SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
osha
How Donald Trump Undermined the Health and Safety of American Workers
Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures under the Trump administration contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States.
Aug 16, 2024
During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers.
Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history. According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.
Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.
In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter. In an industry already notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety. Even so, the Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’ safety and health before issuing the rule.
Downplaying workplace hazards, the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust, infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an increased risk of lung cancer. Eager to reduce business expenditures, it also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen. In addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule, thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first responders.
The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety.
The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces. Trump refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly vulnerable workers. Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an executive order to require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open. This fact, plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed, led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry workers and to the deaths of hundreds.
Other groups of workers were also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United, by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it. In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted Covid.
By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking, food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for violations of health and safety regulations. JBS (the biggest meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51 billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield (owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only $13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid). Both companies refused to pay the fines. Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named.
Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual number of worker deaths on the job rose between 2016 (the last year of the Obama administration) and 2019 (the last pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333. In addition, an estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational diseases.
Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed by occupational injuries and illnesses. As the AFL-CIO reported: “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all industries, including state and local government, had work-related injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.” Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of workplace injuries, this number understates the problem. The true toll is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5 million injuries and illnesses a year.”
The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety. But it might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls this November.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Monumental': Advocates Applaud Federal Rule to Protect Workers From Extreme Heat
The administration has established that "every worker in America has the right to shade, water, and rest while working in temperatures that could kill them," a labor leader said.
Jul 02, 2024
Labor advocates celebrated on Tuesday following the Biden administration's announcement of a proposed rule to protect workers from extreme heat—the first national workplace heat safety standard.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor, published the rule, which the administration says would protect about 36 million indoor and outdoor employees from heat-related injuries and illnesses. It follows similar regulations that five states have approved in recent years.
Labor groups said the rule was the result of decades of advocacy by farmworkers and others subjected to extreme heat, who tend to be working-class people of color or immigrants. The movement was galvanized by heat-related deaths in workplaces around the country.
"This is a bittersweet moment for farmworkers," United Farm Workers president Teresa Romero said in a statement. "Every significant heat safety regulation at the state, and now federal, level was written in the blood of farmworkers."
"Today, the federal government put itself on the right side of history by seeking, for the first time, to establish the precedent that every worker in America has the right to shade, water, and rest while working in temperatures that could kill them," Romero added.
Juley Fulcher, a worker health and safety advocate at Public Citizen, an advocacy group that first called for a federal workplace heat protection standard in 2011, said in a statement that the OSHA rule was a "monumental victory for those who toil in the summer heat."
President Joe Biden has and will continue to protect workers. This President continues to show us where his priorities lie.
Thank you for prioritizing workers' right to safe working conditions, @POTUS. https://t.co/D4YMvWgIml
— Machinists Union (@MachinistsUnion) July 2, 2024
The focus on protection from heat comes as millions of Americans are under heat advisories this week and fossil-fuel driven climate change causes record-setting temperatures month after month.
The OSHA regulation, which will be the subject of written comments and a public hearing before being finalized, requires worker access to clean drinking water, indoor or shaded areas, rest breaks, and heat-related training. The regulation contains tiers so that certain protections kick in at a heat index of 80°F and still more at 90°F. The rule mandates an acclimatization process for new employees, as they are especially at risk in high temperatures.
The rule would also substantially increase the penalties that employers might pay in the case of heat-related employee injuries, according toThe Guardian.
Bill McGuire, a climate scientist at University College London, wrote on social media that the new rule was "absolutely vital" but warned that "working outside will not be possible at all in the extreme summer temperatures that coming years will bring."
The federal rule comes amid a push by labor and environmental groups to establish more workplace protections against extreme heat. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) helped organize a "thirst strike" with unions and civil society groups on the U.S. Capitol steps last July. Responding to bottom-up pressure, California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington have passed workplace heat safety standards in recent years.
