On Killing Workers: I started my first job in the Bethlehem Steel, Steelton Plant in November of 1972, at the Splice Bar Shop. I vividly remember being brought into the lunch room (a long cinderblock room with picnic tables stretching from door to door). My first memory was seeing the Punch Operators eating their morning breakfast. With heavy coats on, a white substance dripped from their sleeve cuffs and onto the food they were eating. The Operators used a mix of pure white lead and oil to swab the punches as they were driven through steel plates. Keeping the punches cool and preventing dangerous breakage. This exposure to lead had gone on for the decades that the Splice Bar shop had been punching spike holes in railroad rail bases. And workers had been dying from it all those years. Congress enacted OSHA and NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) in 1970. NIOSH published definitive reports on the deadly impact of lead in the workplace. Then, in 1978, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration promulgated 29CRF1910.1025, that set permissible lead exposure levels, and the white lead killed no more.
These pieces of pro-worker, pro-life legislation were not easily enacted. Powerful corporations and financial interests fought workplace safety and health advocates tooth and nail. They go back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the work of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins in the 1930’s. Hero’s like Tony Mazzocchi, the head of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union) and the USW’s George Becker and Michael Wright, devoted huge amounts of time and organizing efforts to win these victories. So too, countless workplace advocates whose names we don’t know because those who write history didn’t think their stories were important for the next generations to know. Working people themselves devoted time and applied political pressure that could not be ignored. The fight for workplace safety and health became bi-partisan and it was Republican President Richard Nixon who signed OSHA into law.
Congress enacted Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), that oversaw mine inspection and Miner’s health and safety. Also enacted were programs to deal with Miners Black Lung disease. There are additional programs that help Longshoreman, Energy Workers and Federal Workers who suffer from work-related injury and illness. This nation is now in the process of stripping these agencies of their experts, defunding these programs, undermining their authority to set standards and letting loose again the scourge of unsafe and unhealthy workplaces. Bring on those pails of white lead to flavor those breakfast sandwiches!
Ghandi is quoted as saying’ “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”. In the face of trillion-dollar global corporations and a sold-out political system, workers become among the “most vulnerable”. The call for “deregulation” is really a call for mistreatment of workers and any other piece of our world that corporations want to plunder and profit from. The principle that government’s role is to promote the people’s welfare has been replaced with the idea that government’s role is to facilitate unbridled profit-taking. If workers die as a result, well that’s just the price of protecting rich people’s right to be insatiably richer.
What is truly astounding is that we have people in this nation cheering this on. Many of them are the very people whose right to a safe and healthy workplace is being stripped away. As the wealthy and powerful have sucked the money out of working people’s pockets, something my Dad used to say becomes even more relevant. Dad used to scoff at the Company posters that said “Safety First”. He responded by pointing out that “if it came between a worker’s jo
b and safety, the worker would choose the job.” He concluded by saying that “it was the Union’s job to make sure they never had to make that choice”. These laws were our tools to make good on that need. In a huge, national sense now, his maxim is proving out. We’ll chuck our own safety and health, for the desperate promise of employment. The nation is abandoning our efforts to keep workers from having to make that devil’s choice.
The attack on workers protections goes far beyond just workplace safety and health. Pension and healthcare security are being undermined. Education programs that offer upward opportunity are being stripped. Labor Unions, which are the most proven vehicle for economic advancement, are being bombed and shelled. Equality laws that provide a level playing field for job applicants are being discarded. Child care support, that allows low income people the ability to work, is disappearing. Anything that gives a hand-up or protects workers from predators, is openly being wiped out. The victims often facilitate what’s happening as they are stoked by emotional falsehoods and outright lies. Imagine the merriment in those in wealthy clubs and backrooms, at how easy it is to gain working people’s assistance in their own misery and deaths. They’re laughing all the way to the bank.
Frantz Fanon, the French West Indian philosopher, is quoted as saying “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” That is where we are. Will we discover our mission is to protect each other? To protect and offer opportunity to those who create our prosperity? Or will we betray ourselves on the altar of greed and gold?
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