Victims of "Parking Rage"

Bill Borwegen, health and safety Director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) reminded me today that generally, when one thinks of "law enforcement," one thinks of cops, well armed and trained to defend themselves against any aggressive lawbreakers who might try to assault them.

But actually, there are all kinds of "law enforcement" personnel -- including those who enforce parking laws -- and they aren't generally armed, trained (or paid) for the aggressive behavior of frustrated drivers -- particularly in San Francisco. So what seems at first like an amusing article about the trials and tribulations of parking in the City on the Bay, is actually a rather harrowing tale of yet another unseen (and unappreciated) category of public employee.

Burdened with one of the densest downtowns in the country and a Californian love for moving vehicles, San Franciscans have been shocked in recent months by crimes related to finding places to park, including an attack in September in which a young man was killed trying to defend a spot he had found.

More recently, the victims have been parking control officers — do not call them meter maids — who suffered four attacks in late November, and two officers went to a hospital.

Over all, 2006 was a dangerous year for those hardy souls handing out tickets here, with 28 attacks, up from 17 in 2005.

All of which has left officials in this otherwise civilized community scrambling to explain, and solve, “parking rage.”

And it ain't funny.

“It’s hard for me to understand people reacting in such a hostile manner,” said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees parking. “Clearly, this is a working person simply doing their job. I’ve gotten parking tickets, and I sort of slap myself on the wrist and pay the ticket.”

People in the field say abuse is common, often frightening and, occasionally, humiliating. In November, an officer was spat on, another was punched through the window of his Geo Metro, and an irate illegal parker smashed the windshield of another officer’s golf-cart-like vehicle.

“Just driving down the street, you get yelled at,” said Lawanna Preston, staff director for Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents parking control officers.

The officers are city employees but not in the Police Department.

“They can’t even eat lunch with that uniform on, because people approach them and curse at them,” Ms. Preston said.

And they ain't taking it any more. About 75 of the traffic enforcement officers, who make around $40,000 a year, demonstrated last week in front of the Hall of Justice to ask for more protection.

And like most workplace safety issues, there are causes and there are solutions. The causes include a geographically confined, densely populated city with too few underpriced parking spaces and too few overpriced garage parking. Possible solutions: adding cameras to the officers’ vehicles and pepper spray to their equipment, as well as increasing the penalties for attacking parking officers.

One thing missing from the article, however, is any mention of CalOSHA's involvement -- the agency that is supposed to be ensuring the safety of workers -- even parking enforcment workers.

Of course, San Francisco isn't the only city with serious parking problems. In fact, the problem is so widespread that there's even a parking blog.

Surprise: Employer Finds "Worker Error" To Blame For Fatality

Why is this not surprising? Employer investigates employee's death. And the cause is? Worker error, of course.

Public employees, as we regularly complain, are not covered by OSHA in 26 states. This is bad for a number of reasons, the first being that they get injured and killed in easily preventable accidents because the employer is not incompliance with the same OSHA standards that apply to private sector workers doing the same job.

Another reason why it's bad not to cover public employees is that when one is killed, there's likely to an inadequate investigation or no investigation at all.

Take the case of Shawn Patilla. I wrote about Patilla's death already last October, after a valve ruptured in the high-pressure water main he was working on. He died from head and neck injuries as a result of being hit by the water at a pressure of 90 pounds per square inch Patilla had two daughters and a son.

So what was the problem? Human error, according to the investigation, conducted by Denver Water, the utility that employed Patilla. The problem with employers investigating their own accidents (which happens with workplace fatalities in workplaces not covered by OSHA) is that they often come up with "human error."

Denver Water officials wouldn't name the foreman or say how he was disciplined. He is a 25-year employee with a good safety record who cooperated fully with the investigation, said Trina McGuire-Collier, Denver Water spokeswoman.

The three-week probe by the water utility revealed that Patilla's foreman failed to pass on information to the crew that a 24- inch conduit had not been drained and was fully pressurized.

The crew's routine job that night was to remove an 8-inch line and reconnect it to a newer pipe that had been installed earlier in the summer.

Initially, the 24-inch conduit was expected to be drained. But it was decided the job could be accomplished without draining the conduit, which would avoid temporarily disrupting water service to dozens of homes.

The foreman reportedly told investigators he thought the crew had overheard a discussion about the conduit not being drained, but he didn't directly tell them it would be pressurized.

He also assumed a valve was bolted to the conduit, the investigation determined. Instead, it was a few feet from the conduit attached by pipe and steel restraining rods.

When the rods were cut and a small section of the pipe was removed, the valve and remaining length of pipe "separated violently from the conduit, flooding the excavation with water and causing the fatal injuries to Patilla," according to a Denver Water statement Friday.

Sure, blame some worker for screwing up. Discipline him, problem solved. Right?

Wrong.

Now, believe it or not, a worker being injured or killed because he cut into a pressurized pipe is not a freak accident; it happens all too often. In fact, it happens so often that OSHA has a standard designed to protect workers from being killed or injured in such incidents. It's called the "Lockout-Tagout" standard, technically known as the "Control of Hazardous Energy" standard, and is used to protect workers who may be repairing equipment that could turn on while they're working on it, or for pipelines that may be pressurized, as the one that killed Shawn Patilla was.

The utility blamed a supervisor for failing to communicate properly. He probably did fail to communicate properly. But that's only the direct cause of the incident, not the root cause. Lack of communication and miscommunication in these situations is so common that the OSHA standard requires a lockout-tagout program. In fact, the most likely root cause of Patilla's death was not worker error, but the employer's failure to have a lockout tagout program.

The OSHA standard for The Control of Hazardous Energy (Lockout/Tagout), Title 29 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 1910.147, addresses the practices and procedures necessary to disable machinery or equipment, thereby preventing the release of hazardous energy while employees perform servicing and maintenance activities. The standard outlines measures for controlling hazardous energies — electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, chemical, thermal, and other energy sources.

The lockout-tagout standard standard also requires workers to be trained about the employers program.

Pressurized pipes need to be depressurized, or the pressurized part needs to be isolated from the section the workers will be working on. A number of safeguards -- work permits or tags, for example -- must be used to ensure that workers don't work on the piping until it's safe, and that the pipes are not re-pressurized until the work has finished.

Bottom Line: Blaming workers (even foremen) for accidents is generally a way of shifting blame from poor management safety systems. And the fact that OSHA doesn't cover public employees just allows them to get away with it.

Chemical Safety Board Tackles Public Employee OSHA Coverage

Well, there's at least one agency in this country that cares about the workplace safety conditions of public employees.

The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board held a hearing last week laying out the preliminary findings from an explosion at the Bethune Point Wastewater Treatment Plant in Daytona Beach, Florida last January that killed 2 employees. Workers were using a cutting torch above a tank of methanol when vapors from the tank ignited, the flames flashed back into the tank, where an explosion and fire killed two workers and seriously injured another. The CSB found that the workers had not been trained about the hazards of methanol, a flame arrester that was intended to stop the flames from entering the tank malfunctioned due to lack of maintenance, and the pipes attached to the tank were made of plastic, instead of metal, which increased the severity of the fire. (A CSB animation of the incident can be viewed here)

But the most important finding of the Board was that public employees in Florida, like public employees in 25 other states are not covered by OSHA and that lack of coverage was one of the factors that lead to the fatal incident.

Florida is one of 26 states that lacks a mandatory program that meets OSHA standards, federal officials said. Only a few categories of public workers in Florida are covered by mandated safety standards, including correctional officers and firefighters. The state safety program was eliminated in 2000 and a governor's executive order made such programs voluntary.

"There are 26 states that are in this same situation. That's over half of our country," Merritt said of the lack of safety programs. "It's really quite an amazing situation and why we thought this was a very important case to investigate."

Union official Marc Brody of the Florida Council 79 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said Florida's 133,000 public workers face great risks not working under OSHA standards.

"It is scandalous that wastewater-treatment workers and thousands of other state and local government workers in Florida do not have the most fundamental rights to a safe workplace that every American worker needs and deserves," Brody said.

AFSCME Council 79 represents the workers at the plant.

Better training, construction of the system and maintenance of the flame arrester -- all of which would have been required by OSHA -- would have prevented the deaths, according to CSB investigators:

Robert Hall, who headed the federal investigation, said the explosion may have been prevented if the corroded safety device on the methanol tank had been regularly cleaned or inspected.

