Beryllium

End the Delays Deadly to Workers

Leo Gerard — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:02:28 -0400

Wear black on Saturday. It is Workers’ Memorial Day, a time devoted to commemorating those killed on the job.

A month later, on soldiers' Memorial Day, the nation will recognize those who sacrificed their lives for American ideals, for a nation’s freedom. That ultimate gift is given in most cases valiantly and voluntarily. No one, however, volunteers to sacrifice their life for corporate profit. Every day in workplaces across this country, the lives of 12 workers are taken, not given.

The shield Congress erected in 1970 to protect workers – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) – is mutilated from relentless attacks by corporations and their battering ram -- the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The delays in OSHA rule-making that corporate carping achieves cost workers their lives. Congress must intervene to restore OSHA’s power to act swiftly.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) detailed the delays in a report issued last week titled, “Multiple Challenges Lengthen OSHA’s Standard Setting.” The GAO found it takes OSHA longer than seven years to issue a new standard. In one case, it was 19 years. And it’s getting worse. It took 70 percent longer to finalize standards in the 1990s than it did in the 1980s, and another 30 percent longer in the 2000s.

The GAO determined that this was a result of increasing demands on OSHA. These occurred as corporations sued to stop enforcement and new mandates for review of proposed rules were stacked on top of existing ones. The GAO said defenders of the delays argue that the layers of obligations balance worker protections with employer costs.

So the very corporations and Chamber of Commerce that constantly deride government red tape demand it for this special case -- to delay implementation of rules to protect workers. And this is their justification: Corporate profits trump worker lives.

There’s no doubt that the rules OSHA implements actually save lives. Members of my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), are alive today because of OSHA’s lockout/tagout rule. The GAO noted this in its report.

The lockout/tagout standard, established in 1989, requires corporations to install devices and adopt procedures that prevent workers from accidently switching on big machines while co-workers are cleaning or repairing them. The GAO wrote about this rule:

“In a 2000 review, OSHA attributed a 55 percent reduction in machinery-related fatalities at 10 steel-producing companies between 1990 and 1997 to the provisions in this standard.”

The quicker such a regulation is implemented, the more worker lives saved. But now, for OSHA, “quick” is anything less than seven years and nine months. For standards limiting exposure to some highly-toxic substances, including silica and beryllium, exposed workers have waited much longer than seven years. OSHA has been working on a silica standard for 15 years and a new beryllium standard for 12.

Beryllium is so dangerous that no safe level has ever been established. It causes a devastating lung disorder called chronic beryllium disease (CBD). It is so hazardous that office workers in factories where it’s used and family members of workers who handle it can be struck down by tiny particles carried on shoes or pant cuffs. This year, my union and Materion Brush, the only U.S. producer of pure beryllium metal, recommended a new standard that is 90 percent lower than the current limit.

That, however, followed years of obstruction by industry officials. This is typical of corporations fighting standards that will save lives but cost money. They strangle proposed standards by suing and by entangling them in red tape. The lawsuits, the GAO report says, mean OSHA must provide extraordinary levels of proof. And the suits have restrained OSHA from using its full powers to protect workers.

For example, theoretically, OSHA has authority to issue emergency temporary standards. OSHA hasn’t done that in 29 years, despite 23 requests from workers or health officials. That’s because of industry lawsuits. In the 13 years from the agency’s creation until 1984, OSHA used the authority nine times, but five of those orders were invalidated or frozen by industry lawsuits.

One of the nine was for asbestos. In 1983, OSHA issued an emergency temporary standard lowering the exposure limit for this cancer-causing material. Using mathematical projections from long-term epidemiological studies, OSHA estimated that the six-month-long emergency rule would prevent at least 80 eventual asbestos-related deaths.

The industry sued to stop implementation of the emergency standard, and a judge killed the OSHA effort. The court contended the agency’s projection was inadequate to establish grave risk. And it said if OSHA intended to use such estimates, then a new standard based on them should not be enforced until after public notice and comment.

That would delay implementation of a lower exposure standard, which, when dealing with toxic substances like asbestos and beryllium, costs lives. But industry won. And who knows how many workers suffered early deaths across the country.

Last Workers’ Memorial Day, Robert Stubblefield, 66, a member of my union, was killed on the job at Republic Special Metals in Ohio.

Over the next 12 months, 34 more Steelworkers died, one every 10 days. They made glass, tires, cement, aluminum and steel. They refined oil and mined potash, platinum and palladium. They logged forests and constructed earthmovers.

They produced the products that build North America. They should not die for that. No worker should die for a job.

Traditionally, Memorial Day is the first day of the season when women wear white -- white shoes, white purses, white hats.

On Workers Memorial Day, Saturday, April 28, wear black for the workers who perished on the job last year. Hold loved ones close and hope that the delays imposed on OSHA won’t cause for another worker’s family the suffering endured by Robert Stubblefield’s widow, five children and nine grandchildren.

