WITNESSES DEMAND HIGHER OSHA
PENALTIES, STRONGER ENFORCEMENT

Workers’ safety and health on the job are hampered by small fines and fitful--at best--enforcement of job safety and health laws, witnesses told the Senate Labor Committee on April 29.

In the second of a series of hearings on the anti-worker GOP Bush regime’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and whether it is doing its job or not, they demanded lawmakers vastly increase the fines, make OSHA violations that cause a worker’s death on the job felonies punishable by long prison terms, and increase enforcement while relying less on voluntary industry cooperation.

Senators, led by panel chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), were sympathetic. Even Republicans Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and Michael Enzi (R-Wyom.) did not defend business at the session, just after Workers Memorial Day. “I ran a company for 33 years and it included heavy equipment, for golf courses. I knew if I had an accident--and I never did--it would hurt the worker and the company. My best assets were on two legs.”

The witnesses, led by AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario, made the point that deaths and injuries from preventable accidents--such as from falls, fires, explosions and machinery “or where workers are being crushed” are increasing while deaths on the job from other causes, notably traffic accidents and killings, are dropping.

Much of that increase, witnesses said, is lack of enforcement, including small fines and little or no time in prison. Seminario pointed out the maximum fine for a “willful” violation of job safety and health laws is $70,000, and it’s $7,000 for a “serious” violation. But the average “willful” fine was $906 and the average when a worker dies is $10,133.

University of Michigan environmental law and policy professor David Uhlmann, who prosecuted environmental crimes for the Justice Department for 17 years, until last July, compared the penalties for environmental crimes and those for deaths on the job and found the latter way too low.

A company that commits a willful violation that leads to a worker’s death, he told Kennedy, can have its executives brought to trail, for a misdemeanor. The maximum jail term is six months. He contrasted that with the penalties for environmental crimes, citing a 1996 case where Evergreen Resources, an Idaho fertilizer factory, ordered workers to clean out a tank and dump cyanide-laced sludge from its bottom.

The workers pleaded unsuccessfully for safety equipment, Uhlmann said. Young untrained worker Scott Dominguez was overcome by fumes, collapsed and nearly died. His life was saved by heroics at the hospital and Evergreen denied there was cyanide in the tank when the doctors called.

But ensuing investigation uncovered the denial and company owner Allan Elias was convicted for breaking environmental laws. He got 17 years in prison, “yet Elias did not commit a criminal violation of the worker safety laws,” Uhlmann added.

Such light penalties and lack of enforcement are the rule, Seminario told senators. “Right now, there’s no serious consequences” for breaking job safety and health law and rules, she said. “Deaths are treated by OSHA as a routine matter.

“The majority of workplace fatalities are because of workplace conditions” which could be easily corrected, she told Enzi.

And if Dominguez had died in that Idaho accident, Evergreen owner Elias “could have been tried for a Class D misdemeanor,” former prosecutor Uhlmann said. But U.S. attorneys, he added, rarely prosecute misdemeanor cases. And OSHA’s maximum fine of $70,000--changed only once since the law passed in 1970--is inconsequential now, he said.

“There will always be some employers who don’t think the law applies to them--who think workers are expendable,” he added.

Kennedy and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) have introduced legislation to vastly increase the fines for job safety and health violations, and to make incidents where a worker dies felonies punishable by years-long jail terms for company officials involved. Seminario reminded senators that, especially at larger firms, the responsible official is not necessarily top one, as Elias was at Evergreen.

And she said in an interview after the hearing that lack of enforcement is compounded by OSHA’s in-house settlement manual, which gives regional officials--above the on-the-ground inspectors--directions on how to settle job safety and health cases.

“it starts out by saying ‘We offer you a 30% cut’ in the fine ‘if you sign now,’” she said. “They’re offering to cut the fine down across the board even before you (the company) decides to contest the violation” of job safety and health rules. That makes the fines even less of a deterrent to lawbreakers, Seminario pointed out.

“Then you get into a contest with the company and the agency’s staff doesn’t even have the resources to litigate”--go to court--she added. “So it’s only a rate case, a BP or a Cintas, where you have high penalties.”

Despite the favorable reception, and recent signs from Isakson to Murray that he wants to work jointly on job safety issues, the outlook for the safety and health legislation this year is cloudy. “We’re going to try to do whatever we can” to move it, Kennedy said after the hearing. But even Seminario admitted “the legislative calendar is pretty jammed.”

“Still, it’s an outrage that after all these years, we have the lowest penalties” of any law for its violation. “Civil penalties (fines) changed in 1990, from $1,000 per violation to $10,000, and the criminal penalties haven’t changed at all.”