The device, called a flame arrester, is commonly used to stop an external fire from igniting chemicals inside a tank. At the Daytona tank, the bread-box-sized aluminum flame arrester, that might have cost less than $500, had corroded so badly that it had gaping holes where flames could pass through, he said.

Flame arresters should be inspected regularly and cleaned of dirt so that they can be effective, Hall said. However, city officials had not cleaned or inspected this device since it was installed in 1993, he said.

The methanol tank also should not have had plastic PVC pipes and valves, but should have had steel pipes, Hall said. The plastic pipes failed, causing methanol to gush onto the crane cab where Jones sat.

Hall also pointed out that Daytona Beach did not have enough safety training for its employees, with the number of training sessions declining since 1997. Facing severe financial woes, the city eliminated the job of safety officer in 2004.

OSHA standards require that employees who weld or use cutting torches receive specific training on the potential hazards and that supervisors must review and control the use of torches.

Hall said Daytona Beach had neither the training nor a control program. If it had, "This accident would not have occurred," he said.

The CSB will issue recommendations to the City of Daytona and other parties, including recommendations to the state of Florida addressing the lack of public employee protections.

Related Stories

• A Workplace Death That Will Never Be Solved, December 12, 2006
• Oops. Did OSHA Forget That Public Employees Are Second Class Citizens?, October 18, 2006
• Laws Of Nature, Laws Of Man (Some Men, At Least), April 20, 2006
• Florida Public Employees Pay The Ultimate Price For No OSHA Coverage, January 18, 2006
• Conducting The Public's Business -- And Dying For It, November 11, 2005
• Death of Boston T Worker Raises Issue of Public Employee OSHA Coverage, February 2, 2005
• America's Most Mistreated Workers: Public Employees, April 8, 2004
• Public Employees to Senator Graham: Go Forth and Agitate, December 12, 2003

A Workplace Death That Will Never Be Solved

Normally, I'd just file this away for The Weekly Toll. But Pastor Douglas was a public employee in the state of Louisiana which has no OSHA coverage for public employees, where public employees do not have the right to a safe workplace. What that means is that there will probably never be an indepth investigation into Douglas's death by a safety professional. No lessons will be learned, no citations will be filed, and the family will never really know what happened.

Pastor Douglas, a maintenance worker at the plant for two years, was standing atop of the 15-foot-deep container preparing to clear foam from collecting at the top of the open-air container with a high pressure hose. He was working with another Lucas Waste Water employee at the time of the incident, who went to turn on the pressure hoses used to minimize unnecessary foam. When the employee returned, Douglas wasn't standing atop the container.

"He was doing a normal cleanup type deal" said Mike Strong, director of operational services for the city. "I'm not sure exactly if it was a slip or the hose with the water pressure on it knocked him off, but he went into the basin."

Oops. Did OSHA Forget That Public Employees Are Second Class Citizens?

Last Friday:

CHERRY HILLS VILLAGE, Colo. -- A Denver Water employee was killed overnight when a valve in the high-pressure water main he was working on ruptured, sending a crushing stream of water toward him. After the accident, Shawn Patilla, 35, of Denver was trapped in the trench and and his co-workers needed help to get him out.

The Arapahoe County Coroner's Office said an autopsy determined that Patilla died from head and neck injuries as a result of being hit by the water at a pressure of 90 pounds per square inch. "The transmission and distribution crew was disconnecting from a 24-inch water main and reconnecting service to a new 8-inch line when the valve in the 24-inch line blew out," said Craig Austin, with Denver Water.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration was called in to investigate the accident.

Yesterday:

DENVER -- The federal agency that investigates workplace fatalities will not be involved in further investigation into the death of a Denver Water employee.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration does not have jurisdiction over city, state or county municipalities, according to the area director.

So what's the deal here? Did OSHA forget that Colorado is one of the 26 states in the country where OSHA doesn't cover public employees? It wouldn't be a complete surprise. Few people are aware of this gross injustice. Last Spring, for example, two public employees, Jose Rodriguez Garcia of Mission, Texas and Tony Poole of Byron, Georgia were were killed on the job. But Texas and Georgia are two other states that provide no OSHA coverage for public employees. Both articles about the fatalities initially stated that OSHA would be investigating the accidents. Both articles were wrong -- OSHA wouldn't be investigating -- and both were later corrected.

All three of these workers were killed in trenches, pretty dangerous work to be doing if your employer isn't even obligated to comply with basic safety precautions and if workers have no right to call for an inspection, no will any independent investigation be conducted if anyone dies, nor will anyone be fined if safety precautions were ignored.

You may recall the Labor Day death of Robert J. Creamer, 25, at the Georgetown Waste Water Treatment Plant "who allegedly drowned in a 600,000-gallon sewage vat."

According to the Georgetown Police Department, Creamer was in the process of taking liquid samples from a large, open concrete tank early Monday morning.For some reason, unknown at this point in time, Creamer fell into the tank and drowned.

Well, I haven't seen the investigation report, but generally when someone drowns in a tank in a wastewater treatment plant, it's likely because he was overcome by hydrogen sulfide or oxygen deprivation, and it's likely a violation of OSHA's Confined Space standard. Of course, in this case, we'll probably never know because there was no OSHA investigation because Ohio is yet another state where it's OK to kill public employees.

The Labor Day death of a Georgetown Waste Water Treatment Plant employee has been deemed an accidental drowning, said Brown County Coroner Dr. Tim McKinley and Georgetown Police Chief Forrest Coburn.

"We have no indication that it was anything but an accident," said Coburn.

Robert J. Creamer, 25, of Russellville was allegedly in the process of taking liquid samples from a large open concrete tank, known as a clarifier, when he somehow fell into the tank and drowned, said officials.

"Somehow" fell in. Just "an accidental drowning." Right.

And let's not forget Eric Johnson and Clyde Anthony Jones, 40, who were killed in a methanol explosion at a wastewater treatment plant in Florida. That incident is also being investigated by their employer, the city of Daytona Beach (although in this case, the US Chemical Safety Board has also decided to investigate the incident.)

Oh, and don't worry, even thought OSHA has pulled out, there will still be an investigation into the death of Shawn Patilla -- by Denver Water, Patilla's employer. Let me see if I can guess what the result will be: "just an accident." Prove me wrong, Denver.

Meanwhile, the total fines for the deaths Shawn Patilla, Robert J. Creamer, Jose Rodriguez Garcia, Tony Poole, Eric Johnson, Clyde Anthony Jones and other public employees that I probably don't even know about will come to about nothing, zippo, nada.

Which is apparently about how much this country values their lives.

Race To The Bottom: Anti-Union Organization Says Drag Public Employees Down

When it comes to new projects by Richard Berman's anti-union Center or Union "Facts" (sic), I'm always torn between giving them more publicity, versus truth telling -- a bit of comic relief for my readers.

Berman, who we've written about before, is (in)famous for flacking corporate America's arguments in favor of drunk driving, eating plenty of mercury in fish, paying low wages and killing people with tobacco and obesity, has now turned his attention to ensuring that workers return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when bosses were bosses and workers were slaves.

Berman's latest target is public employees -- Michigan and Oregon public employees to be specific. His Oregon advertisement is odd, however. Check it out:

Thanks to lobbying by government employee union bosses and the contracts they hammer out, Oregon's public employees often work under conditions that most private-sector taxpayers would envy. Typical employment includes:

12-26 days of vacation, based on seniority

8 hours of sick leave per month

Up to 18 hours of personal leave each year

Nine paid holidays

Benefit dollars to spend on medical and dental insurance, and life insurance for employee and/or dependents

Membership in the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS)

What message do you take from this?

a) "those damn public employees, wasting my tax dollars, or

b) "sounds good to me. Where do I sign up?"

Berman is clearly banking on (a).

Of course, we've seen these attacks on unionized public employees before -- most recently during the New York Transit workers strike last December when Stephen Malanga, writing in the Wall St. Journal, attacked the "porcine" benefits earned by NY public employees -- outrages like fully paid health care, pensions and decent wages -- the same benefits that most American manufacturing and industrial workers earned until relatively recently. And before that, the luxury lives of rich and famous public employees was used a reason to support California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt last year to curb the power of public employee unions in his "paycheck deception" initiative last year.

One only hopes that reason will prevail and people will compare what unionized public employees have, compare it to their increasingly Wal-Martized jobs, and decide that being a member of a union sounds like a pretty good deal. The question is, do we let the exploited and de-unionized private sector drag down the heavily unionized public sector, along with its decent pay and benefits, or do we let the public sector set an example for what the rest of non-union America can achieve?

