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Wear black on Saturday. It is Workers’ Memorial Day, a time devoted to commemorating those killed on the job.

A month later, on soldiers’ Memorial Day, the nation will recognize those who sacrificed their lives for American ideals, for a nation’s freedom. That ultimate gift is given in most cases valiantly and voluntarily. No one, however, volunteers to sacrifice their life for corporate profit. Every day in workplaces across this country, the lives of 12 workers are taken, not given.

The shield Congress erected in 1970 to protect workers – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) – is mutilated from relentless attacks by corporations and their battering ram — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  The delays in OSHA rule-making that corporate carping achieves cost workers their lives. Congress must intervene to restore OSHA’s power to act swiftly.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) detailed the delays in a report issued last week titled, “Multiple Challenges Lengthen OSHA’s Standard Setting.” The GAO found it takes OSHA longer than seven years to issue a new standard. In one case, it was 19 years. And it’s getting worse. It took 70 percent longer to finalize standards in the 1990s than it did in the 1980s, and another 30 percent longer in the 2000s.

The GAO determined that this was a result of increasing demands on OSHA. These occurred as corporations sued to stop enforcement and new mandates for review of proposed rules were stacked on top of existing ones. The GAO said defenders of the delays argue that the layers of obligations balance worker protections with employer costs.

So the very corporations and Chamber of Commerce that constantly deride government red tape demand it for this special case — to delay implementation of rules to protect workers. And this is their justification: Corporate profits trump worker lives. (more…)

Across America, people are dying for work. It’s not because they’re unemployed. It’s because they work for corporations that don’t care if they die.

Every day, 12 workers die on the job in America – often because a corporation has defied regulations or ignored standard safety procedures. Many more die prematurely from work exposure to toxic materials.

If corporations are people, as Mitt Romney and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court claim, then their privileges as humans come with the responsibility to act humanely. Corporate-people must fulfill their obligations to workers and communities. Profit can’t be their sole raison d’etre. That’s not how it is with flesh-and-blood people. If it were, then society would condone profit-motivated murder, like killing a parent for insurance money. Now that they’re people, corporations have an even greater duty to prevent deaths on the job. And if they don’t, they must be held accountable in criminal court the same way a money-grubbing son would be if he murdered his parents for the life insurance.

Workplace explosions get all the attention.  Three that occurred two years ago next month killed 47 workers. Within 18 days, seven died at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash.; 29 in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia and 11 on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Writing about industrial homicide in the American Criminal Law Review last year, Jane F. Barrett, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and director of its environmental law clinic, said of these explosions:

“In all of these cases, safety procedures were bypassed or standard operating procedures were ignored due to pressures on plant personnel to save time and/or money.”

There it is – the profit factor. Making money trumping worker survival. Occasionally, people accept risk when personal gain is held out as a possibility. But in the workplace, corporations take the gains while imposing the risks on workers. Barrett put it this way:

“And in all cases, the brunt of the consequences was borne by those who did not share in the economic rewards of the corporate non-compliance (with regulations).”

In 4,500 such instances each year, the worker’s death is quick and the cause obvious. In many more cases, however, the deaths are slower, and the reason — workplace exposure to toxic substances –less evident.  Workplace exposure causes more than 40,000 premature deaths annually from conditions like cancer and neurological disease. (more…)

Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer 

Tough new mine safety and workplace safety rules cleared a big hurdle yesterday when the House Education and Labor Committee approved legislation that includes stronger enforcement tools, tougher penalties and broader workers’ rights.

The bill—now named The Robert C. Byrd Miner Safety and Health Act (H.R. 5663) in honor of the late West Virginia senator who was a champion of mine safety—focuses on mine safety, but also includes provisions to strengthen safety protections in all workplaces. Says committee chairman George Miller (D-Calif.):

Too many families have suffered a tragic loss because of callous mine operators, ineffective protections and outdated laws. It is time to provide effective protections so that every worker can return home safely at the end of their shift.

