Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc.
www.cqresearcher.com
Worker Safety
Is OSHA falling down on the job?
T
he American workplace is far safer today than it was
four decades ago, but nonetheless a dozen workers
die every day from job-related injuries. A catastrophic
workplace accident occurred in April, when a West,
Texas, fertilizer plant exploded, killing 15 people and obliterating
much of the town. Worker safety remains controversial, with labor
advocates complaining that antiregulatory sentiment has hobbled
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ability to regulate workplace hazards. But business groups argue that many
OSHA rules are ineffective and hurt productivity and profits. Meanwhile, emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and synthetic
An apartment building in West, Texas, lies in ruins
after an explosion at a nearby fertilizer plant on
April 17 damaged parts of the surrounding
community, killing 15 people and injuring
more than 150. Workplace accidents kill
some 4,500 Americans each year.
biology pose new challenges to regulators, while age-old workplace
problems like trench cave-ins and musculoskeletal pain are still
widespread. Overseas, deadly industrial disasters at factories pro-
I
ducing clothing for the U.S. and European markets have raised
N
questions about the ethical responsibility of companies that out-
S
source jobs to developing countries with lax worker protections.
THIS REPORT
I
D
E
CQ Researcher • Oct. 4, 2013 • www.cqresearcher.com
Volume 23, Number 35 • Pages 837-860
THE ISSUES ....................839
BACKGROUND ................845
CHRONOLOGY ................847
CURRENT SITUATION ........852
AT ISSUE........................853
OUTLOOK ......................855
RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR
EXCELLENCE ◆ AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................858
THE NEXT STEP ..............859
WORKER SAFETY
THE ISSUES
839
• Is OSHA aggressive
enough?
• Are worker safety regulations
keeping up with emerging
technologies?
• Are companies doing
enough to make sure their
overseas operations and
vendors are safe for workers?
SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS
840
841
Grain Bins Pose Lethal
Hazard on Farms
Inexpensive prevention
measures are available but
often go unused.
844
OSHA Boosts Penalties
and Enforcement
The number of $100,000-plus
penalties is rising.
847
Chronology
Key events since 1860.
848
OSHA Lacks Clout on the
Family Farm
“You don’t love my child
any more than I do.”
BACKGROUND
845
Era of Industrialization
Workers often died in unsafe
factories in the early 1900s.
846
Progressive Era Reforms
Social activism in the early
20th century prompted passage
of worker safety laws.
850
Modern Reforms
A bipartisan effort created
the Occupational Safety and
Health Act in 1970.
850
CURRENT SITUATION
852
854
New Silica Rule
Revised silica dust standards
could save 700 U.S. lives and
prevent 1,600 new silicosis
cases.
Congressional Gridlock
A bill to overhaul the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration is stalled.
OUTLOOK
855
Evolving Hazards
Injury prevention programs
could help employers foresee
emerging job-site dangers,
say safety advocates.
Cover: Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla
838
CQ Researcher
Overexertion Most Common
Work-Related Injury
Excessive lifting, pulling and
carrying cause more than a
third of nonfatal injuries.
853
Many States Run Their
Own OSHA Programs
“I see more activity in the
states now than ever before.”
At Issue:
Does OSHA need major reform?
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
857
For More Information
Organizations to contact.
858
Bibliography
Selected sources used.
859
The Next Step
Additional articles.
859
Citing CQ Researcher
Sample bibliography formats.
Oct. 4, 2013
Volume 23, Number 35
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Worker Safety
BY T. R. GOLDMAN
THE ISSUES
On the global front, a series of deadly industrial disasters at foreign plants makammy Miser wonders
ing clothing for export to the
how many more workUnited States and Europe has
ers will die before her
raised troubling questions
brother’s death is vindicated.
about the ethical responsibilIn 2003, Shawn Boone, a
ity of big companies that use
33-year-old maintenance workcheap, outsourced labor in
er at the Hayes Lemmerz aludeveloping countries. In the latminum smelting plant in Huntest major episode, more than
ington, Ind., had just relit a
1,100 Bangladeshi textile workfurnace when highly comers died in the April 24 colbustible aluminum dust exlapse of a massive garment facploded, instantly knocking him
tory in Dhaka’s Rana Plaza. 2
down and blinding him. A secThe building’s owner allegedly
ond blast left him “smoldering
had ignored construction
while the aluminum dust concodes and has been charged
tinued to burn through his flesh
in the deaths. The tragedy
and muscle tissue,” Miser told
has prompted European and
a congressional committee.
American companies that
His last words before his
buy clothing made by lowfamily took him off life supwage workers in developing
port: “I’m in a world of hurt,”
countries to promise to monMiser said. 1
itor and improve working conFor a decade, Miser has
ditions, but critics charge that
urged Congress and the Ochuge gaps remain.
cupational Safety and Health
Meanwhile, OSHA and
Administration (OSHA), the
other worker safety groups
A woman grieves for one of the more than 1,100 textile
main federal agency charged
are struggling to keep up with
workers who died when a garment factory collapsed in
with protecting employees
revolutionary technological
Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 24. The disaster prompted
from workplace dangers, to
changes in production methEuropean and American retailers — who together
purchase more than three-quarters of Bangladesh’s
pass safety rules on comods and materials that could
textile exports — to promise improvements in working
bustible dust — fine particles
pose unseen dangers to workconditions in factories where low-wage workers
that can explode when susers. For example, new safemake the companies’ clothing. Globally, workplace
pended in high enough conty concerns have been raised
hazards kill nearly 1 million workers each year,
centrations and ignited with
about the pell-mell growth of
according to the World Health Organization.
something as simple as static
nanotechnology, which maelectricity. But neither lawmakers nor cern and controversy. In the United States, nipulates microscopic particles to creOSHA under the George W. Bush and labor advocates charge that OSHA’s rule- ate new materials used in the promaking process moves at a glacial pace duction of everything from airplane
Obama administrations has done so.
“We’re not getting any more from and that business resistance to federal wings to processed foods. 3 Safety adthis administration than we did from and state regulations has hobbled the vocates worry that workers may be inthe last one,” Miser says today. While agency’s ability to set new standards. haling such particles in laboratories or
the threat of combustible dust in fac- Many business groups, on the other on factory floors or otherwise being
tories and mines continues to be a hand, argue that while worker safety is exposed to risks that scientists have
“huge” worry, she says, getting tougher a key concern, many government work- yet to understand.
place rules are ineffective and drag down
rules has been “like a yo-yo.”
And workers continue to die from
Workplaces are far safer now than productivity and profits, hurting work- solvable but longstanding problems,
they were decades ago, but worker safe- ers and the economy rather than help- agency critics say, such as failure to adty continues to be a source of both con- ing them.
equately reinforce a trench to keep it
AFP/Getty Images/Munir uz Zaman
T
www.cqresearcher.com
Oct. 4, 2013
839
WORKER SAFETY
Overexertion Most Common Work-Related Injury
More than a third of nonfatal occupational injuries in 2011 were due
to overexertion, which results from excessive lifting, pulling or carrying.
Being struck by an object, such as a falling tool, was the second most
common injury resulting in missed work. Employees lost an average
of eight days of work because of on-the-job injuries.
Nonfatal Occupational Injuries and Illnesses
Resulting in Missed Work, 2011
Overexertion* and bodily reaction**
Struck by object, equipment***
Fall to lower level
Fall on same level
Slips, trips
Exposure to harmful substances
Transportation incidents
Violence and other injuries
Fires and explosions
All other causes
* Overexertion — Injuries from excessive lifting, pushing, pulling, holding, carrying, throwing
** Bodily reaction — Injuries from bending, climbing, reaching, standing, sitting,
slipping or tripping without falling
*** Struck by object — such as a tool falling on a worker or an employee striking an
object, such as walking into a door
Sources: Bureau of Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor; “Death on the Job: The Toll
of Neglect,” AFL-CIO, April 2013, www.aflcio.org/content/download/79181/1933
131/DOTJ2013.pdf; “2012 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index,” Liberty Mutual
Research for Safety, 2012, www.libertymutualgroup.com/omapps/ContentServer?
pagename=LMGroup/Views/LMG&ft=2&fid=1138356633468&ln=en
from collapsing on workers inside.
“These are ancient hazards that we
still can’t get ourselves to correct,”
says Michael Silverstein, a clinical professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of
Washington School of Public Health
and former director of the Washington state OSHA program and former
policy director at OSHA headquarters
in Washington, D.C. OSHA has a rule
on proper techniques for shoring up
trenches, but collapses still kill at least
one worker a week in the United
States, he says. 4
840
CQ Researcher
Even as the agency struggles to deal
with such age-old hazards, “new hazards are emerging all the time,” Silverstein continues, “yet we often allow
the technology that creates these hazards to run way ahead of our efforts
to control our exposure.”
About 4,500 U.S. workers die in
workplace accidents each year, and
millions more become sick or injured
at work, often from handling hazardous
chemicals or other materials. 5 Medical and lost-productivity costs stemming from the injuries alone run about
$250 billion annually — more than the
cost of lost productivity and treatment
for all cancers, according to health
economist J. Paul Leigh at the University of California, Davis. 6
Business groups such as the National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM) say
the solution lies in more collaboration
between employers and employees, not
more federal regulations. “We are strong
supporters of safe workplaces,” says
Amanda Wood, director of employment
policy at NAM. “But at the end of the
day, it’s about employees and management working together.”
Today’s American workplace is far
safer than in 1970, when Congress created OSHA in the wake of a growing
increase in occupational injuries and
illnesses. That year, more than 14,000
workers died in job-related accidents.
Workplace deaths have fallen more
than 65 percent since then, even though
nearly twice as many people are working now. 7
Yet critics charge that today’s workplaces could be even safer if enforcement were more aggressive. For instance, one of the most catastrophic
workplace accidents this year occurred
in April in West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant exploded, killing 15 people
and obliterating part of the small town.
Although seven state and federal agencies had some responsibility for regulating the plant, it had not been inspected by OSHA since 1985, when the
agency cited it for improper storage of
anhydrous ammonia and fined it $30. 8
At the time of the explosion, however, the plant was storing 1,350 times the
allowable amount of ammonium nitrate
— a fertilizer component sometimes used
in homemade bombs. As a result, the
Department of Homeland Security should
also have been monitoring the plant, investigators said later. But the department
said it had never been notified that the
plant was storing that much of the potentially explosive material. 9
While OSHA’s enforcement record
remains a major source of concern,
measures to reform the agency intro-
duced repeatedly in Congress in recent years have never made it into
law. They have been stymied by broad
disagreement among lawmakers over
whether OSHA regulates too much or
too little, and whether its enforcement
is too aggressive or too weak.
At the top of reformers’ agenda is
revamping OSHA’s rulemaking process,
by which the agency creates health and
safety standards. A recent Government
Accountability Office (GAO) report said
the process can take from 15 months
to 19 years — with an average of more
than seven years — leading many to
call the system broken. 10
David Michaels, the assisstant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health, agrees there is a problem. “We would like to modify the
system so that it took less time” to
write regulations, he says.
But over the years, Congress and
the courts have imposed multiple layers of analysis and review and an extensive public vetting process. While
other federal regulatory agencies must
often follow numerous procedural and
consultative steps before issuing a new
regulation, OSHA is especially hampered by a 1980 Supreme Court decision that requires it to prove “significant risk” for any hazard the agency
decides to regulate. 11 Moreover, says
Michaels, the agency has only about
300 employees in its national office.
By comparison, a small office within
the Food and Drug Administration —
its tobacco enforcement section — has
some 500 employees.