A race to the bottom, or a fight to the top?


Related Stories

• Department of Labor Union Busting, June 24, 2006
• Union Organizing In the 21st Century: Card Check and Roach Motels (FireDogLake), May 30, 2006
• Union "Facts" -- NOT, March 20, 2006
• Not Your Father's Labor Department, March 14, 2006
• Democracy In American Workplaces? Joke, right? March 12, 2006
• The crocigator, February 22, 2006
• Anti-Union Forces Running Ads, Running Scared, February 14, 2006
• Strike Postscript: In Appreciation of Public Employees, December 22, 2005
• Live Like Slaves -- Part III (Public Employees Threaten Democracy), August 25, 2005

Laws Of Nature, Laws Of Man (Some Men, At Least)

Now here's something interesting. ("Interesting" in a tragic sort of way.)

Two public employees have been killed in the past two weeks in perfectly preventable trench collpases: Jose Rodriguez Garcia of Mission, Texas and Tony Poole, of Byron, Georgia.

Both articles about the fatalities initially stated that OSHA would be investigating the accidents. Both articles were wrong -- OSHA won't be investigating -- and both were later corrected.

You see, Garcia and Poole were public employees, and in 26 states in this country -- including Texas and Georgia -- public employees are worth slightly less than other human beings. They don't get OSHA inspections, they don't get OSHA investigations, they don't have the right to a safe workplace and their employers don't get fined or penalized if they kill workers by ignoring well-recognized safety standards and best practices that private sector employers are required to follow.

One more thing: Check out the original headline in this article about Garcia (it was later changed):" Vibrations from car may have caused man's death." Now, a person who doesn't know a whole lot about trench collapses and how to prevent them might think, "Oh, well, shit, what a tragic coincidence, a car going by causing that trench to vibrate just when the poor guy was inside it. Who could have predicted that? Unlucky bastard."

Well, lots of things cause trenches to collapse -- vibration, water, soil conditions, and, who knows, maybe even sun spots and the juxtaposition of Jupiter and Mars. It isn't quite as important for employers and employees to know exactly why trenches collapse, as it is for them to understand that trenches collapse -- they collapse all the time. It's really more a function of the law of gravity -- which is why we have the laws of man to protect workers from the laws of nature.

The problem is that the laws of gravity apply to everyone, whereas the laws of man apply only to private sector employees. A lesson that the news media, and family of Garcia and Poole are only now finding out.

Killing Of Texas Social Service Worker Raises Workplace Safety Issues

The killing of Texas social worker Sally Blackwell, 53, is bringing attention to the hazards faced by social service workers. Blackwell, a program director with Texas Child Protective Services, was found dead in a field. The authorities have not said whether her death was related to her job, although she had received threats.

Threats and violence against social service workers is nothing new, but it rarely rises into the headlines until someone gets killed.

A study released last week by the National Association of Social Workers found that 55 percent of 5,000 licensed social workers surveyed said they faced safety issues on the job. Sixty-eight percent of them said their employers had not adequately addressed their concerns. A survey in 2002 of 800 workers found 19 percent had been victims of violence and 63 percent had been threatened.

In 1997, federal OSHA issued guidelines to assist health care and social service workers to prevent workplace violence, but Texas isn't exactly at the forefront of protecting public employees:

Currently, social workers in Texas receive a half day of safety training, and the issue frequently comes up in a 12-week course, said a spokesman, Chris Van Deusen.

The child services department has no way of tracking how many threats its roughly 3,000 caseworkers receive, said Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services. But even people who have spent their entire careers with the agency can remember only a few instances in which threats escalated to violence, Mr. Crimmins said.

Texas social worker Holly Jones stressed that "We don't have weapons, we don't have training in self-defense, we didn't go through a police academy and we're dealing with the same people they are."

After Marty Smith, a crisis responder for the Washington State mental-health system, was beaten to death last November while attempting to hospitalize a schizophrenic client who had not been taking his medication, Smith's union, SEIU 1199NW, began organizing to pass Marty's Law: Make Our Work Safer. (HB 2921). Marty's Law would provide funding so clinicians can work in pairs when they are sent to evaluate a client in a private residence. The bill also requires clinicians to be provided with cell phones, prompt access to patient records, and training on violence prevention.

In addition,

In 2001, Michigan lawmakers toughened the penalties for people who threaten or attack social workers after a child welfare caseworker was beaten, bound, gagged and suffocated while checking on a family. The law also required safety training for workers who make home visits.

The death of a Kansas mental health social worker prompted Representative Dennis Moore, Democrat of Kansas, to introduce a resolution last fall that would encourage state and local agencies to improve the safety of social workers. The resolution is pending.

Hey, I have another idea. Being as workplace violence is a serious workplace safety problem across the United States, and there are feasible ways to prevent attacks, maybe a federal government agency responsible for workplace safety should issue an enforceable standard.

Related Stories

• Case Worker's Death Spurs Safety Campaign in Washington, January 29, 2006
• Conducting The Public's Business -- And Dying For It, November 11, 2005
• Precautions Save the Life of Child Protective Services Worker, February 17, 2005
• Social Worker Killed In The Line Of Duty -- What's Being Done?, September 14, 2004
• Workplace Violence in Health Care on the Rise, April 26, 2004

The Right To Bargain And The Right To Live

Mike Begatto, Executive Director of Delaware's American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees urges the Delaware legislature to support a bill that would give collective bargaining rights to the state's public employees. Public employees are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act and only 27 states allow collective bargaining for public employees. Delaware is one of those states, but the law doesn't allow them to bargain over economic issues.

Full collective bargaining for public employees is a good thing. But so is the right to come home from work alive and healthy. Delaware is also one of 26 states that does not provide OSHA coverage for public employees. While AFSCME lobbies for collective bargaining right, maybe they should also lobby for the right to a safe workplace.

After all, the logic is the same. As Begatto writes in defense of collective bargaining:

Those who oppose the right of state employees to bargain over wages cannot justify their position based on the nature of work performed by state employees. For many occupations there is little, if any, distinction between public and private sector work. Services provided by nurses and attendants at a private hospital are no different than those provided at a public hospital. Yet one group of workers enjoys the right to bargain over wages while the other does not. Laborers employed by a private firm that contracts with the state have the right to negotiate over their wages, but laborers employed directly by Delaware do not. There are countless other examples. The bottom line is, the current status of labor relations law in Delaware is not rational or justifiable.

Just replace the right to "negotiate" or "bargain" with the "right to work safely."

To paraphrase Begatto, "The bottom line is, the current status of public employee workplace safety in Delaware is not rational or justifiable."

Makes sense to me.

Florida Public Employees Pay The Ultimate Price For No OSHA Coverage

Two Daytona Beach wastewater treatment plant employees were killed last week when a methanol tank exploded while they were using a cutting torch above the tank to remove a roof damaged in a hurricane. The tank at the Bethune Point water treatment facility had apparently been venting fumes during the warm weather. Eric Johnson, the 59-year-old lead plant mechanic at the Bethune Point Wastewater Treatment Plant was killed instantly, and maintenance worker Clyde Anthony Jones, 40, died the following day. Maintenance worker Michael Martin, 42, is in critical condition.

Just another couple of deaths in the American workplace? These were slightly different because public employees in Florida, like those in 26 other states, are not covered by OSHA. For that reason, the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has decided to investigate.

"The workers do need to have a fundamental understanding of the hazards they are working with," said Robert Hall, lead investigator with the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board in Washington, D.C., who is looking into the incident. His agency, which does not issue citations but makes recommendations to prevent future accidents, is investigating whether the employees knew about safety measures.

"Certainly when you work in the vicinity of flammable tanks, you have to take certain precautions," Hall said.

He said the chemical-safety board has requested training records for the employees. They had not been provided Friday afternoon.

The Bethune Point Wastewater Treatment Plant is not regulated by any state or federal agency for safety issues, and city officials said Friday they could not answer whose responsibility it was.

But if an agency similar to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversaw the plant, there would have been detailed regulations about what the workers could and could not do, Hall said. He said Florida, like about two dozen other states, falls into a legal loophole where municipalities are not regulated.

According to CSB Chairman Carolyn Merritt:

This was a serious incident involving the tragic loss of life at a government-owned facility where work activity is not overseen by any government entity. The wastewater treatment worksite was not subject to any outside safety inspections or regulations, a situation that is common in many states. We want to find out whether that was a factor in this accident and then decide what should be done about it.

