Anti-Safety Legislation

* In response to your editorial, “Job Safety Is Good for Business,” Oct. 21:

Let me acquaint your staff and readers with an interesting aspect of job safety.

In 1972 Bob Moretti, then-Speaker of the Assembly, and Paul Priolo zipped through the Legislature a bill that eliminated the right to introduce safety orders into trial evidence! This was one of the most incredible back-room deals of the decade and it was justified on the basis that it was part of a “deal” between the Manufacturers Assn. and the unions to increase workers’ compensation.

As the then president of CTLA I indicated that the public had not been part of that deal and that the legislation absolutely made no sense. Why have a safety order if you can’t get it into evidence to show it has been violated? The answer from Moretti was “it doesn’t make sense, but the deal is only good for this year. We can always repeal it next year.”

I didn’t believe it then, and it hasn’t happened since.

It’s been 20 years and you still can’t introduce into evidence in the trial of a negligence action the fact that a railing violates a safety regulation because it is not between 40 inches and 42 inches, or that step risers are not within one-eighth of an inch of each other, and all of the other subtle safety orders affecting compressors and boilers that make up safe workplaces. There was no real policeman at the gate.

One of the answers given at the time was that the criminal law would take care of it. I pointed out then that out of 239,000 industrially disabling injuries in 1972, there were only seven misdemeanor prosecutions! The statistics haven’t changed much. Those 35 new regulators you praise won’t change much.

The private marketplace and the courts are the only effective way to safeguard the worker. That is a bad statute that should long since have been repealed. You can’t hire enough inspectors to do the job. Injured workers and their lawyers can do the job for free but not under this 1972 law. Let’s have an editorial on that one.

HERB HAFIF

Claremont