OSHA remains one of the federal
government’s smallest regulatory agencies, with an annual budget of over
$500 million. Its nearly 2,400 inspectors — counting those working in state
OSHA offices — are responsible for inspecting 8 million worksites — or about
one inspector for every 60,000 workers. 12 In comparison, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and
Inspection Service has some 8,033 inspectors and a $1 billion budget. 13
www.cqresearcher.com
Grain Bins Pose Lethal Hazard on Farms
The number of farmworkers who suffocate in grain bins was down in
2012 from a record 31 in 2010. However, workers still die in such
accidents even though inexpensive measures can prevent such deaths.
And experts believe many grain entrapment cases go unreported.
Historically, the majority of documented entrapments have occurred
on small farms exempt from federal workplace standards, but in
2012 more reported cases occurred at big commercial facilities.
U.S. Grain Bin Entrapments
31
No. of annual incidents
Fatal
Non-fatal
26
22
19
19
17
17
11
11
8
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
Source: “2012 Summary of Grain Entrapments in the United States,” Agricultural
Safety and Health Program, Purdue University, May 31, 2013, http://extension.
entm.purdue.edu/grainlab/content/pdf/2012GrainEntrapments.pdf
Peg Seminario, the longtime director
of safety and health at the AFL-CIO,
which represents 12 million workers in
57 different unions, says OSHA’s staffing
levels have been declining since 1980,
when Ronald Reagan was elected president and an anti-government movement
began to take hold across the country.
“That year, there were more absolute
people on board and more inspectors,”
she says. “It’s been downhill ever since.”
OSHA’s critics also complain that
its penalties have been capped too
low to deter abuses — and that the
agency often negotiates penalties down
to even smaller fines. The maximum
penalty for each workplace safety violation that could lead to death or serious injury is $7,000; a willful violation — one that the employer knowingly
commits — gets a maximum fine of
$70,000 per offense. “A $7,000 fine is
a very significant fine for a small em-
ployer and could put them out of business,” says Michaels. “But for a large
company, $7,000 is the cost of doing
business.”
However, in practice OSHA’s average
penalties are much lower. For instance,
they averaged only $1,069 for a serious
violation in 2010. Since then the agency
has revised its penalty policy and implemented a new, more targeted enforcement strategy that focuses on the
most egregious repeat offenders. The
two measures helped to more than
double the average penalty for a serious violation to $2,167 in 2011. 14 But
the business community, which prefers
a more collaborative approach, complains that the stepped-up enforcement
is unwarranted.
“In recent years, the agency has shifted dramatically away from the collaborative agency that businesses could
work with and rely on as a partner to
Oct. 4, 2013
841
WORKER SAFETY
ensure workplace safety,” argues Joe
Trauger, vice president of human resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. “We do not need
the agency strengthened in a way that
increases unhelpful, unproductive regulation.” (See “At Issue,” p. 853.)
With worker safety issues making
news in recent months, here are some
of the questions being debated by
workers, safety advocates, businesses
and lawmakers:
Is OSHA aggressive enough?
Ever since it opened its doors in
1971, OSHA has been a lightning rod
for controversy. Labor advocates say the
agency saves lives, forcing employers
to follow common safety practices, but
they also say enforcement is sometimes
lax and fines too low. Many businesses, on the other hand, believe OSHA
is far too intrusive.
Even figures on worker deaths can
stir debate. For example, preliminary
figures showed job-related deaths falling
in 2012 to 4,383, the lowest level since
the Bureau of Labor Statistics began
collecting such data in 1992. The numbers show that “we are absolutely
moving in the right direction,” said
Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez. 15
But others, such as Keith Wrightson,
a worker safety and health advocate
with the consumer rights group Public
Citizen, point out that while the overall count may have declined in 2012,
workplace fatalities have risen in some
industry sectors, such as oil and gas,
which saw a 23 percent jump between
2011 and 2012. And in some states,
worker deaths rose. In Texas, they went
from 433 in 2011 to 531 in 2012. 16
“As far as a culture of safety and
health on the job” is concerned, Wrightson says, “I see zero movement.”
Even OSHA’s severest critics concede
that it faces innumerable challenges, including insufficient resources and laws
that require numerous steps it must follow before issuing a regulation, procedures that can take years to complete. 17
842
CQ Researcher
In addition, a 1980 Supreme Court case
determined that the agency could not
address multiple hazards with a single
rule. 18 And at its current staffing level,
says the AFL-CIO’s 2013 annual report
on OSHA, the agency would need 131
years to inspect each workplace under
its jurisdiction. 19
In addition, OSHA’s $7,000 maximum allowable penalty for a serious
violation of the law has been updated only once since the agency began
operations in 1971. And an employer
cited for a workplace health or safety
violation does not have to fix the problem while the violation is being appealed — and appeals can drag on
for years.
“OSHA is virtually the only agency
that . . . has to wait until a company
exhausts its appeals, all the way up
to the Supreme Court, if necessary,”
says Mike Wright, who heads the United Steelworkers’ Health, Safety and Environment Department. “The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] wouldn’t
tolerate that in an airplane, the Food
and Drug Administration wouldn’t tolerate not being able to take a drug
off the market.”
Furthermore, in criminal cases —
those in which an employer willfully
or repeatedly violated the law — OSHA
penalties cannot exceed $70,000 per
violation. But such cases are only misdemeanors that can include a maximum sentence of only six months in
jail. At the very least, says the Center
for Progressive Reform, a liberal-leaning
network of university scholars who
specialize in health, safety and the environment, felony convictions should
be available for willful violations of
worker safety laws. 20
With little hope of a legislative fix
by Congress, OSHA has made several
administrative efforts to bolster its effectiveness, leading some business advocates to complain that the agency is
becoming overly aggressive.
OSHA administrator Michaels says
that although inspection numbers have
remained relatively stable over the past
five years, enforcement is more targeted now, focusing on severe violators — employers who willfully and
repeatedly violate basic safety guidelines. The agency’s new Severe Violator Enforcement Program, which began
in 2010, includes mandatory followup inspections and examinations of
offending employers’ other worksites
where similar problems may exist.
OSHA has also changed its formulas
for calculating penalties, so that serious violations are now more costly.
For example, in July 2011 a Brooklyn tortilla maker, Tortilleria Chinantla,
was fined $62,400 after a 22-year old
Guatemalan immigrant died after falling
into a dough-mixing machine. 21 The
owner of the plant was later sentenced
to 90 days in jail. 22 Another company, Boston-based P. Gioioso & Sons,
which works on underground sewers,
had been cited nine times since 2000
for exposing workers to cave-in hazards. In November 2012 the company
agreed to pay OSHA a $200,000 fine
for the repeated violations. 23
“The . . . takeaway is that enforcement works,” said Jordan Barab, deputy
assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health, referring to
the $84 million in fines levied on oil
giant BP after a March 2005 explosion
at its Texas City, Texas, refinery killed
15 workers and injured 170. “It definitely got BP’s attention. Their behavior has significantly improved.” 24
OSHA also is doing more to publicize its enforcement actions, says
Michaels. “If we only impacted 40,961
businesses, we’d be a failure,” Michaels
says, referring to the number of inspections OSHA conducted in fiscal
2012. “But people are saying, ‘How do
I make sure I don’t get into a press
release from OSHA?’ I think we’re targeting better.”
Industry groups are unhappy with
the new targeted enforcement program,
however. “The sentiment out there is
that OSHA’s become enforcement heavy,”
Are worker safety regulations
keeping up with emerging technologies?
It could be the beginnings of a
technological revolution as profound
as the steam engine or the Internet.
Nanotechnology involves the use of
particles less than 100 nanometers
long — or 80,000 times smaller than
the width of a human hair — that take
on unique chemical, physical or biological characteristics. The technology
has begun to revolutionize the manufacturing of a wide range of products,
but its implications for the health and
safety of workers who manufacture
nanotech products are less clear. 25
Almost by definition, it is impossible
to guarantee that safety regulations will
www.cqresearcher.com
keep up with emerging technologies,
whose health effects sometimes require
long-term studies. “We will always be
somewhat behind the curve,” concedes
OSHA administrator Michaels.
Some OSHA critics ask whether an
agency that hasn’t even issued official
regulations for some age-old problems
posure limits for carbon nanotubes —
long, thin carbon atoms that behave
like fibrous materials such as cellulose,
fiberglass or ceramic fibers. 26 They can
be used to create an airplane wing onetenth as heavy and up to 10 times
stronger than wings used today. At certain exposure levels, however, they can
AP Photo/The Manitowoc Herald-Times Reporter/Sue Pischke
says Wood, of the National Association
of Manufacturers. “Let’s go back to
working with employers, so the inspector comes in, and the employer
says, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry about
that. I’ll fix it in record time.’ ”
Marc Freedman, the executive director of labor law policy at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, says OSHA’s
stepped-up enforcement has come at
the expense of other programs that
produced better results, such as cooperative agreements between employers and the agency.
“The thing that gets lost in these discussions is the practicality of these issues. There are people who make the
argument that there is no safe level at
all for certain things, and that safety trumps
all,” notes Freedman. “I’m saying that safety is always a balancing act between the
absolute need to protect employees and
what it takes to protect employees. At
the end of the day, a large part of how
safe an employee is will be driven by
his or her own actions.”
However, OSHA officials bristle at the
idea that employees ultimately are responsible for their safety. “We are often
asked why we don’t cite workers,” says
Barab. “Employers control the workplace. And they control their workers.”
Rescue workers struggle to pull a critically injured worker from a collapsed water
and sewer line trench in Manitowoc, Wis. Federal safety rules cover proper
techniques for shoring up trenches, but collapses still kill at least one worker a
week in the United States, according to Michael Silverstein, a clinical professor
of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Washington.
“These are ancient hazards that we still can’t get ourselves to correct,” he says.
such as combustible dust can keep up
with rapidly emerging new technologies. Responding to those concerns,
Charles Geraci, a chemist who coordinates nanotechnology research at
the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says
OSHA has “a very aggressive research
program on nanotechnology — from
basic toxicology to risk assessment.”
NIOSH, a sister research agency to
OSHA, studies worker safety issues and
recommends ways to prevent work-related disease and injury. In the spring,
NIOSH released its recommended ex-
lead to pulmonary fibrosis — scaring
of the lungs that can cause chronic
coughing and shortness of breath.
The good news, says Geraci, is that
laboratory workers have plenty of experience handling fibrous materials,
which require working in a controlled
environment and wearing protective
equipment.
But while much can be studied
about new technologies, it is often impossible to know their long-term impact. Nonetheless, nanotechnology
remains “the No. 1 issue” for the future of workplace safety, says Aaron
Oct. 4, 2013
843
WORKER SAFETY
OSHA Boosts Penalties and Enforcement
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in
2010 revised its formula for determining penalties for the most
serious workplace violations and began targeting the most egregious
offenders — employers who willfully and repeatedly violate basic
safety guidelines. The two efforts have resulted in a sharp increase in
the number of penalties of $100,000 or more.
Significant OSHA Cases, FY1997-2012
No. of cases
250
(with penalties of $100,000 or more)
200
150
100
1997 ’98 ’99 ’00 ’01 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 2012
Source: Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Trippler, the director of government affairs at the American Industrial Hygiene
Association, which represents 10,000
specialists in occupational hazards.
“Everybody says, ‘What kind of problem will nanotech create for the human
body 10 years down the road?’ and the
answer is: ‘We don’t know,’ ” Trippler
says. “I’ve seen studies. Even the masks
people wear, they don’t know how tight
we should make them. We don’t know
what’s getting through and into the body.”
