Democracy:

Occupational Safety and Health

The American mission of safe and healthful workplaces should be highly visible, heralded and backed by an adequately funded and enforced program. Far more Americans have lost their lives due to trauma and toxics in places of employment–especially factories, farms, construction sites and mines–than were lost in all of our nation's wars. Nonetheless, for generations it has been a reluctant push and a strained pull to eke out the most minimal governmental safety initiatives in these arenas.

The failure to act is all the more tragic because it is clear that occupational health and safety regulation works. For all their limitations and crises of underfunding, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the agency it created, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), have dramatically reduced the death toll from workplace hazards in the United States. Since the passage of the Occupational and Safety Act in 1970, and despite the inconsistent enforcement of OSHA rules, overall industry fatality rates from trauma have fallen by 75 percent. Construction fatality rates have been cut by almost 80 percent, mining rates by 75 percent, agricultural rates by nearly two thirds, and manufacturing rates by 60 percent.

But the injury and death toll remains shamefully high. In 1998, over 6.2 million workplace injuries and illnesses were recorded in the private sector. More than 6,000 workers die annually from workplace trauma; the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health estimates that another 50,000 workers die every year from workplace-related disease.

A national commitment to protecting the right to a safe workplace will require massively increased funding for OSHA, a renewed commitment to meaningful and regular inspections, a new penalty structure for OSH Act violations, a revamped system for the promulgation of regulations and, perhaps most importantly, strengthening existing legal rights and establishing new rights to allow workers to protect themselves from workplace hazards. We need: