“Paying
For Protection”
By Gene C. Gerard
24 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Two
prominent labor organizations have sued the Bush administration for
failing to protect nearly 20 million workers from job injuries. In 1999
the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) proposed a rule requiring employers to pay for
protective clothing, face shields, gloves and other equipment used by
workers. But before the proposal became a standard Mr. Bush was elected
to office. Since then, the Department of Labor has neglected to enact
the standard and has consistently failed to ensure the safety of America’s
working men and women.
The personal protective equipment
(PPE) rule would require employers to pay for safety items that protect
workers from job hazards. Many workers in the nation’s most dangerous
industries, including meatpacking, poultry, and construction, who have
high rates of injury, are forced by their employers to pay for their
own safety gear because of the failure of OSHA to implement the PPE
rule. According to OSHA’s own figures, 400,000 workers have been
injured and 50 have died owing to the lack of the PPE rule.
Under the Clinton administration,
OSHA maintained that employers are in a better position than workers
to select, maintain, and pay for the equipment best suited to protect
them from injury. Poultry workers wear specialized wire mesh gloves
to protect their hands and arms from cuts. Construction workers wear
hard hats and shoes made of sturdy materials to protect them from falling
objects. Consequently, in 1994, OSHA maintained that the PPE rule was
intended to require employers to provide and pay for personal protective
equipment that enabled workers to perform their job safely.
In fact, James W. Stanley,
the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, asserted
in 1994 that “failure of the employers to pay for PPE that is
not personal and not used away from the job is a violation and shall
be cited.” But in April 2001, only four months into the Bush administration,
OSHA suddenly discontinued listing a target date for formalizing the
PPE rule into a standard. And it listed the rule on its regulatory agenda
as simply “undetermined.” OSHA later announced that the
rule would be implemented by March 2005, but that never happened.
That’s why the AFL-CIO
and United Food and Commercial Workers sued the Department of Labor
earlier this month. The lawsuit asks the federal courts to compel the
Secretary of Labor to make the PPE rule an OSHA standard. It’s
a sad turn of events when a government agency created to protect the
health and welfare of the nation’s workers must be forced to do
so. But the Bush administration has done little to help America’s
working men and women since taking office.
In its first term the Bush
administration withdrew dozens of safety and health rules from OSHA’s
regulatory agenda. These rules dealt with indoor air quality, safety
and health education programs, and dangerous industrial equipment. And
in six years OSHA has only issued one major safety standard. In 2006,
after being sued by a group of steelworkers, OSHA issued a standard
regarding the potentially deadly chemical hexavalent chromium. But the
standard was so weak that even OSHA admitted that it leaves workers
at a significant risk of developing cancer.
Since 2001 OSHA’s budget
has been cut by $14.5 million. Job safety programs have repeatedly been
slashed. President Bush has consistently cut annual funding for safety
training and education programs, and his fiscal year 2007 budget completely
eliminated this funding. Not surprisingly, workplace fatalities and
injuries have been on the rise. In 2004, the last year for which figures
are available, there were 5,703 workplace deaths due to injuries. This
was the first increase in the national workplace fatality rate in a
decade.
Owing to cutbacks at OSHA,
there were only about 2,100 inspectors responsible for enforcing the
law at approximately eight million workplaces in 2005. At this staffing
level it would take OSHA 117 years to inspect each workplace under its
jurisdiction just once. And these inspections are becoming increasingly
brief. Under the Bush administration, the average amount of time spent
on each safety inspection by OSHA has declined 13 percent.
Given the previous position
by OSHA to require employers to pay for personal protective equipment,
there’s no justifiable reason that the Bush administration should
not have formalized this rule by now. OSHA was created by Congress to
protect the health and safety of America’s working men and women.
It’s unfortunate that workers now have to rely on litigation to
ensure their basic safety. The federal courts should move quickly to
hear this lawsuit and force the government to protect the nation’s
workforce.
Gene C. Gerard
have taught history, religion, and ethics for 14 years at several colleges
in the Southwest. He is a contributing author to the book “Home
Front Heroes: Americans during Wartime,” by Greenwood Press. He
writes a political blog for the world news website OrbStandard at www.orbstandard.com/GGerard.
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