[corp-focus] The Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress

[Robert Weissman]

The Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

In what appears an almost calculated move to demonstrate its disdain for
worker health and safety, the Bush administration yesterday revoked a
requirement that employers keep records on ergonomics injuries.

The rule would have required employers to check a box on their workplace
injury and illness log if an employee suffered an ergonomic injury.
Ergonomics injuries include repetitive stress injuries such as carpal
tunnel syndrome.

Issued by Bill Clinton's Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) on his administration's last day in office, the rule was
immediately suspended by the Bush administration.

Two years later, the Bush OSHA has concluded that checking a box is too
much to ask of employers.

"OSHA concluded that an additional recordkeeping column would not
substantially improve the national injury statistics," says OSHA
Administrator John Henshaw, "nor would it be of benefit to employers and
workers because the column would not provide additional information
useful to identifying possible causes or methods to prevent injury."

Fancy that.

Throughout the 1990s, a controversy raged in Washington over issuance of
a rule to require employers to address ergonomics hazards. Heavily
lobbied and funded by UPS and other employers whose workers continue to
experience an epidemic of ergonomic injuries, Republicans repeatedly
included appropriations riders which prohibited the Clinton
administration from issuing such a rule. The Clinton administration
didn't fight too hard to advance the rule -- even though there is
widespread public understanding of the severity and extent of ergonomics
injuries, and an eagerness to prevent them.

The Clinton administration finally issued its ergonomics rule at the end
of its second term, along with dozens of other postponed regulations. As
with virtually all of those last-minute regulations, the Bush
administration suspended the ergonomics rule, and then revoked it.
Voluntary measures would be enough, the Bush guardians of worker
well-being said.

All that was left was the reporting requirement, which the
administration now has quashed on the grounds that it wouldn't do much.

It is true that a mere reporting requirement wouldn=92t mandate workplace
changes to reduce ergonomic risks, though that's a strange argument for
an administration that eliminated regulations that would have mandated
such risk reduction.

And although its impact would have been modest, a reporting requirement
would have helped alert employers to hazardous workplace conditions, and
it would have provided better national data.

The administration apparently wants neither of these things, since they
might impel action by individual employers and the federal government.

Anyone who has experienced the agony of a repetitive stress injury, or
knows anyone who has, can appreciate the folly and cruelty of this
approach.

"Just because the government is not going to require employers to track
these injuries, and just because the government is not going to enforce
a safety standard, doesn't mean that workers will stop becoming ill or
permanently disabled on the job," notes AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
with disgust. Sweeney calls the administration's rule revocation
evidence of a "head in the sand" approach to ergonomic injuries.

Every year, roughly a million people in the United States suffer from
workplace-related musculoskeletal disorders (mostly ergonomics injuries)
so severe they must take time off from work, according to Peg Seminario,
director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO. That's twice
the number actually reported by employers. The canceled ergonomics rule
-- not the reporting requirement, but the rule actually requiring
employees to reduce ergonomics hazards -- was projected to avert half of
those injuries, she says.

In fact, the injuries are so frequent and serious, Seminario says, that
employers who take steps to avert them have rapid payback in worker's
compensation savings.

The "arguments in the political arena are totally contradicted by the
experience in the real world of the workplace," she says. Employers "see
that by taking fairly straightforward steps they can significantly
reduce and in some cases eliminate these injuries. In six months or a
year, they=92ve got their investments paid for, because these injuries are
so costly."

"But the ideology and the opposition to regulation [has been] stronger
and [has] trumped the economic reality," she says.

The stomped-out reporting requirement is just the latest manifestation
of the ideological campaign against rules to protect workers in the
United States.

More than 5,000 U.S. workers die annually from traumatic injuries, and
nearly 60,000 from occupational disease.

These tens of thousands dying every year -- along with the millions
suffering workplace injuries annually -- are the victims of unbridled
corporate violence, aided and abetted by government officials and
Members of Congress who, as Sweeney says, choose the head in-the-sand
approach.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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