Strengthen Cal/OSHA, Group Urges Governor

A broad-based coalition of environmental, labor and law enforcement groups Thursday called on Gov. George Deukmejian to implement sweeping reforms in the state worker safety and health program, which is scheduled to start up again on Monday.

The staff of the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be increased by 25%, civil and criminal penalties for law-breaking employers should be increased and protections for employees who exercise their right to refuse unsafe work should be strengthened, said Jan Chatten-Brown, special assistant to Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who is the chairman of the coalition called Worksafe.

Additionally, Chatten-Brown said, the state should improve its methods of setting safety standards, and California should create a workplace hazard prevention fund to improve employee and employer knowledge about problems. She made the recommendations in unveiling a white paper on California’s future occupational safety and health program at a Sacramento press conference.

She said that increased staffing for Cal/OSHA was important because when the agency resumes operations it will have the same number of workers it had in 1987 when it ceased operations after Deukmejian vetoed funding for the agency. Moreover, Chatten-Brown said the agency will have slightly fewer employees than it had in 1982.

Since that time, California’s working population has increased by 22%, creating the need for more safety engineers and industrial hygienists to inspect workplaces.

“The report will be reviewed by the Administration,” said Kevin Brett, Deukmejian’s press secretary. “During the process, we will question what is more important to Worksafe--the merits of their proposal or Dist. Atty. Reiner’s political ambitions.”

He was referring to the fact that Reiner has declared that he plans to run for state attorney general in 1990. Reiner was the prime public spokesman in a successful initiative campaign to restore Cal/OSHA.

The Worksafe coalition also includes the Sierra Club, the California Trial Lawyers Assn. and the California Conference of Machinists.

The Worksafe report also calls for:

- Mandated joint labor-management safety committees for all workplaces with 25 or more employees.

- Updated standards for exposure to lead and other toxics.

- Barring employers with poor safety records from receiving state contracts.

There is “abundant evidence” that improved worker safety is needed in California, said state Sen. Nicholas C. Petris, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on hazards in the workplace, who appeared at the press conference and then held a hearing on the issue.

“Our ability to control the trend toward the ‘toxification’ of our work and community environments has not kept pace with technological advances,” Petris (D-Oakland) said at the hearing. “The existing regulatory system generally responds only after the exposure to dangerous substances has caused a noticeably irregular number of illnesses, a point when treatment is frequently too late for those exposed, or highly expensive.”

Dr. Robert C. Spear, director of the Northern California Occupational Health Center, said at the hearing that “by the most conservative estimates, 2,000 California workers die from occupationally related cancer each year.”

He said that he had done a review of recent California budgets to assess how the state was allocating its resources to combat toxics-related problems. “California spends far too little of its toxic dollar on hazards to workers in proportion to the risks they face,” Spear said.

Spear said that financing of workplace safety programs had declined, while spending for environmental safety had increased. He said that while he supports “cleaning up the environment and keeping toxic chemicals out of the air and water,” in many instances workers are exposed to hazards before the general public is and that greater expenditures on workplace safety would benefit society at large as well as workers.