Truth or Consequences at the FDA

Sometimes, as bad as you think things are, it turns out they’re actually worse.

Welcome to Bushworld Part Deux, where government agencies that are supposed to protect the public provide nothing more than a weak façade while thousands pay the price in illness and death. Think I’m exaggerating? You may have been hearing about the Vioxx scandal. Vioxx is the best-selling pain reliever that was recently withdrawn by Merck, its producer, but only after it has caused heart attacks in an estimated 88,000 to 139,000 Americans, 30-40% of whom probably died.

According to the fascinating, but disturbing testimony last week of FDA’s David Graham, Associate Director for Science and Medicine in FDA’s Office of Drug Safety,

Today, in 2004, you, we, are faced with what may be the single greatest drug safety catastrophe in the history of this country or the history of the world. We are talking about a catastrophe that I strongly believe could have, should have been largely or completely avoided. But it wasn’t, and over 100,000 Americans have paid dearly for this failure. In my opinion, the FDA has let the American people down, and sadly, betrayed a public trust.

***

The problem you are confronting today is immense in scope. Vioxx is a terrible tragedy and a profound regulatory failure. I would argue that the FDA, as currently configured, is incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx. We are virtually defenseless.

That’s reassuring. And what was the response of the Bush administration’s man at the FDA?

Dr. Steven Galson, director of the agency's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, charged that some of Dr. Graham's conclusions "constitute junk science" and were "irresponsible."

Yeah, telling the truth is irresponsible, but killing up to 55,000 Americans is, what? Freedom of the marketplace?

Oh, but how was Merck and the FDA to have known? Turns out in 2000, Merck did a study showing that when compared with the pain reliever naproxin, Vioxx caused 5 times as many heart attacks as those who took naproxin. Alarm bells? Hardly. Merck just concluded that naproxin must be highly protective.

According to GWU Professor David Michaels, speaking at a recent American Public Health Association forum, if Naproxin were that good at preventing heart attacks, we’d be putting it in the water.

And where was FDA while this and other studies showing similar results were going on? Turns out that FDA, once it approves a drug is highly reluctant to withdraw it. According to Graham,

When it comes to safety, the OND (Office of New Drugs) paradigm of 95% certainty prevails. Under this paradigm, a drug is safe until you can show with 95% or greater certainty that it is not safe. This is an incredibly high, almost insurmountable barrier to overcome. It’s the equivalent of “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” And here’s an added kicker. In order to demonstrate a safety problem with 95% certainty, extremely large studies are often needed. And guess what. Those large studies can’t be done.

There are 2 analogies I want to leave you with to illustrate the unreasonableness of CDER’s (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research) standard of evidence as applied to safety, both pre- and post-approval. If the weather-man says there is an 80% chance of rain, most people would bring an umbrella. Using CDER’s standard, you wouldn’t bring an umbrella until there was a 95% or greater chance of rain.

The second analogy is more graphic, but I think it brings home the point more clearly. Imagine for a moment that you have a pistol with a barrel having 100 chambers. Now, randomly place 95 bullets into those chambers. The gun represents a drug and the bullets represent a serious safety problem. Using CDER’s standard, only when you have 95 bullets or more in the gun will you agree that the gun is loaded and a safety problem exists. Let’s remove 5 bullets at random. We now have 90 bullets distributed across 100 chambers. Because there is only a 90% chance that a bullet will fire when I pull the trigger, CDER would conclude that the gun is not loaded and that the drug is safe.

That’s reassuring.

Now let me say something about Graham. He’s a “government bureaucrat” not a wild-eyed public interest bomb thrower. Just doing the job like it’s supposed to be done. And he’s been doing it for twenty years:

To those who have closely followed the agency, his comments could not have come as much of a surprise. Dr. Graham has been making similar warnings for most of his 20-year career there.”

A physician trained at Johns Hopkins and Yale, Dr. Graham, 50, has spent his entire professional life in the agency's Office of Drug Safety, which monitors reports of adverse events for approved medicines and tries to determine whether drugs now on the market are as safe as initially thought.

Widely acknowledged as whip-smart and well prepared, he is a Roman Catholic and a strong opponent of abortion. On his wall is a picture of Jesus calling Peter and Andrew to be his disciples. When he works, he often glances at it, "and it reminds me why I'm here," he said in an interview on Friday.

Dr. Graham has six children and is an assistant scoutmaster for a Boy Scout troop. He said his faith had served as the spur and guide for much of his work. He has often been told to tone down his conclusions, to get on the team, he said. He has refused. "We all have a responsibility to honor the truth," he said.

There are still a log more government employees like Dr. Graham in the federal government. But more and more are leaving or being forced out, frustrated by the political domination of the agencies that are supposed to protect public health by the industries they are supposed to be regulating.

This is the so-called evil "big government" that the Republican spinmeisters use to scare the unknowledgeable American public. But their concern isn't really about about "big government" intruding on the lives of private citizens; what they're upset about is government agencies that enforce the laws as they were intended to be used; to put effective obstacles in the way of profits over public health. And after eight years of ignoring and harassing those who take their public responsibility seriously, what will be left?

These are the stories that the American people need to hear. Not just about the "evil" drug companies, but about a federal government controlled by those who are giving the green light to the the irresponsible.

Immigrant Dies On The Job: What America Thinks

A taste of America in the Greeley (CO) Tribune.

Man killed at plant

Greeley, CO -- A Western Sugar employee died Wednesday afternoon when he apparently got caught in a conveyor belt that was unloading sugar beets from a truck.The loading station is located behind the Western Sugar Co. plant, north of the intersection of Ash Avenue and 16th Street in east Greeley. In addition to the Weld County Coroner's Office, also responding to the scene Wednesday afternoon were Union Colony Fire/Rescue Authority firefighters and Greeley police.The name of the victim may not be released for days, according to the coroner's office, because his family must be located in Mexico.

Coroner's investigator Marcia Vincent said the man was working at the conveyor and a piece of his clothing may have been caught in the machinery. He was pulled into the machine and died immediately.

Comments

Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 07:46:16 PDT

Was he here legally?? or are the tax payers going to have to eat the cost of his funeral because he was here illegally??

Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 09:09:07 PDT

can you really be that much of an a$$ that a life is lost tragically and all you can think of is if taxpayers are going to have to pay the funeral. I feel so sorry for you if thats how sad and full of anger your life really is. This person had a family that is going to feel so much sadness and all you can think of is the money. I pray maybe one day you'll have a little more compassion for all of God's people.

As for the family of the victim
Dios te bendiga


Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 09:50:21 PDT

NO, but we'll probably have to pay shipping and handling to get him back to the old country


Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 10:20:14 PDT

More than likely you will be more of a burden on taxpayers than he would have ever been. Have a little sense of compassion/decorum.


Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 10:37:38 PDT

Once again, a heartless, unnecessary comment when a human being has died. I see your point of view but don't you think that you should express your opinion on a different situation instead of after a death. He isn't legal or illegal now, he is dead. Have respect!!!


Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Friday, October 29 @ 08:26:22 PDT

Unfortunately for we Americans, we would have never known he was in this country if he hadn't died. These people need to be ferreted out before their names make the paper.

Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 10:44:02 PDT

If here Illegaly, Western sugar can pay for the funeral. The death is tragic however. He probably was not instructed well enough because of the language barrier. Being a non-english speaker may have cost him his life. The feds need to do a better job of making sure these people are not put into dangerous postions with lack of communication skills. Oh yeah, lets get the borders sealed up better so these families don't have to endure the tragic losses caused by the ungrateful American business owners...


Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 10:58:50 PDT

wow! way to be ignorant. a man just died.


Re: Man killed at plant
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 28 @ 15:32:50 PDT

If so many born and raised coloradans would get off there lasy buts and quit collecting welfare and do the jobs that are out there. Greely would not have to hire workers from Mexico to come and do the job. But Greeley knows, these workers are the ones that keep the town going, and do the job, knowing they are making crap money. But they don't complain.They do there job every day. where as thes rest sit on there behinds collecting welfare. so please have some respect for the man who gave his life to make sure his family many miles away would be taken care of. god bless him and his family

Confronting the Global Asbestos Tragedy

The bad news is that “Every hour, another American dies from asbestos-related cancers.” The good news, according to our friend Barry Castleman, writing in today’s Washington Post, is that “asbestos use in the United states has continued to plummet.” This despite continuing imports and the inability to pass Senator Patty Murray’s (D-WA) “Ban Asbestos In America Act,” which would shut down the remains of the asbestos industry here and stop importation of products containing asbestos.

