Unions Likely to Win in Fight to Resuscitate Cal/OSHA

Unions rarely try and almost never succeed in using the California initiative process to advance even their most admirable causes. Now, however, they are headed for just such a victory and it could have national significance.

Unions have collected nearly 700,000 signatures for an initiative to restore Cal/OSHA. That is the state occupational health and safety agency Gov. George Deukmejian gutted last year by eliminating almost all of its budget.

Petitions for the initiative will be filed Monday. They carry far more than the 372,178 signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot.

Los Angeles County’s AFL-CIO executive secretary, William Robertson, said that in his county alone, unions--backed by prestigious health, environmental and public interest groups--have collected more than 200,000 signatures.

Even more encouraging, it looks so far as though Deukmejian practically will be alone in opposing the unions’ attempt to rebuild Cal/OSHA.

Many of Deukmejian’s usual allies in the business community opposed his Draconian move to save a small fraction--$8 million--of the state’s $41-billion budget by blue-penciling Cal/OSHA almost out of existance.

Many other business leaders stayed out of the fray last year and have turned down pleas from the Administration to fight the initiative this year because with strong safety programs there are fewer worker injuries. And that, in turn, means that management has to spend less on workers’ compensation benefits.

Deukmejian’s lack of support from his politically minded business friends means the Cal/OSHA initiative could pass easily in November, especially since opinion polls show that it has broad public backing.

The governor claimed that the agency just wasted the state’s money by duplicating the job of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He ignored the fact that the state regulations are far more stringent than the federal rules and that federal enforcement is even more lax than California’s.

Deukmejian’s move already has been declared illegal by a lower court, but he hopes his appointees to the state Supreme Court soon will reverse that decision and hold that he can devastate Cal/OSHA, even though it was an agency established by the state Legislature.

Whether the courts or the voters do it, Cal/OSHA should be restored because the law authorizing it is the best of its kind in the nation and is a model for other states, even though its enforcement is inadequate.

The contrast between the federal and state agencies is being noted in Senate hearings that started in Washington on Monday. Representatives of unions, church groups and other organizations and individual workers are telling often tragic stories about the consequences of inadequate enforcement of federal health and safety laws, which themselves are inadequate.

Some of the testimony this week will be reminiscent of the muckraking stories told by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle” in 1906 about the oppressive Chicago slaughterhouses where workers labored on “disassembly lines,” dismembering bloody animal carcasses.

Just last summer, IBP Inc., the nation’s largest meatpacker, was fined a record $2.59 million for “willfully failing” to report more than 1,000 injuries and illnesses over a two-year period at just one of the company’s plants.

IBP, a subsidiary of Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum Corp., was one of the few companies in the meatpacking industry to be hit by a hefty fine for violations of health and safety laws, even though the industry is by far the most dangerous in the nation.

There will be other stories, like those reported in The Times on April 4, describing how almost nothing is being done to enforce last year’s court order requiring growers to provide sanitation facilities and fresh drinking water for farm workers.

In a sad way, though, the drive to restore Cal/OSHA and the Senate hearings that are exposing the federal OSHA inadequacies are all much ado about very little. There are fewer than 2,000 federal inspectors to police the job sites of more than 116 million U.S. workers

There were only 215 state inspectors who enforced Cal/OSHA rules even before it was knocked in the head by the governor. In addition, there were 12 U.S. inspectors to enforce the federal OSHA regulations in California.

Those 227 men and women were expected to police the work sites of some 700,000 California employers. Even when all 227 inspectors were on the job, their ranks were much too thin.

When the governor drastically reduced Cal/OSHA, the number of state safety officers dropped from 215 to 12, and they were restricted to checking only state and local government job safety conditions. The federal government increased its number of safety officers in California to only 100, not nearly enough to fill the gap left by the laid-off state officers.

In other words, the number of safety inspectors in the state has been cut roughly in half since Deukmejian decided to save money by avoiding “duplicative” federal and state safety programs.

The Cal/OSHA regulations and enforcement, even though limited, at least sometimes deterred employers who might otherwise be inclined to ignore safety.

Cal/OSHA also should be rescued from Deukmejian’s heavy hand because it would serve as a better model for other states and the federal government alive than it does dead.

Even better models are available, though. For example, look at the agreements between the United Auto Workers and the auto industry, especially GM.

The $30 million-a-year UAW-General Motors health and safety program provides extensive training of volunteer groups of workers in safety practices at a large, well-equipped center in Madison Heights, Mich. Then those workers train other workers and, along with supervisors and outside experts, they are entrusted with responsibility for plant safety.

A huge, five-day demonstration of the UAW-GM program started Sunday at the Anaheim Hilton. It will attract 1,200 GM workers and managers, and officials claim that it will be the largest health and safety conference of its kind ever.

It would be useful for Deukmejian and members of the Senate hearing committee to visit the demonstration to see what both the state and federal governments can do to reduce the 400,000 workplace injuries and illnesses that occur each year in California alone.

Tougher enforcement of federal safety laws won’t come out of those hearings in Washington--at least not during the Reagan Administration. But the strong probability that Cal/OSHA will be saved either by the courts or by labor’s initiative is cheering news.

There is a profound political irony in Deukmejian’s perspective.

Traditionally, most conservatives talk fondly about “states’ rights”--that is, letting government be run by state and local officials who are “closer to the people” than those in far off Washington. It is a Reagan battle cry.

Yet here is Deukmejian standing conservative tradition on its head by trying to shift the responsibility of California’s health and safety law enforcement to the feds.

What next for conservatives if conservative Deukmejian prevails? Shift to Washington the enforcement of other “duplicative” laws, such as those fixing minimum wage and hours or prohibiting discrimination in employment?

One must wonder what Reagan, who is so anxious to get the federal government “off the backs” of the people, must think of his ideological partner, Deukmejian, trying to push state responsibilities back to the federal government.