The Occupational Safety and Health Act turns 30 today. We should be thankful for its existence, but America's workplaces are still too dangerous -- and they may get more so under the Bush administration.
Since Congress created OSHA on Dec. 29, 1970, the agency has saved 220,000 lives and prevented millions of injuries and illnesses, according to the AFL-CIO.
But OSHA is still inadequately enforced: It would take more than 60 years for the current number of inspectors to visit all work sites just once. What's more, the penalties are absurdly low: Violators pay an average fine of $776 for serious offenses, and criminal prosecutions for workplace violations are extremely rare.
There were 6,026 reported workplace deaths from traumatic injuries in 1998 and 5.9 million reported injuries and illnesses, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But because corporations often discourage reporting of workplace injuries and because work-related illnesses may develop slowly, academic studies have concluded that the actual number of injuries may be twice that high, and more than 50,000 people die each year of occupational illnesses.
George W. Bush already has announced he wants ``less regulation'' in general. Business groups and their political allies -- mainly a large bloc of Republican legislators -- have continuously tried to weaken enforcement, to give higher priority to business costs than worker health and to obstruct the development of new safety standards.
Yet despite their distorted portrayals of OSHA as an all-powerful, intrusive agency, more than 70 percent of Americans want the federal government to play a major role in workplace safety, according to the Council for Excellence in Government.
Employers also complain that OSHA costs them too much. But safety ultimately pays off in higher productivity and reduced medical and insurance costs. By controlling worker exposure to toxic chemicals, OSHA also helps protect the environment and public health.
The latest big battle is over ergonomic standards, rules for the design of work to avoid muscular and skeletal strains, especially from repetitive trauma. Ergonomic hazards are the main cause of workplace injury and illness, accounting for about 43 percent of lost-time incidents, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On Nov. 13, OSHA issued its final standard, which could eliminate hundreds of thousands of crippling injuries each year. And even though the standard is weaker than many unions and safety professionals wanted, this was a triumph over corporations and their allies, which had stalled the development of a standard for 10 years.
Yet the story isn't over. Business groups already have filed court challenges, and worker advocates fear that Bush may issue an administrative stay to delay implementation.
We should look not to weaken OSHA but to strengthen it. Here are five ways to bolster the agency and its mission:
Expand the law to cover public employees.
Let OSHA develop new standards on many toxic chemicals in the workplace.
Increase oversight of workplaces that rely on temporary workers.
Give workers who blow the whistle much stronger protection.
Require large workplaces to have worker-selected health and safety committees to provide front-line enforcement.
If Bush wants to show he's a different kind of Republican, he can start by safeguarding America's workplaces.
David Moberg is senior editor of In These Times.
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