The news around the rest of the world is not as happy, however. While many countries have banned asbestos, our normally more liberal friends north of the border (that would be Canada for the geographically challenged) continue to be the world's largest exporter of asbestos and an aggressive challenger of other countries’ efforts to ban the deadly mineral.

Castleman calls for help from international lending institutions such as the World bank to assist countries to phase out asbestos production and use, assist countries in converting asbestos-cement plant to safer materials, and “promote construction practices for the careful renovation and demolition of asbestos structures. “

Bush Version 2.2: A Chemical in Every Pot, an Oil Rig in Every Park

You know, I really need to read the newspapers more. I completely missed the fact that this election was fought over the Bush administration's environmental "philosophy and agenda." Nor did I catch anything about the American people giving them "a broad mandate to refashion the regulation of air and water pollution and wildlife protection in ways that will promote energy production and economic development."

Silly me. I really must be more observant in the future.

I guess I should have figured this out when I was in Ohio making phone calls and knocking on doors and person after person told me: I’m voting for Bush. I mean, terrorists scare the hell out of me, the war in Iraq really isn’t going too well, my kids will have to pay off the national debt (if the abortionists don’t get them first) and gay people are undermining my marriage, but the main reason I’m voting for Bush is that I fully support his plan to refashion the regulation of air and water pollution and wildlife protection in ways that will promote energy production and economic development. I’ve been wanting to get rid of that mountain behind my house and replace it with a vista of open pit mines and oil wells.

But seriously folks, we’re still two months from Bush’s second inauguration and this LA Times article is most infuriating thing I’ve read. If this doesn’t get your blood boiling, check your pulse. You may have passed on:

Environment Officials See a Chance to Shape Regulations

WASHINGTON — Emboldened by President Bush's victory, the nation's top environmental officials are claiming a broad mandate to refashion the regulation of air and water pollution and wildlife protection in ways that will promote energy production and economic development.

"The election was a validation of the philosophy and the agenda," said Mike Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental protections, he said, must be done "in a way that maintains the economic competitiveness of the country."

A look at coming attractions:

• James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said President Bush would not reconsider regulating carbon dioxide emissions — despite scientific alarm over global warming — because such a policy would hurt the domestic coal industry and send jobs overseas.
  
  
• The administration's top environmental officials, along with key allies in Congress, have made clear their intentions to push forward with controversial plans to open more of the Rocky Mountain region to gas development.
  
  
• They have also expressed hope that a larger Republican majority in the Senate will allow proponents of energy production to prevail in their long-running battle to open Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
  
  
• They also are geared up to make industry-inspired changes to the way the government regulates air pollution from power plants and decides whether hydroelectric dams need to be altered to allow fish to pass.
  
  
• Republicans in Congress said they would try to relax laws that protect species from going extinct; that compel power plants to reduce smokestack pollutants; and that require the military to abide by air and toxic pollution laws during peacetime training exercises.

But don’t expect the battles to be fought where the public might actually find out what’s going on….

But industry lobbyists caution against excessive optimism, pointing out that the 55 Senate Republicans still need five votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster of bills.

William Kovacs, a vice president of the U.S. Chambers of Commerce, said it would be "very difficult" to pass pro-industry legislation and predicted that most efforts to ease restrictions on business would have to come through changes in the regulations.

On the other hand, four more years does give the administration a chance to make a lasting impact on environmental policy through lifetime appointments to the federal courts. During Bush's first term, the courts often sided with groups that sued the federal government to compel stricter enforcement of environmental laws. But the judicial climate could change dramatically with new appointments.

"It is close to the tipping point in a number of appeals courts, particularly on the U.S. Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit [Court of Appeals]," said Glenn Sugameli of the environmental law firm Earthjustice.

And the mandate that Leavitt is claiming? Even the LA Times doesn’t buy it:

Despite unrelenting criticism of the president's policies by Democrats and activists, the environment did not emerge as a prominent issue in the presidential campaign. Nor did Bush say a word about the subject in his news conference last week outlining his second-term priorities.

Yup. Sounds like a mandate to me. Don't say you haven't been warned.

Fighting Republican Stealth Attacks

While catching up on my blog reading, I ran across a post from one of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly, about “stealth conservatism.” That is, “modern conservatives are largely trying to implement their policies via stealth. It's not always clear what they're up to, and even when it is, it's way too complex to explain what's going on to the average voter.” The problem is that their tactics make it hard to mobilize widespread opposition to their policies.

A related problem that he raises comes from a deeply disturbing New Republic article by Jeffrey Rosen in which he argues that the overturning of Roe v. Wade may be the least of our problems with a Bush-appointed Supreme Court:

In fact, what is at stake in the election is not the future of Roe v. Wade, school prayer, or any of the culture-war issues that have inflamed the country since the 1970s. …If Bush wins, his aides seem determined to select justices who would resurrect what they call "the Constitution in Exile," reimposing meaningful limits on federal power that could strike at the core of the regulatory state for the first time since the New Deal. These justices could change the shape of laws governing the environment, workplace health and safety, anti-discrimination, and civil rights, making it difficult for the federal government to address problems for which the public demands a national response.

The “problem” that conservatives want to address is that since the New Deal, the courts have allowed an “expansive interpretation of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, which the Court extended to include any activities that might affect commerce indirectly.” This allowed the federal government broad discretion to regulate health, safety, the environment, and the workplace. Republicans would like to roll the clock back to the days when such intervention was unconstitutional. Although the Rehnquist court has struck down 33 federal laws since 1995, the highest annual average ever, the moderates (Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy) have kept the court from repealing any major environmental or workplace safety laws. And there are plenty of lower court Republican-appointed “candidates” for the Supreme Court whose previous actions show that they would be ready and willing to declare the Occupational Safety and Health Act or various environmental laws unconstitutional.

“In short,” according to Rosen, “the greatest danger from a Bush Court is not the overruling of Roe v. Wade but the overruling of the post-New Deal regulatory state.”

OK, now all of this is bad. Very bad. But my friend Kevin is approaching despair, mainly because the Republicans'cowardly refusal to stage a frontal legislative assault on OSHA or environmental laws, preferring to use stealth attacks instead to undermine protections by issuing or weakening complicated regulations behind the scenes or by passing obscure laws that few will notice and even fewer will understand like the Data Quality Act (unless, of course, you’re a Confined Space reader where you’ve read about the dangers of the Act here, here, here, and here.)

I don't have a clue how to make this stuff simple enough that it becomes an electoral winner for liberals. Eventually, of course, when it becomes clear what conservatives are up to, they'll lose public support. But it would be a lot better if we could make it clear now so we don't have to clean up the mess it leaves in another decade or two.

I'm just not sure how to do that.

How do you make this stuff simple enough? Well first, lets look at a bit of history. I remember well how the Republicans learned the lesson that stealth works better than frontal attacks. After the Gingrich revolution in 1994, Representative Cass Ballenger (R-NC), loaded his committee with a bunch of new congressman who had largely been elected on anti-regulatory platforms, and one of whom (Roger Wicker, R-MS) suggested that it might not be a bad idea to abolish OSHA. Ballenger introduced measures to eliminate NIOSH, merge OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration, direct one-third of the agency’s funds for non-enforcement programs, allow employers to fix violations before being fined, force employees to take their safety and health complaints to bosses before contacting OSHA, and drop fines based on the catch-all general duty clause came under fire.

Ballenger was so pleased with his party’s recent victory and confident of success that he boasted to the press that his committee was so solid that it could probably repeal motherhood if they so desired. What Ballenger ended up with, however, was a political and public relations nightmare.

Every time he held a hearing on his proposals, every seat in the hearing room filled early in the morning with miners, dressed in full gear, who had driven all night from the hollows of West Virginia. Miners and other workers held rallies outside and filled reporters’ notebooks with stories of co-workers and family members killed in the workplace. Stories were beamed back to the 6:00 news in hometowns across the nation. A button with a “Wanted” poster displaying Cass Ballenger’s face became the hot item in Washington.

What had happened? Instead of a battle about OSHA and burdensome regulations, we created a story about workers.

