A Farewell and Tribute to Confined Space

by Mike Hall, Feb 1, 2007

	Confined Space won the 2005 Koufax award—named after famous Dodger lefty Sandy Koufax—for best single issue blog.

After four years and more than 2,800 posts about workplace safety issues and Bush administration assaults on health and safety laws and regulations, Jordan Barab has shut down Confined Space, the online world’s most extensive worker health and safety site.

Although the end of Confined Space is a loss felt throughout the safety and health and progressive blog communities (read tributes to Barab and Confined Space here, here, here and here), Barab is taking his expertise to the House Education and Labor Committee to work on OSHA-related legislation investigations and oversight hearings.

In other words, instead of just writing about what Congress and this administration needs to be doing to protect workers, I’ll hopefully be able to directly affect some of those things.

Barab, a health and safety professional, headed AFSCME’s Health and Safety Department for 16 years. He served in the Clinton administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and as special health and safety consultant to the AFL-CIO. In recent years, he also was a regular contributor to the labor spot on the popular Firedoglake site. Barab plans to retain the Confined Space website and archives online.

In his final post, Barab says he set out to not only educate readers about workplace safety but to put workplace safety and health into a political context.

You won’t read in any newspapers that if the 12 deaths at Sago last year, or the 15 deaths at the BP Texas City refinery the year before had been the only workplace fatalities on those days, those would have been good days in the American workplace. More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices….

…you’ll never learn from the evening news that we have more fish and wildlife inspectors than OSHA inspectors, or that the penalties from a chemical release that kills fish is higher than a chemical release that kills a worker. Not many are aware that workers are often afraid to complain about health and safety hazards or file a complaint with OSHA. Almost no one understands that OSHA inspections are so infrequent and penalties for endangering workers are so insignificant that there is almost no disincentive for employers to break the law. Employers are almost never criminally prosecuted for killing workers even when they knew they were violating OSHA standards…

…And there are still far too many health and safety professionals that don’t understand that to a very great extent, who lives and who dies in the workplace is determined by politics––both power relationships in the workplace, and traditional politics that determines who controls our government. What that means is that organizing unions and electing politicians who will fight against unlimited corporate control over our regulatory agencies, our workplaces and the environment are of vital importance to protecting the health and safety of American workers…

Click here to read his entire farewell column.

The loss of Confined Space creates a big vacuum for news of worker safety and health issues we hope soon can be filled. In the meantime, America’s workers now have a great ally with Barab on the Education and Labor Committee.