At last week’s hearing on the bill, Stanley “Goose” Stewart, who was able to escape the April explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) mine that killed 29 other coal miners, told the committee:

Something needs to be done to stop outlaw coal companies who blatantly disregard the laws….This bill must pass to keep coal companies honest or make them pay the price for their unscrupulous behavior. (more…)

Lindsay Beyerstein

By Lindsay Beyerstein

At least 58 workers in the energy sector have been killed on the job in the last four months. Among the dead are 11 oil workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Louisiana; 29 coal miners in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia; 6 workers at the Kleen Energy plant in Connecticut; and 7 refinery workers at the Tesoro Corp. refinery in Washington State.

The explosive fire at the Tesoro plant was the deadliest incident at a U.S. refinery since the disaster at BP’s Texas City refinery killed 15 workers in 2005.

The recent spate of high profile disasters in the energy sector moved the worker safety subcommittee of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to hold a hearing last week. The star witness was Jordan Barab, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health and a former acting head of OSHA.

Since OSHA doesn’t have jurisdiction over oil rigs or coal mines, Barab’s testimony focused on the dismal state of process safety in the U.S. refinery industry.

In the wake of the Texas City refinery disaster, OSHA launched a major program to increase process safety at virtually every refinery in the United States.

Five years after Texas City, Barab characterized the results of the program as “deeply troubling.”

“[W]e are particularly disturbed to find even refineries that have already suffered serious incidents or received major OSHA citations making the same mistakes again,” he said.

Barab characterized BP as one particularly recalcitrant repeat offender in an industry teeming with hardcore recidivists.

OSHA proposed an additional $87 million in penalties last year because BP had failed to make promised upgrades after the Texas City disaster. Just a few months later, the company racked up another $3 million in proposed penalties because OSHA found similar “egregious willful violations” at the BP-Husky refinery in Toledo, Ohio. The Toledo plant’s violations were themselves repeats of violations that had been identified and corrected elsewhere in the plant after previous OSHA inspections.

An astonishing 70% of all violations stem from violations of the same four well-established principles of process safety, Barab reported.

Clearly, fines alone aren’t getting through to the industry.

Another witness, Kim Nibarger, a safety specialist with the United Steelworkers, called for jail time for managers whose negligence results in deaths or serious injuries. Nibarger said managers who disregard safety standards are “no different” from careless drivers who kill with their cars. Negligence must have consequences.

“Only when the consequences of allowing workers to be injured or killed on the job are severe enough will companies take serious action to change their safety culture,” Nibarger said.

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This piece was first published on the blog site Working In These Times.

***

Lindsay Beyerstein, a former InTheseTimes.com political reporter, has been published in Salon.com, Slate.com, AlterNet.org, The New York Press, The Washington Independent, RH Reality Check and other news outlets. Beyerstein writes a daily foreign affairs bulletin for the UN Foundation’s UN Dispatch website and covers healthcare for the Media Consortium. She is the winner of a 2009 Project Censored Award and blogs at Majikthise. She can be reached at frege@mac.com. In 2006, she joined the investigative team at Raw Story as a national correspondent specializing in labor, immigration, and crime issues, and worked as a metro reporter for Chelsea Now.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Tea Party darling and Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul spoke last week like the political novice he is – revealing unfiltered GOP “truths.”

First he informed MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow that government should not be able to force businesses to serve black people. Corporate desire to discriminate should trump the civil rights of black people, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and pants-wearing women, according to this Republican candidate, who has since rushed to assure everyone that he personally is not a bigot.

Rand Paul followed up the assertion of corporate-privilege-over-human-rights with two more Republican tenet revelations. First he called the Obama administration “un-American” for holding the corporation BP accountable for the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers and devastated the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. Then Rand Paul added that society should refrain from the “blame game” in the case of another corporation, Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine that blew up killing 29 workers. “We had a mining accident that was very tragic,” he said, “Then we come in, and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

The Republican candidate who openly espoused these views was embraced last Saturday by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at a rally in Frankfort, Ky. And during the primary, former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Republican senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Jim Bunning of Kentucky actively supported Rand Paul. He simply said what Republicans believe – that this country should focus on promoting corporations and those corporations should have privileges, but not responsibilities. To the GOP, the U.S.A. should be a country of corporations, by corporations, for corporations.