To make a long story slightly shorter, Ballenger’s legislation never went anywhere, and no anti-OSHA legislation has been seriously considered since. (Which isn’t to say they won’t try again this year.)

Therein lies the “clue” that Kevin is looking for “to make this stuff simple enough that it becomes an electoral winner for liberals.” The first thing we do is stop playing the game on their fields, using their rules. We don’t talk about laws and regulations. We talk about dead workers and sick kids. We talk about poisoned water and hunting and fishing areas that are no longer accessible.

We can do this because we’ve done it before. Ballenger’s attack on OSHA was only one small part of the Republicans’ legislative assault on the regulatory state in the mid-1990s. Those attacks were largely stopped by a strategy created by the newly formed “Citizens for Sensible Safeguards,” a brilliantly named organization designed to fight Republican attempts to gum up the regulatory process in ways that few mortals could really understand. Instead of trying to explain the intricacies of the regulatory process, CSS simply held press conference after press conference featuring the families of workers killed on the job and parents of children killed by tainted food, asking why their local Congressman wasn’t doing something to protect people. The stories didn’t play well with the jaded national press, but the press from the victims’ local areas ate it up. Few of the Republicans’ proposals were passed.

Fast forward back to the present. We have a mission to complete before 2008, and preferably before 2006. This country is being overrun by a level corporate rapaciousness not seen since the early days of the last century, aggressively supported by Republicans in Congress, the White House and the cabinet agencies.

As Kevin illustrates, we’re facing attacks in Congress with bills that no one can decipher until it’s too late, regulatory attacks from deep within the agencies that few notice and fewer can explain before its too late. And we’ll soon be faced with Supreme Court nominations of judges who will oversee a catastrophic dismantling of the protections that workers, families and communities have come to take for granted over the past 75 years. Our mission is to put a human face on these actions. We need to replace the laws and regulations with the faces of families who have lost loved ones in underregulated workplaces, parents who have lost children from eating unmonitored food, children sickened from inhaling polluted air that has damaged their lungs.

Safeguarding the health and wellbeing of our families, protecting us from those who would do us harm, destroy our communities, and rob us of whatever control we still have over our lives – these are issues that strike at the very heart of traditional American values. And if we can’t make clear to Americans in red states and blue states that uncontrolled corporate attacks on their loved ones -- made possible by the Republican party -- are a far bigger threat to them than two women who want to get married in San Francisco, then we really don’t deserve to win any more elections.

Democracy (sic) in America: The Streets Of Columbus

In Columbus, Fraud Wasn't the Problem. Fairness Was

I don’t know University of Texas professor James K. Galbraith, but we have some things in common. We both left our jobs and our families and traveled to Columbus, Ohio to work on getting John Kerry elected. And both of us were upset (traumatized, in my case) at the long lines in the rain and cold that turned away countless, mostly Democratic voters.

In my case, I only cursed the darkness. Galbraith has analyzed it:

The vote in Ohio raised another issue, yet more serious for the future. Was the election conducted fairly? And, in particular, what effect did new machine technologies, used in many parts of the state, have on the vote? That forces us to consider the votes that were not cast.

Kerry did very well in Ohio. By the method described in the previous section, he exceeded his "expected vote"--based on Al Gore's 2000 performance--by nineteen full percentage points. This was better than Bush's gains in the state, which were seventeen points above expected values, in a state where turnout rose by just under ten full percentage points, from 53 to nearly 63 percent. Kerry's campaign had a terrific ground operation, which had canvassed his strong neighborhoods repeatedly and knew his voters. If Kerry lost the state, it was because Bush did just well enough so that Kerry could not quite overcome the deficit with which he'd started. Yet--as I wrote earlier--a scandal of this election became clear to me personally at 6.30 PM on election day, as I drove a first-time voter to her polling place in south Columbus. We arrived to find voters lined up outside, three and four across, for about a hundred yards, in the rain. Later the line moved indoors; we were told that the wait had averaged two hours for the entire day. By the time the doors closed at 7.30 PM, it was considerably longer.

Why such a line? The turnout--on average in the state, twenty percent above the previous base--was a factor. But in Franklin County high turnout was entirely in line with rising registrations, and the Election Commission obviously knew about it. The real problem was a grotesque shortage of voting machines. At Finland Elementary, where three precincts voted, an election officer told me that the smallest had some 400 registered voters, the middle-sized one had more than 800, and the largest had "thousands." Voters were being limited to five minutes to finish their ballot, and because of its length and complexity most were using the full time.

Each precinct had two functioning voting machines. The largest precinct was supposed to have three machines. One was broken at the opening, and later replaced with another machine that also did not function. Five minutes per voter means twelve voters per machine per hour. Ohio polls were open for thirteen hours, for a maximum throughput of 156 voters per machine, or 312 voters per precinct in this case. That's barely enough for a 75 percent turnout in the smallest precinct of the three. And the lines for all three precincts were jumbled together--so even if your machine was ready for you, you had to wait.

This situation played out all over the city of Columbus on election day, with lines reported at ninety minutes to two hours from start to finish. One of my drivers spent two and a half hours accompanying a single elderly voter to the polls. Commentators marveled at the turnout. But you cannot judge from the lines. You have to know the number of machines and the time it takes to vote. In relation to registrations, turnout in Franklin County was only 2 percent higher in 2004 than in 2000--by far the lowest proportionate gain of any major county in Ohio. While Kerry won Franklin County, he could have done much better. Vote suppression worked, in the face of the greatest get-out-the-vote drive I've ever seen. Raising the increase in turnout of registered voters to ten percent (as happened in Cuyahoga County) would not have made the difference in the state.

Nevertheless: it is an injustice, an outrage and a scandal--a crime, really--that American citizens should have to wait for hours in the November rain in order to exercise the simple right to vote.

All I can say is “amen.”

Voter suppression or just good old American underfunding of basic human (democratic -- small "d") needs? I don't know. It doesn't really matter.

Galbraith’s solution is voting by mail. This is, of course, fraught with its own potential for fraud and manipulation, but from our experience, it sounds like the better alternative. Or we maybe we could just fund our democracy adequately...

Milestone

Confined Space went over 100,000 visits today (and over 167,000 page views.) Hoist one on me.

MSHA Head Lauriski Resigns

First Ashcroft, then Powell, and now Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety, Dave Lauriski is resigning.

The Wheeling News Register doesn't think the Bush administration should rush to appoint a successor:

One reason the United Mine Workers of America failed to endorse Bush for re-election involved concern about enforcement of safety and health regulations. UMW officials didn't think Lauriski and the Mine Safety and Health Administration were doing enough to protect them.

Mining is among the most dangerous jobs in the nation, from the standpoints of both health and safety. While it never can be made entirely without risk, miners deserve the best protection possible. In such a situation, effective government oversight and enforcement is essential.

Has MSHA been doing its job adequately? We don't know - but now would be a good time to conduct an objective evaluation concerning the issue. Answers to specific questions about enforcement of mine safety and health rules would provide guidance to Lauriski's successor. They could help him understand whether change is needed - or whether, perhaps, amendments in mine health and safety laws are in order.

Lauriski, a former top executive for a mining company, had come under fire for his close ties to industry and for rolling back or issuing weak regulations that control dust levels and diesel exhaust fumes in mines. And all of these actions were accompanied by major contributions to Republicans by the mining industry.

Meanwhile, Washington Post regulatory reporter Cindy Skrzycki describes today the United Mineworkers' extreme disastisfaction with Bush's MSHA.

Joseph A. Main, health and safety director of the United Mine Workers of America, figures he has his work cut out for him.

For the past four years, the union has been dissatisfied with decisions the Bush administration's Mine Safety and Health Administration has made to place former industry officials in high-ranking jobs and eliminate long-standing regulatory proposals.

"They pretty much pulled off all the progressive regulations already," said Main, a former miner. "Those regulations should not have been withdrawn and make the difference between whether miners are protected or not."

Among the regulatory proposals no longer being worked on, some of them spanning years and administrations, are those addressing safety issues with self-rescue respiratory devices for miners, the shortage of mine rescue teams, problems with huge trucks that are the leading cause of mine fatalities, fire-resistant conveyer belts in mines, and improved air quality rules.

Since the new MSHA team came to office, 17 of the 26 rules that were in some stage of completion were taken off the agency's regulatory agenda. The union wants more attention focused on safety rules at mines since coal production is expected to increase under the Bush administration to fill the nation's energy needs.