There are currently bills in the US House of Representatives, H-2004 introduced by Congressman Major Owens (D-NY), and the Senate, S-5944, introduced by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) that call for coverage of public employees. Similar bills are introduced every year, but are stopped by the Republicans who control Congress.

Related Articles

Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs (Part 5), August 30, 2005
Public Employee Safety and Health: Follow-Up, April 12, 2004
America's Most Mistreated Workers: Public Employees, April 08, 2004
Public Employees to Senator Graham: Go Forth and Agitate, December 12, 2003

Pensions:NY Transit Strikers Show Value Of Unions

Labor reporter Steven Greenhouse has an article in the NY Times today about the nation-wide battles that workers are fighting (and generally losing) to preserve their promised pension benefits. The MTA's attempt to raise the pension contributions of new New York transit workers was a major cause of the recently ended strike.

Many officials and fiscal experts assert that across the nation government pension plans face a shortfall of hundreds of billions of dollars. From New Jersey to California, government officials say that attempts - either through contract fights, legislation or public referendums - to limit the amount of money that states and cities contribute to pensions are inevitable and overdue. Labor unions, for their part, say that the worries are overblown.

"Every level of government in New York City, New York State and in states across the country face large and growing pension obligations," said E. J. McMahon, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. "If nothing is done to bring pensions under control, all the other headaches that state governments will be facing in the next 20 years on needs like education and health will be enormously worse."

You hear a lot of that, but as Greenhouse points out, that's not the only story:

Many government employees and their unions assert that the campaign to trim pensions threatens America's social contract for the middle class: a respectable pension.

Saying that in recent contracts they had sacrificed wage increases or better health benefits for solid pensions, many public employees and their unions assert that governments are betraying their commitments by seeking to now cut pensions. Further, they argue that much of the shortfall in pension financing could be erased by a strong stock market in the next several years.

"A lot of people are exaggerating the size of the problem," said Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 1.4 million government workers. "Right-wing think tanks and conservative Republicans want to do away with traditional pension plans and replace them with much-cheaper 401(k)'s at the same time they want to give all these tax cuts to the rich."

Now, over the past week I've been communicating about the strike and expressing my extreme disappointment with those who think that the "greedy" transit workers should be happy to give up benefits because they're already much better off than many other workers.

NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg exploited that sentiment during the strike:

Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly called the strikers greedy. "The public says, 'I don't want to pay more taxes and I don't get these kind of benefits,' " he said yesterday. "You have no idea how many e-mails I got, 'I don't make that kind of money. I don't have those kinds of pension benefits. Why are people striking?' "

But read further. Greenhouse goes on to analyze the reasons that some workers are better off than others:

Nationwide, 90 percent of public-sector workers have traditional benefit plans - known as defined-benefit plans because retirees receive a defined amount each month- while just 20 percent of private-sector workers do. In 1960, 40 percent of private-sector workers were in traditional pension plans. One reason for the disparity: 36.4 percent of government employees belong to unions while just 7.9 percent of private-sector workers do.

So, in other words:

Union = Defined-benefit pensions: good.

No Union=Defined contribution pensions (where you contribute a defined amount, but what you get back depends on how your investments behave): bad.

Now, there are two possible conclusions to these equations:

1. Damn unions are greedy. They're ruining America. Why should those transit workers have a right to better pay and benefits than I have? (And why, or why do they have a right to inconvenience me to keep those outrageous benefits?) They should face reality and be satisified with what I and everyone else I know has submitted to.
   
   OR
   
   
2. Hmm, looks like belonging to a union means better pay and benefits. Maybe I should organize a union that would help me fight for better pay and benefits.

As I've written before, in a race to the bottom, there's no finish line. Who's to say, following Option No. 1 to its logical conclusion, that someone else doesn't come along a bit later and say Unreliable pensions with high employee contributions? Look at all the workers in this country that don't have any pensions. How dare you protest when I take the entire pension away, you greedy bastards!"

Health and safety protections? Look at the workers in Mexico and China who are dying by the thousands. How dare you object to abolishing OSHA!

But looking back at history, is that the way human progress has been made? What if people who were working 60 hour weeks with lousy pay, and no vacation days or holidays or sick days or health and safety protections had said, "Gosh, look around, there are people even worse off than I am, making even less money and working even more hours. Maybe I should just be happy with my lot in life, put my head down and get back to work."

That logic would undoubtedly make perfect sense to billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Luckily for all of us, that's not the way that workers thought throughout history. Those who advocate that mindset today are basically in favor of reversing the course of human progress.

Not a world I'd want to live in.

Related Stories

• Strike Postscript: In Appreciation of Public Employees
• Lives And Deaths Of NY Transit Workers
• Blogging The Transit Strike
• NY Transit Strike: More Than Just Money

Strike Postscript: In Appreciation of Public Employees

Well, the NY transit strike seems to be over. I'm not sure of the outcome yet, but I'm left with a rather sour taste in my mouth about a few things.

David Sirota had the exact same feelings about many people's "support" for the NYC transit strikers that I did: they fully support labor unions and workers in principle, but get pretty damn pissed off at all the messiness and inconvenience that it causes when people are forced to take some action to preserve their wages, benefits and working conditions. And then there's the silent (or not so silent) resentment that public employees often have better pay and benefits that many private sector employees who are "better educated."

As Sirota wrote:

And there, really, is the ultimate contradiction of the argument against the transit workers. You can't simultaneously argue that the workers are absolutely essential to the city's way of life, while also arguing that they should accept pension/benefit cuts. Because if something is that valuable to you, then you need to actually pay a premium for it.

"Friends" like that are only a shade better than types like Steven Malanga conjuring up the ghost of Ronald Reagan in the Wall St. Journal (subscription required). Malanga's upset about the "porcine" benefits earned by NY public employees -- outrages like fully paid health care, pensions and decent wages -- the same benefits that most American manufacturing and industrial workers earned until relatively recently:

Public unions rarely have to strike to win such benefits. The vast and growing political power they wield in state legislatures and city halls is usually enough to swing contract negotiations in their favor. But the TWU has always been a militant organization, whose leaders, egged on by the membership, seem engaged in a game of one-upmanship even with other unions.

But now New York officials should take a page from President Reagan's playbook: The MTA should start sending out termination letters to striking workers for breaking the law, and hiring a new work force -- including offering jobs to current workers, but on terms set down by the MTA.

While rebuilding the work force, transit officials could unleash the privately owned van services and bus lines, which they currently prohibit from operating along public bus lines, to protect the MTA's and the TWU's monopoly. The MTA should begin handing out long-term contracts for these operators to provide alternate, competitive services on a permanent basis.

Between the "friends of labor" who don't want to be inconvenienced, and the Malanga types who want to just fire the lazy bastards, does anyone really understand who provides the services that are essential to the life of New York city -- and the country?

Think about it. Let me take you to a world without public employees....

Don't bother flushing your toilet. It just empties into the back yard because there are no wastewater treatment plant or sewer workers to fix the lines and treat the waste on the other end.

Need a trip to the store? Get out the horse because there's no one out there fixing the roads.. And make sure you drive extra carefully with no working traffic signals, no traffic cops and lots of people driving without licenses. Better take the gun along with the horse, because there's no law enforcement and no corrections officers to guard the criminals that had been apprehended.

Oh, and if you're water still works, save it up. Because if your house catches on fire, there are no fire figters to put it out. Don't try actually drinking the water though, because without EPA enforcers, it's too polluted to even give to your horse.

Of course, you can always put the kids to work, because there's no school or teachers for them to go to anyway. But they might as well stay home and inside anyway, because the air's become too polluted for them to play outside. Anyway, there's no time to play, because they'll be tending the garden you planted when you realized that there are no FDA inspectors to check the meat you used to buy and ensure that your veggies aren't full of carcinogenic pesticides. And, come to think of it, I'm not so sure about that garden either, because the soil's no so good anymore. Without those feared regulators, we've got lead back in gasoline and house paint. Turns out it was good for you.

Hopefully you still have a job, but good luck getting there without public transportation. Anyway, you'll be climbing over the garbage just to get to your car because no one's picking up the trash. And you better have a pretty nice insurance policy, because without anyone out there enforcing workplace safety laws, you've got a much lower chance of coming home alive and healthy.

True, you can always fly off to somewhere where life is better, but would you get on an airplane with no government authority making sure maintenance is done correctly? Are all those airplanes falling out of the air due to faulty maintenance done by underpaid, untrained workers? Who knows, because there's no NTSB inspectors left to investigate plane crashes? If you do manage to get away from it all, don't forget to take grandma with you. She'll need you more than ever without Medicare, Medicaid and public hospitals.

