Fight for the Living

An unpublicized epidemic has taken hold in the United States. Each year, according to the Labor Department, approximately 10,000 workers are killed in industrial accidents and 70,000 suffer permanent injuries. Tens of thousands more--the National Safe Workplace Institute estimates 50,000 to 70,000--die from workplace induced disease.

What is perhaps most horrifying about this carnage is that much of it is avoidable. But corporate indifference and weak government enforcement of workplace safety laws allow thousands of workers to die needlessly each year.

Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been dramatically weakened. Its budget and its inspector staff have been cut, and it has pursued "cooperation" rather than confrontation with employers.

Even this weakened agency has found the 10 largest U.S. corporations to be guilty of over 3,800 violations of workplace safety regulations since 1982 (see "Crime Without Punishment" in this issue). Yet these corporations are subject to insignificant penalties for their criminal acts, and have been fined for only approximately one-third of their violations. They face an average fine of $437 per violation.

Corporations are almost always able to avoid serious penalties for the worst workplace disasters. Though approximately 200,000 workers have died on the job during OSHA's 20-year existence, it has referred only 74 cases to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. Of these referrals, the Justice Department won only 15 convictions. And only one individual was sent to jail--for 45 days--for an occupational-safety crime.

Addressing the scandalous national rate of workplace-related death, disease and injury will require fundamental changes in workplace regulation and the balance of power on the shop floor.

The government must make a commitment to forcing corporations to protect their employees from job-related accidents and illness and must turn OSHA into a tough law-enforcement agency.

Harsh criminal penalties for companies which kill their workers through negligence--coupled with a willingness by OSHA to use them--would heighten corporate concern with workplace health and safety. Most companies are able to write off the current monetary sanctions as "a cost of doing business"--and not a very significant one at that.

The OSHA Criminal Penalty Reform Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate by Howard Metzenbaum, D-OH, and in the House of Representatives by Tom Lantos, D-CA, would help rectify this shortcoming in law and performance. The legislation would increase the maximum criminal sanction for a wilful violation of the OSH Act that results in the death of a person from six months to 10 years and would create a new criminal sanction, with a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment, for a wilful violation of the OSH Act that results in "serious bodily injury" to a person.

But harsh penalties along with a revamped OSHA will not be sufficient to eliminate preventable accidents and toxic exposures, especially with a presidential administration that displays so little concern for worker health and safety. Workers must also have some role in creating a safer workplace. Labor unions must aggressively resist speed-ups in the pace of work which foster accidents. And individual workers must be given the right to refuse unsafe work without endangering their jobs. A "right-to-act" law, which would grant workers this right, is a necessary complement to workers' "right to know," guaranteed by the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986, which requires corporations to publicly report information regarding hazardous chemicals used in or resulting from their operations. Knowing that certain substances are dangerous may intensify workers' precautionary measures, but some situations may be fundamentally unsafe--and workers should not be faced with a choice of performing unsafe tasks or losing their jobs.

Efforts to implement such basic changes in occupational safety and health regulation will encounter immense corporate opposition. OSHA has long confronted employer hostility; business associations have lined up against Senator Metzenbaum's bill; companies have made line speed-ups essential components of their efforts to improve productivity; and, in the few states where right-to-act legislation has been seriously considered, corporations have responded with outraged disbelief. Safety regulations interfere with corporations' control of the workplace, which they view as their most fundamental prerogative.

Overcoming the corporate lobby against workplace safety improvements--as well as the corporate-allied Bush administration--will require a concerted effort on the part of organized labor, which has not sufficiently emphasized the issue. Doing so might improve labor's negative public image of being concerned only with wages, but it will also require a willingness to confront corporate power that few unions have demonstrated in the last decade.