Workers Stiffed
Freedman, Allan
Workers Stiffed by Allan Freedman Death and injury rates among America's workers soar, and the government has never cared less On his best day, Stephen King couldn't have made this up: Homer...
...Just 18 percent of all wage and salary workers currently belong to unions, compared to 25 percent in 1970...
...The plant had lost electrical power, and deep in the vat, the bovine blood stagnated instead of circulating, releasing deadly hydrogen sulfide fumes...
...Though fatalities are down, 10,000 workers were killed on the job in 1990...
...To blame only OSHA and the administration for OSHA's failures is misleading...
...But the administration said no...
...What can we do now...
...OSHA's boilerplate defense is that it's understaffed and underfunded...
...There's now hard evidence that such injuries skyrocketed by 550 percent from 1981 to 1989...
...The insurance gives employers a rationale to cut corners on safety: If the company's covered, then it doesn't have to cough up huge settlements when somebody croaks in a tank of blood or gets eaten by a machine...
...But even those directors who have stuck around for a while haven't been especially interested in creating intelligent regulations or even enforcing the old ones...
...When Stull, oblivious to the danger, climbed up on the tank, the blood's fumes choked him...
...it's the result of three consecutive Republican administrations that would rather bow to businesses than protect workers...
...The Al-'L-CIO estimates that 6 million workers are injured every year...
...Strunk clucked over the money side of things, too...
...Weird coincidence...
...Meanwhile, labor unions, long advocates of safe working conditions, are declining at an alarming rate...
...in 1992, the GAO found that the average penalty still fell dramatically short of the new maximum levels...
...In 1991, another pointy-headed ruling in effect required companies to label ordinary table salt with health warnings...
...He was cleaning a filter atop a 20-foothigh storage tank holding 27,000 gallons of the blood—a tank where something had gone seriously wrong several days before...
...That job should fall to the president and to the Congress...
...Even when OSHA levies hefty, high-profile fines, corporations often succeed in getting those fines reduced...
...In April, the United Food and Commercial Workers' union petitioned for a new standard to protect workers from repetitive motion injuries...
...OSHA, for example, doesn't fully use its civil power to impose significant fines...
...The macabre case of National Beef underscores an equally macabre new trend, one endangering millions of American workers...
...Bravely, the agency fined the corporation $5.7 million...
...While there's been some talk about requiring employers to identify confined spaces, flag their hazards, check oxygen levels, and require breathing equipment (regulations that, according to OSHA inspectors, might have saved the six men at National Beef), OSHA failed for more than a decade to get the new regs on the books...
...The mine safety agency can require that a given hazard be corrected while appeals are pending...
...After the asphalt industry launched what The Wall Street Journal called "a back-door lobbying assault," Labor suggested an asphalt exposure standard 25 times higher than what OSHA's health officials thought appropriate...
...In 1983, three National Beef workers died in a similar way at the same tank in the same plant...
...What's going on...
...In Washington state, workeremployer safety committees are mandatory, and they work...
...While a healthandsafety committee program similar to Washington's has been introduced in Congress, and is supported in principle by the Clinton campaign, the Bush administration remains opposed to the idea...
...The agency wasn't slow on the trigger when the second round of deaths occurred: It hit National Beef with a $1.5 million fine...
...Is it...
...As a result, OSHA must routinely rely on a company's good faith to clean up hazards...
...William D. Ford, the Democratic chairman of the House committee on education and labor, said that the administration had spurned his overtures after the infamous 1991 Hamlet chicken-processing plant fire...
...And the agency has been notoriously reluctant to use what little power it does have...
...He died, retching on poisonous gas—as did two other workers trying to rescue him...
...That's about one Homer Stull every hour...
...When the first trio of men died, OSHA fined National Beef $960—that's $320 a life—and asked that the cleaning routine be made safer...
...That may be true, but at the same time, the agency hasn't really lobbied for more money...
...Jackson was the first to testify...
...After all, with unions fading fast, and their limited resources focused on simply protecting wages, the days are gone when they could also battle management to make mines safe and close down sweatshops—let alone push weighty legislation through an ambivalent administration and Congress...
...Between 1972 and 1990, the median death or injury penalty was $480...
...If nothing else, that remark—and the rest of the hearings—indicates that this is a rare instance where there's money but no will...
...That was not an isolated case: The GAO says contested OSHA penalties get cut in 57 percent of the cases employers fight...
...By contesting OSHA citations, on the other hand, companies easily delay fixing hazards until cases are resolved years later...
...Workers Stiffed by Allan Freedman Death and injury rates among America's workers soar, and the government has never cared less On his best day, Stephen King couldn't have made this up: Homer Stull, a 20year-old kid working the graveyard shift in June 1991 at Liberal, Kansas's National Beef packing plant, died in a tank of cattle blood...
...But after a single follow-up inspection in the wake of the first deaths, OSHA never came back to check if the new rules were being enforced...
...To make matters worse, observers inside and outside OSHA say these death and injury figures may be underreported by as much as 50 percent...
...In fact, OSHA has never had the authority to close a hazardous workplace: It has to go to court to take that drastic step, and companies know it...
...The bill "would require a doubling in OSHA's budget," she said, adding that "that kind of increase is simply unrealistic...
...While the big fish slip the hook, OSHA seems more interested in pursuing dubious microregulations...
