Copyright 2000 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
The Houston Chronicle
December 12, 2000, Tuesday 3 STAR EDITION
SECTION: A; Pg. 33
LENGTH:
902 words
HEADLINE: This is no way to improve workplace
safety
BYLINE: SEN. MIKE ENZI; Enzi, R-Wyo., is
chairman of the Senate Subcommitte on Employment, Safety and Training.
BODY:
WHILE the nation has had its attention glued
on the presidential cliffhanger, the Clinton administration focused on something
else: a workplace regulation that could leave injured workers' compensation
systems in ruin, close nursing homes and overshadow existing safety needs.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, moving at lightning
political speed, published a controversial ergonomics
regulation aiming to prevent repetitive stress injuries. Everyone
supports the idea of trying to reduce workplace injury; the problem is that the
administration's regulation is fundamentally flawed in its approach to the
issue.
In fact, the regulation is so contentious that it became a major
reason Congress locked horns with the White House on its annual spending bills
and forced us into a lame-duck session. Meanwhile, OSHA rammed through its
regulation so that no matter what happens in the negotiations between the White
House and Congress, the 1,600-page rule has already been codified in the Federal
Register, meaning it will be very difficult to overturn - which is why several
groups are suing to try to stop it.
Since 1988, the average time OSHA
has spent per rule has been more than four years. Yet the ergonomics
regulation was finalized in under one year by OSHA for a rule that
involves broader applicability and has a bigger impact on the nation's economy.
In defense of its fast-track approach to ergonomics, OSHA has pointed to the
number of repetitive stress injuries, implying that there is a public epidemic.
But it is interesting to compare OSHA's response to the AIDS outbreak: Its 1991
regulation to protect health-care workers from AIDS exposure took 920 days to
finalize - two and a half times as long as ergonomics.
Why the rush? The
history books are closing on the Clinton presidency.
Every employer in
America has a stake in making sure his/her employees are injury-free; it reduces
absenteeism, avoids productivity losses and reduces workers' compensation costs.
For these reasons, employers and employees have been working together quietly,
privately and successfully for 20 years to solve ergonomic problems.
It's been working: The rate of repetitive stress injuries has declined
22 percent over the last five years, according to OSHA's own analysis. This
trend should continue, eliminating the ergonomic problem over the next decade
without government regulation.
OSHA has stated its ergonomics rule would
cost $ 4 billion to implement and save employers $ 9 billion a year. But
according to a survey by the Employment Policy Foundation of occupational safety
and health managers at Fortune 500 companies who had voluntarily implemented
ergonomic programs, the regulation will cost $ 91 billion per year.
However, after examining 2,000 pages of new data that OSHA questionably
inserted into the record so late that it was impossible for interested parties
to officially comment, EPF found that the regulation could cost $ 125.6 billion
per year.
Proponents assume that business will simply pay for these
costs themselves. What is most likely to happen is that business will be forced
to pass on their costs somewhere, either by lowering future wage increases,
reducing benefits, forcing layoffs, passing the costs on to their consumers, or
slowing growth of new jobs.
The regulation will also cripple nursing
homes dependent on Medicare, costing elderly and poor patients access to quality
health care. The rates that Medicare uses are fixed and new expenses this rule
would add cannot be passed on to patients who depend on this program. A cut in
service is the only option.
There are other serious questions about this
regulation: Specifically, OSHA has included a provision that requires employers
to compensate injured workers at 90 percent of their salary, encroaching into
the states' workers' compensation programs.
I held hearings on this rule
and many of its flaws were exposed. We found that OSHA itself played a
questionable role, paying contractors $ 10,000 each to testify at its public
hearings, a clear conflict of interest. As is required of it, OSHA held its own
hearings and received thousands and thousands of negative comments about this
rule. Not only did the agency not incorporate those comments, when it finally
did publish the rule, the language was actually worse than the first OSHA draft.
That's right - after the hearings and comments were in, OSHA added scope
and depth to the rule the public and its representatives in Congress had never
seen - making the rule's coverage even broader and more onerous.
The
bond of trust between government and the people it governs becomes eroded when
the government is not honest about the consequences associated with its
proposals. Since President Clinton has gone through the back-door to legislate
his agenda, Congress was left with no other option than to use the
appropriations process to block OSHA.
The constitutional process of
having checks and balances was something the Founding Fathers believed in
passionately, yet OSHA must feel otherwise since it finalized this regulation in
spite of bipartisan, bicameral votes ordering it to take more time.
It
is a true shame - and outrage - that a government agency has put politics ahead
of the interests of safety and health of the people of the United States. The
ergonomics regulation will clearly do much more harm than good.
GRAPHIC: Drawing
TYPE:
-LINKS-; Editorial Opinion
LOAD-DATE: December 13, 2000
