For Labor Day, honor workers by keeping them alive. We need COVID workplace standards.
Donald Trump has incapacitated OSHA in the midst of COVID-19 and, in doing so, put essential workers at risk for sickness and injury in the workplace.
This Labor Day, a holiday intended to celebrate workers’ contributions to our economy and society, will also be a day of mourning. Tens of thousands of workers who care for the sick and elderly, pick and process food, bag groceries and perform other essential tasks, who are disproportionately people of color and women, have been hospitalized or died from a virus they contracted at work.
As outbreaks surge because of employers’ negligence, and rampant labor abuses surrounding COVID-19 go unpunished, only a handful of states have moved to compensate COVID-afflicted workers, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) has largely been missing in action. Republicans in the Trump administration and Congress are now insisting that a second round of COVID-19 stimulus shield employers from liability related to the pandemic.
Trump's OSHA takes US back in time
The Trump administration seems determined to steer the United States back to where it was in the late 19th century. Back then, the annual toll of occupational deaths and injuries exceeded the battlefield casualties of the Civil War. In the early 20th century, juries’ large awards for worker-victims led employers and insurance companies to favor state-level workers’ compensation systems, but they often failed to cover work-related diseases. When President Richard Nixon signed the Coal Mine Safety Act in 1969, most coal-producing states still offered no compensation for black lung disease.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA. In 1972, the agency estimated that “there may be as many as 100,000 deaths per year” from occupational diseases in the United States. Today, epidemiologists estimate that the death rate from occupational diseases in the United States fell by roughly two-thirds between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. That decline was due in no small part to OSHA standards for exposure to dust, chemicals and bloodborne pathogens in the workplace.
Wear a mask:It's foolish and selfish to ignore COVID-19 precautions. You're endangering the rest of us.
Although OSHA has saved countless workers’ lives, it has always been a favorite target of anti-regulatory business groups and their political allies. President Ronald Reagan slashed the agency’s budget by 25% and its staff by 22%, moves partly reversed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The Republican majority in Congress took special aim at OSHA’s enforcement budget, bringing OSHA inspections down to a record low in Clinton’s second term.
President George W. Bush cut OSHA’s budget by 10% and halted the writing of new rules. Under President Barack Obama, OSHA issued long-overdue standards for silica, beryllium and electronic record-keeping, and started work on an airborne infectious disease rule that would have required health care employers to implement a Worker Infection Control Plan, including stockpiling personal protective equipment to handle patient overloads.
The increased risk to workers
The long Republican war on OSHA has culminated in the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump’s OSHA still has no acting director, the longest vacancy in half a century, and Obama-era OSHA standards have been repealed or delayed. Trump has cut OSHA’s budget to the lowest ever, and reduced its staff to levels not seen since the early 1970s. In 2017, the administration scrapped OSHA’s airborne infectious disease rule, contributing directly to shortages of personal protective equipment that cost untold numbers of healthcare workers’ lives.
Trump’s USDA allowed meatpacking plants to increase already breakneck line speeds, and he commanded them to stay open by executive order, despite COVID-19 outbreaks in dozens of plants. Trump’s OSHA has refused to issue an emergency temporary standard for COVID-19, and has issued only two serious citations for health and safety violations related to the pandemic, despite receiving thousands of complaints. Trump’s OSHA has done something essential workers cannot afford: failing to show up for work.
Coronavirus ride: 4 ways America can get back on track
This Labor Day, the best way to honor American workers is to keep them alive. To do that, it is urgent that OSHA issue a temporary emergency standard for COVID-19. Any COVID-19 stimulus bill must not shield employers from legal consequences for negligent labor practices. These include failing to provide adequate personal protective equipment or sanitary facilities, concealing co-workers’ positive test results, retaliating against whistleblowers, and refusing to provide sick leave for quarantine. Whistleblowers must be protected from employer retaliation, as Colorado recently did under state bill HB20-1415. And when we cast our votes this fall, we need to remember that workers’ lives are on the line.
Josiah Rector (@JosiahRector) is an assistant professor of History at the University of Houston. Christopher Sellers (@ChrisCSellers) is a professor of History at Stony Brook University and member of the Environmental History Action Collaborative, a working group of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