With limited information on such
emerging technologies, said Bill Kojola,
an industrial hygienist with the AFLCIO, it’s difficult to know exactly when
workers should be protected. The best
response to uncertainty, he said, is to
take a conservative approach. “I think
we learned from the impacts of asbestos exposure that if there is a technical uncertainty, then precaution is
well advised,” he said. 27
OSHA may get some help in regulating nanotechnology, however. Earlier
this year the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) announced it would regulate the use of carbon nanotubes under
the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act,
844
CQ Researcher
which gives EPA authority to regulate
commercial chemicals that pose health
hazards. 28
Other workplace hazards likely will
crop up in the next decade in the
field of synthetic biology, which combines biology and engineering (and also
uses elements of nanotechnology), and
in the manufacturing of yet unknown
chemical substances.
“What we don’t know,” says the
AFL-CIO’s Seminario, “is the impact of
combinations of chemicals — people
who are not exposed to just one thing
but are producing different chemicals,
sometimes at levels that are 10 to
100,000 times the normal environmental
exposure.”
As workplaces evolve — spurred
by globalization, telecommuting and
24/7 timetables — worker stress will
emerge as another safety challenge,
says Seminario. The impact of stress
on health and productivity is as variable and individualized as, for example, a worker’s reaction to a particular chemical. “There are a host of
issues related to the organization of
work, like stress in the workplace,
staffing levels, mandatory vacations —
all these things have an impact on
people’s health and productivity — especially if you look at the workplace
holistically.”
Are companies doing enough to
make sure their overseas operations and vendors are safe for
workers?
Some worker advocates attribute at
least part of the declining number of
workplace accidents in the United States
to trade globalization, which has resulted in many dangerous U.S. jobs being
outsourced to developing countries with
weaker worker safety regulations.
“We don’t have coke ovens and steel
mills and paint and dye manufacturers” to the same extent as in the past,
notes Jeanne Stellman, editor of the
Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health
and Safety. The transformation of the
United States from an industrial to a
service economy has been a “major driver” in reducing workplace injuries and
death in the United States, she says.
But as the deadly Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh showed,
conditions in some of those outsourced
factories are often dismal. Globally,
nearly 1 million workers die each year
due to a combination of workplace
injuries and hazards, according to the
World Health Organization. 29
The April collapse was not the first
disaster in Bangladesh’s lucrative textile industry, where conditions have
been notorious for years. 30 Since 2005,
1,800 workers have been killed in preventable factory fires and building collapses in the country, according to the
Washington-based International Labor
Rights Forum. 31 Labor organizers
blamed the Rana Plaza incident on lax
worker safety laws and political corruption. The Bangladeshi textile industry employs 4 million people, wields
immense political power, is fiercely
anti-union and generates $20 billion a
year in revenues. It produces clothes
sold by some of the biggest U.S. and
European retailers — from H&M to
Inditex, the parent of the Spanish brand
Zara, to PVH, which owns the Calvin
Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands. 32
Labor advocates hope the graphic
images of the Rana Plaza collapse —
the worst disaster ever in the apparel
industry — will trigger reforms around
the world, much as the deadly 1911
Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New
York triggered significant worker safety reforms in the United States. (See
“Background,” p. 846.) “We’re hopeful that it will have a similar effect, in
that people will not wait for yet another tragedy,” says Celeste Drake, the
AFL-CIO’s global policy specialist.
Labor activists think the horror and
scope of the disaster is what has compelled U.S. and European apparel makers to react. “When somebody dies in
Vietnam or Bangladesh or Africa making goods sold in the U.S. market, that
death is in a sense on us,” says Wright,
of the United Steelworkers union. In the
past, U.S. companies haven’t paid much
attention to such disasters occurring in
their supply chains, he contends. Now,
“they’re forced to look at them, forced
to at least give them lip service.”
A month after the Rana Plaza disaster, U.S. and European apparel retailers — who together purchase more
than three-quarters of Bangladesh’s textile exports — organized safety and
ethics audits and signed on to two wellpublicized accords to address worker
safety issues in Bangladesh. But the
agreements are strikingly different.
A mostly European-supported accord
involves about 70 global retailing giants,
such as H&M, Carrefour, Marks & Spencer
and the Bridgewater, N.J.-based PVH
— one of the few U.S. companies to
sign the agreement. 33 Some signatories,
such as Inditex, buy merchandise from
as many as 350 Bangladeshi factories. 34
The plan calls for the companies to
inspect all their Bangladeshi vendors’ factories by next spring, then focus on fixing plants with serious safety flaws, such
as inadequate fire exits or unstable build-
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ings. Companies are responsible for improving the safety conditions in their
vendors’ factories, either by lending money
to the factory owner or paying for the
fixes themselves.
Most important, says Erik Autor, a retail consultant familiar with both accords,
the European plan is a contractual agreement with a binding dispute-resolution
process and includes representatives of
Bangladeshi labor unions and two global unions, IndustriAll and UNI Global
Union. As a result, IndustriALL, for example, could legally force another member of the accord, such as a clothing
manufacturer, to make what the union
believes are essential safety improvements.
A separate North American plan, crafted by 15 companies including Walmart
and Gap, is similar in intent to the European plan, but it was written without input from local labor-rights groups.
And several labor groups have criticized
the fact that it is nonbinding. 35
Instead of requiring factory owners
to pay for upgrading safety features at
their factories, the American plan calls
for participating retailers to provide
$42 million for improvements, although
much of that would be used for administrative expenses to run the program,
and $100 million more in financing for
loans to garment manufacturers to address safety issues. 36
“If you trust the CEOs of large corporations to do the right thing for workers purely out of the goodness of their
hearts, then the Walmart/Gap scheme
is a great plan,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a monitoring organization for
the apparel industry. “If you recognize
that we live in the real world, where if
you want large corporations to do the
right things by workers, you need to
require them to do it, then . . . this
Gap/Walmart scheme is not going to
help workers in any way.” 37
However, Avedis Seferian, who heads
Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, a group that certifies that factories are following appropriate envi-
ronmental, health and safety laws, argues that “in the end, voluntary efforts
. . . are likely to be much more sustainable than being forced to do something.” 38
The two accords say much about
the difference between the United States
and Europe regarding worker rights,
says the AFL-CIO’s Drake. “It would
have been different 25 years ago, but
right now the big corporate interests
represented by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and others are about as
anti-worker as they can be,” she says,
“whereas in Europe, unions are still a
legitimate civil society partner.”
Freedman of the U.S. Chamber disagrees. “We’re not anti-worker at all,
and I always bristle at this notion that
the only voice for employees are
unions,” he says. “Without employers,
there would be no employees. Our
goal is to make conditions more agreeable for jobs and economic growth,
and by extension, help workers.”
BACKGROUND
Era of Industrialization
e are up five flights of stairs.
There are at least two hundred
girls. Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the
floor — such debris as only awaits a
spark from a lighted match or cigar to
burst into flames. Despite laws and regulations the building is not fire-proof.
There is no fire-escape. A cry of fire, and
great Heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from this mountain height,
level with roofs of the distant town!” . . .
“The air of the room is white with
cotton, although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. These little particles are
breathed into the nose, drawn into the
lungs. Lung disease and pneumonia —
consumption — are the constant, neverabsent scourge of the mill village.”
“W
Oct. 4, 2013
845
Getty Images/Bloomberg/George Frey
WORKER SAFETY
A worker grinds a safe door at the Champion Safe Co. in Provo, Utah. Workrelated deaths in the United States have fallen more than 65 percent since 1970,
when Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But
safety advocates say some U.S. workplaces could be even safer if enforcement
were more aggressive. Business advocates argue, however, that more
collaboration between regulators and employers would be more effective.
— Excerpted from The Woman
Who Toils: Being the Experiences of
Two Ladies as Factory Girls, by Miss
Marie Van Vorst and Mrs. Bessie Van
Vorst, 1903.
When the aristocratic van Vorst
sisters-in-law made their turn-of-thecentury undercover foray into America’s
industrial heartlands — working at pickle, shoemaking and textile factories
from Massachusetts to South Carolina
— the industrial revolution was in full
force. The historic shift from the production of homemade goods to the
mass manufacturing of products happened amid a whirl of overlapping in-
846
CQ Researcher
novations — roughly bookmarked by
Eli Whitney’s use of interchangeable
parts to make muskets at the beginning of the 19th century and the development of reliable electricity transmission at the century’s end.
Transformative inventions — from
the telegraph to the sewing machine
to the factory assembly line — propelled technological progress, but
worker safety was hardly more than an
afterthought. Upton Sinclair’s landmark
1906 exposé, The Jungle, detailed the
horrors of the disease-ridden and dangerous meatpacking industry, prompting passage of the Pure Food and Drug
Act of 1906, which created the Food and
Drug Administration.
But not until the calamitous Triangle
shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 — which
killed 146 workers and had the deadliest workplace death toll in New York
City until the 9/11 terrorist attacks —
were there any serious efforts to create worker safety laws. The fire lasted only half an hour, but its impact
was felt for decades.
Most who died were young immigrant women from Eastern Europe and
Italy. The single fire escape collapsed
because of the heat; the exit doors
opened inward, and the press of people effectively sealed them shut. Fiftyfour people jumped to their deaths
from the eighth, ninth and 10th floors,
in full view of a United Press reporter
and hundreds of spectators, including
Francis Perkins, a future secretary of
Labor. 39 A funeral march for the victims attracted 350,000 people. 40
As journalist David Von Drehle said
in his book about the fire, “Death was
an almost routine workplace hazard
in those days. By one estimate, one
hundred or more Americans died on
the job every day in the booming industrial years around 1911. 41 Mines
collapsed on them, ships sank under
them, pots of molten steel spilled over
their heads, locomotives smashed into
them, exposed machinery grabbed
them by the arm or leg or hair and
pulled them in.” 42
Progressive Era Reforms
n the fire’s aftermath, New York state
established a Factory Investigating
Commission, which eventually recommended passage of 36 new laws governing working conditions. The laws required fire drills and sprinklers, set a
minimum wage and spelled out child
labor codes. Within two years of the
Triangle disaster, the New York state
legislature had addressed “nearly every
I
Continued on p. 848
Chronology
1860s-Early
Workplace disas1900s
ters and fatalities are common.
silicosis after digging the threemile Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in
Gauley, W.Va.
1860
Pemberton textile mill collapses in
Lawrence, Mass., killing 145.
1930s
Ninety-six workers die during the
five-year construction of Hoover
Dam on the Colorado River; unofficial toll is much higher.
1877
Massachusetts passes the nation’s
first factory safety and health law.
Within 10 years, 14 other states
pass similar laws.
1938
Landmark Fair Labor Standards Act
limits child labor, creates minimum
wage and 44-hour workweek.
1878
Exploding flour dust at Washburn
Mill in Minneapolis, Minn., kills 18.
1905
Boiler explosion at Grover Shoe
Factory in Brockton, Mass., kills 58.
1907
Coal dust explodes at West Virginia’s
Monongah mine, killing 362; considered nation’s worst mining disaster.
•
1910s-1960s
Federal government begins regulating the workplace following new disasters.
1910
Congress creates Bureau of Mines
to regulate mine safety.
1911
Horrific Triangle shirtwaist factory
fire in New York City kills 146
garment workers, prompting passage of state workplace safety
laws requiring fire drills, sprinklers
and limits on child labor.
1927
In one of the nation’s worst workplace disasters, an estimated 4001,000 workers sicken and die of
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•
1970s-Present
As job-related deaths and injuries rise, Congress creates
federal agency to establish
workplace standards.
1970
Congress creates Occupational
Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA), National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and
Occupational Safety and Health
Review Commission.
