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BushWatch: Job Safety and Health Took Big Hits |
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This is our second look back at eight years of BushWatch. Today we review an area where outgoing President George W. Bush’s actions have a daily, and maybe deadly, impact on men and women who go to work every day—job safety and health.
Whether it was via regulation, legislation, executive order, policy decision or inaction, Bush repeatedly carried out the wishes of Big Business—less enforcement, weaker safety laws, lighter penalties or no regulation at all.
If there was any doubt whom he served, Bush erased that when he ended decades of practice and refused to name union representatives to serve on job-safety study and advisory groups, which also include academic, professional and management representatives.
Here are just some of the lowlights. For the complete accounting, go to BushWatch and click on Health and Safety in the top box.
When Bush took office, the top priority of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers was repeal of the nation’s first ergonomics standard. The standard—developed after almost a decade of research—was designed to prevent hundreds of thousands of repetitive motion injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Bush pushed for and signed legislation to overturn the ergonomics safety standard.
Bush then revoked 19 health and safety grants for universities, labor-management groups and unions to develop new health and safety programs. Later in 2001 (yep, we’re still in just the first year of the Bush administration), Bush forced the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to stop work on 30 job-safety initiatives that were in the regulatory pipeline.
In 2002, Bush began what was a budget pattern throughout his tenure, cutting jobs at OSHA and MSHA. That summer, he began another pattern that’s marked his time in office—refusing to provide adequate funding to monitor and treat the health problems of thousands of workers who cleaned up the toxic rubble at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center. His fiscal year 2009 budget cut Congress’ appropriation of $108 million for 9/11 workers’ health care by 77 percent.
Over the years, the Bush administration refused to act on safety standards that would protect workers from toxic substances such as lung-damaging beryllium and diacetyl (an additive used in microwave popcorn that may cause respiratory injuries) and illnesses such as tuberculosis and pandemic flu.
Despite eight years in office, Bush’s OSHA and MSHA—with their corporate alumni leadership—blocked or delayed new safety regulations to prevent industrial dust explosions, crane accidents and mine fires.
With time running out, the Bush administration last fall began a last-minute end run to implement several new rules long sought by Big Business, including a change in how exposure to toxic substances is measured that could increase workers’ susceptibility to the effects of dangerous chemicals.
Click here to read a BushWatch roundup about his attacks on workers’ freedom to join unions.
4 Comments
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Mike Hall,
Once again you are writing about circumstances that, as you say… “have a daily, and maybe deadly, impact on men and women who go to work every day—job safety and health,” and you are Absolutely Right!! But at some point we also need to be talking about, writing about and doing something about creating a Workmen’s Compensation system that provides timely, responsible and meaningful, medical treatment, compensation and benefits for injured workers! Another critically important aspect of workplace responsibility that… “have a daily, and maybe deadly, impact on men and women who go to work every day—job safety and health.”
We need to be addressing all of the issues you outline here and more to raise the conditions of health and safety within the workplace. But where is our voice? Where is the leadership on this issue? Where do you hear any voice of “Working Families” talking about the issue of addressing the conditions of Health Care Delivery for Injured Workers? It’s SILENCE from every corner and this is the signal that these concerns are not even a blip upon the Radar Screen of Labor and Safety Advocates! This is what is most troubling as we go forward. Workmen’s Compensation is a BROKEN Health Care Delivery System - It too needs Reform!
The destruction that has been done by the Bush Administration along with far too many other “Commerce Friendly” environments within state government, have completely emasculated the protections for workers. You take these actions, add the effect of time, and you have created a “Hostile Workplace Environment” for conduct and actions that were intended to serve, protect and provide benefits to Working Families. This is clearly conduct designed to place the risk and cost of injury upon the backs of workers, not upon the backs of the employer.
As a result, the entire scheme has become bastardized in a process to serve Profits above People. This will continue until “Working Families” have a voice of reason, have a voice that represents the safety interest of working people, and that provide leadership within a voice that rises up to bring responsible action and a balance of power to the injured within this void of protections that has been created.