Anyone want to take any bets on John Henshaw?

Whistleblower Fired For Warning of Mine Contamination

Poor fool. Doesn't he know worker and environmental protection lost the election. What was he thinking?

RENO, Nev. -- A former project manager for a contaminated mine site said Wednesday he was fired for refusing to keep silent about dangers posed by radioactive and other toxic wastes at the site.

In a federal whistleblower complaint seeking more than $1 million in damages, Earle Dixon said he was fired by the Bureau of Land Management in October in retaliation for his aggressive research and public comment on the health and safety risks to workers and residents near the former Anaconda copper mine bordering Yerington, an agricultural town in northern Nevada.

A copy of the administrative complaint obtained by The Associated Press said Dixon refused to go along with repeated attempts by BLM management and the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection to downplay the issues.

ILO Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety Available on Web

Thanks to the International Occupational Safety and Health Information Centre (CIS), the International Labor Organization's Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety is now available for free on the web. The encyclopedia is intended to "present a panoramic view of the basic available information in the field" of occupational health and safety:

Volume I

• The Body and Health Care take a medical approach and provides information on disease, its detection and prevention, and occupational health services and health promotional activities.
  
• Prevention, Management and Policy covers legal, ethical and social policy aspects of the field, as well as educational and informational and institutional resources.
  
• Tools and Approaches provides insight into the disciplines which comprise the study and application of occupational health and safety: engineering, ergonomics, occupational hygiene, epidemiology and statistics and laboratory research.

Volume II

• Hazards spans the range of chemical, physical and social hazards, accidents and safety management methods that may be encountered around the world. The nature of the hazard is detailed, together with technical information on its recognition, evaluation and control.

Volume III

• Chemicals presents basic data on use in industry and chemical, physical and toxicological properties information on more than 2,000 chemicals categorized by chemical family
  
• Industries and Occupations takes a “how things work” and “how to control hazards” approach to all the major industries. The hazards associated with a variety of occupations which span several industrial sectors are presented in a hazard card format.

Volume IV

• Indexes and Guides provides a how-to-use the Encyclopaedia guide; lists of tables and figures and collaborating institutions; and indexes of chemical substances, cross-references, subjects and authors cited.

Also available on the web is the CISDOC bibliographic database of the ILO's International Occupational Safety and Health Information Centre (CIS).

CIS monitors the occupational safety and health literature of the world. Publications - print or electronic - of interest to one or more of CIS's constituencies are cited in CISDOC with summaries of their content. More than 62,000 references have been collected to date.

Behavioral Safety Comes To The Railroads

I wrote earlier this week about the NY Times investigative articles describing the dangerously close relationship between the railroads and those who should be overseeing their safety, as well as the railroads' disturbing practice of blaming motorists for accidents at crossings while covering up the railroads' failure to make the crossings safe.

Well, it turns out that the railroads have established a nonprofit "rail-safety" group called Operation Lifesaver. What's the purpose of Operation Lifesaver? To warn motorists to be more careful at railroad crossings.

So what's the problem with that?

Operation Lifesaver is the nation's most influential rail-safety group, preaching its gospel of driver responsibility to judges, police officers, elected officials and the news media. No one disputes the value of its message - that drivers should pay attention at rail crossings - or the dedication of many of its volunteers. And its work is widely praised by police and community groups.

But documents show that the organization is tightly bound to the railroad industry, and critics, including many accident victims, say the group's message serves another agenda: to inoculate the railroads against liability in grade-crossing collisions.

Not only did a railroad help found Operation Lifesaver; rail industry officials make up half the organization's national board and provide much of the financing for its state chapters. It also gets millions of dollars from the railroads' federal regulator, which is itself closely intertwined with the industry.

And even as Operation Lifesaver speaks out about changing drivers' behavior, it spends little time on a range of safety matters that are the responsibility of the railroads and is largely silent on the benefits of warning lights and gates, which many experts say are among the most effective of all safety devices.

This is strikingly similar to "behavioral safety" theories which argue that most workplace accidents are the result of employee carelessness (as opposed to unsafe conditions). Just encourage those workers to be more careful, give them prizes for not reporting injuries fewer reported injuries, and punish them when they get hurt.

Didn't their parents teach these railroad guys to take responsibility for their mistakes? Or maybe they were taught to make the President of the United States their model.

I'm Back...And Looking For Some Help

Well, as you can see, I can’t seem to keep myself away from the computer.

For those of you just joining, I wrote before the election that I would reconsider the future of this blog (and my life) after the election and then would try to decide what I wanted to do from there. I figured whatever was going to happen on November 2, it would require a re-evaluation of my life anyway. And for better or worse, here we are.

The main problem is that I’d like to reclaim some of my the free time I used to have. I’ve got this dangerously high stack of books beside my bed that I never have time to read because I’m always reading and writing this Blog until the wee hours. Well, my future is still a mystery, but I’ve decided to continue writing this thing (mainly because lots of people seem to think its important, and because otherwise my life would be an gray, empty meaningless wasteland spent cursing but doing nothing to fight the darkness emitted by the White House) To compromise, I’m going to try to write less frequently and leave myself more time to read (books), think, contemplate and sleep more.

Which is where you come in, dear readers. If you have anything that you need to say, but nowhere to say it, I’m your man. I try to cover the national issues, and whatever local items I can glean from the web, but if you have local stories (from newspapers, your workplace or whatever) that you think others should know about, feel free to e-mail them to me. Or write about national or even international issues. There’s plenty to write, but I just don’t have the time (or energy) to do it all.

You don’t have to be totally focused on workplace safety & health. Politics, labor issues, the environment, regulatory issues, business shenanigans are all fair game. I don’t promise to publish everything, but I’ll read and seriously consider everything. Let me know if you want to use your real name or remain anonymous.

Thanks in advance.

I'm waiting.....

What's Henshaw Got Against A Little Violence?

Wat the hell is wrong with OSHA Administrator John Henshaw?

Wait, not all at once. Let me rephrase that. Why, after all of these years, after not one, but two published OSHA guidelines on preventing workplace violence (for health care workers and for late night retail workers) in addition to numerous fact sheets, after tons of literature describing steps employers can take to prevent workplace assaults -- How can he still dismiss workers killed by workplace violence as not legitimate workplace fatalities?

This is what he said in a recent speech to the Greater St. Louis Safety and Health Conference after admitting that workplace fatalities rose last year:

Let's unpack the numbers a little further. In 2002, we had the largest percentage drop in fatalities and the fatality rate since the census of fatalities began. In 2003, there were 61 MORE deaths from assaults and violence and 114 MORE deaths among the self-employed than in 2002. If you subtracted these deaths -- among workers OSHA doesn't cover and related to third party violence -- then there is a good decline in fatalities. But even that explanation is not good enough. We must do better.

Why doesn't a mental health worker in an understaffed mental institution count as a legitimate workplace fatality? Or a all-night convenience store employee shot during a robbery at 3:00 a.m. Or a taxi driver? Hey, maybe we should subtract falls on consruction sites too. They're probably the workers' own fault anyway.

Once upon a time, federal OSHA used to cite employers for failure to protect employees from workplace assaults. CalOSHA still does.

Personally, I think Henshaw should sit down at his keyboard and write a letter of apology to the families of each of the 631 workers who died as a result of workplace assaults in 2003.

He should be ashamed.

Election Reflections

OK, I've been back from Ohio for almost two weeks now, and I've reached the final stage of dying/grieving:

Stages of Grieving

Denial: Wah the fuh? What about the exit polls, cheating, Diebold, paper trails...?

Anger: The headline from the British Daily Mirror said it all: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"

Bargaining: OK, OK, just give us the Senate, you can have the Presidency. OK, just a few more Democratic Senators. OK, just save Tom Daschle.

Depression: No, I'm not getting out of bed until October 2008. OK, maybe 2006. I don't care about my job. The kids can go to hell. The dogs can starve. Friends? I don't need no stinkin' friends. Just turn off the damn radio and hide the newspapers -- and sharp objects. Defeating George Bush was my life, and now it's over, gone....

Acceptance: OK, I'm up, I can see clearly now. I solemnly accept the fact that George Bush is President for another four years (barring impeachment)and I accept the fact that I must do everything I can to fight for the other half of this nation who believes that this is the most disasterous administration this side of Herbert Hoover. Just let me at 'em....