People, by contrast, are trifling to the GOP. In the past couple of weeks, the GOP has made its position on humans clear by trying to end an emergency fund that will create 186,000 subsidized jobs this year for poor people and by blocking an extension of unemployment insurance for those thrown out of work during the worst recession since the Great Depression, a downturn caused by reckless Wall Street corporations. Following the lead of Bunning, who delayed an extension in February, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said the unemployed shouldn’t receive the insurance because it “encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment.”

While attempting to deny relief to the desperate, Republicans have also blocked efforts to force oil corporations to assume full liability for catastrophic spills – like the BP disaster in the Gulf. If the oil corporations – which vehemently oppose an increase in their liability — don’t pay for environmental clean up, then taxpayers – including the unemployed – will get the bill. Still, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio opposed raising the laughably-low liability cap of $75 million, and Republicans James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have blocked efforts to lift the cap in the Senate.

Like Rand Paul, Boehner didn’t want to assign culpability to BP. Boehner said, “I think it’s important that we get to the bottom, get to the facts, before we begin to point fingers.”

Murkowski and Inhofe have a financial interest in kissing up to Big Oil. Those corporations have handed them buckets of bucks. According to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.org, the oil and gas lobby has given Inhofe $433,950 over the past five years.  That lobby gave Markowski $240,326 in just the past year. That is 15 times what she got from oil and gas just two years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. A Murkowski spokesman said the senator’s connection to oil and gas corporations is “the same relationship she has to all constituents.”

So, to Republican Murkowski, oil and gas corporations are constituents, exactly like the actual humans who live in her district. That characterization of corporations is consistent with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, written by its Republican-selected, right-wing majority, giving corporations the same rights as humans under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a ruling that will enable corporations to spend virtually unlimited money to influence elections.

Usually such rights come with responsibilities. But Republicans, by impeding an increase in the liability cap, have made clear their opposition to oil and gas corporations bearing the responsibility of paying all costs when their errors kill workers and destroy the environment. Not only that, under the guise of government downsizing, they have thwarted enforcement of regulations intended to prevent deaths and catastrophes. The Bush administration, for example, cut funds for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Also during the Bush administration, according to a Department of Interior inspector general report released this week, federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed corporate officials to fill out inspection reports in pencil, then traced over those marks in pen and submitted them. That “self-regulation” is consistent with the Republican contention that the “invisible hand” of the market will adequately smack down bad corporate behavior.

Rand Paul reiterated the Republican policy on government during his rally with McConnell last Saturday. He said, “What unifies Republicans is a belief that the Constitution restrains the size and scope of government.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who Republicans chose to respond in February, 2009 to President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress, told that national TV audience he opposed “big government,” like all good Republicans do.

Also in that speech, Jindal joined the Republican chorus of “Drill Baby Drill,” calling for increased domestic oil and gas drilling. Now he’s got the ugly results of drilling-gone-wrong coating his coast. 

Since the spill, Jindal has petitioned the federal government – yes, the very government Republicans want to shrivel – to solve his state’s problems. He asked Obama to pay for 6,000 National Guardsmen for 90 days to help clean up. He wants the U.S. Department of Commerce to provide financial help to fishermen, the Environmental Protection Agency to test air quality, and the U.S. Business Administration to suspend loan repayments for small businesses affected by the gushing oil.

The Republican policy, apparently, is “Drill Baby Drill;” taxpayers can always clean the “accidental” spill. In the Republican world, corporations have the right to do anything they want, but no responsibility to do it right or restore what they wreck. Republicans hold the unemployed accountable – but not corporations.

Leo W. Gerard

Leo W. Gerard
USW International President 

BP, Massey Energy and Tesoro all have hauled out plaques celebrating safety achievements to deflect allegations of corporate recklessness in the aftermath of explosions in April that killed 47 of their workers. 

Though each of these corporations accepted awards for safety statistics, not one has taken responsibility for workplace deaths. 

The disconnect between safety awards and dead workers has enabled these corporations to characterize the explosions as accidents, random events for which no one really is to blame, certainly not corporate officials who control conditions in workplaces. That’s why these pseudo-safety awards are so destructive. 

