Here’s a chilling thought: You can get more jail time for harassing a burro on federal land than for killing a worker.
Tragic, but true. Willful violation of workplace safety laws that kills a worker carries a maximum jail term of six months for a first offender. It’s a year for burro harassment.
Penalties for employers who knowingly put workers’ lives in danger are so weak — and so ripe for manipulation — they hardly matter.
Since the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was passed in 1970, more than 360,000 workers have died on the job — but only 79 cases have been prosecuted, with defendants serving a total of 89 months in jail. And the civil penalties are just as toothless. After legal wrangling and settlements, the average penalty paid by an employer for violations involving a worker’s death is a pitiful $5,000.
Life shouldn’t be this cheap.
Every year, unions and workplace health and safety advocates around the world mark April 28 as Workers Memorial Day — a time, to quote Mother Jones, to “mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
The heartbreaking — and likely preventable — deaths of 29 coal miners April 5 at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia temporarily focused national attention on the negligence of Massey Energy and the inadequacies in our health and safety laws. It was the deadliest coal mine disaster in 40 years. But it was not an isolated event or some rare fluke. An explosion at the Tesoro Refinery in Anacortes, Wash., three days earlier killed seven workers. In February, six workers were killed in an explosion at the Kleen Energy Plant under construction in Middletown, Conn. More than 5,200 workers were killed on the job in 2008, the most recent data available. That’s 14 a day.
Too many employers put profits before safety, pushing for production at any cost. That certainly seems to be the case at Massey, with CEO Don Blankenship’s shameful record of demanding that miners “run coal” regardless of the consequences, drawn-out litigation to delay stronger enforcement and racking up 639 violations at Upper Big Branch since the start of 2009.
There’s got to be justice for those 29 miners, their families, their colleagues and their close-knit community. Legal authorities, federal and state mine safety agencies and congressional committees all are investigating. Personally, I’d like to see Blankenship sent to jail. Clearly we have to stop allowing the gamesmanship that lets people like Blankenship postpone harsher enforcement action until an inevitable catastrophe occurs.
But we’ll do a disservice to those unnecessarily lost miners and thousands of others if we don’t look more broadly at what must happen to make sure workers get home alive at the end of their shifts.
Decades of struggle by workers and their unions have improved workplace safety significantly, but eight years of neglect, inaction and outright hostility by the Bush administration eroded our protections. Focus shifted from protecting workers to protecting employers, claiming corporations could police themselves and allowing crackdowns on workers who had the nerve to get hurt on the job.
OSHA is 40 years old now. It’s been tweaked a bit over time, but it’s due for a real update. OSHA does not cover millions of public-sector workers. Obviously, its penalties are so weak they don’t deter recklessness. It doesn’t shield workers from retaliation for reporting injuries. And with the current work force of 885 federal safety inspectors, the federal safety agency can inspect workplaces on average only once every 137 years. The Mine Safety and Health Act is a much stronger law that provides for regular inspections in all mines, but it still has loopholes that operators exploit to avoid tougher sanctions.
The Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067, S. 1580) would extend OSHA coverage to workers who lack legal protection, increase civil and criminal penalties, strengthen anti-discrimination protections and expand workers’, union and victims’ rights.
The S-MINER Act introduced in the last Congress would stiffen enforcement of the mine safety law. And labor law reform enabling more workers to choose a union voice on the job for safety would add protections every working woman and man deserves.
With loss of life at Upper Big Branch mine still fresh on our minds, the least we can do to honor fallen workers is to fight to pass these laws. In our ongoing fight for “good jobs now,” we must never forget that a good job must be a safe job first and foremost.
Richard Trumka is president of the AFL-CIO.
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