Ohio

Going to Ohio was the perfect cure for Pre-Election Anxiety Disorder. I was working with my old union, AFSCME, talking to locals about making sure members vote, working on phone banks and canvassing door-to-door. It was great to be among union members again -- people who could see through the Bush B.S. and were willing to work hard to get that guy out of the White House. And then there were the thousands of people from elsewhere in the country -- working with their unions or with America Coming Together, taking time off work, away from their families -- because there was nothing more important than getting this crowd out of Washington.

Getting anti-Bush Democrats out to vote, making sure they knew where to vote, and what documents they needed was certainly worthwhile work. I have serious doubts, however, about how persuasive phone-banking and door-knocking is in terms of actually persuading undecided voters to vote for Kerry. People will talk to their family, friends, co-workers, and maybe even union reps about how to vote, but probably not a strange (probably out-of-state) voice on the phone or face at the door reading a canned script. Even having deep-sixed the script, one wonders...

In fact, the most useful "debate" I had with semi-undecided voters was when I visited by daughter one night at college and got into a two-hour debate with some of her Republican-leaning friends. (Unlike me, my daughter is capable of having friends of the Republican persuasion.) They were depressingly uninformed, hadn't watched the debates and had absorbed much of the anti-Kerry propaganda, and they were mostly voting as their parents did. But they were curious, open-minded and not at all unwilling to debate their esteemed elders. They're freshmen. There's hope there.

But I must admit that it was rather shocking while walking precincts to run across the occasional young African American family who had decided to vote for Bush because "we're Christians." The whole values voter thing has been debated up and down since the election. The general consensus seems to now be that "values voters" weren't much more important than economic issue voters (who went for Kerry), or "terrorism voters" (who went for Bush.) I must admit to having my doubts after looking at the turnout in the rural areas of Ohio (in the 80 percents) vs the cities (mid-60's), as well as reports from a colleague working in southern Ohio who reported that most of his "ones" (Strong Kerry) had turned to "fives" after church the Sunday before the election when all of the ministers threatened to resign if everyone didn't vote for Bush.

SEIU Education Rep Deborah Rosenstein wrote an interesting piece about her campaign work in West Virginia. Regarding the "values" issue, she writes:

In almost every conversation I had with Bush supporters -- be they strong or weak supporters-- they would quickly agree with and/or inform me that Bush represents rich people and that they guessed that Kerry would be better on the economy, healthcare, social security, union rights, etc. BUT-- they need to vote for the sake of the unborn babies, for the children who might be hurt by gay marriage, for freedom around the world and for Iraqi people in particular. They wanted me to understand how much they wished, for themselves and their families, that they could vote for Kerry, but they needed to vote for something bigger than themselves-- altruism, as they saw it.

***

The good news, I think, is that what the 'red' folks have in common, instead of some sort of shared 'culture,' is that they want to vote for something beyond what they perceive to be a narrowly defined self interest... it's our job (progressives, union organizers/educators, etc)-- it seems-- to stand up and say, yes, I vote for more than my paycheck as well, and here's how I define the greater good-- this is what social justice means to me/us, and here's how our values differ from those of Bush and his administration-- what our values are when it comes to children, to people in Iraq, etc. Instead of avoiding topics that aren't narrow union issues, we must do the exact opposite.

Long days, little sleep-- just what the doctor ordered. The bonus was that thanks to some good old friend with whom I stayed, I had excellent dinners instead of the traditional fast food and pizza that we generally subsist on during these campaigns.

ELECTION DAY

I worked with Election Protection on election day. These were the attorneys that would make sure that people -- especially new voters -- weren't harassed and challenged by Republican operatives. The Republicans had been planning to challenge tens of thousands of new voters. Although after much back-and-forth, the courts finally allowed the challenges to proceed, nothing much came of them because some of their pre-election challengers had been threatened with jail for making unsubstantiated accusations.

I was charged with dispatching attorneys around Columbus where voters were having problems. The main problem, however, was not Republican challengers, but long lines in the rain. It wasn't uncommon in the African American parts of town to have two to four hour waits -- in the rain. While we received inspiring reports of voters who were going to vote -- come hell or (literally) high water -- it is clear that many voters with small children or less flexible jobs were not able to vote. How many, no one knows.

One of our attorneys walked across the street to ask a Franklin County Board of Elections official why they weren't better prepared for the predicted high turnout. "Oh, we knew we were going to have a huge turnout, but we didn't have money to buy more voting machines."

The only thing I could think was $200 billion and counting to allegedly bring democracy to Iraq, but not a dime for democracy in America.

Democracy in Gambier...

As I mentioned above, my daughter is a freshman at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH. Aside from being a great school, Kenyon is now nationally (and notoriously) known for having the longest voting lines in the country. My daughter got in line at 11:00 a.m. and voted at 8:00 p.m. The last vote was cast in that polling place at 3:55 a.m.

Politics in Washington

Things here look pretty dreary. But oddly, I'm not as pessimistic as I could be. True, George Bush, who just won one of the closes elections of this century, thinks he has a mandate. But he thought he had a mandate when he lost the last election. More important than what George Bush thinks is whether Democratic Senators -- and most particularly Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) -- believe he has a mandate. (The House is a lost cause, and was a lost cause before the election. The Republicans might as well have all 435 seats for all the effectiveness the D's Tom DeLay allows the Dems to have.)

Ideologically, the Senate isn't that much worse than it was before. Zell Miller was more Republican than Bill Frist. Breaux and Hollings were no great shakes. (Both of them, along with Zell, voted to repeal the ergonomics standard.) Edwards, Graham and Daschle are certainly serious losses, but we gained Obama in Illinois and Salazar in Colorado.

And then there's this analysis by the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg:

In Thursday’s Times, a front-page news analysis argued that “it is impossible to read President Bush’s reëlection with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that
this is a center-right country—divided yes, but with an undisputed majority united behind his leadership.” That is certainly true in institutional terms.

But it is not true in terms of people, of actual human beings. Though the Republicans won nineteen of the thirty-four Senate seats that were up for grabs last Tuesday, for a gain of four, the number of voters who cast their ballots for Republican Senate candidates was 37.9 million, while 41.3 million voted for Democrats—almost exactly Bush’s popular-vote margin over Kerry. When the new Congress convenes in January, its fifty-five Republicans will be there on account of the votes of 57.6 million people, while the forty-four Democrats and one independent will be there on account of the votes of 59.6 million people. As for the House, it is much harder to aggregate vote totals meaningfully, because so many seats are uncontested. But the Republicans’ gain of four seats was due entirely to Tom DeLay’s precedent-breaking re-gerrymandering of the Texas district lines.

It is clear that our only hope lies with Senate Democrats -- with their ability to use the filibuster to safeguard the rights of the minority. So, as soon as you're finished reading this, dash off a letter or fax to your Senator(s) if they're Democrats, as well as a copy to Harry Reid (D-NV). Four words:

No Mandate. No Honeymoon.

Signed,

Name
(One of the 57,123,038 people not represented by George Bush)

A New Low? Harassing Peer Reviewers

The United States may be entering a golden age of corporate freedom to act, unencumbered by government oversight in the form of new regulations or even effective enforcement of those protections still on the books. OSHA has issued no significant new regulations over the past four years, despite a desperate need to address “new” hazards, like ergonomics, reactive chemicals hazards, airborne diseases, and thousands of toxic chemicals. EPA standards and enforcement have been rolled back. Other government oversight agencies are facing similar problems.

Meanwhile, legislation like the Data Quality Act is further undermining agency’s ability to even issue information that warns workers and consumers about hazardous products.

What we are left with to guard our workplaces, environment, food and other products are independent researchers and activists, along with the journalists and writers who will bring that information to the public.

So it is particularly chilling to read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that chemical companies are not only going after the authors of such works, but even the peer reviewers:

Lawyers representing more than 20 chemical companies have taken the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to five peer reviewers of a scholarly book as part of litigation over the alleged health risks of a widely used chemical compound.

The peer reviewers, who are historians and health experts, have been summoned to be questioned next week in the case, which pits a former chemical worker who now suffers from cancer against the companies: the Dow Chemical Company, the Goodrich Corporation, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, the Monsanto Company, and Uniroyal Inc.