...The statistics are there to justify taking a look at what OSHA does and doesn't do, can and can't do, and, most important, what it ought to do to save lives...
...Then came Strunk: "OSHA is protecting America's men and women," she said, and then cut the legs out from under the proposed reform...
...OSHA's power to press criminal charges is even more restricted...
...Oddly enough, this had all happened before...
...Onthejob injury rates—once on the decline—are now at their highest levels in a decade...
...Phillips Petroleum knows all about that...
...In dramatic contrast, OSHA's sister agency, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, has the unilateral muscle to shut down equipment, operations, or entire job sites that pose an imminent danger to workers...
...In many ways, this committee has jurisdiction over the great American promise . . . a promise not just of a job, but of a job with dignity, a job with security, a job with safety...
...But nobody— not OSHA, not the Department of Labor, not Congress—seems to care very much...
...Why the inaction...
...You can have 1,000 people severely injured and there is no potential for criminal prosecution," says Jan Chatten-Brown, a special assistant to the Los Angeles County district attorney...
...In the seventies, for example, the agency decreed that toilet seats had to be horseshoe-shaped...
...Actually, fortune had nothing to do with it...
...After a 1989 explosion killed 23 workers at the Phillips plant in Pasadena, Texas, OSHA found 575 willful and serious safety violations...
...Gutykunst's company took over the Liberal plant a few months before the 1991 deaths, inheriting an operation, he said, with safety problems exacerbated by OSHA's failure to reinspect...
...Follow-up inspections at National Beef would have revealed that management wasn't paying attention...
...Even if corporations appeal, that's the kind of power that can mean the difference between life and death—and between sensible regulatory effectiveness and bureaucratic dithering...
...As a result, today's workers have nowhere to turn to make sure management isn't overlooking safety...
...That means it can inspect individual employers once every 84 years, according to ,the AFL-CIO...
...According to an OSHA inspector general's report, 72 percent of "egregious" penalties were cut...
...Republicans love to hype examples of regulatory overkill as prime reasons to deregulate altogether...
...With organized labor unable— and OSHA unwilling—to take the lead, reform proposals gather dust on the shelf...
...OSHAs apart There is a good bill pending in Congress that would remedy some of the glaring holes in OSHA's power...
...But that misses the real, flesh-and-blood point: The idea isn't to sweep away all regulations or micro-regulate the world, but to make common-sense rules that protect lives as much as possible...
...Accidents happen OSHA's paltry budget is no accident...
...Nowhere, that is, except to an administration that ranks workplace safety about as high a priority as gay rights...
...Deaths due to willful violations of OSHA standards are punishable by a maximum of six months' jail time—and keep in mind that somebody has to actually die before criminal action can be undertaken...
...When I offered to help the secretary of labor to secure more funding for OSHA enforcement efforts in North Carolina after the Imperial Food Products fire, my offer was refused...
...The legislation would boost the agency's fining power, allow it to correct hazards while contested citations are pending, and force employers to verify corrections in writing and post verifications at work sites...
...In 1990, Congress gave OSHA a sevenfold increase in its civil-penalty power...
...60,000 of those are permanently disabled...
...The stakes of the debate were dramatized by two witnesses from opposite political worlds: Jesse Jackson and Dorothy Strunk, OSHA's acting administrator...
...The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—the federal agency responsible for monitoring on-the-job safety—had simply failed, once again, to do its job...
...The agency is supposed to keep tabs on 6 million workplaces with just 1,200 inspectors and 21 OSHA-approved state inspection programs...
...The bill "would lead to excessive conflict and litigation" and "decrease OSHA's ability to continue to respond to emerging hazards...
...Its $300 million federal appropriation is laughable compared to the $1.1 billion earmarked to monitor fish and wildlife...
...While mindlessly pursuing a deregulatory agenda, the Republicans put a clamp on smart regulations...
...The plant was in deplorable shape," concedes Tom Gutykunst, president and CEO of National Beef's parent company, Idle Wild Foods...
...Allan Freedman is a Washington writer...
...But that doesn't mean the firm will end up paying that amount, as OSHA has a history of reducing its heftiest fines...
...While there have been more and better workers' compensation insurance programs in recent years, management has found a way to capitalize on even that...
...But unions alone shouldn't have to carry the burden of making workplaces safe...
...In a catch-22 that squeezes workers from both sides, OSHA doesn't have enough power to force sloppy employers to clean up their acts...
...One reason is that the agency has had 10 different directors in the past 12 years—a political turnover that's kept the agency from setting long-term goals...
...The fact that 300 workers are killed in enclosed spaces every year doesn't faze the administration either...
...Take the Department of Labor...
...Even when OSHA wants to get tough, it's hamstrung by congressional limitations on its enforcement power...
...In another case, when OSHA itself proposed to limit drastically the toxic fumes to which workers could be exposed to during road and roof repairs, Labor declined...
...Washington's job safety program, which unites workers and employers in decisionmaking, allowed companies to cut workers' compensation costs by as much as 18 percent in a year...
...And a General Accounting Office report reveals that because of "resource constraints," fewer than 5 percent of OSHA's 1991 inspections were follow-ups to check on whether existing problems had been resolved...
...June a Senate labor panel held its final hearing of the session on a massive OSHA reform bill...
...Ultimately, however, Phillips got the fine reduced by nearly a third and convinced OSHA to drop charges of the most serious safety violations...
Vol. 24 • November 1992 • No. 11