Industry groups have lobbied against the rules, with remarkable success in states such as Florida and Texas, both of which have gone as far as passing laws that prohibit local authorities from mandating heat protections for outdoor workers. The Texas law was ruled unconstitutional by a state district court judge last year.
The new federal rule comes as a part of a larger administration effort to address the extreme heat that Americans are increasingly facing. An OSHA program that began in 2022 has conducted more than 5,000 heat-related inspections in workplaces with the most heat exposure, according to a Labor Department statement.
Separately on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced a set of 656 projects aimed at preparing for extreme heat and other weather disasters, at a total cost of nearly $1 billion.
Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an emailed statement that the project funding "only scratches the surface of the nation's enormous need for tools to combat extreme heat" and pushed for FEMA to classify extreme heat and wildlife smoke events as "major disasters," which would unlock much more key funding.
Su did praise OSHA's "landmark rule" and called for an "urgent, government-wide game plan to tackle catastrophic extreme heat."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Extreme Heat Expected to Impact Millions of Americans Again This Summer
"These are not your grandparents' heatwaves," said one meteorologist.
May 27, 2024
Millions of people in the United States are facing the high likelihood of extreme heat in the coming weeks, with northern states that frequently have relatively temperate summers among those where higher-than-average temperatures are expected this summer, according to federal data.
As The Guardianreported Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) new predictions for the summer months state that most of New Mexico and Utah have a 60%-70% chance of hotter-than-normal weather, along with parts of Arizona, Texas, and Colorado.
Houston and the surrounding area has already experienced spiking temperatures that were tied to a heat dome that was positioned over Mexico for several weeks. The high atmospheric pressure drove record-breaking heat across Mexico and in Texas, as well as a powerful storm earlier this month that killed at least seven people and left hundreds of thousands of people in the Houston area without power.
NOAA's Heat Risk tool showed that on Monday, a significant stretch of southern Texas was experiencing an "extreme" level of heat, defined as including "little to no overnight relief" and affecting the health and safety of "anyone without effective cooling and/or adequate hydration."
The new tool takes into consideration whether the heat is unusual for the time of the year, whether residents get relief with cooler temperatures in the evenings, and whether temperatures pose an elevated risk of health impacts like heat stroke or heat exhaustion.
NOAA found that the entire Northeast, from Maine to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, has a 40%-50% chance of having above-average temperatures from June through August.
"We can expect another dangerous hot summer season, with daily records already being broken in parts of Texas and Florida," Kristy Dahl, climate scientist for the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, toldThe Guardian. "As we warm the planet, we are going to see climate disasters pile up and compound against each other because of the lack of resilience in our infrastructure and government systems."
The predictions come days after the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen released a report, Scorched States, about state laws that protect outdoor workers from extreme heat—and those that don't.
As many as 2,000 U.S. workers die every year from laboring in extreme heat, said Public Citizen, even though "every workplace illness, injury, and fatality caused by heat stress is avoidable, and relatively simple preventative measures—water, shade, and breaks—have proven extremely effective at protecting workers."
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration's forthcoming heat standard rules are not expected to be finalized until at least 2026, but states including Washington, Colorado, and Minnesota have issued their own labor laws to protect workers from heat-related injuries.
The Guardian pointed out that the extreme heat expected this summer will likely take hold as the Earth transitions away from El Niño—the natural phenomenon that causes ocean temperatures to rise—and toward La Niña.
"As we transition to La Niña, it still looks to be a potentially record-breaking year. That clearly suggests to me that the anthropogenic signal is there," James Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia's atmospheric sciences program, toldThe Guardian. "I am also worried about the ocean temperatures, which are very warm, particularly as we approach the Atlantic hurricane season."
"Attribution studies are pretty decisive that heatwaves will continue to be more intense and frequent" as the planet warms, Shepherd said. "These are not your grandparents' heatwaves."
Last year, scientists found that neither the hot and dry conditions that led to destructive wildfires in Canada, nor extreme heatwaves that took hold in Europe and North America, would have been as likely to occur without the planetary heating that's been linked to continued fossil fuel extraction.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular