Clyde Jones Died on the Job. He Didn’t Have To. Here’s Why.

by Mike Hall, May 25, 2007

Clyde Jones was one of more than 8 million local and state workers not covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). That may have cost him his life.

In 2004, Jones was part of a work crew repairing a hurricane-damaged roof at a Daytona Beach waste water plant. The workers didn’t know that highly flammable dangerous gases were escaping from holding tanks directly below the roof.

His widow, Casey Jones, told a House subcommittee yesterday:

He had no knowledge of the dangers associated with these tanks he worked around every day for the last seven years, because there had never been any safety meetings for him and other workers. He did not know of the dangerous gases which were escaping because he was never advised such a situation existed, nor were there warning signs or other precautions given to him.…As the lighted torch cut through the metal, the gases coming from the vent exploded into a horrible fireball.

The next day, with third-degree burns covering more than 90 percent of his body, Clyde Jones died.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), chairman of the Education and Labor Workforce Protections Subcommittee, which held the oversight hearing on the absence of OSHA protection for public workers, says an investigation into the Daytona Beach blast shows it shouldn’t have happened if OSHA standards had been followed:

This incident caught the attention of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and it decided to investigate precisely because the employees of the City of Daytona Beach, such as Mr. Jones, were not covered by OSHA.…In the accident involving Mr. Jones, the board found that several OSHA standards had been violated, standards that if followed, would have prevented the explosion.

While 24 states have their own federally approved OSHA plans that cover local and state employees, 26 states do not. David Fillman, executive director of AFSCME Council 13, which includes some 65,000 public employee members in Pennsylvania, told the committee:

I don’t have to look further than where I live to explain what the lack of OSHA coverage means. Neither the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania nor local governments are required to follow OSHA standards. For example, workers who must go into a deep trench to repair a water main break or for some other reason do so without their employers having to follow specific procedures or use equipment to prevent the trench from collapsing. When public employees perform the same job just across the border to the east in New York or New Jersey, or to the south in Maryland, their public employers are required by their state OSHA laws to take precautions to prevent their workers from being buried alive. This situation is not fair, and it is not right. Having the right to a safe job should not depend on the state in which public employees work.

 

Having OSHA coverage for all public employees is not just an issue of fairness. It is a matter of life and death.

Fillman pointed out that between 1991 and 2001, a total of 3,227 municipal and county workers and 1,224 state workers died on the job. In 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 520 government workers died. He also noted that each year, hundreds of thousands of public employees without OSHA protections are injured or made ill at work.

But he also said that although public employees need the workplace safety and health protections offered by OSHA, the agency has fallen short in its obligations to workers during the Bush administration.

For the past six years, OSHA has failed miserably to meet its mandate to protect workers. Enforcement of OSHA rules has taken a back seat to voluntary compliance and alliances with companies and trade associations. OSHA has failed to issue new and needed standards. It even withdrew its proposed tuberculosis rule, and now public health officials are warning us about a super drug-resistant strain of TB that has emerged. OSHA just recently denied AFSCME’s petition for an emergency standard for pandemic influenza preparedness, stating they could not take action because no human pandemic influenza virus exists at this time.

Click here to download all the testimony from the hearing and link to an archived webcast.  Also, download the AFL-CIO’s 2007 health and safety report, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect.

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