Article on the WOEFUL state of workplace safety rules in US

[Guest guest]

I was just reading today's op-ed piece in the New York Times -

The Working Wounded

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/27uhlmann.html

Its worth reading. It has some shocking statistics about OSHA and how weak

workplace protections are in the US and how infrequently even the worst

violators are punished.

This is from the article..

* " Mr. Elias wanted his workers to clean out a 25,000-gallon tank that

contained cyanide waste. He refused to test the air or the waste inside the

tank. He ignored the pleas of his workers for safety equipment. When the

workers complained of sore throats and difficulty breathing, Mr. Elias told

them to finish the job or find work somewhere else.

The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation of Evergreen

Resources. I was one of the lead prosecutors on the case. We quickly

discovered that we had a major problem.

Mr. Elias did not commit a crime under the Occupational Safety and Health

Act, which is the primary federal worker-safety law in the United States.

Why not? Because Mr. Dominguez did not die.

My colleagues and I were shocked to learn that an employer who breaks the

nation's worker-safety laws can be charged with a crime only if a worker

dies. Even then, the crime is a lowly Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum

sentence of six months in prison. (About 6,000 workers are killed on the

job each year, many in cases where the deaths could have been prevented if

their employers followed the law.) Employers who maim their workers face,

at worst, a maximum civil penalty of $70,000 for each violation.

We ended up prosecuting Mr. Elias for environmental crimes, and he was

sentenced to 17 years in prison. I later became chief of the Justice

Department's environmental crimes section, and we started an initiative —

based on this case and others like it — to seek justice when workers were

seriously injured or killed during environmental crimes. We prosecuted some

of the largest companies in America. But in cases where no environmental

crimes were committed, we often could not prosecute.

Employers rarely face criminal prosecution under the worker-safety laws. In

the 38 years since Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act,

only 68 criminal cases have been prosecuted, or less than two per year, with

defendants serving a total of just 42 months in jail. During that same

time, approximately 341,000 people have died at work, according to data

compiled from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics

by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. " *