The book's publishers also received subpoenas, several months ago, to provide information about early drafts of the book and its peer review.

The civil case is in the discovery phase and is scheduled to go to trial in February in the U.S. District Court in Jackson, Miss. At issue in the subpoenas to the publishers and reviewers is the book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, which was published in 2002 by the University of California Press and the Milbank Memorial Fund, a foundation dedicated to research on health policy.

The book's authors -- Gerald Markowitz, a history professor on two campuses of the City University of New York, and David Rosner, a professor of history and of public health at Columbia University -- analyzed internal industry documents from the 1950s through the 1990s.

In the book, they present evidence that in the late 1960s and early '70s, chemical-industry leaders failed to inform the government about a link that had been found in experiments with rats between exposure to a chemical called vinyl chloride monomer and cancer.

"Basically what we tell in the book," said Mr. Markowitz, "is how the industry kept this secret from the government and how they fought against regulation."

Now, of course, harassing scientists and authors is nothing new, as described by Dr. Barry Castleman, author of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects on a listserve

Authors of historical accounts on occupational and environmental health subjects have been vigorously confronted by legions of lawyers with seemingly unlimited resources and billable time. No effort was spared, in my case with asbestos, to dredge through all manner of arguably relevant files, ask me about statements allegedly made by others, question me about whether I had prejudices against business executives and corporations, contact former employers before I became an independent consultant in 1975, etc., etc. In one deposition I was even asked about my religion, prompting the plaintiff's lawyer to immediately phone the judge to protest. I was interviewed as an example of an over-deposed expert witness by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" -- 20 years and more than 300 depositions ago.

But this is the first time I’ve heard of peer reviews being subpoenaed. It’s not that any legal actions will befall the peer reviewers or authors. This is all about intimidation. Markowitz was deposed for 5 straight days. Who would want to volunteer to peer review a publication critical of industry, fearing that they would be dragged into court and harassed?

Bleeding Hearts and Bloody Bodies

Melanie Mattson over at Just A Bump in the Beltway alerted me to an article in the Washington Post today by Fortune Magazine writer Marc Gunther arguing that Despite the understandable cynicism about the corporate world that has been fed by Enron and other scandals, the truth is that many of America's big companies are becoming more socially responsible, more green, more diverse, more transparent and more committed to serving the common good -- as well as the bottom line?

In fact, according to Gunther, "Corporate America is grappling with those social issues in some surprising -- dare we say liberal -- ways." Melanie blogged it (here and here) and wanted to know what I thought. (By the way, this cross-pollinating is one of the great features of the blogging community.) As long as I sent a long response back to her, I figured I might as well take advantage and write a slightly expanded version for Confined Space.

Gunther uses a few fairly well-known examples:

despite the understandable cynicism about the corporate world that has been fed by Enron and other scandals, the truth is that many of America's big companies are becoming more socially responsible, more green, more diverse, more transparent and more committed to serving the common good -- as well as the bottom line.

Here's a recent example: Hewlett Packard, Dell and IBM have agreed on a far-reaching code of conduct to protect the health, safety, labor and human rights of people who work for their suppliers in the developing world. Their suppliers, who make electronics in Mexico, China and Southeast Asia, will be audited to ensure compliance. Factories that fail the tests will have to reform or lose business. Social activists praised the computer makers, ordinarily arch rivals, for joining together to protect workers' rights. No law requires them to do so.

Or consider gay rights. Voters from Mississippi to Oregon approved resolutions opposed to same-sex marriages, and fewer than a dozen states provide health care benefits to the domestic partners of gay and lesbian employees. The federal government under George W. Bush certainly does not do so, and won't. But at last count, 227 companies in the Fortune 500, including General Motors, Ford and ChevronTexaco, offer domestic partner benefits. A decade ago, only a handful did. More join them every year because firms need to compete for talent and want to be seen as treating everyone fairly.

Why this alleged tilt to the left. G.E?s CEO says that "The reason why people come to work for GE is that they want to be about something that is bigger than themselves." Gunther also mentions political activists and "socially responsible" investors as good infuences on corporate behavior.

Now, anyone who reads Confined Space may suspect that I would be slightly skeptical of this article, particularly considering the railroad company stories I wrote about earlier, as well as a story in the NY Times today about the failure of Merck and the FDA to take action on suspicions as far back as 2000 that Vioxx increases the risk of heart attack. And you'd be right. Not that I deny that these good things are happening. Gunther's examples are real to a large extent (although there are activists out there who know more about his specifics than I). So are we entering a new era of "Compassionate capitalism" rendering obsolete regulatory agencies, regulations, lawsuits, trial lawyers, environmental organizations and labor unions?

I think not.

Most of the real good deeds and policies aren't being done out of the goodness of corporate hearts or because of the growing idealism of their employees; it's from pressure (in the form of boycotts and corporate campaigns), bad media from those few reporters still out there willing to seriously investigate and report on corporate malfeasance, as well as lawsuits.

And clearly, such public pressure works most effectively on "name brand" companies whose products and services you see on the shelves and television commercials. Smaller companies and "middlemen" are comparatively immune from public pressure. And unfortunately, the McWanes, Union Pacifics, Johns Mansvilles and Enrons are the tip of the iceberg. Talk to any worker. It is not uncommon for companies to cut corners on worker, consumer and environmental safety -- if they think they can get away with it. For most, their luck holds out. A few get caught. And sometimes disaster strikes -- an event as large a Bhopal or as small as a trench collapse. Some, like chemical plant explosions or workplace fatalities are hard to hide, but information about previous "close calls" are easier to hide, as is evidence that the hazard was well known to the employer, especially with the assistance of accommodating political appointees in the regulatory agencies. Health hazards, such as chemicals that destroy workers' lungs may be caught by observant physicians, but those that cause more common illnesses or cancers (or even heart attacks) may never be caught.

And, of course, the fact that there really are at least a few companies out there doing the right thing adds weight to the argument of those who say we don't need no stinkin' regulations. Just voluntary alliances and "safety pays" programs.

I'm not trying to badmouth individuals who work for these companies. I think most people want to believe they're doing the right thing, but the logic of capitalism, the logic of profit maximization pushes companies to cut corners, and, at times even hide or cover up incriminating information.

I've generally had good relationships with most corporate safety managers I've met. They're in the business because they're interested in workplace safety. They generally see the need for strong regulation and enforcement -- both because they're interested in safety and to help justify their existence to the higher-ups and the bean counters who don't necessarily seen accident prevention as contributing significantly to the bottom line.

The problem is that safety programs are often the first thing to be cut when costs need to be trimmed -- especially if tough enforcement isn't likely. In addition, those who make the political decision about whether and how hard to oppose regulations and enforcement tend to be the "government affairs" people who are more in tune with their peers at the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers than they are with their own company's workers or safety supervisors.

While at OSHA, I would frequently talk to company safety directors who had implemented highly successful ergonomics programs and saw no major problems with OSHA?s proposed ergonomics standard, only to receive a fax from the company?s CEO claiming that ergonomics was a bunch of unscientific garbage that would drive them out of business, and probably cause the fall of Western Civilization to boot. (Followed, of course, by major contributions to Republican candidates.)

In conclusion, I see nothing wrong with articles extolling the virtues of companies who try to make the earth greener, workplaces more fair and safe for workers, and generally strive to become better corporate citizens. These are good things that need to be encouraged.

But we need to be very clear that these efforts are the result of pressure by workplace safety and environmental activists, by socially conscious investors, assertive reporters, lawsuits and government regulation and enforcement. In other words instead of letting these stories be used an excuse to reduce oversight over industry, we need to make sure that these stories are used to show the importance of government oversight, the need to listen to and support labor and environmental activists and the importance of fighting "tort reform."

Your Customers Deserve to Die...

Blood On (and near) The Tracks

Despite all the talk about the election being won because of "values voters" or maybe "fear (of terrorism)" voters, no one should make the mistake of forgetting what the Republican campaign was was really about: behind the curtain was the same old corporate attacks on workers, consumers and the environment; corporate America's traditional campaign to increase its profit margins and control over American society. Tens of millions of Americans were manipulated by gay marriage, abortion, fear of terrorists taking over every small town in America -- all for the benefit of Bush's Rangers and Pioneers.

Left wing rantings you say? Sour grapes perhaps? Go back to Russia, or France or wherever people like me belong?

