by Tom Price
If President Bush has his way there could be something else to mourn this Workers Memorial Day on April 28—the beginning of the end of federal safety enforcement. Since assuming office in 2001, the Bush regime has repeatedly attacked the enforcement powers of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), and there might be more to come.
OSHA cutbacks are life-threatening for the 91.5 percent of private sector American workers without union contracts. The 8.5 percent who are in unions can bargain for safety and enforce contracts, but that can be an uphill fight. A case in point—as one of his first acts in office, Bush scrapped the ergonomic safety standards. That presented problems the longshore Coast Safety Committee now has to negotiate with the Pacific Maritime Assn. (PMA).
“We have ergonomic issues the Bush administration shot down,” committee member and walking boss Local 94 Secretary-Treasurer Danny Miranda said. “This affects clerks, heavy equipment operators, maintenance and repair mechanics and top handlers. These jobs often affect necks and backs, and Bush has eliminated OSHA protection on this issue.”
In the first 30 years since its founding in 1970, OSHA saved as many as 220,000 workers’ lives by enforcing safety standards, according to the AFL-CIO’s Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario. It also lowered workplace injuries by 39 percent. Those results inspired the AFL-CIO in 1989 to choose OSHA’s birthday, April 28, as Workers Memorial Day. Canada and nearly 100 other countries also remember killed or injured workers on that day.
As well as mourning the dead, unions have to fight for the living. Rebuilding OSHA could become a vital interest for the ILWU if the employers have their way.
“At the last negotiations PMA showed up at the table with as many resolutions on safety as we had, and most of them were to delete language already in the safety code,” Safety Committee Chair and longshore Local 13 member Mike Freese said. “At first they wanted to eliminate the code altogether and just go by OSHA rules. We wouldn’t agree to that.”
Bush’s attack on OSHA began March 21, 2001, when he signed legislation killing OSHA standards on repetitive stress injuries. The rollback pleased corporate lobbyists such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They had fought those regulations for more than 10 years and contributed heavily to Republican candidates in the 2000 election. Administration critics saw Bush’s action as a payback to corporate interests. They would certainly profit if Bush passed the annual $40 billion injury costs from corporations to workers and taxpayers.
One week later Bush’s Labor Secretary Elaine Chao axed a $4.8 million safety-training program. Con-gresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) fired off a protest letter to the secretary. “In rescinding the grants, the Dept. of Labor [DoL] cited ‘budgetary circumstances’ as the cause,” Pelosi wrote on March 30. “Sadly, workplace safety will suffer to once again fund tax breaks for the wealthy.”
Bush’s April 2001 appointment of Eugene Scalia as the DoL’s Solicitor or chief attorney raised such howls of protest from Democrats that he withdrew the appointment during hearings. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) voiced opposition to Scalia’s published opinions that repetitive stress injuries were “psychological” in nature, and questioned Scalia’s fitness for the job.
“Since most labor laws do not include a private right of action [the right to sue], the Solicitor serves as the workers’ lawyer by using his discretion and judgment to decide whether to enforce workers’ rights,” Kennedy said at the October 2001 hearing in arguing that Scalia was the wrong man for the job.
Bush waited until Congress was out of session and appointed Scalia during its recess on Jan. 11, 2002. That way a lawyer who had represented clients like UPS against OSHA standards could become the chief legal officer in charge of enforcing those very standards. The appointment lasted one year.
Since then the Coast Safety Committee has drawn the line on workplace hazards and is negotiating with PMA and OSHA to ensure docker safety.
“On the issue of speed limits, they refuse to put speedometers on yard trucks so we can know their speed,” Miranda said. The employer also refused to post speed limits on the docks.
PMA did agree to conduct a study on dockside diesel emissions. There has been no progress on emissions of another sort—container loads of animal hides that leak a nasty, fetid liquid on dockers. The Safety Committee is also trying to eliminate hexavalent chromium in paint. It becomes a toxic vapor when containers or cranes are heated with cutting torches.
The union fought to get dockside first aid for heart attack victims during the last negotiations. Now the employer has agreed to install Automatic External Defibrillators at some ports, most recently during grain negotiations for the 2003-2006 contract. Defibrillators often save lives by sending an electrical charge through the heart, restoring its proper heartbeat.
The committee will vigorously oppose vertical tandem lifts. This practice requires a crane operator to lift two containers at once.
The union raised these and other issues at the Marine Advisory Com-mittee on Occupational Safety and Health in early March. That committee, representing government, industry and labor, advises OSHA on dock and shipyard safety issues. One issue the union brought to MACOSH was the practice of “riding the beam,” that is, riding in a cage on a crane’s spreader bar onto or off a ship. Workers wear full safety harnesses, but have no place to fasten a tether to the beam.
“We want the crane to work at a slow motion while carrying people, an emergency stop button and tie points on the beam so we can attach safety lines directly to it,” Freese said. “They did agree we should have anchor points on the beam to connect our safety lines to. This doesn’t make it a rule, but it would be a recommendation to OSHA.”
MACOSH wouldn’t agree to place emergency stop buttons in the cages, nor would the employers agree to slow down the crane movement while people are in the cages.
Unlike the employers or the government, the safety committee sees these issues from the workers’ perspective, from the bottom of the hold to the cab of the crane. When accidents happen, it’s workers who pay and workers and families who mourn them on Workers Memorial Day.
“We have been lobbying hard for the container chassis safety inspections,” Miranda said. “Recently a container separated from a chassis on an overpass and fell onto a truck below, killing the driver in that truck instantly.”