The prizes congratulate corporations for reducing incidents such as slips and falls that injure workers to the point that they must miss work. Decreasing worker injuries is good, no doubt about it. But preserving workers’ lives is imperative. The corporate awards programs fail to recognize employers who successfully institute more complicated, costly and rigorous procedures called “process safety management” to eliminate workplace catastrophes that kill.    

Awards for slip and fall reduction promote complacency. The plaques hanging in hallways say the oil rig or coal mine or refinery is super safe – so secure it’s worthy of commemoration.  They create the illusion of protection in workplaces where process safety management hasn’t been properly implemented. The safety plaques are paper shields, easily immolated in explosions, along with the workers they beguiled. 

Some BP executives actually experienced a little of that burn on April 20. A group of BP bigwigs was aboard Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico when it exploded. They’d traveled out to the oil rig to celebrate a safety milestone. Workers on the rig had gone seven years without a lost-time accident – well, seven years without reporting one, anyway. Corporations routinely subtly and overtly discourage workers from reporting injuries. For example, companies grant cash awards for designated time periods during which no injury reports are filed and force mishap victims to wear distinctive clothing like orange vests so they get the blame – and not the corporation – for injury reports that cost entire crews their cash awards. 

The BP executives escaped Deepwater Horizon with their lives. Eleven roustabouts and roughnecks on that day of safety celebration did not. 

Just last year, the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) gave BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, Safety Awards for Excellence –SAFE awards. MMS bestows these on offshore oil and gas corporations for “outstanding safety and pollution prevention performance.” Again this year, BP was a finalist for a SAFE award. After the Deepwater Horizon explosion, MMS postponed announcement of this year’s winners. Last year, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)  presented BP Alaska with a three-year re-certification of its Star award, which recognizes safety performance. 

All of that would lead workers to believe BP is a safe employer – not like the BP with a refinery in Texas City, Texas that blew up in 2005 killing 15 workers and injuring 170, the BP that OSHA slapped with its second largest total penalty ever — $21 million – for safety violations at Texas City that led to the massive explosion, the BP that OSHA hit with its largest ever fine — $87.4 million – last fall for failure over four years to comply with the terms of its settlement agreement to correct the potential hazards at Texas City. 

No, the safety-award-winning BP must be different, a corporation that recognizes its responsibility to establish and conduct safe workplaces. 

A study after the BP-Texas City explosion showed that one of the best ways to prevent such catastrophes is meeting the standards of process safety management. These use engineering and management techniques to continuously ensure that machinery and piping are in good condition, meticulously manage and record changes, and properly train workers.  The concepts are not exclusive to refineries. They can be used to improve safety in other industrial processes as well. 

The refinery industry accepted the process safety standards but hasn’t rigorously implemented them. The United Steelworkers union, which represents oil workers, met with oil corporations and the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade group for drillers and refiners, in an attempt to write two new standards addressing leading indicators in the refining industry and worker fatigue. But the union abandoned the effort last fall because the industry was more concerned about image than safety. 

Then, on April 2, an explosion at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash. killed seven workers. Like BP, Tesoro is a safety award winner – but not for comprehensive process safety management. The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association (NPRA) has granted the Anacortes refinery numerous prizes over the years – “merit” and “achievement” and “gold” — including two last year. Tesoro notes on its web site that this recognition is for reducing “recordable injury rates”– the lost-time injuries that must be reported to OSHA. 

NPRA doesn’t sponsor an award for corporations that improve process safety management. It’s trying to collect statistics on process safety from drillers and refiners, but participation is anything but compulsory. NPRA stresses that the information it receives on process safety will be collected on an aggregate level so it’s not specific to individual refineries, will be kept secret and will be used for benchmarking only.  Clearly, it is striving to entice reticent refiners to participate. 

