President-elect George Bush has promised to create ”a kinder, gentler America.” Some of the first people beseeching him to make good on that pledge will be working men and women.
An extensive Tribune investigation has found that President Reagan`s emphasis on deregulation has left millions of workers vulnerable to death and serious injury from hazards in the workplace.
As vice president, Bush has been a chief architect of that drive. Reagan appointed Bush on their third day in office in 1981 to head a task force to root out ”excessive and inefficient” government regulations. Reagan believed he needed to roll back a wide range of consumer, environmental and worker-safety protections to spark economic growth and bring the country out of recession.
But as Bush prepares to assume the presidency, the political momentum appears to be swinging against deregulation.
Opinion surveys show that a majority of Americans believe the Reagan administration has gone too far in its deregulatory efforts, particularly in the area of worker safety.
Labor leaders are preparing for the first time in years to push for legislation to increase penalties for violations of workplace safety standards and to revitalize the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Labor Department agency charged with protecting workers.
And leaders of the Democratic-controlled Congress see the worker-safety issue as a potent way to test Bush`s willingness to compromise and his commitment to the vision of a more compassionate country.
Even conservative analysts agree that the time for making major cuts in government regulation seems to have passed.
”There would appear to be little prospect for the next president to accomplish substantial overall reductions in government regulation,” Jeffrey A. Eisenach wrote in a new book, ”Mandate for Leadership III,” in which he and other conservative thinkers outline their policy recommendations for the Bush administration.
In fact, Eisenach, a former Reagan administration budget official, said he believes the return to greater regulation already has begun. In a sharp reversal from Reagan`s first term, he said, government agencies passed a total of 451 new regulations last year while eliminating only 85.
Still, given the pressing need to lower the federal budget deficit, it is unlikely that Congress will approve significant new spending to beef up OSHA`s enforcement staff. Reagan slashed the number of OSHA field inspectors from 1,300 to 1,050, adding to a general perception that the agency is overwhelmed in trying to ensure the safety of workers at millions of job sites.
If deficit pressures prevent Congress from demanding a sweeping reinvigoration of the government`s regulatory apparatus, Bush will continue to control policy in this area through vast administrative powers that enable him to make the final decision on many health and safety rules without congressional review.
Consequently, labor leaders plan to ask Congress to test some innovative solutions, such as requiring most corporations to start joint labor-management safety committees at all medium and large plants.
The idea, already in use at some companies, is to set up a mechanism to resolve safety problems at many job sites without placing further strain on OSHA`s limited resources.
”We`d like to try to build competence and oversight among people in the workplace itself to deal with safety and health problems,” said Margaret Seminario, associate director in the occupational safety and health division at the AFL-CIO.
Lobbyists for different industries are split on the value of this approach, and Seminario conceded that ”it is still an open question whether there will be any agreement on how to improve the law.”
Waiting anxiously to see what happens are millions of workers in high-risk manufacturing and construction industries who believe that OSHA has failed to protect them adequately from exposure to toxic chemicals and other traditional hazards.
People in the meatpacking industry and a wide range of clerical jobs complain that OSHA also has been slow to address vast recent increases in newer types of injuries, such as those caused by repetitive job motions.
Besides cutting the number of OSHA inspectors, Reagan in 1981 expanded the power of the White House Office of Management and Budget to reject or demand changes in any safety regulations if budget officials calculated that the expense to industry of implementing them would be too high.
Budget office officials repeatedly have used that power to block standards lowering limits on exposure of workers to dangerous chemicals. In several instances, budget officials have relented only after federal courts intervened and ordered them to issue the regulations.
OSHA officials now are hurrying to try to change admittedly outdated exposure limits for 600 hazardous substances before Reagan leaves office. Union officals have complained that many of the new limits still will not provide adequate protection to workers.
Assistant Labor Secretary John Pendergrass, who heads OSHA, counters that the agency has done ”a good job” under Reagan. He cites figures kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggesting that the number of deaths caused by job- related accidents has declined from 4,400 in 1980 to 3,400 last year.
But experts at the National Academy of Sciences have questioned the reliability of the figures. Other government and private scientists have estimated that the actual death toll is two or three times higher and could be increasing.
Union leaders say parts of Bush`s record suggest he will be as dogged as Reagan in seeking further cuts in regulation, but his record in deregulation is not that clear.
One of his task force`s chief efforts focused on a proposal to overturn an OSHA policy that requires employers to make engineering changes to vent toxic gases from work sites where feasible. Many industries would prefer to take a cheaper option and simply equip any exposed workers with filtered breathing masks.
The task force and the Office of Management and Budget have urged OSHA officials repeatedly throughout the Reagan years to allow greater use of the respirators even though the agency`s scientists say all published studies indicate that they are not as effective.
But as recently as last March, Bush met with members of the task force and ”expressed his personal interest and concern” in making this and other changes, according to a memo prepared shortly after the meeting by Assistant Labor Secretary Michael Baroody.
John Martonik, OSHA`s deputy director of health standards programs, testified at a Senate hearing in April that members of Bush`s vice
presidential staff also supported efforts by budget officials to weaken standards limiting worker exposure to noise and requiring corporations to inform workers about hazardous chemicals at their job sites.
On the other hand, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) said Bush ”personally intervened” in 1981 to keep the budget agency from completely ditching plans for the hazard-communication standard. Bush also kept budget officials from tossing out a standard limiting exposure to cotton dust.
Meanwhile, in an effort to strengthen OSHA`s enforcement powers, labor leaders plan to ask Congress to increase the civil fines and the maximum criminal sentence of six months in jail for violations of OSHA standards.
Justice Department officials endorsed the idea last week in a move suggesting that some administration officials acknowledge that Reagan`s effort to make OSHA less adversarial and more cooperative to business has failed in key areas.
But even if the OSHA officials think Reagan did not dismantle worker safety regulation, thousands of workers and their union leaders think he did.