1978
OSHA limits worker exposure to lead.
1986
Deadly gas leak from a Union
Carbide factory in Bhopal, India,
kills 2,259 people immediately and
another 15,000 later, in world’s
worst industrial accident in history.
1988
Oil rig operated by Californiabased Occidental Petroleum explodes in North Sea, killing 167.
1991
Fire at Imperial Foods chickenprocessing plant kills 25 and injures
more than 50 in Hamlet, N.C.;
locked doors at the plant, which
had never been inspected, prevented workers from escaping.
1996
Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996 is
adopted by newly elected Republican majority in Congress, allowing
lawmakers to nullify almost any
federal agency rule.
2001
Congress repeals OSHA’s standards
on ergonomics in major defeat for
the labor movement.
2005
Explosion at oil refinery in Texas
City, Texas, kills 15, injures 170.
2008
Sugar dust explosion at Imperial
Sugar factory in Port Wentworth,
Ga., kills 14. Congress holds hearings, but OSHA fails to issue a
federal combustible-dust standard.
2009
President Obama appoints prominent epidemiologist David Michaels
to head OSHA.
2010
Upper Big Branch mine explosion
in Montcoal, W. Va., kills 29 in
worst U.S. coal mining accident in
40 years. . . . OSHA changes the
way it calculates penalties for safety
violations and launches Severe Violator Enforcement Program.
2013
The collapse of a garment factory
in Dhaka, Bangladesh, kills more
than 1,100 and focuses international
attention on unsafe working conditions at U.S. and European textile
suppliers. . . . Explosion at Texas
fertilizer factory kills 15 and injures
more than 150; President Obama
orders review of federal safety
rules at chemical plants.
Oct. 4, 2013
847
WORKER SAFETY
OSHA Lacks Clout on the Family Farm
“You don’t love my child any more than I do.”
t was a sweltering July day in rural Illinois. Fourteen-yearold Wyatt Whitebread, Alex Pacas, 19, and Will Piper, 20,
were working inside an enormous, four-story grain bin.
Their job was to shovel corn toward a center drain hole and
chip away at kernels crusted up to half a foot thick on the walls.
But when someone opened up a second drain hole in the
bottom of the bin, a quicksand effect took over. Whitebread
began to sink up to his neck in corn. His two friends tried to
grab him under his arms, but then they too began to sink.
Rescuers were able to jam a bucket with the bottom cut out
around Piper’s head so he could breathe. But Whitebread and
Pacas died, suffocated by corn. 1
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA),
which regulates workplace safety, issued 24 citations and fined
grain storage operator Haasbach LLC $550,000, one of its largest
fines ever, in connection with the death of the two teens. But the
initial fine was negotiated down to $200,000, — something that
happens in 60 percent of grain bin entrapment cases, according
to an investigation by NPR and The Center for Public Integrity, a
nonpartisan foundation that conducts investigative journalism. 2
“Sadly,” says Brittany Jablonsky, acting director of education
at the National Farmers Union, which advocates for family farmers and ranchers, grain bin entrapments are “pretty common”
in the nation’s farming regions. Indeed, the NPR investigation
found 179 cases of grain bin entrapments since 1984. Harnesses
that can be attached to “grain walkers,” as they are called, are
often not used, either because it’s too inconvenient to do so
or the harnesses are not onsite.
In addition, officials believe the actual number of grain entrapments never gets reported, in part because federal workersafety inspectors do not have jurisdiction on small farms or on
family farms, where many such accidents occur.
Congress has instructed OSHA to exempt farms with 10 or
fewer employees as well as the nation’s roughly 2 million family
farms, where family members are not counted as workers. 3
I
Continued from p. 846
deficiency” in the building where the
fire took place, wrote Von Drehle. 43
In fact, most of New York’s fire-safety
mandates had been in use elsewhere
for at least 20 years before the Triangle
fire. Innovations such as firewalls, fire
doors, fire stairs and automatic sprinklers had been required by the Massachusetts Factory Act of 1877 — the
nation’s first factory safety and health
law. By 1897, 14 other states had
passed similar safe factory laws. 44
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CQ Researcher
The small farm and family farm exemptions “make OSHA
irrelevant to the vast majority of U.S. agricultural workplaces
with hired workers,” said a letter to OSHA from Farmworker
Justice, a Washington-based advocacy group that tries to improve migrant workers’ living and working conditions. 4
“Why should a farmer’s life be worth less than other workers’?”
asks Eric Frumin, health and safety director at Change to Win, a
coalition of three labor unions that includes the United Farm Workers. “We don’t exempt small construction companies from OSHA,
and they are not any more dangerous than small farms.”
It seems unlikely that OSHA inspectors would be welcome
on most small family farms, given many owners’ dislike for
what they see as government intrusion. Last year when the
Labor Department proposed a rule prohibiting children from
certain farming activities, such as driving tractors, it was inundated with negative comments.
One farmer’s response typified the reaction: “From your
bureaucratic overreach in an area of family farming life that
the government has NO business being in, you are trampling
my rights . . . YOU don’t love my child any more than I do
. . . You people are nuts!” 5
The department withdrew the proposal, noting in a statement
that, “This regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the
Obama administration.” 6
Farmers do take safety seriously, says Jablonsky, and safety education is “incredibly important.” The farm injury rate has gone
down drastically in the past half-century, she says, in part because most farming equipment now has improved safety features.
Nevertheless, agricultural work remains one of the most dangerous occupations in America. Old tractors without protective
cabs roll over and crush their drivers; combines, reapers and
other dangerous machinery mangle limbs, and manure pits emit
poisonous methane gas.
“In our experience, the smaller farms — those with fewer
resources and personnel — are precisely those with higher
The Triangle fire was a galvanizing
event, occurring as membership in the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’
Union was burgeoning — jumping from
30,000 in 1909 to 250,000 in 1913. 45
More than simply prompting a host of
new safety laws, the fire was the catalyst
for the modern regulatory state, argues
University of Wisconsin law and history professor Arthur McEvoy. 46
In the 19th century, workplace injuries had been widely viewed as a
“natural” and unavoidable byproduct of
industrial progress, and employers
were not seen as being responsible for
workplace deaths. The Triangle fire,
however, was so graphic and public
— with photographs showing dead
bodies piled up on the street — that
it was impossible to ignore the fact that
it was caused by employer negligence.
For decades, reformers had insisted that what society had seen as accidents were in fact a matter of willful neglect, and what had appeared
inadvertent was actually intentional.
Getty Images/Bloomberg/Ty Wright
rates of violations of worker protection laws and those most
in need of compliance assistance,” the Farmworker Justice letter to OSHA said. 7
Yet, small and family farms are not the only agricultural operations that don’t have to abide by OSHA rules. Some of the
estimated 2.4 million farmworkers employed by America’s commercial farming operations also are not covered by certain
OSHA regulations. 8
For example, OSHA’s safety standards for ladders do not yet
apply to agricultural workers, no matter how big the farm, even
though they pose a major hazard — especially for orchard
workers, says Virginia Ruiz, an occupational and environmental health expert at Farmworker Justice.
“You have people climbing up and down ladders with hundreds of pounds of fruit,” she says. “So there are special orchard ladders with an extra leg to make them more stable.” A
handful of states already have their own agricultural ladder
standards, Ruiz says, but OSHA is not expected to begin the
lengthy process of creating one until later this year.
— T. R. Goldman
1 Jim Morris and Howard Berkes, “Rethinking OSHA exemption for farms,”
NPR and The Center for Public Integrity, March 24, 2013, www.publicintegrity.
org/2013/03/24/12328/rethinking-osha-exemption-farms; and “2012 Summary
of Grain Entrapments in the United States,” Agricultural Safety and Health
Program, Purdue University, May 31, 2013, http://extension.entm.purdue.edu/
grainlab/content/pdf/2012GrainEntrapments.pdf.
2 Howard Berkes and Jim Morris, “Fines Slashed in Grain Bin Entrapment
Deaths,” NPR, March 24, 2013, www.npr.org/2013/03/26/174828849/finesslashed-in-grain-bin-entrapment-deaths.
3 “Enforcement Exemptions and Limitations under the Appropriations Act,”
OSHA Quick Takes, www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?
p_table=DIRECTIVES&p_id=1519#; and “Family and Small Farms,” National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, June 18, 2010,
www.nifa.usda.gov/nea/ag_systems/in_focus/familyfarm_if_overview.html.
4 Virginia Ruiz and Shelley Latin, “Letter to the OSHA Docket Office,” Farmworker Justice, March 30, 2010.
5 Ibid.
The Triangle fire helped to solidify that
notion, argues McEvoy, and turn it into
mainstream U.S. jurisprudence. 47
Not only did the Progressive Era, a
period of activism and social reform in
the early 20th century, trigger crucial
changes in worker safety laws, it also
saw the rise of so-called “industrial
commissions,” which could bypass the
cumbersome state legislatures and issue
their own administrative rules, a system that was usually far quicker and
more responsive to developing prob-
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Eighty-six workers died and 95 were injured in grain bin
entrapment accidents on U.S. farms from 2008 to 2012,
but experts believe many cases go unreported.
Above, inside a corn storage bin at Kahle
Supply and Feed Co. in Kalida, Ohio.
6
Ibid.
Ibid.
8 Philip Martin and J. Edward Taylor, “Ripe with Change: Evolving Farm Labor
Markets in the United States, Mexico, and Central America,” Migration Policy
Institute, February 2013, www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/RMSG-Agriculture.pdf.
7
lems. After hearing from labor, management and other interested groups,
the commissions would issue orders
that became law 30 days after being
published. By 1936, industrial commissions were the primary tools for regulating worker safety. 48
Workers’ compensation also grew out
of the Progressive Era. In the decade
after the Triangle fire, 25 states adopted
so-called workingman’s compensation
laws. 49 The idea was simple: Employers pay an insurance premium that pro-
vides benefits to employees if they become ill or injured while on the job. In
return for those benefits, however, employees give up the right, in almost all
cases, to sue their employer for damages
connected with the injury or illness.
In 1938, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, with Perkins as Labor secretary, signed the landmark Fair Labor
Standards Act, which had taken a year
of congressional wrangling to enact.
It established for the first time a minimum hourly wage (25 cents), banned
Oct. 4, 2013
849
WORKER SAFETY
Many States Run Their Own OSHA Programs
“I see more activity in the states now than ever before.”
SHA encourages individual states to set up and run their
own job safety and health programs, as long as they
are “at least as effective as” the federal regulations. 1
Since OSHA was created in 1970 — operations began the
following year — 21 states plus Puerto Rico have started their
own state plans covering private and public sector employees.
Four other states and the U.S. Virgin Islands have plans that
cover only public workers. 2
The concept of allowing individual state plans has both an
upside and a downside, says Michael Silverstein, a clinical professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Washington School of Public Health and a former director of Washington state’s OSHA program and a senior policy
official at the federal OSHA office. “On the positive side, there
is an opportunity for state creativity and inventiveness,” he says,
which dovetails with the idea that states are best suited to handle their own unique safety issues.
On the downside, says Silverstein, when there is a state
patchwork of different regulations, workers exposed to the same
hazard don’t get equal protection across the country because
some states might have standards for certain toxic substances
that are stricter than other states’ rules.
Indeed, some states create standards that are stricter than
federal rules or cover hazards that federal OSHA does not.
