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‘Millions of Workers Lack Even Most Basic Safety Protections’ |
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In the 36 years since the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) became law, the nation has made significant progress in protecting workers. But in the past six years progress has slowed, and now may be reversing.
Testifying today before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee on employment and worker safety, Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s safety and health director, said the economy has changed greatly since 1970, when the act was passed, with new hazards presented and new groups of workers at risk. Yet, the number of workers and workplaces covered by the OSH Act today is double what it was in 1970, but there are fewer resources available to OSHA to meet its responsibilities.
Health and safety standards are out of date or non-existent for many workplace hazards. Millions of workers still are not covered by the OSH Act, and lack even the most basic safety and health protections.
Seminario said the AFL-CIO supports the legislation being introduced today that would increase penalties for companies that violate workplace safety rules. The Protecting America’s Workers Act would penalize companies a minimum of $50,000 for a willful OSHA violation that leads to a worker’s death. Currently, the minimum fine is $5,000.
Congress is holding two days of hearings on worker safety and health, days before Workers Memorial Day, April 28, when workers around the nation commemorate those killed and injured on the job and highlight the need for improved job safety standards. In the United States, health and safety advocates will focus on the Bush administration’s troubling workplace safety record. (Check out Bush’s record on the BushWatch site.)
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| Estimates of the true toll of workplace injuries and illnesses compared to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports 2005. |
On Tuesday, Eric Peoples, 35, described before a House subcommittee dangers on the job that occur when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ignores or is slow to respond a hazard. The Carthage, Mo., resident said he has bronchiolitis obliterans, a severe, progressive disease of the lung, which he developed while working at the microwave popcorn maker Jasper Popcorn.After Peoples and eight other popcorn workers in Missouri came down with severe respiratory disease, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) began inspecting plants and determined the illnesses were caused by the chemical additive diacetyl. But OSHA, which is charged with overseeing workplace safety, did very little. It did not increase plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.
Rather, George Michael reports on The Pump Handle, a health and safety blog, the Bush administration waited until Tuesday, just before the congressional hearings began to take its first steps to protect diacetyl-exposed workers.
Unfortunately, OSHA has announced it will ignore thousands of workplaces where workers are being exposed with no protection, and will focus only on microwave popcorn factories, the one set of workplaces where NIOSH has already been helping employers address the problem. So when OSHA inspectors go out, they will likely find the problem under control in the popcorn factories. And more workers in the remainder of the food industry will get sick.
This kind of response is typical of the way the Bush administration responds to workplace safety issues, according to The New York Times. The administration
vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees—often former officials of the industries they now oversee—have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.
That’s the big problem, Seminario says.
Under the Bush administration, voluntary efforts and partnerships with employers have been favored over mandatory standards and industry-wide enforcement initiatives. With this approach, OSHA has abandoned its leadership role in safety and health, choosing to work with individual employers, rather than taking bold action to bring about broad and meaningful change in working conditions on an industry-wide and national level.
As a result, as a nation we are falling further and further behind in protecting workers from serious hazards that cause death, injury and disease. In 2007, the promise of a safe job for every American worker is far from being fulfilled.
The AFL-CIO latest report on safety and health, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, shows that 5,734 workers died from workplace injuries in 2005, compared with 5,764 the previous year. But the figures show a significant increases in fatalities among Latino and foreign-born workers.
On average, according to Death on the Job, 16 workers were fatally injured and more than 12,000 workers were injured or made ill each day of 2005. These statistics do not include deaths from occupational diseases, which claim the lives of an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 workers each year.
Although the official figures show a slight drop in injuries and illnesses, Seminario says that the figures are misleading because thousands of injuries are not reported.
Numerous studies have shown that the government survey of occupational injury and illness is failing to capture a large proportion of the job injuries and illnesses that are occurring.
Lee Friedman, director of the Social Policy Research Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago, backs up Seminario’s point on The PumpHandle.
A recent study we published illustrates that the steep decline in reported occupational injuries and illnesses during the past 10 years in the U.S. workforce is an artifact resulting from changes to the recordkeeping rules and regulations rather than an improvement in workplace safety.
Another study published in the April 2006 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that examined injury and illness reporting in Michigan found that the federal survey of injuries missed more than two-thirds of occupational injuries and illnesses in the state.
Despite the rising need for more inspections and regulation, the Bush administration has cut significantly the resources available to help save workers’ lives. Since 2001, OSHA’s budget has been cut by $25 million in real dollars and the number of OSHA personnel cut by 200. Seminario says Congress must act to keep the Bush administration’s feet to the fire on safety regulation. She also urged the committee to conduct an in-depth investigation into the true toll of occupational injuries and illnesses and the reasons why a large proportion of job injuries and illnesses are going unreported and uncounted.Other changes Seminario proposed would:
- Extend OSHA’s coverage to all workers and enhance civil and criminal penalties, strengthen whistleblower protections for workers who raise job safety concerns.
- Determine why OSHA’s standard setting process is no longer working and what can be done to fix it and update concerns.
- Increase the resources available to OSHA, particularly for its enforcement and standard setting programs, so that the agency can move more quickly to set needed standards and expand oversight of dangerous workplaces.
Visit the AFL-CIO’s Workers Memorial Day site to download a copy of Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect and other important material on job safety and Workers Memorial Day.
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