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Bush’s Toxic Labor Day Gift to Workers |
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Here’s an early Labor Day present from the Bush administration—a nice little package of workplace chemicals, toxins and carcinogens all neatly wrapped up with a new proposed rule that Bush’s Labor Department tried to keep secret earlier this summer.
The proposed rule, published today on the Federal Register’s website, could increase workers’ exposure to dangerous chemicals and toxins and make it more difficult for the next administration to enact new safety rules. The rule’s development was pushed by Bush political appointees over the objections of career health and safety professionals.
The Bush administration has just a few months left in office and faces the possibility that a Barack Obama administration would reverse many of the anti-worker policies and rules—including workplace safety—that have been a Bush hallmark and have been strongly backed by Big Business.
Bush and his corporate allies, says Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO health and safety director:
are spending their last months making it more difficult to put needed protections for workers in place in the future.
The proposed rule would change the way risks to workers posed by dangerous workplace chemicals are measured and could increase workers’ exposure. It also would add an extra step to the rule-making process for any new rules restricting the amount of chemical and toxic substance exposure to workers. That, in effect, would give corporations another tool to fight and delay safety regulations and make it more difficult for a pro-worker safety administration to implement new regulations.
Says Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee:
In its final months in office, the Bush administration continues to attempt to sneak through significant last-minute regulatory changes at the behest of special interests. For nearly eight years, this administration has consistently failed to respond to the real health and safety threats workers face while on the job. But, now they will stop at nothing to rush through significant regulatory changes that are detrimental to average Americans. This is unacceptable.
In late July, The Washington Post revealed that Bush political appointees in the Labor Department were to “Fast Track” the proposed rule, which, when it first surfaced in 2006, the National Academy of Sciences called “fatally flawed” and lacking scientific grounding.
David Michaels, an epidemiologist and workplace safety professor at George Washington University, told the Post:
This is a guarantee to keep any worker safety regulation from every coming out of OSHA. This is being done in secrecy, to be sprung before President Bush leaves office, to cripple the next administration.
The Labor Department refused to make the proposed rule public at the time, but news organizations and safety advocates were able to obtain copies of the proposal.
On July 31, Miller introduced legislation (H.R. 6660) that would prohibit the Department of Labor from finalizing the rules, saying:
Congress will not stand for any backdoor effort by the political appointees to further cripple our nation’s ability to respond to vital health and safety concerns. This entire effort is the product of a flawed, politicized process that has failed to properly consider the views of experts or the consequences for workplace health.
This last-minute push to change the chemical exposure rule comes while dozens of important workplace safety and health rules remain buried in the Bush administration. Those proposals include a crane safety standard, as well as rules to protect workers from exposure to dangerous substances and chemicals such as silica, which can cause serious respiratory disease; diacetyl, a flavoring additive linked to “popcorn lung”; and beryllium, a light metal that can cause lung damage, especially to metal and dental workers.
In addition, the Bush administration refuses to develop combustible dust rules that could help prevent explosions like the one in February at an Imperial Sugar plant that killed 13 workers.
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Bush and Congress are the ones who are responsible for our present delimna. They sent our jobs overseas, they sent our factories overseas, they qave free trade to all countries but the USA. Big business is responsible for our sinking automobile sales. They added more steel, making cars bigger and less fuel efficient, all a part of the Great American Sellout and Giveaway by our leaders and those we trusted. They supported OPEC, our very worst enemies, who back stabbed us. TREASON!!
If you vote for McCain, you can be sure that any of the policies that Bush has set forth will remain in place, unquestioned. GW wants to make it very hard for new leadership (Obama) to undo the damage. I am so angered that so many of his negative environmental decisions have gone unchecked, and as much as I’d like to blame Congress, I really have to blame the Republicans for filibustering nearly every single piece of legislation that has been pro-environment, pro-working class, pro-union, pro reproductive rights, pro common sense - over 90 filibusters in all. This is a typical example of a government not working on behalf of its people, but dictating to its people what its own interests and agendas are.