Three days after the Tesoro tragedy, 29 workers died in an explosion in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Massey CEO Don Blankenship immediately began blaming God and the workers themselves for the catastrophe and citing Massey’s safety awards. In 2009, The National Mining Association and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) gave Massey three “Sentinels of Safety” awards, the most any mining company had ever received in one year. These recognize, as the NPRA and MMS awards do, low levels of lost-time injuries.  “At Massey Energy, we embrace our commitment to safety at all levels – from executive to miner. The Sentinels of Safety awards reflect the company’s dedication to safety at all of our facilities,” Blankenship said six months before the worst mining disaster in 40 years killed 29 Massey workers. 

After two Massey miners suffocated in 2006, the corporation pleaded guilty and paid $4.2 million in criminal fines and civil penalties – the largest settlement in coal industry history — for willful violation of mandatory safety standards. By a count the United Mine Workers of America conducted, 52 people have been killed on Massey Energy properties in the past decade. UMWA President Cecil Roberts called Massey mines the most dangerous in America. 

And yet, Blankenship touts Massey’s safety awards. Like BP and Tesoro. 

 The standards for these prizes must change to stop deluding workers and deceiving the public. No agency or association should ever again laud workplaces that are lax on meeting process safety management standards.

Richard Trumka

By Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

Over the course of the past three weeks, 32 U.S. coal miners have died in three separate mining disasters. As a former coal miner and the son and grandson of coal miners, the tragedy of their deaths is close to my heart. But as an American, the catastrophe of 151 workers’ lives lost everyday in this country, on the job and through occupational diseases, cuts me to the bone.

The 2010 AFL-CIO report, “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect,” shows that well into the 21st century, employers in this nation still are failing on a massive scale to ensure those who toil for them stay healthy–and alive.

In 2008, 5,214 workers were killed on the job — an average of 14 workers every day — and an estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases. More than 4.6 million work-related injuries were reported, but our study finds the true toll of job injuries is two to three times greater — some 9 million to 14 million job injuries each year.

Eight years of neglect and inaction by the Bush administration seriously eroded safety and health protections. Standards were repealed, withdrawn or blocked. Major hazards were not addressed. The Obama administration is returning the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to their mission to protect workers’ safety and health. The president has appointed strong, pro-worker safety and health advocates to head the agencies — Dr. David Michaels at OSHA and Joe Main at MSHA.

The administration is moving forward with new standards on silica, cranes and derricks, infectious diseases and coal dust and strengthening enforcement. The Obama administration has increased the job safety budget and hired hundreds of new inspectors, restoring the funding and staffing cuts made during the Bush administration.

These are great and much-needed improvements. Now, the Obama administration and Congress must take a serious look at updating the 40-year-old Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act. Congress should pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to extend the law’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations by employers who break the law, enhance anti-discrimination protections and strengthen the rights of workers, unions and victims.

Here’s why it’s needed. Right now, OSHA penalties are too low to deter violations. The average penalty for a serious violation of the law in fiscal year (FY) 2009 was $965 for federal OSHA and $781 for the state plans. Even in cases of worker fatalities, penalties are incredibly weak. For FY 2009, the median initial total penalty in fatality cases investigated by federal OSHA was $6,750, with the median penalty after settlement $5,000.

Since the OSH Act was passed in 1970, more than 360,000 workers have died on the job–but only 79 cases have been prosecuted, and altogether, the people to blame served a total of 89 months in jail.

Here in the United States, you can get more jail time for harassing a burro on federal land than for killing a worker. Willful violation of workplace safety laws that kills a worker carries a maximum jail term of six months for a first offender. It’s a year for burro harassment.

Improvements in the Mine Safety and Health Act also are necessary to give MSHA more authority to shut down dangerous mines and close loopholes that enable employers to endlessly delay enforcement of violations. The new administration at MSHA also must strongly enforce the MINER Act, passed in 2006 in the wake of the 12 miners killed at the Sago coal mine in West Virginia. And as the Mine Workers is urging, hearings on mine tragedies, like the one that claimed 29 workers’ lives at the Massey-owned mine, must be public.

Creating the 11 million jobs we need in this country to get workers back to work means ensuring these jobs are good jobs — those that not only pay family-supporting wages and offer health care and retirement security — but those that ensure when workers leave home in the morning, they’ll return uninjured that night.