Highly combustible dust, for example, is a serious, pervasive
O
“oppressive” child labor and fixed the
work week at a maximum 44 hours
with time-and-a-half compensation for
certain jobs after that. 50
Coal mining, traditionally one of the
world’s most dangerous occupations,
faced rudimentary regulatory controls
beginning in the late 1800s. In 1891,
Congress required regulations on some
aspects of mine safety and barred children under 12 from the job. 51 But by
1905, U.S. mining deaths were surpassing
2,000 a year. Two years later the
Monongah mining disaster in West Virginia claimed 362 miners, spurring Congress in 1910 to create the Bureau of
Mines to regulate the industry.
It was another three decades, however, before the bureau was granted
authority to inspect mines, and even
then progress was agonizingly slow.
Congress mandated annual inspections
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CQ Researcher
problem that has eluded a federal rule for more than a decade.
In Georgia, however, the state took quick action after combustible sugar dust caused a horrific explosion at the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth in 2008, killing 14 people and injuring 42. Within weeks, Georgia’s Office of
Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner had required industries that create combustible dust — a fine powder produced
from substances as varied as aluminum and pharmaceuticals
— to draw up emergency plans and train employees in evacuation techniques. 3
“I see more activity in the states now than ever before,
an influx of more pieces of legislation dealing with health
and safety,” says Aaron Trippler, director of government affairs for the American Industrial Hygiene Association, representing 10,000 occupational hazard specialists. “Why? Because
of inactivity on the federal level. Georgia changed its laws in
less than a year,” he adds. But it takes the federal OSHA office from 15 months to 19 years — or an average of more
than seven years — to develop and issue safety and health
standards, according to a recent Government Accountability
Office report. 4
And only recently has federal OSHA taken its oversight responsibilities for state OSHA plans seriously, says Eric Frumin,
health and safety director at Change to Win, a coalition of three
large labor unions. “For years, federal OSHA did nothing but
of some coal mines in 1952, but all
coal mines were not required to be inspected until 1969. 52 The act also required quarterly inspections of underground mines, beefed up federal
enforcement power, limited how much
unfiltered coal dust could circulate in
a mine and compensated miners stricken with black lung disease.
In 1977, Congress combined all mining — not just coal mining — under
the same legal framework and created
the Mine Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor to
oversee the industry. Even so, annual
coal mining fatalities did not fall below
100 until 1985. 53
However, even after Congress
strengthened mine safety requirements
in 2006, the worst mining accident in
40 years occurred four years later at
West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine.
Twenty-nine miners were killed in
what the Mine Safety and Health Administration called “systematic, intentional and aggressive efforts” to hide
life-threatening problems from federal
inspectors. 54
Modern Reforms
or nonmining jobs, workplace safety issues emerged amid the political and social reform movements of
the 1960s. Work-related injuries rose
20 percent during the decade, and by
1970 some 14,000 people were dying
on the job each year. 55
A bipartisan consensus emerged in
Congress — fueled by pressure from
labor groups — that the country needed a federal agency to issue binding
safety standards for all businesses. The
F
wink and nod at state plans,” he says, adding that the situation improved with the appointment of David Michaels, a prominent epidemiologist and worker safety advocate, as OSHA director in December 2009.
Still, he says, worker safety regulation is an “utter disaster”
in states such as Oregon and South Carolina. In South Carolina, the average penalty for a “serious” violation is $538 compared with more than $2,153 for citations issued by the federal OSHA. 5 In Oregon, a “serious” violation can get a $300
fine. 6 “People who say those plans are great don’t know what
they’re talking about,” Frumin says.
Under current law, after the federal government approves a state
plan, OSHA can provide up to 50 percent of the state’s worker
safety funding. This year that amounted to about $100 million for
all 27 plans, according to OSHA.
Washington state has a long history of worker safety legislation, according to Janet Kenney, operations manager at the
Washington state OSHA, who says the state’s constitution requires workers to be protected by laws that include penalties
for unsafe practices. Washington has several state-specific rules,
such as requiring employers to recognize heat-related illnesses
and rules for hazards specific to the wind-energy industry. A
proposed rule on underground work was prompted by major
state tunneling projects that exposed workers to hyperbaric
pressures similar to those divers experience.
Occupational Safety and Health Act of
1970 created both OSHA and its research
arm, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
OSHA’s first 10 years are often described by labor advocates as the
agency’s golden decade. OSHA issued
standards regulating such hazards as
asbestos, lead and cotton dust, which
causes brown lung disease. The lead
standard in 1978 cut by 75 percent the
allowable exposure to the toxic metal,
a move that helped 835,000 workers
sharply reduce their risk of urinary tract,
nerve and reproductive damage. 56
But after Reagan’s election as president in 1980, anti-regulatory fervor
among big business helped to turn standard setting into a slow and cumbersome process. As a result, since its
launch in 1971, OSHA has set safe exposure limits on only 16 deadly work-
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Kenney says she stays in close contact with federal OSHA
officials who monitor the Washington state plan to ensure federal grant money is properly spent and to see that individual
safety programs are effective and carefully monitored by the
state’s 117 inspectors.
Issues of divided jurisdiction do occasionally crop up, says
Kenney. For example safety hazards on the water are federal
OSHA’s jurisdiction, while bridge building and drydock work
are regulated by the state. “If it’s sitting in the water, it’s OSHA;
if they haul it out on land, it’s ours. And sometimes, we both
go out to inspect together.”
— T. R. Goldman
1
“OSHA Quick Takes, What is a State OSHA Program,” Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, www.osha.gov/dcsp/osp/faq.html.
2 Ibid.
3 Katherine Torres, “Georgia Issues Combustible Dust Regulations,” EHS Today,
March 13, 2008, http://ehstoday.com/fire_emergencyresponse/ehs_imp_79104.
4 Revae Moran, “Multiple Challenges Lengthen OSHA’s Standard Setting,”
Government Accountability Office, April 19, 2012, www.gao.gov/products/GAO12-330.
5 “Evaluation shows low penalties, insufficient staffing plaguing state OSHA
programs,” Moultrie News, Sept. 5, 2013, www.moultrienews.com/article/
20130905/MN02/130909826/1003/evaluation-shows-low-penalties-insufficientstaffing-plaguing-state-osha-programs.
6 “Oregon State Table of Violations and Penalties,” www.cbs.state.or.us/
osha/pdf/pubs/ 4949.pdf.
place hazards, leaving it up to employers
to figure out safe limits on thousands
of other dangerous substances workers
handle each day. 57
Former OSHA official Silverstein
says many of the agency’s early
achievements, such as limits on vinyl
chloride in 1974 and the pesticide DBCP
in 1978, were possible because the
business community had not yet fully
mobilized to stop them. “An attempt to
do the lead standard today would have
the same fate as silica,” he says, referring to efforts to create a standard for
silica dust, which have dragged on for
16 years and could continue for several more. “There have been a lot of
barriers constructed over the years.”
Today, a host of separate reviews
are required before a new standard on
safe levels of any dangerous substance
can be approved. Some are the result
of the 1996 Congressional Review Act,
which gave Congress the power to nullify almost any federal agency rule. 58
Officially called the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of
1996, the law was part of the Republican Party’s Contract for America, a sweeping series of laws aimed at lowering
taxes and shrinking the size of government, enacted after Republicans took
control of the House in 1995 for the
first time in more than 40 years.
In fact, the law has been used only
once: to kill a federal OSHA standard
on ergonomics in 2001. But its mere
existence, according to some labor advocates, has had a chilling effect on
major OSHA rules and emboldened
business advocates to block new
regulations. 59
“As corporate influence in U.S. politics
has increased, Congress and presidential
Oct. 4, 2013
851
WORKER SAFETY
administrations have become more directly involved in OSHA rulemakings,
setting roadblocks for the agency’s regulatory initiatives,” says a report on OSHA
inaction by the consumer advocacy group
Public Citizen. 60
“Fifteen years ago, you had 20 to
30 stakeholders; nowadays, you have
150 stakeholders, and each looks at a
new regulation and says, ‘I don’t like
this paragraph on page 29,’ and each
of these stakeholders has realized they
have a certain amount of control over
the process,” says Trippler of the
American Industrial Hygiene Association. “People have watched Congress
do the same thing and realized it’s real
easy to stop the progress.”
Increasingly, worker safety issues have
been slugged out in court, adding another layer of complexity to OSHA’s
work. A key 1980 Supreme Court decision — Industrial Union Department,
AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute — more commonly known as the
benzene case, required OSHA to determine through scientific studies that
“it is more likely than not” that a chemical’s current exposure limit already presents a “significant risk” of harm before
OSHA can tighten a standard. 61
As a result, OSHA must subject each
potential new standard to a battery of
tests to determine whether there is
“significant risk,” including multiple risk
analyses as well as economic and technological feasibility studies.
Workers’ advocates have filed numerous class action lawsuits over such
workplace hazards as asbestos, which
in the 1990s involved hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs who filed claims
against some 8,400 businesses, resulting in payouts of about $49 billion as
of 2002. 62
The rise of the antiregulatory movement coincided with the steady decline of the labor movement — the
biggest advocate for increased safety
on the job — both in absolute numbers and political influence. “The demise
of regulation and the demise of activism
852
CQ Researcher
is completely parallel to the . . . shrinking of the labor movement,” says Stellman, editor of the Encyclopaedia of
Occupational Health and Safety.
Union membership dropped in 2012
to 11.3 percent of U.S. wage and salary
workers, nearly half the level of 1983,
when just over one in five workers
was unionized. 63
OSHA oversees state-run worker
safety plans in 25 states, Puerto Rico
and the Virgin Islands. Although states
are required to impose standards at
least as stringent as the federal rules,
they sometimes fall short. The most
dramatic example was the Sept. 3, 1991,
fire in the Imperial Foods poultry processing plant in rural Hamlet, N.C., that
killed 25 workers and injured more than
50. The plant, which had never been
inspected, had no sprinkler system and
the exits were padlocked, investigators
later discovered. 64
The lengthy recession and stillweak economy have undercut the
leverage employees normally have to
insist on safety improvements when
jobs are plentiful, says Wrightson, of
Public Citizen. “People really are in
fear of losing their jobs, and employers have tended to cut out safety programs because there’s no payback involved. A lot of employers
will just roll the dice,” says Wrightson, who spent 15 years working as
a carpenter on construction sites.
Worker safety advocates had high
hopes when President Obama took office in 2009, especially after the appointment of Michaels, a respected epidemiologist, to lead OSHA. But, says
Stellman, “although he’s a good administrator, he can only get things
through Congress if there’s a perception there’s pressure among the voters.
Thus, by the end of its first term,
the Obama administration had issued
only two major OSHA rules, including one on the use of cranes and derricks, compared to the three issued
during the Bush administration’s second term. 65
CURRENT
SITUATION
New Silica Rule
orker safety advocates received
some welcome — and unexpected — news during a sleepy August in Washington: After a decade
and a half, the government was finally moving to finish establishing a new
federal limit on the amount of silica
dust workers can safely tolerate.
Deadly silica dust is produced when
one of the most common substances
on earth — quartz — is crushed, chipped,
sawed or drilled. When inhaled, the fine
silica dust particles can cause scarring
and thickening of lung tissue, difficulty
breathing and, in some cases, death.
And because silica dust appears in widely used construction materials such as
concrete and granite, it is a major problem in a variety of industries. 66
The proposed new standard cuts in
half the current exposure level, established 40 years ago and based on 1960s
science. The new standard limits exposure to 50 micrograms of silica dust
per cubic meter, down from 100 micrograms for general industry (and 250
micrograms for the construction industry). Every year, the new standard
will save 700 lives and prevent 1,600
new cases of silicosis, according to
safety advocates. 67
“Silica dust is a killer,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said when the
new proposal was released on Aug. 23.
