| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"¥" |
| Date: |
04 Jul 2003 06:01:59 PM |
| Object: |
Workers' rights regressing under the Bush regime. |
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
by Russell Mokhiber / Robert Weissman
In what appears an almost calculated move to demonstrate its disdain for
worker health and safety, the Bush administration yesterday revoked a
requirement that employers keep records on ergonomics injuries.
The rule would have required employers to check a box on their workplace
injury and illness log if an employee suffered an ergonomic injury.
Ergonomics injuries include repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel
syndrome.
Issued by Bill Clinton's Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) on his administration's last day in office, the rule was immediately
suspended by the Bush administration.
Two years later, the Bush OSHA has concluded that checking a box is too much
to ask of employers.
"OSHA concluded that an additional recordkeeping column would not
substantially improve the national injury statistics," says OSHA
Administrator John Henshaw, "nor would it be of benefit to employers and
workers because the column would not provide additional information useful
to identifying possible causes or methods to prevent injury."
Fancy that.
Throughout the 1990s, a controversy raged in Washington over issuance of a
rule to require employers to address ergonomics hazards. Heavily lobbied and
funded by UPS and other employers whose workers continue to experience an
epidemic of ergonomic injuries, Republicans repeatedly included
appropriations riders which prohibited the Clinton administration from
issuing such a rule. The Clinton administration didn't fight too hard to
advance the rule -- even though there is widespread public understanding of
the severity and extent of ergonomics injuries, and an eagerness to prevent
them.
The Clinton administration finally issued its ergonomics rule at the end of
its second term, along with dozens of other postponed regulations. As with
virtually all of those last-minute regulations, the Bush administration
suspended the ergonomics rule, and then revoked it. Voluntary measures would
be enough, the Bush guardians of worker well-being said.
All that was left was the reporting requirement, which the administration
now has quashed on the grounds that it wouldn't do much.
It is true that a mere reporting requirement wouldn't mandate workplace
changes to reduce ergonomic risks, though that's a strange argument for an
administration that eliminated regulations that would have mandated such
risk reduction.
And although its impact would have been modest, a reporting requirement
would have helped alert employers to hazardous workplace conditions, and it
would have provided better national data.
The administration apparently wants neither of these things, since they
might impel action by individual employers and the federal government.
Anyone who has experienced the agony of a repetitive stress injury, or knows
anyone who has, can appreciate the folly and cruelty of this approach.
"Just because the government is not going to require employers to track
these injuries, and just because the government is not going to enforce a
safety standard, doesn't mean that workers will stop becoming ill or
permanently disabled on the job," notes AFL-CIO President John Sweeney with
disgust. Sweeney calls the administration's rule revocation evidence of a
"head in the sand" approach to ergonomic injuries.
Every year, roughly a million people in the United States suffer from
workplace-related musculoskeletal disorders (mostly ergonomics injuries) so
severe they must take time off from work, according to Peg Seminario,
director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO. That's twice the
number actually reported by employers. The canceled ergonomics rule -- not
the reporting requirement, but the rule actually requiring employees to
reduce ergonomics hazards -- was projected to avert half of those injuries,
she says.
In fact, the injuries are so frequent and serious, Seminario says, that
employers who take steps to avert them have rapid payback in worker's
compensation savings.
The "arguments in the political arena are totally contradicted by the
experience in the real world of the workplace," she says. Employers "see
that by taking fairly straightforward steps they can significantly reduce
and in some cases eliminate these injuries. In six months or a year, they've
got their investments paid for, because these injuries are so costly."
"But the ideology and the opposition to regulation [has been] stronger and
[has] trumped the economic reality," she says.
The stomped-out reporting requirement is just the latest manifestation of
the ideological campaign against rules to protect workers in the United
States.
More than 5,000 U.S. workers die annually from traumatic injuries, and
nearly 60,000 from occupational disease.
These tens of thousands dying every year -- along with the millions
suffering workplace injuries annually -- are the victims of unbridled
corporate violence, aided and abetted by government officials and Members of
Congress who, as Sweeney says, choose the head in-the-sand approach.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of 'Corporate Predators: The Hunt
for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy' (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press).
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0702-10.htm
--
"There can be no effective control of corporations while their political
activity remains."
-- Theodore Roosevelt, speech, August 31, 1910
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| User: "Winston Smith, American Patriot" |
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| Title: Re: Workers' rights regressing under the Bush regime. |
04 Jul 2003 09:05:15 PM |
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Michael Hirtes <mhirtes@KILL.ALL.THE.SPAMMERS.telemarketers.too.com> wrote
in inimitable style:
In article <3f04b5f5_2@newsfeed>, "¥" <windriver2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
by Russell Mokhiber / Robert Weissman
In what appears an almost calculated move to demonstrate its disdain for
worker health and safety, the Bush administration yesterday revoked a
requirement that employers keep records on ergonomics injuries.
That's nothing! Bush even wants to outlaw overtime, so bosses can make
their slaves work extra long hours without any pay.
Bosses already have figured out a technique without going back to 19th
century United States.
They pick slavishly devoted "key" employees, put them on low salary, and
then work them 60-80 hours a week. Much more value and productivity, and
eventually when they cut back staff, they get rid of all the wage earners
who may or may not belong to a union, putting their workload on those
salaried remaining.
Then they figure a way to lay off the 19-year employees just before they
vest their 20-year retirements.
It's all very cozy, and Bush has stacked the courts to thwart those suing
for workplace abuses.
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