After 44 years, halting progress on workplace disease
On May 28, 1971, exactly one month after opening its doors, the already reviled Occupational Safety and Health Administration handed out its first citation.
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The citation went to Allied Chemical Corporation, which had allowed highly toxic mercury to pool on floors and working surfaces at its chlorine plant in Moundsville, West Virginia. It was issued under the so-called general duty clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which says that workplaces must be “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”
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Forty-four years and some 9 million violations later, health hazards such as mercury continue to plague America’s workers. OSHA has issued only 36 health standards and relies on mostly outdated exposure limits for the 470 substances it regulates; many more substances go unregulated. It rarely uses the general duty clause to cite alleged health violations, having concluded that the burden of proof is too steep. Hindered by court decisions, the White House, an often-hostile Congress, a weak underlying statute and — some say — its own timidity, the agency is still searching for ways to protect workers from fumes, vapors, dusts, fibers and liquids that can kill or incapacitate them.
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While OSHA’s overall record on worker health is undistinguished, it has seen periods of productivity. The most notable came during the Carter administration in the late 1970s, when the agency rammed through standards for benzene, arsenic, lead and other substances known to cause cancer, neurological problems and other ailments. Unions were influential then, government employees motivated. “We had such loud, knowledgeable, vibrant voices,” said Eula Bingham, who ran OSHA from 1977 to 1981. “The time was right.”
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The momentum died when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. Bingham was replaced by Thorne Auchter, a construction company executive who, like Reagan, argued that overregulation was hurting American enterprise and set OSHA on a more conciliatory course.
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Reagan insisted that “we can relieve labor and business of burdensome, unnecessary regulations and still maintain high standards of environmental and occupational safety.” But many believe OSHA never recovered from the change in administrations.
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“We were a cadre of people who were really serious,” said Nicholas Ashford, a professor of technology and policy at MIT who chaired the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health while Bingham led the agency. “If we had had four more years, we would have really, really protected the American public from a variety of hazards.”
The following account is based on interviews with scores of current and former government officials — including OSHA leaders spanning administrations from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush — and others in the fields of medicine, law, labor, industry and science, as well as thousands of documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the Reagan and Nixon presidential libraries in California; and private collections.
‘Gestapo’
A division of the U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA faced an uphill battle from the day it began operation in April 1971. Business owners and lawmakers bemoaned and belittled it. Its inspectors elicited oddly visceral reactions; references to Adolf Hitler and the Gestapo became too numerous to count. In a handwritten note to Nixon in October 1971, a self-described “lifelong conservative Republican and … Nixon booster” from Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote that if the president had played any role in OSHA’s creation, “you should be thrown out of office at once.”
In fact, Nixon had played a major role. In a message to Congress in August 1969, he observed that technological progress could be a “mixed blessing. The same new method or new product which improves our lives can also be the source of unpleasantness and pain.”
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This story is part of Unequal risk. Workers in America face risks from toxic exposures that would be considered unacceptable outside the job. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2015 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
