss 15 months ago!

It took six years for workers and unions to get federal worker safety officials to issue the bulletin, which warns auto mechanics the car and truck braking systems they work on could contain lethal levels of asbestos.

OSHA officials and officials of the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) held up the release of the bulletin, which was ready to be published in 2004, until July of this year. The bulletin was finally released only after Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pressured OMB to allow OSHA to release the bulletin, says Edward Stern, shop steward for AFGE Local 12.

Just three weeks after the warnings were posted, John Henshaw, who was OSHA administrator during much of the time the bulletin was under wraps, called for the agency to include studies, financed by the auto industry, that say asbestos in brakes presents little risk of harm to mechanics.

Last week, David Ippolito, an official with OSHA’s Directorate of Science, Technology and Medicine, told Wainless he would be suspended without pay for 10 days because he did not originally include references to the science paid for by the auto manufacturers (the changes Henshaw wants) in the original bulletin, according to documents obtained by The Sun and AFGE.

In a six-page letter to Ippolito rebutting the agency’s charges against Wainless, Stern wrote:

It becomes clear that you have selected [him] as a scapegoat and whipping boy to justify revising the [warning] in response to big industry. Mr. Wainless, like every other OSHA employee, is supposed to serve the public interest, not industry lobbyists.

Stern says it’s “outrageous” that OSHA officials would try to intimidate one of its own scientists who did his job just to cover their own tracks:

Everybody signed off on the guidance. Now that the industry is leaning on them, they want to blame the employee. This man is a conscientious employee trying to do a good job for years. Now management wants to punish him because he offended big industry. This type of behavior is intimidating to other workers.

It’s not surprising that Henshaw is pushing for an industry spin to the guidelines. When he resigned last year, Jordan Barab wrote:

If John Henshaw’s primary objective was to steer OSHA into obscurity and irrelevance, he can happily retire with mission accomplished. His main achievement was the creation of the Alliance program—partnerships with his “business buddies” (but not with unions)—that has replaced the development of standards. Happy trails, John.

Henshaw worked with the consulting firm ChemRisk, Stern says. ChemRisk and a related firm, Exponent, according to Stern and The Sun, have been paid more than $23 million since 2001 by Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler to help fight asbestos lawsuits brought against them by former workers.

Henshaw and industry critics say asbestos is no longer used in the United States and the warnings are not needed. But the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an investigative series in 2000 documenting high levels of asbestos being released as mechanics worked on brakes in garages in seven cities. The United States is one of the few industrialized nations that hasn’t banned the use or importation of most asbestos products.

In May, The Sun reported an 83 percent increase in imported brakes with asbestos over the past decade. Most of these are replacement brakes used by garages and backyard mechanics.

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