Dying for Work

Leo Gerard — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:52:07 -0400

Across America, people are dying for work. It's not because they're unemployed. It's because they work for corporations that don't care if they die.

Every day, 12 workers die on the job in America – often because a corporation has defied regulations or ignored standard safety procedures. Many more die prematurely from work exposure to toxic materials.

If corporations are people, as Mitt Romney and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court claim, then their privileges as humans come with the responsibility to act humanely. Corporate-people must fulfill their obligations to workers and communities. Profit can’t be their sole raison d’etre. That’s not how it is with flesh-and-blood people. If it were, then society would condone profit-motivated murder, like killing a parent for insurance money. Now that they’re people, corporations have an even greater duty to prevent deaths on the job. And if they don’t, they must be held accountable in criminal court the same way a money-grubbing son would be if he murdered his parents for the life insurance.

Workplace explosions get all the attention. Three that occurred two years ago next month killed 47 workers. Within 18 days, seven died at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash.; 29 in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia and 11 on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Writing about industrial homicide in the American Criminal Law Review last year, Jane F. Barrett, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and director of its environmental law clinic, said of these explosions:

“In all of these cases, safety procedures were bypassed or standard operating procedures were ignored due to pressures on plant personnel to save time and/or money.”

There it is – the profit factor. Making money trumping worker survival. Occasionally, people accept risk when personal gain is held out as a possibility. But in the workplace, corporations take the gains while imposing the risks on workers. Barrett put it this way:

“And in all cases, the brunt of the consequences was borne by those who did not share in the economic rewards of the corporate non-compliance (with regulations).”

In 4,500 such instances each year, the worker’s death is quick and the cause obvious. In many more cases, however, the deaths are slower, and the reason -- workplace exposure to toxic substances –less evident. Workplace exposure causes more than 40,000 premature deaths annually from conditions like cancer and neurological disease.

Beryllium, primarily used in weapons production, is one of those deadly substances. It causes a lung disorder called chronic beryllium disease (CBD). It is so toxic that no safe level has ever been established. Finally, this year, decades after studies established the inadequacy of the 60-year-old “taxi cab standard” that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) used for worker exposure to beryllium, a more stringent level may be set. The exposure level suggested in February by my union, the United Steelworkers, and Materion Brush, the only U.S. producer of pure beryllium metal, is 90 percent lower than the current limit.

The taxi standard was set by two scientists riding in the back of a cab in New York in 1948 as concern rose about CBD suffered by workers using beryllium and by residents of surrounding communities. Over decades, industry executives concerned about compliance costs and government officials who feared slowed weapons production obstructed imposition of stricter exposure limits. Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson admitted it in 2000, telling a reporter:

“Priority one was production of nuclear weapons. . .[the] last priority was the safety and health of the workers that build these weapons.”

That’s treating workers like collateral damage. It’s not human. Or humane.

Similarly, mining industry officials delayed publication of two studies establishing a connection between deadly lung cancer and exposure to heavy diesel exhaust in mines. In an attempt to suppress the information that could lead to costly regulations protecting workers, the industry began challenging the research in 1996. With litigation and other measures, the mining industry succeeded repeatedly in postponing publication until this month.

Sustaining deadly exposure to improve profit margins -- that’s not humane.

As it stands now, corporate-people who commit industrial homicide are cited and fined. This is not effective. Over the past decade, the federal government repeatedly fined BP tens of millions for violations, including the highest fine in OSHA for an explosion at its Texas City refinery in 2005 that killed 15 workers and injured 170. That didn’t change BP’s behavior. Five years later, the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and seriously injured 17.

Similarly, Massey had been cited and fined for years for flagrant and chronic mine safety violations. In 2006, two miners suffocated while trying to escape a fire in a Massey mine. Four years later, 29 workers died in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine.

The only way to make a difference is to hold accountable those executives and managers who are the actual flesh-and-blood of corporate-people, the executives and managers who determine corporate culture, who decide to violate standards and risk workers’ lives in exchange for profits. Professor Barrett, in her law review article, described how it could work:

“Personal accountability, which creates a risk to an individual that he might go to jail as a result of decisions he makes, can change behavior and drive deterrence.”

A real threat of prison time would focus the CEO mind on worker safety.

Barrett recommends a Seaman’s Manslaughter Law to protect land-based workers. The Seaman’s law criminalized misconduct and negligence by ship operators that led to the death of sailors or passengers. Those convicted, including corporate executives who ran the shipping businesses and condoned the recklessness, faced 10 years in prison.

The authors of this law had it right. Corporate-people – that is boards of directors, CEOs, managers and supervisors – who believe their own freedom is at stake will be far less inclined to gamble with workers’ lives to save a buck.