Every year on April 28, union members and workers around the nation commemorate Workers Memorial Day. April 28 was selected because that’s the date the OSH Act was signed into law. This year, we took part in a ceremony to dedicate the National Workers Memorial at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. The recently completed memorial features granite benches and brick pavers engraved with the name of union members killed on the job.

Pointing toward the bricks and benches that family members and co-workers have engraved with the names of those killed on the job, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler said:

Every brick represents not just a worker lost–but a family left behind, a wife without a husband, a child without a mother, a mother without a son.

The nation’s death toll for workers killed while doing their job should cut all Americans to the bone. Let’s take action now to stop the slaughter.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Don Blankenship, the man ultimately in charge of Massey Energy’s West Virginia mine where 29 workers died in an explosion April 5, assured financial analysts last week that safety is paramount in his operation.

Massey, the country’s fourth largest mining company, issued a statement that same day asserting that a review of conditions in the Upper Big Branch mine uncovered no problems shortly before the blast that killed more workers than any other mine disaster in nearly four decades.  

All that could only mean one thing, right?  Massey did nothing wrong and bears no responsibility. So clearly the disaster was an act of God or an omission by workers. God killed them. Or they killed themselves. Blankenship suggested that in earlier interviews and repeated it to stock analysts last week:

“Obviously, I don’t want to speculate, but either something went wrong from a natural/unnatural manner that was not foreseeable by us or human beings or somebody made a mistake or something.”

That contention – that God’s hand or worker blunder caused a disaster – is a bogus employer excuse that managers frequently dredge up. The supervisor of the Westray Mine in Canada, where 26 workers died in an explosion in 1992, did the same thing. A government-commissioned report on that catastrophe recounts that manager, Gerald Phillips, “blatently blamed the miners for the explosion.” It’s a refrain that might be repeated in the aftermath of the Tesoro refinery blast on April 2 that killed seven workers and the explosion on the Transocean Ltd. oil offshore oil drilling platform on April 20 that killed 11 workers.

It’s a lie. And when workers die, it’s a damned lie. Employers are responsible for maintaining safe working environments. Yet, across this country, 14 workers are killed on the job every day. The American people and their government must hold employers accountable. Or the workplace killing will never stop. 

Employers routinely attempt to dodge culpability. Blankenship spouted the “I-am-not-responsible” talking points in his telephone call with financial analysts. He swore to them with reassuring double negatives:

“It’s not due to us not being focused on safety, not having a strong safety culture, not putting safety first. Some of the implications have been that we don’t focus on safety or we put dollars in front of safety, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

Blankenship has also said incidents are “unfortunately an inevitable part of the mining process,” suggesting they just happen like hurricanes or tornados; no one can control them.

The U.S. Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore oil rigs like the one that exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico this month, blames workers as well.  MMS is writing rules requiring rig operators to prevent human error.  This follows an MMS report on the 41 deaths and 302 injuries on oil rigs between 2001 and 2007 that said:

“It appears that equipment failure is rarely the primary cause of the incident or accident.”

This is the same MMS whose inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, said suffered from a pervasive “culture of ethical failure.” In three reports to Congress in 2008, Devaney portrayed MMS as, the New York Times said, “a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.”

It is not surprising that MMS blames workers when, the New York Times noted, eight MMS officials accepted expensive gifts from energy companies. These exceeded values set in federal ethical regulations. And several MMS officials, the Times said:

 “Frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

Regulators for mines and refineries take an entirely different view from MMS. Kevin Stricklin, the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s administrator for Coal Mine Safety and Health, said while at Upper Big Branch:

 ”All explosions are preventable. It’s just making sure you have things in place to keep one from occurring.” 

That is management’s responsibility.  

Similarly, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration does not blame workers for explosions at refineries. To prevent catastrophes, OSHA requires refineries to implement a system called process safety, which is a mixture of engineering and management focused on prevention. After a 2005 blast at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas that killed 15 workers and injured 170, OSHA launched a two-year program to emphasize process safety at refineries.

Afterward, OSHA director of enforcement Richard Fairfax reported:

 “We are pretty shocked and dismayed by what we found.”

OSHA’s review of 14 refineries in the first year found 1,517 violations, including 1,489 for process safety.