I wonder what Roger Bruening thinks. Or thought. He's dead. So are Gene Hale and her daughter, Lois Koerber. What were they? On the surface they were all "innocent bystanders" killed in railway "accidents." The root cause of their demise, however, is the selling of worker and public safety to the highest bidder by the oh-so-moral Bush administration.

Bruening was killed this past Wednesday:

Man Killed in Fifth Train Derailment in San Antonio Since May

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN ANTONIO, Nov. 10 (AP)-- One man was killed and another injured Wednesday when a train car smashed into a cold-storage warehouse where they were working, city officials said.

The derailment was the fifth in San Antonio since May, all involving Union Pacific Railroad trains. It was the second with fatalities.

Roger Bruening, 39, was killed in an office at Crystal Cold Storage when the train car crashed into the corrugated metal building. Another employee was taken to a hospital with injuries that the authorities said were not life-threatening.

Sgt. Gabe Trevino, a police department spokesman, said, "It appears that the train was backing up to hook onto cars, but it pushed them too far back and they went over the rail stop and into the wall."

Hale and Korber were killed last June after two trains collided, releasing a deadly cloud of chlorine gas which also killed the engineer. Hale and Korber weren't killed by the collision, however. Their bodies were found in their home over a mile away, killed by inhaling chlorine gas.

Hey, accidents happen, what are you going to do? Right? Wrong.

Just three days before Bruening's death, a NY Times investigation revealed that the Federal Railroad Administration has become so intertwined with the railway industry that rail safety is suffering -- and rail workers and bystanders are dying.

Does this sound familiar, OSHA watchers?

Federal inspectors were clearly troubled by what they had been seeing in recent years at Union Pacific. According to their written accounts, track defects repeatedly went uncorrected; passenger trains were sent down defective tracks at speeds more than four times faster than were deemed safe; and engines and rail cars were dispatched in substandard condition.

Soon, the inspectors from the Federal Railroad Administration began talking tough: bigger fines and more of them. But as they began to crack down on the railroad, they found themselves under fire from an unexpected quarter: their boss, the agency's deputy administrator, Betty Monro.

Ms. Monro demanded to know why agency officials had not pursued the less punitive "partnership" approach that she favored, according to a July 2002 memo from her and the agency's chief at the time, Allan Rutter. A year later, in a senior staff meeting, Ms. Monro rebuked her subordinates as being "overly aggressive" toward Union Pacific, according to one person present.

Ms. Monro, who now runs the railroad agency, was in a position to know just how unhappy her inspectors were making officials at Union Pacific. She and the railroad's chief Washington lobbyist, Mary E. McAuliffe, are longtime friends and have vacationed together on Nantucket several times since Ms. Monro joined the agency in 2001.

The railroad industry and its federal overseer have long been closely intertwined. And increasingly, like many other federal regulators, the Federal Railroad Administration has emphasized partnership as the best, quickest way to identify, and fix, safety problems from the roots up. But the story of its recent oversight of Union Pacific - spelled out in a series of internal memorandums from agency officials and inspectors - raises questions about whether this closeness has actually served to dull the agency's enforcement edge.

Critics of the agency say that it has, over the years, bred an attitude of tolerance toward safety problems, and that fines are too rare, too small and too slowly collected. Those concerns have been underscored recently by a number of major Union Pacific derailments in Texas and California, including one in which the release of poisonous chlorine gas killed a woman and her daughter in their home near San Antonio.

Read on, it gets better.

• CSX, one of the largest railroad company's offered the FRA's chief safety official a job potentially worth $324,000 a year while he was visiting CSX headquarter to discuss safety problems.
  
  
• The industry is a rich source of campaign contributions, mostly to the Republicans, with Union Pacific as the biggest giver. Its corporate political action committee was among the top 10 donors to Republican candidates for this election cycle
  
  
• The FRA's associate administrator for safety resigned recently after complaining that he felt pressured by superiors to go easier on Union Pacific.
  
  
• The FRA acknowledges that it levies fines for only about 2 percent of all violations that it finds. The New York Times recently reported that the F.R.A. last year investigated fully just 4 of about 3,000 grade crossing accidents and that the agency had failed to enforce its own rules requiring that railroads promptly report grade crossing fatalities.
  
  
  

So is all of this smiley-face voluntary alliance stuff working? The FRA says yes:

The Federal Railroad Administration began to emphasize its partnership approach in 1995. "We start with the assumption that railroads and their employees want to promote safety for their own benefit, not just because a law or regulation requires it," the F.R.A. would later explain.

Supporters of this approach, called the Safety Assurance and Compliance Program, say it has sharply reduced accidents by focusing on big-picture problems, rather than minor rule infractions.

Others, presumably including those killed by the railroads, aren't so sure:

Charles Lewis, who runs the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington, said the vacations merely underscored "the level of incestuousness between the railroad industry and the regulator."

And the recent derailments have caused some government officials to question the F.R.A.'s oversight of Union Pacific. After five derailments in five months near San Antonio, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, asked for a federal investigation into the company's operations in the area. Two of those derailments occurred near a high school; in another case, two engines plunged into a creek, spilling diesel fuel. "People are asking now, 'What's going on?' " said Mayor Edward D. Garza of San Antonio.

In California last month, a Union Pacific train derailed east of Los Angeles, damaging two houses, spilling fuel, cutting off electricity to 100 houses, and forcing the evacuation of 24 homes. A little more than a year earlier, in the same county, a runaway train raced through residential neighborhoods at speeds up to 95 miles per hour before derailing, injuring 13 people and damaging or destroying 8 houses.

Last July, a NY Times investigation revealed that Union Pacific and other railroads repeatedly sidestep their own responsibility in grade-crossing fatalities while they blame motorists for deadly accidents. These would be the railroads that, according to FRA politicals, "want to promote safety for their own benefit."

At least someone's getting pissed off. After Bruening's death,

Judge Nelson Wolff of Bexar County was visibly angry at the crash scene, calling it more evidence that a too-close relationship existed between railroads and their federal regulators that compromised safety.

Judge Wolff said he and others were going to Washington next week to meet with the Federal Railroad Administration, as well as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Representative Charlie Gonzalez of San Antonio.

Asked the message he would deliver, Judge Wolff replied, "Get more inspectors out here, and stop being so damn cozy" with the railroads.

So America, this is the price you paid for keeping yourselves safe from terrorists under your bed and matrimonial homosexuals. Hope you feel better. Just watch out for runaway trains and wandering clouds of chlorine.

Hexavalent Chromium: A long story, lacking sound or fury

Let's imagine we had a law that gives workers the right to a safe workplace and that the agency was supposed to issue standards to protect workers against hazardous chemicals.

Now suppose there was a sister agency that was supposed to conduct research into workplace hazards and issue recommendations for standards. Suppose this agency had determined that a certain chemical

should be considered carcinogenic and a cause of liver and kidney tumors and central nervous system effects [and that] extensive testing has shown it also causes lung cancer, asthma, skin ulcerations and contact dermatitis in the 1 million workers exposed to it.

In fact, this chemical was so bad that the research agency recommended that the regulatory agency issue an emergency standard.

Now imagine that more than 25 years later, the regulatory agency has basically done nothing.

I'd say that one might question the effectiveness of that agency. In a rational world, Congress, which established the agency almost 35 years ago, would rise up in anger and demand that the agency get off its butt and issue that standard.

Of course, in the real world, that regulatory agency is OSHA, the research agency is NIOSH, the chemical is hexavalent chromium, the current Congress eats its young is in the business of killing OSHA standards, not promoting them, and real people continue to get sick and die from chromium poisoning.

Happily, we still have an independent court system (for now) that believes that the federal agencies should actually exercise the responsibilities given them by Congress.

Only after two lawsuits and a court order issued in April 2003, which essentially told the agency "enough is enough," did the wheels of the regulatory machinery begin to turn in a meaningful way.

On Oct. 4, OSHA issued three proposals that would cover general industry, construction and shipyards, lowering the permissible exposure from the current standard of 52 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 1 microgram on an eight-hour, time-weighted average -- a limit that is four times higher than what Public Citizen requested in its petition. The proposal also calls for controlling exposure through engineering controls, protective clothing and respiratory protection

The Washington Post's Cindy Skrzycki does a pretty good job explaining the sorry history of OSHA's slow journey to a hexavalent chromium standard.

