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As
I remember my brother today, I recall the terrible unjust
circumstances surrounding his death, the inadequacies of the
regulatory system designed to protect corporations not workers,
the lack of accountability of corporations and the unbalanced
scales of justice.
Capital
is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless
under compulsion from society"---Karl Marx
Details
of Gary ’s case and the OSHA “investigation”
are at http://garypuleio.blogspot.com.
Thanks
to blogger Mick Arran for writing about Gary at
http://puleiotower.blogspot.com
The
short video made by 1 investigator carrying a portable camera was
all that was deemed necessary after Gary was killed is posted at http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=15508585
Videos
also posted to:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=ED1FC267A0C0A4B0
Donna
Puleio Spadaro
http://workingclassmatters.blogspot.com
Letter to Editor:
Three years have passed this August 15th, since my brother, Gary Puleio, was killed on the job due to unsafe working conditions. I have chosen to honor his memory by becoming involved in the struggle for improved workplace safety so that other families do not have to suffer the horrible unnecessary loss that my family did.
Our family was devastated when Gary was killed at a concrete plant. Gary, had been employed there only 3 months as a cement truck driver.
He fell 25 feet to his death, from a cement tower, while shoveling gravel off the hopper to clean it. The company claimed Gary just wandered up there on his own at the end of his driving shift rather than being assigned this unpleasant task because he was the “new man”.
Our grief was compounded when this implausible story was passively accepted by
OSHA. After admitting no wrong doing, the company paid a $6000 fine for REPEAT violations. From the OSHA website, we learned that this company had multiple serious violations issued only months before my brother was killed. These were informally settled with reduced fines called “abatement” only a few weeks before his death.
Gary’s case illustrates the vast discrepancies that exist between workers access to OSHA and that of corporations. Corporations routinely “negotiate” with OSHA to downgrade fines through this process called “abatement” This process combined with inadequate workers’ compensation laws make it impossible to hold negligent employers criminally and civilly liable.
OSHA fines are not issued as punishment and no amount of money can ever compensate for the loss of life. These were the tired clichéd excuses OSHA gave our family to justify the paltry slap on the wrist fine issued for my brother’s death. However the issuance of trivial fines and citations results in no accountability nor any acknowledgement of responsibility on the part of the offending company.
Consider these appalling facts:
1. In the past 20 years, 170,000 workplace fatalities occurred but only about 1700 were considered by OSHA to be due to the “willful” violation of safety laws. Without a “willful” designation it is difficult for prosecutors to make a case that an employer was criminally liable and civil suits pursued by families are not likely to succeed.
2. The percentage of cases being downgraded from “willful” to less serious violations has been rising steadily. In 2001, the year my brother was killed, 60 percent of all cases were downgraded.
3. Of the mere 1700 “willful’ cases out of 170,000 fatalities in the past 20 years, only 196 were referred to prosecutors. In these 20 years there were only 81 convictions and only 16 carried jail sentences.
4. It is a MISDEMEANOR to kill a worker by willfully violating safety laws. The maximum sentence is 6 months in jail.
I
have come to realize that my brother’s death was not just an
isolated case of “bad luck”. The statistics I just cited amount
to something quite worse—a litany of employer indifference coupled
with the inaction and timidity of OSHA.
Here
is the scope of the problem—in 2002, 4.7 million workers were
injured, 5500 were killed and an estimated 50,000 died from
occupational diseases. On an average day, 150 workers lose their
lives as a result of workplace injuries and diseases and another
12,00 are injured.
OSHA
does not have the funding or staff to adequately oversee the safety
of the 100 million workers under its jurisdiction. OSHA’s current
budget of $475 million amounts to about $4 dollars per worker.
Federal OSHA has only about 900 safety inspectors and can only
inspect workplaces on average once every 100 years.
The
Bush administration has done nothing to correct this situation. It
has overturned or blocked dozens of workplace protections and
weakened job safety programs with such actions as repealing the
ergonomics standards. These standards would have led to a
significant reduction in the number one safety hazard in the US- the
occurrence of disabling repetitive motion illnesses and injuries. It
has killed dozens of worker protection measures including rules on
cancer causing substances, reactive chemicals and infectious
diseases like TB. The Bush administration has even refused to issue
a rule requiring employers to pay for personal protective equipment,
particularly important for immigrant and low wage workers.
While
trying to dismantle worker safety and health training programs, the
Bush administration has increased funding for outreach to employers.
It favors employer voluntary programs over enforcement and excludes
workers and unions.
Senator
John Kerry is well known for his support of issues of importance to
workers. Throughout his 20 year career as a U. S. senator he has
voted correctly on all of the workplace safety and health
legislation that has been brought before the U. S. Senate.
In
2000 and 2001 Senator Kerry voted against the efforts led by the
Bush Administration to kill the ergonomics standards. In 2001,
Senator Kerry voted in favor of legislation to prohibit unsafe
trucks and buses from entering the U. S. from Mexico. Citing
provisions of NAFTA, the Bush administration had proposed to open US
highways to Mexican trucks which were not required to meet the same
safety standards as American trucks.
Both
Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards support legislation to initiate
stronger OSHA penalties against employers who willfully violate
safety laws and allow workers to be exposed to hazards that resulted
in serious injury or death.
I
think of my brother every day and will do so especially on Election
Day 2004 as I cast my vote. I can never forget the terrible
circumstances surrounding his death nor the insulting story told by
the company about how he just “wandered up there on his own”.
But what stands out most painfully, is the inadequacy of the
regulatory system designed to protect workers and the injustices of
the current system. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “in
the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the
silence of our friends.”
Election
Day 2004 is the day we call for an end to the “silence” of the
very agencies assigned to protect workers from these injustices. We
must fight to make workplaces safer. We must toughen laws that make
the willful killing of workers a felony not a misdemeanor. The
downgrading and abatement of violations until they amount to little
more than a meaningless “slap on the wrist” must be stopped. Our
country cannot become a low wage economy where safety is ignored and
dead workers are an accepted cost of doing business.
Donna
Puleio Spadaro, MD
309 Warren Rd
Franklin, PA 16323
814-432-5450 home
814-437-7891 work
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