Worker Safety Takes A Beating During Trump’s First 100 Days
- Submitted by: Love Knowledge
- Category: Politics
The post Worker Safety Takes A Beating During Trump’s First 100 Days appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.
Each year, an estimated five million workers are injured on the job, 50,000 workers die from occupational diseases, and 4,800 die in workplace accidents.
That’s 13 worker deaths a day, said David Michaels, who served for seven years as head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) during the Obama administration. Michaels spoke at a Workers Memorial symposium in Washington on April 28, the annual date for observances in the US and internationally.
The event — hosted by the non-profit economic think tank, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the National Employment Law Project — brought together worker-safety advocates and the workers and their families who directly experience the effects of lax safety regulations.
Speakers tallied the setbacks from President Donald Trump’s first hundred days.
When you do enforcement, there is a record that establishes whether an employer knew about a safety lapse, did nothing about it, and should be punished for it.”
One of the most troubling rule rollbacks approved by Congress and Trump would mean that businesses no longer have to maintain records of workplace injuries and illnesses for five years.
Those records, EPI vice president Ross Eisenbrey told WhoWhatWhy, are not unnecessary red tape.
“They are how OSHA knows about dangerous workplaces, and how NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) knows what [workplace exposures] need to be addressed. When you do enforcement,” he added, “there is a record” that establishes whether an employer knew about a safety lapse, did nothing about it, “and should be punished for it.”
There are other setbacks to workplace safety that have been implemented or proposed during the first 100 days. They include:
• Delaying by three months a rule that would regulate worker exposure to silica — a fine dust from sand and granite that can lodge in the lungs. By one estimate, this will result in an additional 160 worker deaths in the construction industry. The longer the Trump administration delays, the more workers will die. The rule had taken years to be finalized.
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