“This rule is long overdue.” 68
In fact, the lengthy history of creating a new silica rule had become a
running but rueful joke among labor
advocates. And containing silica dust
on the worksite was hardly a complicated process, according to safety
advocates.
W
Continued on p. 854
At Issue:
Does OSHA need major reform?
yes
REP. JOE COURTNEY, D-CONN.
JOE TRAUGER
RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON
WORKFORCE PROTECTIONS, HOUSE
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION & THE
WORKFORCE
VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES
POLICY, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF
MANUFACTURERS
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, OCTOBER 2013
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, OCTOBER 2013
s
a
ttitude drives outcomes, and OSHA needs to change
the adversarial way in which it conducts oversight and
enforcement. In recent years, the agency has shifted
dramatically away from the collaborative agency that businesses
could work with and rely on as a partner to ensure workplace
safety. We do not need the agency strengthened in a way that
increases unhelpful, unproductive regulation.
Manufacturers are committed to reaching for the highest
achievable standards of workplace safety. They care for their
employees and consistently work to ensure that their work
environments are healthy and rewarding. Manufacturers share
best practices and work together to improve workplace standards, and they strive to work with OSHA. To its detriment,
OSHA has decided not to pursue that type of collaborative
partnership, and that’s where we need to see some change.
Manufacturers and their employees deserve better.
OSHA should actively engage businesses to find approaches
that will lead to proper enforcement and better procedures.
Sweeping regulations, based on desktop theories and a onesize-fits-all philosophy, will not work. OSHA must instead take
a real-world approach to worker safety that will actually uphold the standards that businesses are pursuing.
A transparent and open OSHA is necessary to arrive at
thoughtful and smart regulations that improve the workplace.
The new sub-regulatory agenda process and closed door,
backroom decision-making are not working for manufacturers
and, more importantly, not working for the 12 million men
and women who make up the nation’s incredibly broad and
diverse manufacturing sector. It only creates skepticism in the
process and the agency.
There was a time when OSHA worked with business to
make the workplace safer, but OSHA halted that partnership
by choosing to exact punishment rather than embrace collaboration and results. Today, manufacturers often have to go it
alone as they pursue the once-shared agenda of improving
workplace safety.
Improvement doesn’t always require an act of Congress,
new regulations or a proclamation from the president. Sometimes all it requires is simply a shift in attitude and a recognition that employers want to have the safest workplace possible for their employees.
Let’s change the mindset at OSHA and get back to a meaningful partnership that ensures the United States is the best
place in the world to work and do business.
yes no
ince the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) was created more than four decades ago, the
agency has saved an untold number of workers’ lives and
limbs, but there are many things it could and should do better.
Occupational injuries and deaths in the United States cost
$250 billion to $300 billion a year, according to two recent
studies. Too many people are still getting killed or sick on the
job, and while many businesses abide by OSHA regulations,
there remain businesses that view penalties for violations as
just the cost of doing business.
Because OSHA penalties have not been updated in 23 years
the average penalty was only $2,156 for a violation with a
substantial probability of causing death or bodily injury and a
meager $5,175 in cases involving worker fatalities.
One of OSHA’s primary responsibilities is to set comprehensive health standards to protect workers, but it has issued
standards for only 29 substances since its inception. Many
health standards enforced by OSHA date as far back as the
1950s and have not kept up with science or the development
of new chemicals, posing a significant risk to millions of
workers.
OSHA takes an average of seven years to issue a new safety standard because of red tape, numerous reviews and courtimposed analyses. This delay has real consequences. During
the eight years it took OSHA to update its cranes and derricks
standard, 176 workers lost their lives from injuries the updated
standard could have prevented.
The methods used to communicate these updated standards
to the business community also need to be updated, particularly
for small businesses. OSHA should ensure that its complianceassistance programs are helping employers quickly institute
necessary changes that will protect employees’ lives. Improved
compliance assistance will help American businesses comply
with new safety standards, benefiting both workers and employers.
Unfortunately, a thoughtful modernization of OSHA is not
part of the debate today. Rather, we have a strong movement
to turn back the clock on workers’ safety protections, delaying
action on updating OSHA regulations and creating uncertainty
for workers and businesses alike. We must break the logjam
so Congress can work with all stakeholders — from workers
to our nation’s employers — to protect America’s workforce
and give OSHA the updates it so desperately needs.
no
www.cqresearcher.com
Oct. 4, 2013
853
WORKER SAFETY
Continued from p. 852
“If you can’t put out a standard on
regulating silica, which basically requires
ventilation and water, both of which can
be done at low cost, we’re doomed,”
says Seminario, of the AFL-CIO.
OSHA administrator Michaels says
the White House “has committed” to
completing the standard before President Obama’s second term ends in
January 2017. “Silica will come out this
term,” he says flatly.
But it won’t be easy. OSHA is expected to hear from hundreds of different constituencies, all affected by the
rule, as it goes through the publicreview process.
Already, many trade and business
groups are lining up against the proposal, which they say is simply too
costly to implement.
National Association of Home Builders
Chairman Rick Judson said in a statement that independent studies have estimated compliance costs for the construction industry at $1 billion a year.
Beyond that, he said, the rule is also
impractical. For example, he said, spraying water to cut down on dust may
work on a construction site, but “using
it inside a home while cutting granite
counters can cause mold.” 69
The National Association of Manufacturers is also fighting the rule. “We
have no idea what the cost will be, and
that’s the million dollar question,” says
employment policy director Wood. “We’ve
been very vocal in terms of cost. We
think it’s fine the way it is.”
Congressional Gridlock
pposition to the silica dust proposal mirrors longstanding opposition on Capitol Hill to legislation regularly introduced by Democrats that would
give OSHA the tools to do its job more
effectively, worker advocates say.
In nearly every Congress, a lawmaker introduces the Protecting America’s Workers Act, which would increase
O
854
CQ Researcher
OSHA’s civil penalties, add felony charges
for violators whose actions cause death
or serious injury and expand OSHA’s
coverage to public employees. Sen. Patty
Murray, D-Wash, introduced the latest
version in March. 70
However, the measure — like its predecessors — is almost certain not to
make it out of the Senate Committee on
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
for a vote by the full Senate. “It’s not
going to go anywhere,” says Trippler of
the American Industrial Hygiene Association. “You’re talking about a bill introduced by a Democrat, and you can’t
even get a hearing in the Senate, which
is controlled by Democrats.” The reason, he says, is cost, something even
Democratic senators worry will affect
their small-business constituents.
At a hearing on a similar measure
in 2010, Minnesota Rep. John Kline, the
senior Republican on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce,
listed cost as the top reason for moving cautiously on changes to worker
safety rules.
“Policies that impact our workplaces
virtually always carry with them a cost,
and we must be mindful not to impose
any unnecessary or unnecessarily costly
new requirements,” he said in his opening statement. “Workplace safety is an
imperative, and every employer must
abide by safety and health standards.
But Congress should not make it more
difficult to keep our workplaces safe
and efficient by inserting unnecessary
or overly punitive hurdles.”
Even a Republican-sponsored bill that
would codify a popular and long-running
OSHA initiative known as the Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) has only
a 5 percent chance of getting out of the
House Education and Workforce Committee, according to Govtrack.us, which
rates bills according to their chances of
adoption. 71 Introduced by Wisconsin
Republican Rep. Tom Petri in February,
the measure would allow companies with
exemplary safety records to undergo
fewer inspections.
“Interactions between OSHA and
businesses can often be adversarial,”
Petri said in a statement. “This program takes a different approach. . . .
VPP is a great example of successful
cooperation between private businesses
and a government regulator.” 72
In fact, with Congress’ productivity
at an all-time low, substantive changes
to worker safety laws, like many other
congressional actions, are occurring in
the appropriations committees, which
set spending levels for each federal
agency, rather than in the policymaking
panels. 73 “Everything that gets done on
OSHA these days is an appropriations
rider,” says Aaron Albright, spokesperson for the House Education and Workforce Committee Democrats, referring
to unrelated measures tacked onto an
appropriations bill.
The 2011 OSHA appropriations bill
included a particularly controversial
rider. It prohibited OSHA from using
any funds for a program requiring employers to identify on a checklist “musculoskeletal disorders” as an occupational illnesses from which an employee
might suffer. The idea behind the program, says Michaels, was that if employers have to count their workers’
musculoskeletal disorders, they might
take the issue more seriously.
Meanwhile, Congress has not yet
acted on OSHA’s proposed $570 million budget for fiscal 2014, which was
scheduled to begin on Oct. 1. The OSHA
budget calls for a $2 million increase
to help the agency draft safety and
health standards, including the silica rule.
The total budget request is up only
marginally — less than $6 million —
from the previous year.
OSHA, along with other federal agencies that impose civil penalties, suffered
a major blow in February when the
Supreme Court ruled unanimously in
Gabelli v. SEC that the six-month statute
of limitations on penalties starts when
the violation occurs, not when it is discovered by a government investigator.
Many OSHA violations are discovered
well after the fact, when inspectors
make an on-site visit looking for something else. 74
While worker injuries have declined
sharply over the past four decades,
the central dynamic of workplace safety remains unchanged: How much is
a company willing to spend to protect the life of a worker?
Cost is at the heart of the two recent agreements by European and
American clothiers to help bring the
Bangladeshi textile factories where their
merchandise is produced up to international safety norms. The European
plan mandates that companies spend
what is necessary to meet international
standards. The North American version, which is less costly, does not.
Cost is an argument that OSHA administrator Michaels hears a lot these
days. But it’s an argument that goes
only so far, he says. “The stuff [we’re
hearing about] the silica standard, we
heard the same thing on the polyvinyl
chloride standard in 1974,” he says, referring to the widely used industrial
plastic whose handling, packaging and
manufacturing OSHA now regulates.
“That it was medically unnecessary,
there were no diseases below the current standard, it was technologically
unfeasible, and it will kill jobs.”
None of that turned out to be true,
Michaels says.
OUTLOOK
Evolving Hazards
orker safety advocates face an
increasingly complex world. Not
only do a host of new technologies —
such as nanotechnology and synthetic
biology — pose potential hazards but
so, too, do old problems, such as entrapment in grain bins and periodic dust
explosions. 75 (See sidebar, p. 848.)
W
www.cqresearcher.com
OSHA did begin to work on a rule
to regulate combustible dust, such as
the aluminum dust that killed Tammy
Miser’s brother in 2003, but the process
is still far from complete. To speed
things up, Rep. George Miller, the top
Democrat on the House Committee
on Education and the Workforce, introduced legislation in February to
propose a final rule within 18 months.
But seven months later, however, the
measure had moved no further in the
Republican-controlled House than the
Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. The measure’s “widely recommended protections . . . are caught
up in red tape and special interest objections,” Miller said. 76
Meanwhile, workplace hazards are
evolving, making it tougher for regulators, already beset by chronic staffing
shortages, to keep up. Some safety advocates say the most obvious solution
is to require employers to establish socalled illness and injury prevention programs, known as I2P2. Under such
programs, companies proactively analyze their workplaces, find potential
hazards and fix them before they
cause problems. “It makes far more
sense to require employers to search
out hazards than to have a huge rule
book,” argues Wright, at the United
Steelworkers union.
But the U.S. Chamber’s Freedman
says employers already have a “general duty” obligation under the law to
provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards.” Requiring illness
and injury prevention programs “would
be the general duty clause on steroids,”
he says, adding that “it would formalize the idea that employers would
be held accountable for any workplace hazards — or any that OSHA
believes they should know about.”
Labor advocates say injury prevention programs would require a sea
change in employers’ attitudes. Far too
often, says Wright, employers react to
hazards rather than remove them from
the workplace before they cause harm.
