703,316 Voters Sign Petitions to Restore Job Safety Program

Organizers of an initiative campaign to restore the state’s occupational safety and health agency Monday filed 703,316 signatures in support of placing the initiative on the November ballot.

The total is almost twice the number of signatures of registered voters needed--372,178--to qualify the measure and is a sign that it almost surely will go before the voters.

The signatures were collected by the Coalition to Restore Safety at Work. The group is led by organized labor but also is supported by several other groups, including the California Medical Assn., the American Cancer Society, the Sierra Club and a number of industrial hygienists and safety engineers who work for California corporations.

Wide Support Cited

“No labor-led campaign in my memory has drawn more support from such a diverse cross-section of California society than the fight to restore Cal/OSHA,” said John F. Henning, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation (AFL-CIO) at a Sacramento news conference.

The campaign was precipitated by Gov. George Deukmejian’s decision to eliminate funding for most state job safety office programs and turn most of the job over to the federal government.

Opponents of the move sued to stop it and one case is still pending. Federal OSHA assumed responsibility for private sector workplace safety in California in July. The state Department of Industrial Relations kept responsibility for maintaining safe workplaces at state and local government sites.

Supporters of the initiative contend California workers are not as safe with federal OSHA as they were with the old state program because California standards are stricter and because federal OSHA is understaffed.

Inspections Report

A report issued earlier this year by the state Senate Industrial Relations Committee said that federal OSHA did 3,123 workplace inspections between July and December, 1987, compared to 9,765 inspections done by Cal/OSHA of private workplaces between July and December, 1986.

Thus far, no major opposition to the initiative has emerged, although Deukmejian may campaign against it. Proponents have raised about $600,000 and spent all but $70,000 of it in the signature-gathering campaign, said Tom Rankin, research director of the California Federation of Labor. He said proponents were prepared to raise $1.5 million more, depending on whether significant opposition to the initiative emerges.