Take a good dose of free-market ideology, mix in political debts to your business backers and an overriding concern with re-election, and voila: You have the recipe for George W. Bush's domestic policies. The imperative of re-election has taken precedence over Bush's conservative convictions on some occasions, leading him to adopt policies like the tariffs on steel that have annoyed some of his business backers. But this doesn't happen often and hardly at all on complicated issues that don't receive widespread attention from the national media. Such has certainly been the case with many regulatory (or deregulatory) decisions by the Federal Communications Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But nowhere has it been more apparent than in Bush's approach to worker health and safety.
This issue is the all-time unsexy news story. It only gets attentionwhen a mine explodes or a postal employee goes berserk. Yet it's of vitalinterest to just about every blue-collar worker -- and to white-collar workers whohave to perform repetitive physical tasks or who work in poorly ventilated orexcessively noisy offices. And it's an issue where government regulation has madea difference. During the 1970s and the late 1990s, when the Occupational Safetyand Health Administration (OSHA) was adequately funded, it had a dramatic effecton the incidence of job injuries. Between 1995 and 2000, for instance, the numberof injuries and illnesses dropped to 6.1 from 8.1 for every 100 workers.
But companies heartily dislike OSHA because it often costs them real money toimprove working conditions. They don't want existing regulations rigorously enforced and they don't want any new ones created, which last happened inNovember 2000 when the Clinton administration issued new rules governingmusculoskeletal "ergonomic" injuries. During the last election cycle, companiessuch as United Parcel Service, FedEx, and Anheuser-Busch gave Republicansmillions of dollars to tame OSHA and to fight any such new regulations.
And Bush and the Republicans in Congress have delivered. The president adoptedthe classic conservative strategy for undermining agencies that regulatebusiness: Underfund them, and when that doesn't work, replace governmentregulation with Herbert Hoover-style business self-regulation. As governor ofTexas, Bush did just that with the state's clean-air laws; as president, he hasfollowed the same strategy toward environmental- and worker-safety regulations.
Conservatives have always understood that even the strictestlabor laws or environmental regulations don't matter if the government doesn'tenforce them. Their first line of attack against agencies such as the OSHA or theEPA has been to cut their budgets in ways that force them to lay off theemployees who would do the enforcing. In the Reagan years, Republicans usedbudget cuts to reduce OSHA's staff to 2,211 in 1987 from 2,951 in 1980. In1995-1996, the Republican Congress moved against OSHA, reducing its staff to2,069; but in Bill Clinton's second term the agency's budget began to rise andOSHA began to increase its enforcement staff. By 2001 there were 2,370 workers atthe agency.
Bush has tried to start the ball rolling downward again. In his firstbudget, he proposed a cut in OSHA funding. But Congress, led by the DemocraticSenate, was able to raise funding slightly but not enough to preserve 54 jobs.For fiscal year 2003, the Bush administration has once again proposed a drop inOSHA funding and the elimination of 83 positions, 64 of them in enforcement. It'salso taking a whack at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health(NIOSH), the other agency set up by the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act.NIOSH is one of 11 health-research agencies funded through the Health and HumanServices Department. While the administration has proposed sharp spendingincreases in 10 of the 11 agencies (including the National Heart, Lung, andBlood Institute and the National Cancer Institute), it has proposed a 10.5percent reduction in NIOSH's funding (even though it already receives far less than any other health agency). Under Bush's proposal, for instance, the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases would receive 540 percent more funding than NIOSH. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute would exceed it by more than 1,000 percent. That's not a misprint.
Bush and his his labor secretary, former Heritage Foundation fundraiser ElaineChao, have also taken the offensive against any serious initiatives that addressmusculoskeletal disorders. These kinds of injuries -- from herniated disks to torncartilage to carpal tunnel syndrome -- particularly affect truck divers, nursinghome workers, janitors, cashiers, stock handlers and baggers, and constructionlaborers. And they now account for more than one-third of all worker ailments.Elizabeth Dole, the secretary of labor for Bush Senior, proposed regulationscovering these kind of injuries in 1990. When the Clinton administration tried toadopt them, however, congressional conservatives passed riders to LaborDepartment funding that required new scientific reports. After these studies(conducted by NIOSH in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1998) affirmeda clear link between workplace conditions and musculoskeletal disorders,congressional Republicans held the entire budget hostage until Clinton agreed notto adopt the regulations. Finally, on November 13, 2000 -- one week after thepresidential election -- Clinton decreed new standards for workplace safety byexecutive order. Even though these standards represented a compromise between theAFL-CIO and business groups, overturning them became a causecélèbre for business lobbies and their conservative allies. Noissue was as important to Bush in establishing his bona fides among K Streetlobbyists who had backed his campaign.
In March 2001 the Republican Congress, at Bush's urging, overturned theClinton administration's new regulations. Chao wrote a letter to Congressdeclaring her intention "to pursue a comprehensive approach to ergonomics, whichmay include new rule-making, that addresses the concerns levied against thecurrent standard." But she failed to keep her promise. In July 2001 she rejecteda proposal from within the Labor Department that would require employers toinclude a separate category of musculoskeletal injuries as part of the regularreports they file with OSHA. Even though studies from three scientific bodies (thelatest being another National Academy of Sciences report that appeared in January2001) had reaffirmed the importance of musculoskeletal injuries, Chao, whoseadvanced degree is in business, claimed that these injuries were "inadequatelydefined" and "hard to identify."
In November, prodded by members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Chaopromised to issue a department policy on ergonomics -- but one, she said, thatwould be based "on cooperation and prevention, rather than the antiquated,adversarial approach of years past." Last month Chao finally unveiled herapproach. "Our goal is to help workers by reducing ergonomic injuries in theshortest possible time frame," she said. "This plan is a major improvement overthe rejected old rule because it will prevent ergonomics injuries before theyoccur and reach a much larger number of at-risk workers."
The Chao plan, though, was actually designed to allow businesses to ignorethese workers. Under the proposal, the Labor Department would draft voluntary"guidelines" aimed at specific industries. A department handout specificallyassured industries that if they failed to heed the guidelines they would not beprosecuted under OSHA's general-duty clause, which requires employers to ridtheir workplaces of known hazards. "A guideline is a tool to assist employers inrecognizing and controlling hazards," the Labor Department declared. "It isvoluntary. Failure to implement a guideline is not itself a violation of theGeneral Duty Clause of the OSH Act." In other words, businesses would not pay anyprice for ignoring the guidelines.
The Labor Department plan also proposed "outreach" to inform workers aboutmusculoskeletal injuries and a new advisory committee to research thosedisorders. But it proposed no new money or personnel for either venture in its2003 budget. It did, however, include one cynical, shameless sop to an importantBush electoral constituency -- a Hispanic outreach program. "As part of theDepartment of Labor's cross-agency commitment to protecting immigrant workers,especially those with limited English proficiency," the statement read, "the newergonomics plan includes a specialized focus to help Hispanic and other immigrantworkers, many of whom work in industries with high ergonomic hazard rates."
Would any employer ever be prosecuted by the Labor Department for maintainingconditions that lead to musculoskeletal injuries? Chao's OSHA administrator,John Henshaw, said that the agency would continue to prosecute employers who failto remove hazards under the agency's general-duty clause. But a look at the BushLabor Department's record is not reassuring. In 2001 it prosecuted exactly onecase involving a musculoskeletal injury.
You would think that Democrats and moderate Republicans wouldhave prevented Bush and Chao from getting their way, but they have beensingularly ineffective in building a majority coalition to defend OSHA. WhenRepublicans proposed killing Clinton's ergonomics regulations last year, themeasure passed the Senate 56-to-44 because six Democrats voted for it and nomoderate Republican voted against it. In the House, it passed 223-to-206 with 16Democrats voting for it and only 13 Republicans opposed. The situation amongliberal interest groups is no better. Except for the AFL-CIO, none of the majorcivil rights, feminist, or public-interest groups made a fuss over the ergonomicsregulations. And the national press is largely indifferent to issues that concernhospital orderlies but not soccer moms. Workers' health and safety doesn't havethe cachet of polar bears on the Alaskan tundra or stem cells in a petri dish.
Even within the labor movement there was a certain lassitude. Someunions such as the Service Employees International Union were visibly active, butthe International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members are disproportionately affected by ergonomic injuries, was relatively silent. If the Teamsters hadfought against Bush on this issue as fiercely as they fought for him to secure oildrilling in Alaska, the administration might have had more trouble getting itsway in Congress. Instead, Bush and Chao have gotten a free ride on an issue thatshould rightly have taken them straight to political hell.