Business leaders say most employers
will do the right thing for their workers
without outside coercion. “It’s burdensome
to have regulations to deal with the outliers that punish the vast majority of others that are committed to getting things
right the first time,” says Wood of the National Association of Manufacturers.
It’s unclear whether greater globalization of manufacturing will lead to
worldwide improvements in worker safety or merely allow international companies to shift responsibility for a safe
work environment to the developing
world. However, based on the response
of multinational retailers to the Rana Plaza
textile factory disaster in Bangladesh,
companies may be taking at least some
responsibility for catastrophes at the bottom of their supply chains.
“This is a complicated problem, and
it’s not going to be solved overnight
and it’s not going to be solved by
throwing money at it,” says Autor, the
independent retail consultant who has
worked with several textile companies
since the Rana Plaza collapse.
Tragedies such as the Rana Plaza
disaster, whose victims were sewing
the clothes worn by many Americans,
should resonate as loudly in the United States as in Bangladesh, Wright says.
Globalization has triggered uniform
global standards and protections in
many areas of international trade, including “intellectual property and banking,” he says. “But safety and health
— it’s one of the places in which it’s
very clear the world economy has not
been essentially globalized.”
Notes
1
Tammy Miser, “Testimony before the House
Education and Labor Committee on H.R. 5522,
“The Combustible Dust Explosion and Fire Prevention Act of 2008,” March 12, 2008, www.you
tube.com/watch?v=_IPUIgqAzmI&feature=re
lated.
2 Saeed Ahmed and Leone Lakhani, “Bangladesh
Building Collapse: An End to Recovery Efforts,
Oct. 4, 2013
855
WORKER SAFETY
a Promise of a New Start,” CNN, June 14, 2013,
www.cnn.com/2013/05/14/world/asia/bangla
desh-building-collapse-aftermath.
3 For background, see Brian Beary, “Tiny
Nanoparticles Have Big Trade Implications,”
in “U.S. Trade Policy,” CQ Researcher, Sept. 13,
2013, pp. 765-788; and David Masci, “Nanotechnology,” CQ Researcher, June 11, 2004,
pp. 517-540.
4 “Trenching and Excavation,” Quick Takes, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, www.
osha.gov/SLTC/trenchingexcavation/index/html.
5 See “Commonly Used Statistics,” Quick Takes,
Occupational Safety and Health Administration, www.osha.gov/oshstats/commonstats.html.
Also see “Workplace Injury and Illness Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department
of Labor, Oct. 25, 2012, www.bls.gov/news.
release/osh.nr0.htm.
6 J. Paul Leigh, The Economic Policy Institute
blog, Jan. 3, 2013, www.epi.org/blog/250b-costsoccupational-injury-illness-exceed/.
7 “Worker Safety Statistics,” Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, www.osha.gov/osh
stats/commonstats.html.
8 Sam Hananel, “Texas Fertilizer Plant Had Last
OSHA Inspection in 1985,” The Associated
Press, April 18, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/
2013/04/18/texas-fertilizer-plant-ha_n_31131
17.html.
9 Joshua Schneyer, Ryan McNeill, and Janet
Roberts, “Texas Fertilizer Company Didn’t
Heed Disclosure Rules Before Blast,” Reuters,
April 20, 2013, www.reuters.com/article/2013/
04/20/us-usa-explosion-regulation-idUSBRE9
3J09N20130420.
10 Revae Moran, “Multiple Challenges Lengthen OSHA’s Standard Setting,” Government Accountability Office, April 19, 2012, www.gao.
gov/products/GAO-12-330.
11 Justin Feldman, “OSHA Inaction: Onerous
Requirements Imposed on OSHA Prevent the
Agency from Issuing Lifesaving Rules,” Public
Citizen, October 2011, www.citizen.org/oshainaction-report.
12 “Commonly Used Statistics,” op. cit.
13 “USDA FY 2013 Budget Summary and Annual Performance Plan,” U.S. Department of
Agriculture, www.obpa.usda.gov/budsum/FY
13budsum.pdf.
14 Mark Kittaka, “OSHA Fines Double for FY
2011,” Barnes & Thornburg Construction Law
Update, March 2012, www.btlaw.com/files/Up
loads/Documents/Publications/M%20KittakaConstruction%20Update%20March%202012.pdf.
15 Statement by Secretary of Labor Thomas E.
Perez, Aug. 22, 2013, https://www.osha.gov/
pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table
=NEWS_RELEASES&p_id=24603.
16 Press release, Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Aug. 22, 2013, www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/
cfoi.pdf.
17 “The Next OSHA: Progressive Reforms to
Empower Workers,” Center for Progressive
Reform, July 2012, www.progressivereform.org/
articles/Next_Generation_OSHA_1207.pdf.
18 Feldman, op. cit. The case is Industrial
Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute.
19 “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect,”
AFL-CIO, April 2013, 22nd edition, www.aflcio.
org/Issues/Job-Safety/Death-on-the-Job-Report.
20 “The Next OSHA: Progressive Reforms to
Empower Workers,” op. cit.
21 OSHA regional news release, July 29, 2011,
www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_
document?p_table=NEWS_RELEASES&p_id=20
382.
22 “Jail Time for Owner of Brooklyn Tortilla
Factory,” CBSNews/AP, http://newyork.cbslocal.
com/2013/07/08/jail-time-for-owner-of-brook
lyn-tortilla-factory-where-worker-died/.
23 OSHA regional news release, Nov. 8, 2012,
www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_
About the Author
T. R. Goldman is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers politics, Congress, health care and other social issues. He has worked as a reporter and editor for Reuters
and Agence France-Presse, both in the United States and
overseas, and at Legal Times and Roll Call in Washington,
D.C. His work also has appeared in The Washington Post
and The Boston Globe. He has a master’s degree in international public policy from Johns Hopkins University’s School
of Advanced International Studies and a BA in English from
the University of North Carolina.
856
CQ Researcher
document?p_id=23229&p_table=NEWS_RELEAS
ES.
24 L. M. Sixel and Emily Pickrell, “BP settles
most remaining Texas City OSHA violations for
$13 million,” The Houston Chronicle, July 12,
2012, fuelfix.com/blog/2012/07/12/osha-toannounce-settlement-with-bp-over-texas-city/.
25 For background, see Beary, op. cit.; and
Masci, op. cit.
26 “NIOSH Recommends New Level of Exposure for Nanomaterials,” NIOSH Publications and
Products, April 24, 2013, www.cdc.gov/niosh/
updates/upd-04-24-13.html.
27 “Interview with William (Bill) Kojola,” International Council on Nanotechnology, http://
icon.rice.edu/resources.cfm?doc_id=12347.
28 Lynn Bergeson, “EPA Promulgates Final
SNURs for 17 Chemical Substances, Including Certain Carbon Nanotubes,” Nano and
Other Emerging Chemical Technologies blog,
July 3, 2013, nanotech.lawbc.com/2013/07/
articles/united-states/federal/epa-promulgatesfinal-snurs-for-17-chemical-substances-includingcertain-carbon-nanotubes/.
29 A. W. Gaffney, “Life and Death at Work: Labor
and Occupational Health After Rana Plaza,”
Truthout, Aug. 18, 2013, truth-out.org/news/
item/18200-life-and-death-at-work-labor-andoccupational-health-after-rana-plaza.
30 Ibid.
31 International Labor Rights Forum, www.
laborrights.org.
32 Ahmed and Lakhani, op. cit.
33 Steven Greenhouse, “Clothiers Act to Inspect
Bangladeshi Factories,” The New York Times,
July 7, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/
business/global/clothiers-in-deal-for-inspectingbangladeshi-factories.html?pagewanted=1&_
r=0&src=recpb.
34 Ibid.
35 “Frequently Asked Questions about the
Bangladesh Safety Accord,” Clean Clothes Campaign, www.cleanclothes.org/issues/faq-safetyaccord.
36 Ibid.
37 “Will Retailers Invest in Safer Work Conditions in Bangladesh?” PBS NewsHour, July 15,
2013, www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/julydec13/bangladesh2_07-15.html.
38 Ibid.
39 Joseph Berger, “Triangle Fire: A Half-Hour
of Horror,” The New York Times, March 21, 2011,
cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/tri
angle-fire-a-half-hour-of-horror/.
40 David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That
Changed America (2003), quoting an article
by Nancy Cleeland, “Shutting Down the
Death Calendar,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 21,
1999, articles.latimes.com/1999/nov/21/business/
fi-36279.
41 Ibid., Von Drehle.
42 Ibid., pp. 127-128.
43 Ibid.
44 Judson MacLaury, “History, Factory Inspection Legislation,” United States Department of
Labor, www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/
mono-regsafepart02.htm. (MacLaury was the
official historian at the Department of Labor
from 1972 to 2006).
45 Ibid., p. 172.
46 Arthur McEvoy, “The Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of CommonSense Causality,” Law and Social Inquiry, Vol.
20, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 621-651; p. 631.
47 Ibid., p. 642.
48 MacLaury, op. cit.
49 Gaffney, op. cit.
50 Jonathan Grossman, “Fair Labor Standards
Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum
Wage,” U.S. Department of Labor, www.dol.gov/
oasam/programs/history/flsa1938.htm.
51 For background on mine safety history, see
“History of Mine Safety and Health Legislation,”
Department of Labor, www.msha.gov/MSHA
INFO/MSHAINF2.HTM. Also see Daniel
McGlynn, “Mine Safety,” CQ Researcher, June
24, 2011, pp. 553-576.
52 It was the Federal Coal Mine Health and
Safety Act.
53 “Coal Fatalities for 1900 through 2012,” Mine
Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, www.msha.gov/stats/century
stats/coalstats.asp.
54 Vicki Smith, “Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster Victims Say They’re Still Owed $1.5 Million
Each,” The Associated Press, Aug. 7, 2013.
55 “OSHA’s 30th Anniversary,” Quick Takes,
Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
www.osha.gov/as/opa/osha-at-30.html.
56 “OSHA 35-year Milestones,” U.S. Department
of Labor, www.osha.gov/as/opa/osha35year
milestones.html.
57 Ian Urbina, “As OSHA Emphasizes Safety,
Long-Term Health Risks Fester,” The New York
Times, p. A1, March 31, 2012, www.nytimes.
com/2013/03/31/us/osha-emphasizes-safetyhealth-risks-fester.html?pagewanted=all.
58 Morton Rosenberg, “Congressional Review
of Agency Rulemaking: An Update and Assessment of the Congressional Review Act after
a Decade,” Congressional Research Service,
May 8, 2008, assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL3011
6_20080508.pdf.
www.cqresearcher.com
FOR MORE INFORMATION
AFL-CIO, 815 16th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20006; 202-637-5000; www.aflcio.org.
The largest federation of labor organizations in the United States.
American Industrial Hygiene Association, 3141 Fairview Park Dr., Suite 777,
Falls Church, VA 22042; 703-849-8888; www.aiha.org. Professional membership
organization for specialists in occupational hazards.
National Association of Manufacturers, 733 10th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20001;
202-637-3000; www.nam.org. Trade association representing large and small manufacturers.
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Rd., Atlanta, GA 30333; 800-321-6742;
www.cdc.gov/niosh/. Federal agency charged with researching and recommending
worker safety standards.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 200 Constitution Ave., N.W.,
Washington, DC 20210; 800-321-6742; www.osha.gov. Federal agency that sets and
enforces standards for workplace safety.
Public Citizen, 1600 20th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20009; 202-588-1000; www.
citizen.org. Consumer advocacy group whose mission extends to worker rights.
59
Ibid.
Feldman, op. cit.