While MMS contends “human error,” caused incidents on oil rigs, inspections by MMS and the Coast Guard over the past three years of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico found problems such as repair crews working without proper permitting in hazardous areas, inoperable gas detectors and faulty firefighting equipment. These examples of management recklessness are listed in a Houston Chronicle story by Lise Olsen titled, “Blood a part of oil’s price.” 

Similarly, former United Mine Workers union President John L. Lewis said coal was washed in the tears of widows. In West Virginia where there are two dozen new coal widows, Blankenship repeatedly has said Upper Big Branch was as safe as other mines and that citations for violations are just a routine part of the mining business.

A review by Ellen Smith, owner of Mine Safety and Health News, showed, however, that Upper Big Branch had a violation rate 30 percent higher than the average underground bituminous coal mine. In addition, a Massey subsidiary, Aracoma, pleaded guilty to criminal charges of willful violation of mandatory safety standards in the 2006 deaths of two miners.

President Obama had this to say about culpability:

“This tragedy was triggered by a failure at the Upper Big Branch Mine, a failure first and foremost of management, but also a failure of oversight and a failure of laws so riddled will loopholes that they allow unsafe conditions to continue.  Owners responsible for conditions in the Upper Big Branch Mine should be held accountable for decisions they made and preventive measures they failed to take.  And I’ve asked [Labor] Secretary [Hilda] Solis to work with the Justice Department to ensure that every tool in the federal government is available in this investigation.”

Even in the 1800s, managers tried to evade blame by placing it on God and workers. Mine inspector Thomas K. Adams noted that blame shifting in an article published in 1900 by the journal Mine and Minerals:

“During such distressing events [as mine disasters] we have, as usual, a plenteous crop of apologists and general utility men who appear . . . Those men are very resourceful in offering all kinds of excuses for those who are possibly responsible for such calamities. They will tell us about the subtle agencies in operation in nature’s storehouse, the mysteries which wiser men than Solomon cannot unravel and that those mine explosions are the unavoidable and natural accompaniments which gives harmony to the coal-mining industry.”

Adams went on:

“Such rot has no weight with intelligent mining men, of course, but dupes there be everywhere.”

Today is Workers Memorial Day, an occasion to mourn those killed in the workplace, to condemn the lying about culpability and to demand corporate accountability.

James Parks

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

In a major win for workers’ safety on the job, a federal appeals court upheld the power of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to determine how to craft and enforce workplace safety rules. 

The saga began when Eric Ho, a contractor in Houston, hired 11 immigrant workers in 2003 to remove asbestos from a building but did not train them or provide them with respirators. After a city inspector issued a stop-work order because of asbestos violations, Ho directed employees to work at night behind locked gates.

OSHA cited Ho for 22 separate violations—11 for not training each worker and 11 for not providing a respirator for each worker. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission overturned the majority of the citations, saying Ho could only be cited once for not training workers and once for not providing respirators. That meant Ho only had to pay two fines, not 22.

OSHA officials rewrote the rules to make it clear that each worker must be given protective equipment and training, and an employer can be cited for each worker not given this protection as a separate violation. But the National Association of Home Builders sued, claiming OSHA didn’t have the authority to say that employers could be cited for each worker left unprotected.

Late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said OSHA has such authority and ruled for the agency in the case, National Association of Home Builders v. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

AFL-CIO General Counsel Lynn Rhinehart says the decision makes clear that if an employer doesn’t protect its workers,  

[t]he employer can get cited for each worker it doesn’t protect. This is a really important principle that will help ensure that workers get the protection they need to be safe on the job.  

The AFL-CIO filed a friend of the court brief urging the court to side with OSHA and uphold the rule, Rhinehart said. The AFL-CIO also participated in the rule-making proceeding that produced the rule at issue in the case.

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Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog 

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

April 30, 2008, two days after Workers Memorial Day last spring, a mammoth steel girder crushed to death a 61-year-old crane repairman who worked at ArcelorMittal in Burns Harbor, Ind. A 33-year-veteran of the mill, the member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6787 left behind a wife and two sons.

He became one of the 21 to die that day at work, the 21 who die each day at work.  To reduce that daily toll, to make Workers Memorial Day less memorable, the U.S. Labor Department and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration must be properly funded and empowered.

The 5,680 workplace deaths each year are called “accidents” in hushed tones in funeral homes when widows or widowers speak of what befell the loved ones they’d kissed as they left for work, never suspecting they’d never return. But they’re not accidents if the employer failed to supply safety equipment, sufficient workers to safely perform the task, or, generally, a safe working environment.

Employers must provide safe workplaces. For those who don’t understand that moral requirement, Congress established a legal mandate with the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Under OSHA, the Department of Labor created regulations and enforcement mechanisms “to promote the safety and health of America’s working men and women.”

August 15, 2008, a 41-year-old electrical apprentice from Superior, Ariz. was fatally electrocuted while replacing the ballast in a 480-volt flood light on the edge of the Asarco LLC Ray Mine copper pit in Kearny, Ariz. He’d trained for a year and 20 weeks as an electrician, but for 13 years before that had worked at the mine as a member of the USW, and his former Steelworkers local union president, Celestino Flores, said of him, “He was such a hard worker. . . Such a good guy.”  The U.S. Department of Labor cited Asarco, saying, “The accident occurred because management policies and controls were inadequate and failed to ensure that the electrical circuit was deenergized, locked-out, tagged, and tested before work was performed.” But the Labor Department never imposed fines, and after all the mine’s electricians received training, it rescinded the citation.   

Something is wrong. Over the past eight years, the Bush Administration managed to emasculate many regulatory agencies, including the Labor Department and OSHA.  The federal OSHA program has 570 fewer inspectors today than it did in 1980, for example, and its budget of $486 million for 2008 amounted to only $3.89 per worker.

An Office of Inspector General audit report describes one terrible result of this government-shriveling process – additional deaths at workplaces with histories of deaths. The March 31, 2009 report carries an intimidating but also chilling title: “Employers with Reported Fatalities were not Always Properly Identified and Inspected under OSHA’s Enhanced Enforcement Program.”

That special enforcement program (EEP) is for “employers indifferent to their obligations” under the OSHA act. In the audit, the Inspector General found that under the Bush Administration, OSHA was not properly identifying employers for enhanced enforcement. And even when it did, OSHA failed to take proper action. For example, in 29 cases, it “did not take any of the appropriate enhanced enforcement actions. Sixteen of the 29 employers subsequently had 20 fatalities.”  In 14 of those, the violations were similar to the initial ones. But the employer suffered no OSHA penalty the first time. The violation recurred. And another worker died.

“While we cannot conclude that enhanced enforcement would prevent subsequent fatalities, full and proper application of EEP procedures may have deterred and abated workplace hazards at the worksites of 45 employers where 58 fatalities occurred,” the auditors wrote.

January 4, 2009, a 46-year-old municipal worker died of drowning and blunt force trauma when he apparently was caught in a conveyor system and dragged into a pit at the Galveston, Texas waste water treatment plant. A member of USW Local 13-1, he worked for the City of Galveston for a decade. The co-founder of the Galveston Hurricanes and the team’s coach for 14 years, he left behind a widow and three sons.

Tuesday, April 28, is this year’s Workers Memorial Day. The date marks passage of OSHA, which clearly needs to be enforced so fewer bells are tolled on this day to commemorate dead workers and so fewer workers die ignominiously in waste water treatment plants.  Two weeks ago, on the deadline for filing federal income taxes, tea bag protestors cavorted across the country at the behest of conservative talk show hosts. Still conservatives are trying to shrink government, end regulation, strangle enforcement. For American workers, who depend on OSHA for their lives, smaller is perilous. For their very survival, workers need robust regulation immediately.

February 2, 2009, a tracked timber-loading crane ran over and crushed a 65-year-old crane operator at International Paper in Augusta, Ga. A 43-year veteran of the plant, he’d been scheduled to be off that day but went in anyway when called and worked a job not normally his. He left behind a wife, two children and five grandchildren, all of whom had hoped to see him retire next year. A member of USW Local 983, he was, ironically, EMS trained, functioned as a first responder for International Paper and taught CPR.