Federal Worker Safety Laws, Protections in Decline

President Richard Nixon's signature created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in December 1970. For the past seven years, labor leaders and workers' safety advocates say another Republican president has tried to turn back the clock to 1969.

From trying to slash worker safety training to its "fox-in-the-house" approach to filling executive jobs at OSHA with corporate managers, from killing the ergonomics rule as one of its first acts of office to refusing to increase mine safety enforcement even after multiple tragedies, the Bush administration has been criticized by everyone from religious leaders to CNN's Lou Dobbs.

"This administration has turned the mission of OSHA on its head," CWA President Larry Cohen said. "Rather than fighting for safer workplaces and aggressively enforcing the laws on the books, OSHA under Bush — like every other federal agency today that's supposed to protect workers or consumers — has been defunded."

How resistant is the administration to pro-worker policies? It took many years, a lawsuit and estimated 400,000 injured workers before officials had their arms twisted hard enough to issue a rule in November requiring employers to pay for personal protective gear for workers in dangerous jobs.

Though employers provide most on-the-job safety equipment, many workers in industries such as meatpacking, poultry and construction have had to pay for some of it themselves, including hard hats, lifelines, face shields and gloves. The rule requiring employers to foot the bill was first proposed in 1999 but was abandoned when President Bush took office. Now, a lawsuit by the AFL-CIO and the United Food and Commercial Workers and a congressional deadline have forced OSHA to act.

"It should have never taken the threat of a lawsuit and legislation to get the Department of Labor to take these simple steps to protect workers from everyday jobsite hazards and prevent thousands of workplace injuries each year," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chair of the House Education and Labor Committee.

And there are many other entries in the OSHA "Hall of Shame":

• OSHA funds for worker safety and health training programs and hiring of safety inspectors have been slashed. Adjusting for inflation, the proposed 2008 budget gives OSHA $25 million less than the first Bush budget in 2001, according to the AFL-CIO. Regarding worker training, the administration has tried to cut it every year but been rebuffed by Congress.
  
• Pro-Big Business and anti-worker executives in the Labor Department are so plentiful that activists have taken to calling the agency a "second Department of Commerce" rather than an agency to protect and fight for workers.

Bush began by appointing Eugene Scalia as the department's top lawyer, in charge of enforcing 180 laws relating to workers' rights and safety on the job. In private practice, Scalia represented opponents of the ergonomics standard and publicly ridiculed the field of ergonomics.

At the helm of OSHA, Bush installed in 2005 a lawyer from the country's most venomous anti-union law firm. Edwin Foulke, Jr., a partner at the Jackson Lewis firm and a vocal opponent of the ergonomics standard.

In 2006, Bush put coal mining executive Richard Stickler — whose companies had injury rates that were twice the national average — in charge of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. "The pleas of coal miners throughout the land to appoint a strong advocate for their safety have fallen on deaf ears," UMWA President Cecil Roberts said

• The door had barely closed behind President Clinton when Bush signed an order killing the new ergonomics standard, which addressed repetitive motion injuries for computer users and other problems stemming from poor job and workplace design. A wealth of research on ergonomics — a field in which CWA was a pioneer — has produced proof of debilitating job-related injuries ranging from carpal tunnel syndrome to neck and back injuries.

The injuries — sometimes crippling — strike an estimated 1.8 million workers every year. But two years after killing the ergonomic standard, the administration added insult to injury by changing the reporting requirements. No longer did employers have to check a box on injury report forms indicating whether a worker reported a musculoskeletal disorder, or MSD, the type of injury associated with ergonomics.