SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : WEATHERING THE WORKPLACE : MAKING WORK SAFE

Alan Andre, a 22-year-old steelworker, was crushed to death on a steel-cutting machine in a gruesome accident in a Vernon steel mill in 1986.

His death and its cause were officially reported as required by law, just like the deaths and the causes of most of the other nearly 10,000 Americans who are killed each year while at work.

Less certain to be reported is the cause of death of the estimated 50,000 workers who die from sometimes hard-to-detect occupational diseases or the injuries of 5.5 million workers who are hurt on the job annually.

But often entirely unreported are many violations of health and safety regulations issued to prevent those on-the-job illnesses, injuries and deaths like that of the young Vernon steelworker.

Many agencies of the federal, state and local governments have been created to investigate unsafe working conditions and order them corrected before they kill or injure workers. However, there is general agreement that the government agencies do not have nearly enough investigators to cope with all of the health and safety problems of the workplace.

So, many companies and unions have their own health and safety committees that add to government efforts to protect workers on the job. In recent years, though, a new way of increasing workplace safety has been developed.

Small, non-governmental committees for safety and health have been set up in cities around the country to try on a small scale to make up for the shortage of government health and safety enforcement officers and also to help train workers to protect themselves on the job. Louisa Gratz, a founder of the private Los Angeles Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (LACOSH), helped Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Chatten Brown gather information for the prosecution of Andre’s employer, Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co., for failing to train Andre and provide adequate safeguards for the equipment that killed him.

A jury found the company and two of its officers guilty of the charges. They had to pay $60,000 to help train non-Reliance workers to adopt safe work practices. The company was also ordered to set up an extensive safety program of its own, including the employment of a full-time safety inspector.

Chatten Brown said LACOSH “makes substantial contribution to worker safety and health by advocating stringent standards and effective enforcement of those standards.”

“It also provides safety and health training for workers themselves,” she said. “Although this training is the legal and moral responsibility of employers, unfortunately, all too often they do not provide the needed training and the responsibility falls on the employees.”

Ernesto Vegas, head of LACOSH, said that the organization also “makes on-site inspections based on worker complaints of safety law violations.”

The nonprofit committee here, like similar organizations in 25 other cities, was sparked primarily by unions, but financed with contributions from individuals and grants from private foundations and government agencies.

Unions in Philadelphia and Chicago were among the first to establish their own committees on safety and health about 15 years ago and new ones are created each year.

The size of each COSH, as they are called, varies substantially. The committee here has a budget of about $100,000 a year. The one in New York, NYCOSH, has a budget of nearly $700,000. But all of them rely heavily on union volunteers to teach both workers and companies how to prevent injuries and deaths on the job.

Last November, representatives of the committees met in Wareham, Mass., and agreed to share information and coordinate COSH activities on national health and safety issues.

The NYCOSH was selected to serve as a clearinghouse for safety information that is distributed to the other committees, but there is no national headquarters that directs their functions.

They do follow similar practices, though. In addition to training workers and supervisors, they sponsor public conferences on subjects ranging from indoor air pollution and asbestos exposure to so-called “right-to-know” laws that require companies to provide information about toxic chemicals in the workplace.

They bring together rank and file workers, union leaders, company representatives and outside experts in workplace safety to, among other things, develop new safety programs and improve old ones and to lobby local and state governments for improvements in present health and safety laws.

California has an innovative “Cooperative Self-Inspection Program” that allows companies and worker safety and health committees to take joint responsibility for on-the-job safety. Companies with state-approved, management-worker self-inspection programs are removed from regular state inspection lists.

The programs are based on what state officials say is the fact that available state resources do not permit regular or exhaustive inspections of all of California’s workplaces. The self-inspection system uses the knowledge of managers and workers to improve job safety and reduces the need for more state inspections of workplace hazards.

The safeguard in the system is the assumption that workers and managers will keep an eye on each other if there are violations of safety laws that might endanger workers or the company.

A far more innovative idea was proposed last year by some national union leaders. It calls for either state or federal legislation that would require employees in almost all companies to elect members of “worker representation committees” that could give workers an official, major role in helping to enforce health and safety laws.

While the proposal has won some support in Congress, there is little likelihood of Congress adopting it in the near future.

But while that idea is studied, the private committees on safety and health continue to expand, increasing the ranks of those willing to help try to reduce the number of on-the-job injuries and deaths.