You may recall from the recent election the the Republican Presidential candidate's economic program was based on getting rid of "burdensome regulations." This same candidate, in his first term, issued no significant safety or health standards. Yet Article II of the Constitution of the United States states that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." That would be the office of the Presidency that he has sworn to "faithfully execute."

That's faithfully, not faith-based.

Faith based toxicology? Big government run amok?

Hmmm.

APHA Lorin Kerr Award Speech

OK, the election is over, the American Public Health Association Conference is over, so there are no more excuses.

I'm back.

To start myself off easy, I'm going to post a speech I made yesterday at the APHA Occupational Health Section Awards Luncheon at which I was awarded the Lorin Kerr Award. For those who don't know, Lorin Kerr was a life-long worker safety and health activist who served for over 40 years as a physician for the United Mine Workers. He was dedicated to improving access to care for coal miners and other workers, to preventing black lung disease and to assuring compensation for those who suffered from the disease.

The award supposedly recognizes a "new" activist for their sustained and outstanding efforts and dedication to improve the lives of workers. After more than 20 years of work in this area, I'm not sure how I qualify as new, unless the clock started ticking again when I began Confined Space.

Nevertheless, after the events of the past week, being honored by friends of more than two decades was just what the doctor called for.

LORIN KERR AWARD
Remarks by Jordan Barab
November 9, 2004

Thank you.

I want to thank my wife, Jessie, for being amazing supportive, especially over the last year, with my second job – Confined Space -- especially considering how well it pays. I want to thank Darryl Alexander, Gail Bateson and Tony Mazzocchi for taking a lost young International Relations major 25 years ago and getting him excited about workplace health and safety. James August for years of support at AFSCME, and Peg Seminario for her never-failing wisdom and advice. And I want to thank Charles Jeffress for a few very exciting years at OSHA, for letting me be me, (not an easy task as my previous employers know) and for really listening to workers and the labor movement and giving us one last glimpse – at least for a while-- of what the agency can do for workers.

I really can’t tell you how much it means to me to get this award from my peers and friends of decades. Despite the temptation, I’m not going to give you my analysis of the election or the political situation in this country. We’re depressed enough already. Suffice to say, the White House is bad, the Senate is worse, the House couldn’t be worse and the Supreme Court will soon be worse.

The only thing I can offer in the spirit of hope is this quote from I.F. Stone that I’ve had on my blog for some time now. I had hoped to take it down last week, but now I’ll probably have to leave it up for the next few years:

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.

In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing -- for the sheer fun and joy of it -- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.

And in that spirit we face the future together.

Nineteen months ago, I started Confined Space for two main reasons. The first was to have a personal outlet for the outrage that I constantly feel and, hopefully, to spread the outrage. The idea of writing a weblog, or Blog, came to me shortly after the space shuttle Columbia disaster in January 2003 that killed 7 astronauts.

You may remember that the media worldwide covered every detail of their lives. And I admit, I soon felt like I knew more about their lives than I know about my own parents.

At some point it dawned on me that the astronauts were really just workers – space workers – but not terribly dissimilar to the more than 100 other workers who died tragically that week on the job in the United States. They were all just doing their jobs. The only difference is that the other 100 only got a couple of paragraphs in the local newspaper. No outrage, no anger, no call to action. They weren’t glamorous enough. In fact, they were generally people who do ordinary, dirty jobs on construction sites, roads and factories. Most of them died alone, only noticed and remembered by their immediate family, friends and co-workers.

You will only need a few moments on Google to find the names, pictures, hometowns and dates of death of every American killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past three years. But you can search long and hard, and ultimately in vain for the names of the more than 5,000 Americans killed in the workplace last year. You’ll find the few that I can locate on Confined Space. But otherwise, they don’t exist, except in statistics.

Irving Selikoff once said, “statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away.”

Well, our job is to put those tears back.

And while we’re at it, we need to put the politics and the organizing back as well.

Which brings me to the second reason I started Confined Space: To make sure that every worker understands that his or her vote is directly related to their chance of coming home from work alive and health at the end of each workday.

We knew in the very early days of the Bush administration that the Republicans were going to go after the ergonomics standard. My response was something like “Make My Day!" I had a vision of millions of American workers, having patiently waited a decade for an ergonomics standard, rising up in righteous anger to smite those who would snatch away their hard-won gains.

Needless to say, I was wrong. The time was too short to educate and then mobilize the American workforce—or even just the AFL-CIO. We need to have an American workforce that is already educated and pre-mobilized.

So how do we spread the outrage, put back the tears and politicize workers?

First, we need to take advantage of every teachable moment. Last year, we had 5,559 “teachable moments” when workers lost their lives in the workplace (not counting the 50,000 to 100,000 workers who die each year of occupational diseases.) We need to take those moments to educate not just our members and our students, but also journalists. We will not be able to rely on Congressional hearings to bring out the truth. Our best hope is the media.

No longer can we tolerate headlines – even in a rural, low-circulation newspaper -- that claim that a workplace death resulted from a “freak accident” when the unprotected walls of a 12-foot trench cave in on top of a worker.

No longer can we let journalists get way with calling the death of a worker a “mystery” when he suffocates in an unmonitored, unventilated manhole.

No longer can we let journalist blame a severed limb or crushed head on “employee error” because someone accidentally turned on the machine while he was inside.

No longer can we let articles go unanswered that neglect to note that well recognized safe practices were ignored, that laws were broken.

We need to call reporters up, write letters to the editor, send them copies of David Barstow’s NY Times articles and Andrew Schneider’s series on death by asbestos in Libby, Montana. We need to put them in touch with experts, teach workshops at their conventions, convince them that these are tragic tales of good versus evil, stories that Pulitzer Prizes are built upon.

We need to use those teachable moments not just for journalists, but also for politicians. November 4, 2008 may be a bit too far in the future to start focusing on just yet, but November 7, 2006 isn’t too far away. We need to make sure that every time a worker dies, someone in the local paper is quoted asking the local and state politicians what they are doing in Washington – or even in the statehouse – to make sure these tragedies don’t happen again. Are they supporting higher fines, jail terms, stronger standards, more inspectors?

We also need to mobilize families. Some of the most moving mail I’ve received as a result of Confined Space is from the wives, siblings and children of workers killed on the job. They are angry about the death their loved ones. And they find some solace in knowing that there’s someone else out there who is just as angry.

We need to put that anger to good use. We need to spread that anger to the community, to the journalists and politicians. It not only advances the political struggle, but it helps the families know that the death of their loved ones may serve some higher purpose.

And, of course, we need to continue to remind workers that injuries, illnesses and deaths can be prevented, that an organized workforce is their best guarantee of a safe job.

That a safe workplace is a right, not a privilege to be enjoyed only when the company is making a good profit.

We need to make it clear that the right to a safe workplace wasn’t bestowed upon us by concerned politicians or employers who were finally convinced that “Safety Pays.” The right to a safe workplace was won only after a long and bitter fight by workers, unions and public health advocates. It was soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands of coal miners, factory and construction workers. And the current movement to transform the agency into nothing but a coordinator of voluntary alliances is a betrayal of that promise and those lives.

While I was searching for the meaning of life the other day and I happened upon a list of Saul Alinsky’s rules for effective action. Two of them struck a note with me:

1. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

2. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

This was somewhat serendipitous. Earlier in the day I had overheard a Mike Silverstein telling Jim Moran that he had found an audiotape of a very famous Philadelphia City Council hearing. I don’t know how many of you know about this. You young-uns out there probably weren’t even born yet, so I’ll summarize it briefly.

This was back in the days before we had a national Right-to-Know standard. Philaposh was attempting to pass a city ordinance and had to convince a skeptical City Council that workers really deserved the right to know what chemicals they were being exposed to. Jim brought a tank of compressed gas up to the city council desk and opened the valve. The City Councilors scattered, panicked, demanding to know what was in that tank, demanding to know what they were being exposed to!

Those are the kind of tactics we need to figure out how to use again. What we need to do is relax, find some tactics we enjoy, and show the world not just that they are wrong, but that they are ridiculous.

I will leave you with this thought that Jeff Faux, former President of the Economic Policy Institute used to say:

“We don't get to decide who wins; history decides that. We only get to decide which side we fight on and how hard we fight.”

So go forth. Be of good cheer. This too shall pass.

Thank you.