Sure, you could just privatize everything as the Wall Street Journal recommends. I'm sure all those minimum wage, untrained workers with no benefits would be motivated to provide quality service -- even if you could afford it. But you may have to spend an extra night a week paying your school, road, private police, private fire, road repair and garbage collection bills, in addition to the water, electricity and gas bills you already pay. (That is, unless Halliburton is hired to run the entire country.)

Of course, you could complain to your political representatives, but who are they going to listen to? You, or the companies who make the voting machines and run the elections now that elections have been privatized?

There are a couple of bright sides though: Lower taxes and no public employee strikes.

Among all of my white collar acquaintances are several who worked at some point in their lives as construction workers, dish washers, and factory workers -- they look back kind of fondly and some even wish they could do it again. But I rarely find anyone who expresses any desire to do many of the unpleasant, dirty and dangerous jobs of the public employees I used to represent: wastewater treatment plant worker, corrections officer, mental health aides, sanitation workers, etc. These are mostly jobs that people don't even want to think about in any detail, even though they're essential to our lives.

What we're seeing here are public employees who, because of the work they do and the unions they belong to, are finally earning some decent wages and benefits and the opportunity to retire at a reasonable age. So instead of complaining about the inconvenience they've caused by fighting to keep those benefits, maybe people -- especially good, labor-friendly liberals -- would be better putting their energy into actively supporting the strikers and then going out and organizing unions and striving to attain those same benefits and privileges for themselves and others in this society.

We'll give Sirota the final thought:

The lesson for New Yorkers in all of this should be very simple: you really value transit workers, way more than you ever thought. They ARE "essential" as you say - and maybe instead of applauding your politicians when they give away billions to swimming-in-cash companies like Goldman Sachs, you should be angry that they aren't focused on what you now realize is the most "essential" thing that your taxpayer money needs to be going to: keeping your city's basic services running, and responding to the modest demands of workers who do that.

Luckily, polls say most New Yorkers innately understand this and side with workers. But as the strike ends, those who don't understand this basic reality and who still blame workers for having the nerve to fight for their rights need to take a real hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask whether deep down in that place they don't talk about at parties, they really hold a deep hatred for working class people in general.

Indeed.

Related Stories

• Lives And Deaths Of NY Transit Workers
• Blogging The Transit Strike
• NY Transit Strike: More Than Just Money

Lives And Deaths Of NY Transit Workers

Lots of trees being killed and electrons being wasted talking about the hardships of those trying to get to work during the strike.

Very little written about the hardships of being a NY transit employee.

For a little enlightenment, I searched the Confined Space archives and came up with a number of posts about the lives and deaths of NY transit workers.

First, for those who think that unions no longer serve a useful purpose, read this post from earlier this year about a Wall St. Journal article describing how unions like TWU Local 100 contributed to creating the middle class in New York, and are trying to preserve it now.

New York's MTA, with an annual operating budget of $8 billion, has been a haven for African-Americans seeking upward mobility since the 1940s, when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. joined other Harlem activists in pressing city-owned and private transit lines to hire more blacks. The Transport Workers Union's legendary president, Michael Quill (1905-66), was active in the civil-rights movement and once brought Martin Luther King Jr. to address workers, then mostly white, on the subject. Today, about half of the membership of the union's Local 100 are either African-Americans or West Indians. The local's president, Roger Toussaint, arrived in New York from Trinidad in 1974 and started at the MTA as a subway cleaner, as did several of the top MTA managers with whom he negotiates.

Then there's this post about the hazards to workers and passengers in the New York subway tunnels. The TWU is fighting for better marked exits, brighter tunnels, improved evacuation procedures and more employee training on helping passengers escape underground dangers.

And here's how the MTA treats you if you're unlucky enough to be killed on the job:

Sometimes you gotta wonder…..Last January, NY subway conductor Janell Bennerson was killed when her head slammed into a fence as she leaned out of the cab. The New York Transit Authority has now determined that her death was her own fault because she leaned out too far and kept her head out longer than the TA requires to watch the platform.

And here's a post about howTWU Local 100 came to the defense of a New York City Transit (NYCT) supervisor who was charged with responsibility for the 2003 death of a transit worker, when it was actually due to inadequate staffing levels.

Finally, there's this death of a subway motorman a few weeks ago that "highlights the need for transit workers, including motorman and conductors, to have CPR training and ready access to defibrillators, which can save the lives of heart-attack victims if administered quickly."

Rubbing The Union's Noses In The Mud

I also ran across this article today by long-time labor activist, Bill Fletcher, Jr., former Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. He currently serves as President of TransAfrica Forum.

The strike that truly commenced on Tuesday, December 20, 2005, is a strike against the notion of New York being the Emerald City. It is a strike of workers who are insisting that they, as working people, have the right to work AND live in the City of New York. That means that they must have wages and benefits that make it possible to live stable lives. It must mean that the conditions of their employ are safe and secure and that they are treated like human beings rather than as trained animals.

Yet the strike is about something else as well. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is trying to sneak in something very familiar to workers around the USA. They want a two tier situation, that is, a differential in the treatment between newer workers and older workers. In this case, newer employees would need to pay more in healthcare than older employees. Two-tier situations are toxic. The newer employees come to resent the older employees, feeling that they have been sold out or sacrificed. It completely undermines the morale of a workplace, and thereby has a detrimental impact on the ability to get the job done. Thus, TWU Local 100 is right to stand up to this.

What makes this entire situation so completely bizarre is that the MTA has been running a substantial surplus. In this situation, the demand for givebacks is completely absurd. The only reason that givebacks could be demanded under these circumstances is to simply weaken the union and rub their noses in the mud.

Related

• Blogging The Transit Strike
• NY Transit Strike: More Than Just Money
  

Blogging The Transit Strike

Most of the major blogs seem to be ignoring one of the biggest news stories of the year: The New York City transit strike. (It's not every day that 34,000 workers put their jobs and livelihoods on the line to preserve their pay, benefits and rights despite draconian penalties by the courts and a generally unfriendly public.) Some of the "big" blogs that covered the strike are listed below. Read them. Read the comments too for a sometimes inspiring, sometimes depressing taste of what blog readers think about the strike.

One presumes that most of these blog readers are liberals, yet in many cases support for the strike is surprisingly shallow or even hostile. The strikers' issues aren't well understood (fault of the new media or the union?), people assume the strikers are lazy, greedy slugs, people don't understand that strikes are not vacation days for the strikers -- especially when they're ruled illegal by the courts and strikers are being fined.

People fall into the trap of assuming that because most workers these days get less than the transit workers in terms of pay and benefits (thanks Wal-Mart), that the transit workers should face reality, settle for less and be happy about it. They forget the important lesson that in a race to the bottom, there's no finish line.

People assume that struggles like these should somehow come without any kind of hardship for the public. I feel bad for people walking to work in frigid New York, and worse for those low income folks who can't even get to work. But ultimately, the strikers are sacrificing not just for themselves, but for all of us. Workers in this country didn't get where they are today (in terms of decent pay, vacations, 8-hour work days, pensions, health care benefits, etc) without struggle, often bloody, illegal struggles that may have inconvenienced or even hurt "innocent" bystanders. And much of the reason that all of those hard-won benefits are being lost today is that more people aren't in unions and willing to put their jobs on the line to maintain those hard-won benefits.

Finally, people complain that the bad strikers are breaking the law because the "Taylor Law" makes public employee strikes illegal in New York. What people need to understand is that the Taylor law is a shameful example of how this country treats public employees like second-class citizens. Unlike private sector employees, public employees have no federal right to even form unions, much less strike, unless the state gives them that "privilege." To this day, only about half the states in this country provide public employees with the right to form unions and bargain collectively.

To make matters worse, public employees are not covered by OSHA unless the state chooses to cover them. Only 24 states provide their public employees with the right to a safe workplace (NY is one of those, although the law has suffered under Pataki.)

The rights that public employees do enjoy were earned through strikes and militant actions in the 1960's and 1970's, and political action after that time. Now, Republican governors are starting to take some of those rights back and we just saw CA Gov. Schwarzenegger attempt (unsuccessfully) to eviscerate the political power of public employee unions.

So what we're seeing in NY is just more of the same discrimination of those who make life in this country livable.

OK, enough of my blathering. Read what others have to say:

• Jonathan Tasini's Daily Blog: Everyone's Strike

  So, if the riding public is looking for a reason to rally behind the workers, it's this: the workers are willing to endure hardship and lost wages so they can protect the economic futures of those people who aren't even working in the transit system. That's an admirable step, even if a billionaire mayor can't grasp the concept.

