Dive Brief:
- A feature article at Slate.com by Jim Morris outlines how the Occupational Safety and Health Administratin (OSHA) has been rendered ineffective due to politics and business pressure.
- A division of the U.S. Department of Labor, Morris says OSHA faced an uphill battle from the day it opened its doors in April 1971. Business owners and lawmakers bemoaned and belittled it. Its inspectors elicited oddly visceral reactions; references to Adolf Hitler and the Gestapo "became too numerous to count."
- The article is based on interviews with scores of current and former government officials—including OSHA leaders spanning administrations from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush—and others in the fields of medicine, law, labor, industry, and science, as well as thousands of documents from the National Archives at College Park, Maryland; the Reagan and Nixon presidential libraries in California; and private collections.
Dive Insight:
The Slate article, which was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, lays out a case that OSHA was only as effective as the political powers would let it be. In fact, it says that in the 1980s, OSHA was forced to put business interests above worker protections. Today, it’s still falling short in protecting workers, according to the article.
Morris reports that for the past 25 years, Raphael Metzger, a lawyer in Long Beach, Calif., has devoted his practice to representing workers afflicted by toxic exposures. Metzgar estimates that he’s had about 1,000 such clients, among them a young man who developed myelodysplastic syndrome—also known as pre-leukemia—after being splashed with benzene-tainted fuel on a floating dock, and a middle-age golf club maker who needed a double lung transplant after inhaling beryllium, the metal OSHA declined to regulate in the 1970s.
“These are all people who are just trying to make a living and they get horribly, horribly sick at work,” Metzger told Morris. “Basically, we have a legal structure that allows workers to be exposed to chemicals that cause cancer and other diseases. That is accepted. That’s the current paradigm.”
