Toughening OSHA to cut the toll of death on the job

By Will Parry

Studies estimate that the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) has saved the lives of nearly 400,000 workers since its enactment in 1970.

The brutal truth, however, is that in 2010, forty years later, too many workers are still dying on the job.

The death toll in a series of high-profile disasters in recent months has dramatized a continuing crisis. Seven dead in the explosion and fire at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes. Eleven dead in BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. Six dead in an explosion at the Keen Energy plant in Connecticut. Twenty-nine dead at the non-union Massey coal mine in West Virginia.

As recently as 2008, an average of 109 U.S. workers a week lost their lives at work. Single industrial deaths are so commonplace, they scarcely rate a passing mention in the media. And we haven’t even mentioned the ongoing toll in non-fatal but serious injuries, or the many industrial diseases that shorten workers’ lives and ravage their final years.

The Washington State Labor Council sponsored a forum June 19 where a panel of expert worker safety advocates spelled out the weaknesses in today’s OSHA and the compelling rationale for corrective action by Congress.

The essential reforms are embodied in the “Protecting American’s Workers Act,” HR 2067. Introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), HR 2067 would toughen civil and criminal penalties for workplace health and safety violations; strengthen protections for whistleblowers who call attention to unsafe conditions; and for the first time extend OSHA’s reach to millions of public employees and other workers who are not now covered.

At the labor council forum, the need to toughen the language of OSHA was spelled out by five experts who have had first-hand experience with the way the law works in real life.

“This legislation is long overdue,” said Tom O’Connor, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. “The tools that OSHA has at its disposal to protect America’s workers have not been significantly updated since the agency was created during the Nixon administration in 1970.”

“We are in the middle of a national crisis and American workers are being killed in alarming numbers in some very high profile incidents,” said Jeff Johnson of the State Labor Council “Without question, this legislation will save lives.”

A riveting account of the explosion and fire at the Tesoro Anacortes refinery by Kim Nibarger of the Steeelworkers’ Health and Safety Department brought the issue alive for the audience of labor activists.

His voice choked with emotion, Nibarger described the deadly process that led to the explosion, “naphtha heated to 700 degrees, the introduction of hydrogen to remove impurities, and the running of the gaseous product through a series of heat exchangers.

“The explosion melted aluminum 150 feet away,” Nibarger said. “It was horrible – the most horrible thing you could imagine.”