  And that stand is one that will have an effect on the tens of thousands of other public employees who will be targets down the road for the same negotiating ploy--undermine the livelihood of future workers by assuming that current workers won't put their own livelihood on the line for people they don't even know. In preparing his members for a strike, and making it clear what's at stake, Touissant has shown, in my opinion, remarkable leadership.

• My DD: On the NYC Transit Strike

  Now, I can understand that many city commuters can't bring themselves to support this strike. Taking away public transportation from a city that relies on it, especially at the holidays, is incredibly hard to swallow. I'm sure the commuters feel that everything can be negotiated to a compromise settlement that works out in everyone's best interests and that a full strike wasn't necessary. But I'd challenge each and every one of them to find a job that's as dirty, tough, and dangerous as one being done by a city transit worker.

  We'd all do well to keep in mind that, at the end of the day, this strike is about nothing short of the dignity of workers.

• Steve Gilliard: On Strike

  Anyone who thinks these people make too much ought to consider why much of New York is thriving and not a ghetto wasteland. Those salaries build homes, pay taxes, buy cars. In short, while you tour Harlem and live in Billysburg ii is because people with stable jobs and good salaries buy homes and live there. The dollars paid by the MTA to the TWU's members go to the city, support the city, unlike the suburban based police and firefighters.
  
  Yet, Bloomberg and Pataki disregarded that and the effect on business and backed the union into a corner. And they deserve the blame as much as the union or MTA for this. They tried to bully these people like Giuliani did, but that leadership lost their jobs because they buckled.

• David Sirota: The Superlaws That Undermine Working Americans

  But whether the unions demands are "fair" or not is not the real point here – the point is that superlaws like the 1967 statute being used to break the workers' strike undermine the entire concept of unions and workers' rights. Ask yourself a question: what is the one tool that ordinary, blue-collar workers have that can really help them assert economic power in a way that can minimally compete with the massive economic institutions (corporate/government) that run our society? The answer is ultimately through the threat of a strike – whether a strike happens or not. Without a union having the power to strike, they cannot threaten to strike and that means there is no real reason an employer should listen to any union requests, because the employer knows the union can't back up its requests with any consequences.

• And, of course, my Confined Space piece yesterday: NY Transit Strike: More Than Just Money

NY Transit Strike: More Than Just Money

Those of you in the New York area or who follow labor issue know that New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers may go on strike at midnight tonight if no agreement is reached between the MTA and the Transport Workers Union. As with most labor disputes and strikes, most of the media's attention is on the money issues -- wages, pensions and benefits. -- particularly considering that the MTA is sitting on a $1 billion surplus.

But in most labor disputes there are important issues at stake other than dollars and benefits: dignity on the job, and in this case, workplace conditions including on-the-job hazards and abuse from riders.

New York Times writers Steve Greenhouse and Sewell Chan highlight some of these issues:

In a survey of 792 bus drivers, station agents, subway conductors and train operators released last week, Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations provided considerable evidence that many workers feel mistreated and undervalued - which could push them toward greater militancy.

The survey, which was conducted in the spring and summer, found that 24 percent of bus and subway workers said they faced serious hazards more than once a month, including smoke, dangerous chemicals and extreme temperatures. It also found that 70 percent felt that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's policies and procedures were unfair.

Many workers said their jobs failed to provide for essential needs. For example, 78 percent said they lacked access to bathroom facilities at least once a month; 51 percent of bus drivers said they had problems finding a bathroom one or more times a day.

New York City Transit, the authority subsidiary that runs subways and buses, issued 15,200 disciplinary violations last year, but workers said they felt they were often blamed while supervisors and passengers were not held accountable. In the survey, 13 percent said they faced abuse from supervisors regularly, while 74 percent said they faced a verbal or physical threat from passengers at least once a year.

The bottom line is that being treated like shit doesn't make for good labor-management relations:

Valerie Spears, a station agent in Manhattan, said she was angry that agents were being asked to stand outside their booths to answer questions. She noted that agents had been beaten and even killed on the job. "I can't settle for what they're trying to do to us," she said. "I don't want to be killed in front of a booth."

Jimmy Williams, a station cleaner, said: "We need better facilities. It's cold. No clean restrooms. No ventilation. We have peeling paint in the rooms where we change. There are no tables for lunch."

Horace Edwards, a subway-car inspector, said he was under pressure to allow cars into service. "With management, it's all about performance," he said. "They want the subways cars to be on time. A lot of cars go out with violations. They tell us to overlook it."

In addition to the safety issues, the main issues separating the two sides are pensions and health insurance. The MTA offered pay raises of 3 percent a year in a 27-month contract, which the union rejected and that the retirement age for new employees be raised to 62 after 30 years of service. The union wants to lower the retirement age to 50 after 20 years on the job. Transit workers can now retire at age 55 after 25 years of service.

The union accused the MTA of trying to create a two-tier system of employees. New transit hires would pay one percent of their earnings for health benefits while also getting a 1 percent match in a 401K.

ATU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint

said the union would agree to reduce its demand for raises from 8 percent to 6 percent annually over three years, in exchange for fewer disciplinary actions. He also said transit employees needed better training and security.

"We need better treatment for workers," he said, calling the proposal the union's "dignity and respect package."

In response to the planned strike, Mayor Bloomberg is planning on easing laws that prohibit taxicabs and livery cars from picking up passenger at bus stops. But the drivers are having none of it. Turns out they know what "solidarity" means:

Two leaders in the taxi and livery industry, which is highly fragmented, said today that their members would not abide by the plan because they wanted to show solidarity with the transit workers, not take advantage of them.

Julio Alvarez, president of the United Drivers Group, which represents several thousand of the 23,000 livery drivers based at local car service companies, said his members face fines of $350 for picking up a street hail or $500 for picking up passengers waiting at a bus stop and suspension of their license for picking up multiple passengers. Now, he said, the city is asking the livery drivers to violate those same rules to help New Yorkers withstand the effects of a transit walkout.

"We're going to do our normal routine work that we do every day, and we're not going to just do something different just to break the strike," Mr. Alvarez said.

Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a left-leaning group that represents several thousand of the 42,000 licensed yellow-cab drivers, said: "We won't be scabs for the city. If this strike happens, we consider it more of a lockout than a strike, with the way the M.T.A. has conducted itself. We won't participate in bringing down the wages of another work force."

We'll know what happens in a few hours. The stakes are high. New York's Taylor Law prohibits public employees from striking -- yet another example of their second-class status in this "democracy."

Conducting The Public's Business -- And Dying For It

As the health and safety director for AFSCME, the union that represents public employees, conversations about my job were often met with quizzical looks from people wondering what hazards government workers -- bureaucrats -- face aside from paper cuts or possible computer related ergonomic injuries.

Of course, public employees do all kinds of dangerous work -- on highways, in wastewater treatment plants, putting out fires, chasing bad guys -- and then there's social services.

It was after dark last Friday night, and Marty L. Smith was alone when he knocked on Larry W. Clark's door in Poulsbo.

Smith's job — a crisis responder for the state mental-health system — is inherently dangerous. But Smith had done the work for years, and, according to Poulsbo police, Clark was familiar to the local mental-health agency.

Smith had been summoned by Clark's mother, who told neighbors that her son had schizophrenia and was not taking his medications. Instead of consenting to a hospitalization, Clark attacked Smith with his fists and then a carving knife, according to charging papers, as Clark's mother screamed for help outside.

Smith, 46, died in Clark's dining room. He is the first designated mental-health professional (DMHP) to die on the job in Washington since 1987.

In a letter to the Kitsap Sun, John P. Masterson, Chief Executive Officer of Behavioral Health Resources provides a fitting eulogy:

As a CDMHP, Marty responded to mental health crises in Kitsap County 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Marty and his peers throughout the state routinely respond to requests from families, friends, police and others. They go when and where they are needed, often alone, responding to the call for help.

They go without weapons, armed only with their knowledge, their skills, and their commitment to care for very ill people.

They go wanting to help, knowing they are the only ones authorized by law to require gravely mentally ill persons to be hospitalized against their will, if it is necessary.

Above all, they are vital to the health and safety of the individual and to our communities.

Marty's willingness to provide this service is a testament to his compassion.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer notes that the attack on Smith was no fluke -- and there are things that can be done to prevent such tragedies:

Earlier this year, Child Protective Services worker Edith Vance was attacked with a machete and a two-by-four during a child welfare check at a residence in Ferry County. Her attacker, 35-year-old Bryan Russell, who had been convicted of assault and drug possession, was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy who had accompanied Vance and a coworker.

In 2002, Roger Erdman, a field inspector with the state Department of Licensing, was murdered by trucker Ralph Benson near Davenport.

The solution, of course, is not to arm all government workers but to devote necessary resources to guard their safety. Any potentially risky visits should be accompanied by a uniformed police officer or, at the very least, carried out in teams of two or more workers.

Indeed

For Death of Worker, Highway Department Sentenced To ....Training

Am I missing something here?

Skaneateles cited in death of worker

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

The town of Skaneateles (NY) highway department was cited with a violation in the death of a town worker in August. Ruth Pillittere,speaking for the state Public Employees Safety and Health Bureau, said the department was cited for failure to provide training on the proper use of the asphalt roller and failure to recognize and avoid unsafe conditions.

Highway department employee Scott Clarry, 35, of Maple Street, Skaneateles, died Aug. 29 while paving a portion of Hencoop Road. Pillittere said the department must provide a training session for town equipment by Jan. 23.

Highway superintendent James Card said the violation citation was fair.

He said training will be done by deadline.

Doing Society's Dirty (and Dangerous) Work

I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about workers who get killed in trench collapses, falls off buildings and chemical plant explosions.

Lost in the "drama" of these fatalities are the hazards that Public employees do some of the most unpleasant, but necessary jobs that the citizens of this country demand to live the life they've become accustomed to. And they face hazards that most of us don't want to think about.

And for all that they get lousy pay.

Take social workers, for example:

Social work can be a risky business.

In February, an angry mother in Woburn slammed a door into a social worker's face during a home visit. In April, a Fitchburg woman threw a potted plant at a social worker's head. In July, a social worker in Lowell was almost run down by a pickup driven by a disgruntled former client.

And overshadowing all of these recent reports is the slaying of Linda Silva, a Department of Social Services worker who was murdered in 1996 by a father who had lost custody of his children.

State social workers say these examples show the potential dangers they face every day, and because of those hazards, they deserve better retirement benefits.

SEIU Local 509 which represents Department of Social Services workers in Massachusetts is pushing for a bill that put them into a higher-paying category of the state retirement system along with employees that include mental health hospital attendants, county elevator maintenance men, municipal electricians, juvenile probation officers, some correction officers, and court officers. The change would allow them to retire a few years earlier and receive a higher pension.

Summer Twyman was the social worker who had a door slammed on her face in February. She was out of work for months. Her injuries included a concussion and nerve damage. While she was out of work, she used up her sick time and received less pay. She also had to cover some medical expenses.

Twyman, 24, returned to her job at the DSS office in Cambridge in June, while following up with physicians and her neurologist.

"I've been out to many homes with police officers during removals. It's because of those situations [police and probation officers] get those benefits . . . we are in those same homes," she said.

"We should get equal benefits," Twyman said.

Meanwhile, let's look at probation officers in Los Angeles who staged a sick-out to protest dangerous working conditions, inadequate staffing and compensation that falls short of what other counties pay.

Some at the demonstration said they had been attacked while transporting repeat juvenile offenders. Others said they had been shot at — while armed only with pepper spray and a cellphone — while trying to visit probationers.

"They want us to go out and do proactive probation work, but they don't want to compensate us properly for the risks we're taking," said Aldin Tatley, who works with a unit of armed probation officers that checks on violent gang members in Lancaster, Palmdale and Altadena. "I have two kids. I want to go home at night."

AFSCME Local 685, which represents 400 Los Angeles County probation officers, has been negotiating a new contract with the county for three years. Almost 1000 called in sick Tuesday and 500 showed up for a rally to demand that the county return to the bargaining table.

Aside from poorly paying dangerous jobs, you may have noticed one advantage these workers have that most American workers don't have: unions. That means the ability to lobby for legislation, to stage collective work actions and stage demonstrations that build attention and support for their issues.

It's a lesson that more workers in this country should be paying attention to.

Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs (Part 5)

I spend a fair amount of time in this blog ranting about how this country treats public employees as second class citizens -- barely even human. In return for the hard, unpleasant and dangerous work they do, they aren't paid terribly much, don't have the collective bargaining rights in half the states that private sector employees enjoy, and are under constant attack for those benefits they've managed to win by organizing wherever they can.

Public employees, over a third of whom are organized, also provide an example of what America could look like (in terms of pensions, health care benefits and political power) if private sector employers had the same generally passive acceptance of unions that public employers display. In fact, their very organizing success has made public employees and their unions a bigger target for the right wing which fears the example that a well organized sector of the economy makes on the less organized private sector. Their campaigns have focused on reducing the political power of public employees (such as the current "Payroll Protection" campaign in California) and making private sector workers jealous of the benefits that public sector workers haven't yet lost.

But I digress.

What I'm really writing about here is a life and death issue for public employees: the fact that public sector workers in over half the states still are not covered by OSHA -- in other words, they have not legal right to a safe workplace. And it's not just conservative red states, public employees in what is arguably one of the most liberal states in the country -- Massachusetts -- do not have OSHA coverage, often with deadly results:

On the evening of Aug. 3, 2004, Roger LeBlanc was one of nine Massport workers dispatched to restore power to the Hilton Hotel at Logan International Airport. Before beginning repairs, the electricians made sure they de-energized the hotel's switch station. After checking the five cabinets on the right side of the switch station, they turned on the electricity, confident that the five cabinets on the left side were powered separately.

They were wrong. When LeBlanc, 39, touched the top of one of the cabinets on the left, thousands of volts shot through him, and he died hours later. His death has spurred labor unions and workplace safety advocates to unite behind legislation that would strengthen protections for the 150,000 city and state workers in Massachusetts.

City and state workers in Massachusetts are not covered by safety procedures mandated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, even though private employers have been bound by them since 1970. According to an investigation by the state's Division of Occupational Safety, LeBlanc's death would have been prevented if the Massachusetts Port Authority electricians had followed OSHA rules.

And this statement really pisses me off after 16 years running AFSCME's health and safety program where I almost never made any public statement without mentioning the fact that public employees were not covered by OSHA:

Representative Michael J. Rodrigues, who co-chairs the Legislature's Labor and Workforce Development Committee and has served on the panel for eight years, said he was amazed to learn during a hearing on the bill that OSHA did not apply to public employees.

''I certainly feel that all state employees should enjoy the same protections for health and safety as any private employee in the Commonwealth," the Westport Democrat said last week.

Well, I'm delighted that he's concerned and wants to do something about it, but come on! He never knew? This is something that everyone needs to know, especially state legislators.

Without thinking, most people still view public employees as office workers whose main worries focus on paper cuts, and possibly carpal tunnel syndrome. But, of course, they're wrong:

The dangers that police officers and firefighters face are well-known, but other public employees also contend with workplace hazards. Water and sewer workers have to crawl in confined spaces and breathe contaminated air; airport workers are at risk of hearing loss; and road and bridge crews are threatened by hazardous fumes and dangerous heights. Between 1991 and 2003, at least 94 public employees died on the job, according to statistics compiled by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health.

Those figures are comparable to the fatality rate in the private sector. In 2000, a US Department of Labor analysis of workplace injury and death data found that "the public sector poses the same or even greater overall risk of workplace injury and illness as the private sector."

In fact, in its report released last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that nationwide, 526 government workers lost their lives on the job in 2004.

Although bills requiring public employee coverage nationwide are introduced into Congress every year, the last significant effort was made in the early 1990's when public employee coverage formed part of labor-sponsored OSHA Reform legislation. The interesting thing was that, although the bill never came close to passage, there was considerable support even among Republicans for correcting this clear injustice.

The public employer organizations -- the League of Cities, Conference of Mayors, National Association of Counties -- opposed OSHA coverage. The states and cities were already doing a fine job protecting their public servants employees, thank you very much, and we don't need no stinkin' laws and regulations.

And we're still seeing the same thing in Massachusetts:

Romney spokeswoman Julie Teer said the administration has concluded that applying OSHA rules to public workers is up to the Legislature, but that the administration has taken other steps to strengthen workplace protections, such as designating a safety representative for each agency. Teer said the administration ''is committed to ensuring a safe workplace for all state employees."

Robert J. Prezioso, who has served as commissioner of the Division of Occupational Safety since former governor William F. Weld's administration, praised Romney's efforts and said his agency provides some safety advice to state agencies, as well as cities and towns.

