Proposed Job Safety Cuts Are Absurd

Sometimes the Bush Administration comes up with absurd proposals to show its endless faith in America’s corporate executives.

Best known, of course, is the old “trickle-down” trick. It gave hefty tax breaks to wealthy executives and other rich folk on the dubious assumption that they would invest their tax savings to create more jobs for workers.

The theory has failed miserably so far, making the rich richer, the poor poorer, unemployment higher and cutting the real income of the middle class.

Less known and even more absurd is the strange notion coming from the office of President Bush’s powerful budget director, Richard Darman:

Reducing government-mandated job safety protections will save workers’ lives and improve their health.

Hearings are actually being held in Washington on this amazing idea. The budget director’s office demanded that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration stop putting new limits on workplace poisons and reduce old ones unless it can prove that the safety rules do not increase dangers to workers.

If this upside-down logic the Administration calls a “risk-risk analysis” prevails in OSHA, it may then be extended to safety regulations issued by other agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The convoluted theory is that risks to workers’ health and lives would be reduced if workplace health and safety regulations are cut back. So the Administration ordered OSHA to compare the risks of death and illness to the risk stemming from the income workers lose because of the money employers spend to comply with the regulations.

James MacRae Jr., in charge of Darman’s regulatory office, brilliantly explains it all this way:

Employers normally take their costs for complying with health and safety regulations out of the paychecks of workers and by raising prices.

So the Administration figures that if those safety regulations are cut or eliminated employers would generously pass on their savings to workers. That is really blind faith in management’s generosity.

MacRae doesn’t put it just this way, but the Administration demand on OSHA is just another version of the trickle-down theory. MacRae says in effect that we can rely on corporate executives to share the gains they get from the government with their workers.

To quote MacRae’s irrefutable premise of his argument: “The positive effect of wealth on health has been established both theoretically and empirically.

“Richer workers on average take more leisure time, buy more nutritious food, more preventive health care, and smoke and drink less than poorer workers.”

His wild conclusion, however, is that by reducing the money corporations are required to pay for health and safety precautions, workers will get pay raises, become richer, healthier and live longer.

The Bush Administration’s risk-risk analysis theory was imposed on OSHA after it proposed to put limits on poisonous chemicals in construction, maritime and agricultural industries. The proposed limits are similar to those imposed in 1989 on most other industries, which employ an estimated 21 million workers.

Further confusing the efforts of the Administration to “get government off the backs of corporations” is a recent federal appeals court ruling that struck down the 1989 limits themselves.

The court said those OSHA-imposed limits were too general a fashion--some were too strict, some too lenient and few were based on adequate scientific evidence.

So now, to the delight of hordes of lawyers, we are almost back to square one. Most of the old and all of the proposed new OSHA limits on poisonous chemicals in the workplace are being argued furiously and at length in the courts and in OSHA hearings.

At issue is how much poison workers can take without getting sick or dying, and will limiting the poison be too expensive for corporations.

Also in question is that weird Administration theory that workers might well be healthier and live longer if limits on many poisons were reduced and employers would then magnanimously pass on their savings to the workers, thereby making workers richer and healthier.

The theory doesn’t sit well with some managers and labor is outraged. Margaret Seminario, the AFL-CIO safety and health director, calls it “totally bizarre.”

She says “it demonstrates that OMB (Darman’s Office of Management and Budget) will employ any means and rationale--no matter how far-fetched--to block or weaken important worker safety and health standards” as it has been doing “since 1981 under a series of Reagan/Bush executive orders.”

Evidence of the Administration’s faith in corporate management has been shown in a host of other ways, like its startling decision the other day to let coal mine operators continue collecting their own coal dust samples to test for overexposure to the dust that can cause black lung disease.

The unreliability of the mine owners was evidenced last year when the government assessed civil penalties of about $7 million against more than 500 coal companies for submitting tampered dust samples for testing.

It would cost the government an estimated $33 million a year to get the samples and so the Administration says it will continue to put its faith in the integrity of the samples collected by coal company officials.

Richard Trumka, United Mine Workers of American president, said “the bottom line of that decision is that coal miners will continue to contract black lung and other respiratory diseases . . . as long as a coal operator can collect dust samples from a clean section of a mine, his office, or even the back seat of his car.”

There is other clear evidence that this Administration knows its best friends are in America’s corporate executive offices, but these two examples should suffice for now.