Wrong Path to Safety
Gov. George Deukmejian thinks that the state should quit while it is ahead in the crucial and never-ending task of preventing work-related accidents and illnesses. We emphatically do not.
During the past decade, under an expanded state occupational safety and health agency, the rate of such injuries and illnesses in California has fallen faster than the national rate. Nobody can prove that the agency alone is responsible, but common sense says that it had something to do with work places being safer than they were before.
But the governor’s new budget envisions shutting down much of the work of the agency, commonly known as CAL/OSHA, for a saving of $8 million out of a budget of $39 billion.
The governor’s pitch, which is persuasive so long as you don’t examine it closely, is that work safety can be taken over by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and that workers would still be protected.
What the governor does not say is that there is no federal program in California now and that the federal government would have to start from scratch, hiring staff members and getting a bigger budget. Even if that could be done without cutting safety and health standards here, Congress is not likely to add to its own budget problems to bail out California when 23 other states with similar programs would go on paying their own way.
But standards would be lower under federal supervision. CAL/OSHA, for example, has identified 170 toxic substances as potentially harmful to workers while the federal OSHA program is still trying to decide which, if any, of the 170 belong on its list. Other protections provided by state law do not exist in federal law.
The governor should take another look. And we can think of no wiser counsel for him to follow than that of Allen Nacenski, manager of operational health and safety at TRW Inc., one of Southern California’s biggest aerospace companies. “The mere balancing of a budget,” he told The Times, “is not the way to decide (the future of) a program whose goal is to save lives.”
