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The Secret’s Over and Out: Bush Chemical Exposure Rule Killed |
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It’s no secret now. The Bush administration’s clandestine move to loosen the rules on how much toxin or dangerous chemicals to which workers can be exposed—and to make it more difficult to issue new worker protection rules—is now officially dead.
The U.S. Department of Labor announced this week that the proposed rule was unnecessary and withdrew it. The rule came to be known as the secret rule because of the Bush administration’s attempt to keep it off the public’s and media’s radar screen last year.
In January, as one of its first official acts, the Obama administration ordered work halted on the chemical exposure rule and other last-minute regulatory changes the Bush administration tried to ram through before leaving office.
The secret rule could have led to increased exposure of workers to dangerous chemicals and toxins by changing the way worker exposure is measured. The rule was pushed by Bush political appointees over the objections of career health and safety professionals and kept secret until media reports in July 2008 revealed the plan.
When the rule became public knowledge, it unleashed a firestorm of criticism from workplace safety advocates who pointed out that for the eight years the Bush administration had been in office, it had not developed any significant new worker safety rule—but with the clock running out, the administration was rushing to weaken protections.
Last September, Dr. Celeste Monforton, from the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University, told the House Workforce Protections Subcommittee it already takes far too long to implement new safety standards, and the Bush secret rule would only add further delays.
Our nation’s system for protecting workers from harmful substances that cause injuries, illnesses and deaths is paralyzed. Thousands of workers are exposed every day to chemical compounds and physical hazards that are known to be harmful, yet these exposures are permitted by outdated or non-existent OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] and MSHA [Mine Safety and Health Administration] standards. This is a sloppy piece of work that will impede, not improve, protection for workers.
As AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director Peg Seminario testified:
It is shameful that after refusing to take action to protect workers from serious well-recognized health hazards for seven-and-a-half years, that the Bush administration is spending its last months and taxpayer money to lock in place rules that would prevent the next administration from taking prompt action.
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I’m more worried about Obama’s overt programof shutting down missile defense
Strongbuck, those who care about worker safety and health recognize the danger in the Bush Administration’s attempt to hamstring efforts to protect workers from chemical exposures.
Your comment was as misleading as it was irrelevant. With regard to missile defense, there is NO claim that Obama is “shutting down missile defense.” See, e.g., US Mulls Alternatives for Missile Shield, NY Times, August 28, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/world/europe/29missile.html?_r=1.
Strongbuck,
You had best look at the lies the Republican party is telling about Health Care to innocence older people. I could have been exposed to those same chemicals, but I was laid during the Reagan era and wasn’t able to get back to work for 11yrs, luckily I had been in the Reserves and prior to Desert Storm was call back up on Active duty.
Several men where I was working at who didn’t get laid off were exposed to chemical such as Dow Cleaner and suffered horrible deaths, while I was serving the same country which people like Reagan, Bush I & Bush 2 were letting these chemical to be used in the workplace.
Those men were fathers, Grandfathers, husbands, & friends to many people, and this deal about all the lead based paint and chemicals in items made for the U. S. citizen by China, I was wonder who authorized, our country’s company’s to have the Chinese make them with these component chemicals in them, I feel people with the letters RR, GHB, and GWB anyone have any ideas?
Missile defense is a bad joke based on every measure (cost effectiveness etc). My mother was an early backer of the Program-before her mental illness was caught (not kidding on that one). Billions spent on fudged test results. I’d rather see it used to lure Maytag and Whirlpool and other light to medium manufacturing jobs back. Tell you what next time your in Memphis never mind Graceland or Beale Street go vist the areas around the no closed Goodyear and International harvester plants. Drop by the AFSCME local office and talk to the veterans of the sanitation strike in 2008 a couple of them were still working at 70+ because Memphis had no pension plan for them. Then come tell me how this whiz bang waste is better for America
This is a start, but we have a long way to go: A conservatively estimated 50,000 - 60,000 lives are lost each year in our country to worker toxic chemical exposures and other occupational illnesses.
There are hundreds of thousands of chemicals in use in industry today. OSHA has regulated less than 500 of them, and even those PELs (permissible exposure limits) are woefully out of date based on more recent scientific information.
By contrast, the European Union regulates 30,000 chemicals, and many that we allow here have been banned there for decades. The EU looks at the cost of regulation which they see as minimal compared to the benefit in saved health and saved lives.
We can and must do far better. What we have is a national tragedy of pandemic proportions. In Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System, I talk about the human, financial, and environmental cost in more detail.
Patrice Woeppel, Ed.D.
Let’s hope there are no more Bush’s, Clintons and Carters in an office of authority, especially anyone like George Bush who tried to destroy American Working Families.