These abusive conditions are so readily apparent and overwhelming to working people that they create conditions where lawful workplace injury claims are intentionally redirected and placed upon the backs of Private Health Insurance systems and others. This is the signal that in fact, a “Hostile Workplace Environment” does exist for the Lawful Filing and Claim Administration process. What other conduct, coercion or pressure tactic would be responsible for causing honest people to willfully participate in “Insurance Fraud?” A Fraud that only benefits the employer economically and that also prevents Health and Safety records from responsibily representing the true level of risk within the business environment. This is a GAME, a game of Fraud, driven by a “Go Along to Get Along” attitude of compliance. We know and understand this game now, and it’s far past the time for Change within this intentional “Hell Hole” of the workplace!
Where is this central point of focus and contact for this issue? Who is in position to address this issue on behalf of our Injured Workers? Where is the Leadership? Where is the voice that is “On Watch” for Working Families today? Where is the plan to address these know deficiencies? Where is the support and one stop location to provide help and assistance to the already injured and broken families that have had to suffer while the Bush Administration made Profits on the Backs and Blood of the injured? Who will lead the enforcement and protection acts needed on these issues?
The SILENCE is profound!
It has been said that you can tell a great deal about the character of an individual or organization by how they treat the least among us. The Injured Workers here in America clearly can now be seen as the Used and Abused elements that are discarded and thrown to the curb, when their economic value changes from asset to a liability. Is this the FUTURE we provide for our “Working Families” here in America. Is this the promise we get from Union Labor Leaders? This condition stands as the result we see all over the country, and this must CHANGE NOW!
Where is the VOICE of LEADERSHIP? Now that we have CHANGE, where will the ACTION come from?
Your Comments are Welcome… I have heard enough SILENCE!!
Craig Michie
NvVIAW@aol.com - Nevada Voters Injured At Work
Oh Happy Day
The 20th Of January is not far away!
OSHA fines for citations (violations) have been so minimal that it’s generally cheaper for the corporation to pay the fines than it is to provide a safe workplace. In over thirty years of existence, federal OSHA has referred only a small number of cases to US Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal prosecution, and only a minute number of those were pursued by DOJ. In those few cases when OSHA does deem a citation “willful,” (a prerequisite for referral to DOJ for prosecution) the crime is considered a misdemeanor punishable by a small monetary penalty, or by imprisonment for not more than six months, or both.
The abuses in medical treatment under workers’ compensation are legion and varied. Themes that run throughout the experience of injured workers are the delays; the denial of treatment; the inadequate, inappropriate, and cursory medical treatment; inhumane treatment; and the shunting of costs that should be paid by workers’ compensation to others, primarily injured workers and their families.
Employers and their insurers pay only a small portion of $170 billion annual cost of occupational injuries, illnesses and deaths. The lion’s share of the costs of occupational injuries, illnesses, and deaths are paid by the victims and their families; with a sizable portion paid by taxpayers. (Leigh, et al, 2000.)
While the United States has only set permissible exposure limits on less than 500 of the hundreds of thousands of chemicals in use in workplaces throughout our country, the EU regulates 30,000 chemicals utilized in their workplaces, and many that we allow here have been banned for years in the EU.4 Even the small number of chemicals, upon which exposure limits have been set in the US, are grossly out of date based on more recent scientific data.
Increasingly as a nation, we have been all too willing to push corporate costs onto workers and taxpayers; and all too willing to cut protections for workers, communities, and the environment.
The time is long overdue to re-evaluate a structure that evolved over one hundred years ago; and which clearly doesn’t meet the needs of seriously injured, ill, or toxic chemical-exposed workers, or the families of workers who died from their work – a system that has fostered devastating and lasting damage to families, to communities, to our environment.
Each year in our country, a conservatively estimated 60,000 deaths occur which are attributable to occupational disease and occupational toxic exposure.
We need action to bring justice and fairness, corporate accountability, and disclosure to this system - to right this terrible, continuing American tragedy.
1 Leigh, J. Paul; Markowitz, Steven; Fahs, Marianne; Landrigan, Philip. Costs of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses. University of Michigan Press, 2000.
4 Regulation EC 1907/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), http://eur-lex.europa.eu
Patrice Woeppel, Ed.D., Author, Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System
Hello Patrice,
Hope you received my email and will consider responding back. Thank you for your work and writing about these issues in your book, Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System.
Craig Michie
NvVIAW@aol.com
(702) 896-0808