61 Peter F. Stone, “The Significant Risk Requirement in OSHA Regulation of Carcinogens:
Industrial Union Department: AFL-CIO v.
American Petroleum Institute,” Stanford Law
Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Feb. 1981), p. 552.
62 For background, see the following CQ Researchers by Kenneth Jost: “Class Action Lawsuits,” May 13, 2011, pp. 433-456; “Asbestos Litigation,” May 2, 2003, pp. 393-416; and “High-impact
Litigation,” Feb. 11, 2000, pp. 89-112. Also see
“Asbestos Litigation,” The Rand Corporation,
2005, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/
monographs/2005/RAND_MG162.sum.pdf.
63 “Union Members Summary,” Bureau of Labor
Statistics, Jan. 23, 2013, www.bls.gov/news.
release/union2.nr0.htm. For background, see
Pamela M. Prah, “Labor Unions’ Future,” CQ
Researcher, Sept. 2, 2005, pp. 709-732.
64 Richard Lacayo, “Accidents, Death on the
Shop Floor,” Time, Sept. 16, 1991, content.time.
com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973801,00.html.
65 “Death on the Job,” op. cit., p. 25.
66 “The dangers of breathing silica dust,” Worksafe Bulletin, Workers Compensation Board of
British Columbia, 2009, www2.worksafebc.
com/i/posters/2009/WS%2009_04.html.
67 Sam Hananel, “Government Seeks New
Limits on Silica Dust,” The Associated Press,
Aug. 23, 2013, www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=214895141.
68 Richard Trumka, “Statement on the Issuance
of OSHA’s Proposed Silica Standard,” AFL-CIO,
60
Aug. 23, 2013, www.aflcio.org/Press-Room/
Press-Releases/Statement-of-AFL-CIO-PresidentRichard-Trumka-on-the-Issuance-of-OSHA-sProposed-Silica-Standard.
69 Rick Judson, “OSHA’s Proposed Silica Rule
Raises Concerns for Construction Industry,” National Association of Home Builders, Aug. 28,
2013, www.nahb.org/news_details.aspx?news
ID=16434.
70 “Protecting America’s Workers Act: A LongOverdue Update to OSH Act,” The Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers
International blog, May 9, 2013.
71 “HR 632, Voluntary Protection Program,”
Govtrack.us, www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/
113/hr632.
72 Rep. Tom Petri, press release, http://petri.
house.gov/press-release/reps-petri-green-intro
duce-bipartisan-legislation-codify-workplacesafety-program.
73 Chris Cillizza, “The Least Productive Congress Ever,” “The Fix,” The Washington Post,
July 17, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/
the-fix/wp/2013/07/17/the-least-productivecongress-ever/.
74 Kevin Mullen, “Employers Have New Weapon
Against Stale OSHA Citations,” Employment Law
Update, March 14, 2013.
75 “Buried in Grain,” NPR and The Center for
Public Integrity, www.npr.org/series/174755100/
buried-in-grain.
76 Julian Hattem, “Safety group calls for further action on combustible dust,” The Hill,
April 8, 2013.
Oct. 4, 2013
857
Bibliography
Selected Sources
Books
Michaels, David, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, Oxford
University Press, 2008.
An epidemiologist who later became administrator of the Labor
Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) in the Obama administration criticizes what he calls the
“product defense industry,” consultants who seek to avoid regulation of unsafe products by promoting doubts about scientific evidence about hazards posed by the products.
Van Vorst, Mrs. John, and Marie Van Vorst, The Woman
Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen
as Factory Girls, Doubleday, 1903, www.gutenberg.org/
files/15218/15218-h/15218-h.htm.
Two aristocratic sisters-in-law provide a muckraking account of
turn-of-the-century factory conditions in America’s industrial heartland. They posed as factory workers in pickle, shoemaking and
textile factories from Massachusetts to South Carolina.
Von Drehle, David, Triangle: The Fire That Changed
America, Grove/Atlantic, 2004.
A Time editor-at-large examines the 1911 New York City
factory tragedy that killed nearly 150 people, mostly women,
and sparked both a labor and worker safety revolution.
Articles
“Hard Labor,” The Center for Public Integrity, 2012-2013,
www.publicintegrity.org/environment/hard-labor.
A series of articles on worker safety by the nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization seeks to show that corporate irresponsibility and lax regulation contribute to thousands
of worker deaths, injuries and illnesses in America each year.
Berkes, Howard, and Jim Morris, “Buried in Grain,” National Public Radio and The Center for Public Integrity,
March 24, 2013, http://apps.npr.org/buried-in-grain/.
A series of stories and statistics details the tragedy of farmworkers who suffocate in grain bins and the government’s
ineffectual response.
Urbina, Ian,“As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health
Risks Fester,”The New York Times, March 30, 2013, www.ny
times.com/2013/03/31/us/osha-emphasizes-safety-healthrisks-fester.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
A reporter takes a compelling look at the economic forces
behind a North Carolina cushion maker’s decision to continue
using the solvent N-Propyl bromide (nPB) despite evidence that
it can cause neurological damage and infertility to workers.
Reports and Studies
“Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect,”AFL-CIO, April 2013,
858
CQ Researcher
www.aflcio.org/content/download/79181/1933131/DOTJ
2013.pdf.
The labor organization’s annual report on worker safety in
America examines national and state data.
“Hidden Tragedy: Underreporting of Workplace Injuries
and Illnesses,” Majority Staff Report, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, June 2008,
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.cste.org/resource/resmgr/
OccupationalHealth/HouseEdLaborCommReport061908.pdf.
A congressional staff report examines the extent, causes and
impact of the chronic underreporting of workplace injuries.
Leigh, Paul J., “Economic Burden of Occupational Injury
and Illness in the United States,” The Milbank Quarterly,
Vol. 89, Nov. 4, 2011, pp. 728-772, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pubmed/22188353.
A University of California-Davis health economist details the
extraordinary cost to the U.S. economy of occupational injury
and illness.
Lincoln, Taylor, and Negah Mouzoon, “Cranes and Derricks:
The Prolonged Creation of a Key Public Safety Rule,” Public Citizen, April 2011, www.citizen.org/cranes-and-derricksreport.
Researchers at the consumer advocacy group show how it
took 12 years to create a new workplace rule despite agreement by industry and safety advocates that a new regulation
was needed.
McCluskey, Martha, et al., “The Next OSHA: Progressive
Reforms to Empower Workers,” The Center for Progressive Reform, White Paper #1207, July 2012, www.progress
ivereform.org/articles/Next_Generation_OSHA_1207.pdf.
Five scholars provide plentiful suggestions on how OSHA
could improve its regulatory response to workplace hazards.
Michaels, David, et al., “Selected Science: an industry
campaign to undermine an OSHA hexavalent chromium
standard,” Environmental Health, Feb. 23, 2006, www.
ehjournal.net/content/5/1/5.
Epidemiologists look at the chromium industry’s concerted
effort to undermine stronger workplace regulation of a powerful carcinogen by challenging unfavorable results or commissioning “scientific” studies that were selectively published
to skew regulatory decisions. Michaels is now head of OSHA
in the Obama administration.
Moran, Revae, “Workplace Safety and Health: Multiple
Challenges Lengthen OSHA Standard Setting,” GAO-12330, April 2012, www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-330.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reports
on why it takes OSHA so long to create and put into place
new safety standards.
The Next Step:
Additional Articles from Current Periodicals
Farm Conditions
Broder, John M., “Silos Loom as Death Traps on American
Farms,” The New York Times, Oct. 29, 2012, www.nytimes.
com/2012/10/29/us/on-us-farms-deaths-in-silos-persist.
html?pagewanted=all.
Grain entrapments persist as a danger to farmworkers, despite simple and inexpensive safety measures that could prevent them.
Charles, Dan, “How to Better Protect Farmworkers from
Pesticides: Spanish,” NPR, July 18, 2013, www.npr.
org/blogs/thesalt/2013/07/17/203015727/how-to-betterprotect-farm-workers-from-pesticides-use-spanish.
Advocates for farmworkers are pushing for bilingual labeling
on pesticides used on crops to protect Spanish-speaking employees.
factory conditions,” USA Today, March 13, 2012, http://usa
today30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/
story/2012-03-18/apple-supplier-audit/53502544/1.
Electronics companies such as Apple, Philips and Dell are
trying to make overseas suppliers more accountable for working conditions in their factories.
Sokou, Katerina, “Major U.S. retailers work jointly to
improve factory safety in Bangladesh,” The Washington
Post, July 10, 2013, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/
2013-07-10/business/40483561_1_building-safety-factoryowners-labor-unions.
Walmart and other major U.S. retailers announced an initiative to improve conditions in their clothing vendors’ factories
in Bangladesh, but labor unions say the nonbinding plan is
insufficient.
State Workplace Safety
Weigl, Andrea, “Protesters take farm workers’ tobacco issues to local stores,” The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.),
Dec. 8, 2012, www.newsobserver.com/2012/12/08/2533
062/protesters-take-farm-workers-tobacco.html.
Protesters gathered in West Raleigh, N.C., to pressure R.J.
Reynolds to improve working conditions at the farms where
the cigarette company buys its tobacco.
OSHA
Greenhouse, Steven, “Wal-Mart Settles OSHA Case over
Cleaning Procedures,” The New York Times, Aug. 7, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/business/wal-mart-settlesosha-case-over-cleaning-procedures.html?_r=0.
After OHSA cited the company for violations, Walmart agreed
to improve safety conditions related to trash compactors and
cleaning chemicals in more than 2,800 of its stores.
Hubbard, Russell, “AFL-CIO official says too many still
dying on the job,” Omaha World-Herald, May 9, 2013,
http://omaha.com/article/20130509/MONEY/705099926/
1697.
New Hampshire, with an annual fatality rate of 1.2 per
100,000 workers, ranks first in the nation for workplace safety, while North Dakota has the highest fatality rate, with 12.4
per 100,000 workers.
Yonan, Alan Jr., “Workplace safety back under state,”
Honolulu Star Advertiser, Sept. 14, 2013, www.staradver
tiser.com/s?action=login&f=y&id=223731271&id=223731271.
OSHA returned oversight for factory safety to Hawaii after
improvement in the state’s compliance with federal rules.
CITING CQ RESEARCHER
Hanahel, Sam, “OSHA seeks new limits on silica dust,”
The Associated Press, Aug. 23, 2013, http://bigstory.ap.
org/article/govt-seeks-new-limits-silica-dust.
OSHA unveils a long-awaited proposal for standards to
sharply reduce workplace exposure to deadly silica dust.
Sample formats for citing these reports in a bibliography
include the ones listed below. Preferred styles and formats
vary, so please check with your instructor or professor.
Trubey, J. Scott, “OSHA slammed on slow response to
sugar fire,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July, 25,
2013, www.ajc.com/news/news/board-to-rebuke-osha-forfailing-to-write-safety-r/nY3GK/.
Five years after a catastrophic dust explosion in Georgia, OSHA
still hasn’t drafted national standards that could identify hazards
and impose penalties on companies that allow excessive
amounts of combustible dust in their factories.
Jost, Kenneth. “Remembering 9/11.” CQ Researcher 2 Sept.
2011: 701-732.
Overseas Responsibilities
MLA STYLE
APA STYLE
Jost, K. (2011, September 2). Remembering 9/11. CQ Researcher, 9, 701-732.
CHICAGO STYLE
Jost, Kenneth. “Remembering 9/11.” CQ Researcher, September 2, 2011, 701-732.
Chu, Kathy, “Apple report puts spotlight on overseas
www.cqresearcher.com
Oct. 4, 2013
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