''As the state's worker health and safety agency, we go out and help agencies protect workers every day, even though we currently don't have a mandate to do so," Prezioso said. He declined to comment on the legislation, or whether his agency would be equipped to enforce it.

But a leading workplace safety expert casts doubt on the efficacy of the state's efforts. Chuck Levenstein, emeritus professor of work environment at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an adjunct professor of occupational health at Tufts University Medical School, testified on Beacon Hill last spring that, "there is no consistent set of policies across agencies that would provide adequate protection for state workers."

"Serious hazards to public employee could be prevented by extending OSHA coverage to them," Levenstein testified. "The cost of such fairness will be small compared with the great benefits derived from protecting the health and safety of the workers who serve the public."

So what's it going to take?

Unfortunately, it's not until enough momentum is generated around a death that there is action. It shouldn't have taken LeBlanc's death," said Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, who heads the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health. "It's always called 'tragic' or 'shocking.' In most cases, it's not shocking at all. It's that basic procedures were not put in place."

No, it shouldn't take LeBlanc's death, nor the hundreds of other preventable deaths and thousands of preventable injuries. But they happen, every day, year after year and our state legislators and governors in 24 states still see no reason to do anything about it.

A couple of years ago, I outlined my idea for a public employee coverage campaign in a letter to former Senator Bob Graham (FL) Florida Senator Bob Graham after one of his famous "workdays" when he does the job of an "average" worker. That time, he spent the day in a public workplace. I suggested that on his next workday, he mount a campaign for public employee OSHA coverage and kick it off by

going down in a 12 foot deep trench that is not shored or sloped. Climb down into a manhole or other confined space that has not been monitored for hazardous chemicals or oxygen deficiency. Go work on a locked, understaffed, overcrowded mental health ward or maybe in a high security prison. Go drive around in some old city vehicles with defective brakes. Maybe you could bring a few Florida state legislators and Governor Bush with you.

Assuming you live through the experience and that you think that this nation's public employees don't deserve to work and die under such conditions, please consider spending whatever time you have left in the public eye fighting for OSHA protections for public employees. They do the jobs that this country demand to make life safe and enjoyable. Safe workplaces are the least they deserve.

We should be sending the same letter challenging every state legislator in every state that doesn't provide OSHA coverage to public employees.


Related Articles

• Live Like Slaves -- Part III (Public Employees Threaten Democracy), August 25, 2005
• America's Most Mistreated Workers: Public Employees, April 8, 2004
• Public Employee Safety and Health: Follow-Up, April 12, 2004
• Public Employees to Senator Graham: Go Forth and Agitate, December 12, 2003
  

Live Like Slaves -- Part III (Public Employees Threaten Democracy)

I know I shouldn't let the Wall St. Journal get to me. They just write these stupid articles to make me mad.

This article hearkens back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when men were men and public employees were public servants in the truest sense of the word. Today's contribution to turning-back-the-clock comes courtesy of Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution, who, writing in today's Wall St. Journal, portrays evil public employee unions as powerful, anti-democratic, opposed to the public interest, and just plain bad for America.

Public Employees are Too Powerful:

No other interest groups can match their potent combination of money, manpower, and geographic dispersion. Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has proposed reforms (of public employee pensions, of teacher tenure) that California's public sector unions fiercely oppose. And they have responded with onslaughts of negative ads, combined with noisy demonstrations at his public appearances, that have caused his popularity to plummet from stratospheric highs to abysmal lows.

And this is a bad thing? Actually, I think he gives public employees much too much credit. Arnold has managed to alienate almost everyone in California. After all, brining his approval rating a down to 34% -- down 31 points from this time last year -- is even more than powerful public employee unions can pull off.

The troubling thing is that the only initiative on the Governator's special election this coming November that is winning is the "Paycheck Protection Deception" which would curb the ability of public employee unions to use members' dues for political campaigns. The initiative currently has the support of 58% of likely voters.

Public Employees are Enemies of the People:

On the surface, these unions may come across as a benign presence in our midst. After all, they represent teachers, nurses, and other government employees who perform services that are valuable, sometimes indispensable, to all of us. What's good for them would seem to be good for us -- right? The problem, however, is that this is not even close to being right. What's good for them is sometimes quite bad for us.

Say again? What's good for public employees is quite bad for "us?" Let's put aside for a minute the question of who "us" is. Good for public employees would be...decent pay, safe working conditions, good health care plans, secure pensions, treated with respect at work, consulted during reorganizations....

OK, I'm a bit biased, having worked for AFSCME, the largest public employee union for 16 years. I ran the health and safety program, which means I was quite knowledgable about what public employees actually do every day. And most of it ain't pretty (nor is it well paying, especially where there's no union): wading through raw sewage in sewers and wastewater treatment plants, taking care of our mentally ill in understaffed, underequipped overcrowded institutions, watching over our society's most dangerous individuals in understaffed, overcrowded prisons, dealing with angry social service clients in understaffed, underfunded agencies, dealing with abused children or inspecting housing in neighborhoods that the police won't even go into, taking care of this society's poorest, sickest populations in understaffed, overcrowded public hospitals, and I could (and often do) go on and on and on....

In return, they don't have collective bargaining rights in over half the states, and even in those states only by state law or executive order that can be rescinded at any moment. Public employees in over half the states don't even have a legal right to a safe workplace. A public employee in Ohio or Massachusetts gets killed in a 25 foot trench collapse and it's "Dig him out and get back to work." End of story. Unions aren't just important for public employees, they're often a matter of life and death.

So why is treating them like real people instead of second class citizens bad for "us?" Where does society not benefit from decent treatment of those who do the jobs that this great society needs to function?

Public Employee Unions Are Enemies of Democracy:

At the heart of this problem is a genuine dilemma of democratic government: As governments hire employees to perform public services, the employees inevitably have their own distinctive interests. They have interests in job security and material benefits, in higher levels of public spending and taxing, and in work rules that restrict the prerogatives of management. They also have interests in preventing governmental reforms that might threaten their jobs. To the extent public employees have political power, therefore, they will use it to promote their own job-related interests -- which are not the same as, and may easily conflict with, what is good for the public as a whole.

How dare they be interested in jobs security and material benefits! How selfish can you get? Why can't they just accept their lot in life and assume the position? Interested in "reforms" that might threaten their jobs? What do they think? They have some right to try to keep their jobs?

Their interests may conflict with "what is good for the public as a whole". I guess "good for the public as a whole" is making sure we have a underclass to perform all of those unpleasant jobs that we can't do without and would rather not pay too much for (especially if it means more of the "T-word.") And they whine so much when we allow them to have unions.

The fact is that any time state or local governments are reorganized, it alway works out better when the front line employees are involved -- in an organized fashion. Not that it's appreciated. The irony here is that the state where public employee unions worked best with management to reorganize government most effectively and (relatively) painlessly was Indiana, which then elected Mitch Daniels as governor, who immediately eliminated collective bargaining rights for public employees.

Teachers are bad for children:

Because of union power, it is no accident that removing low-performing teachers from the classroom is virtually impossible, even though this nation has been trying to improve the public schools for decades.

Yeah, take a look around our inner city schools and tell me that teachers are the problem.

Public Employee unions are a bunch of commies:

Nor is it an accident that police officers in San Francisco may retire in their 50s and receive retirement pay equal to 90% of their final salaries for the rest of their lives, when most workers have no employer-provided retirement benefits at all.

It would really be much better for "us" if we just shot them all when they're too old to work.

The solution? Castration:

There is no way to eliminate the conflict of interest between government employees and the public at large. So the solution must focus on weakening the power of public sector unions. A Catch-22 quickly emerges here, because the unions will use all their existing power to defeat any attempts to take it away. Yet for reformers there is no alternative but to try -- by pursuing legislation that prohibits collective bargaining by government workers, for example, and pressuring for "paycheck protection" laws that require unions to get their members' permission before spending dues money on politics.

Success will not come easily, if at all. But for those who believe that democracy should represent the public interest, the fight is a good and noble one. It needs to be fought.

Paging Jerry McEntee and Ed McElroy. Your rooms at the Guantanamo Hilton are ready for check-in.

Related Articles

• Labor, Politics and Republicans, Oh My!, August 16, 2005
• Public Employee Bargaining Rights Under Attack, February 8, 2005
• Live Like Slaves, Part II, January 19, 2005
• Blunt To Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs, January 12, 2005
• America's Most Mistreated Workers: Public Employees, April 8, 2004