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From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
July
2, 2003
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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July
2, 2003
The Bush Administration's
War on Workers
Causing Repetitive
Stress
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
and ROBERT WEISSMAN
In what appears an almost calculated move to demonstrate
its disdain for worker health and safety, the Bush administration
yesterday revoked a requirement that employers keep records on
ergonomics injuries.
The rule would have required employers
to check a box on their workplace injury and illness log if an
employee suffered an ergonomic injury. Ergonomics injuries include
repetitive stress injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
Issued by Bill Clinton's Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on his administration's
last day in office, the rule was immediately suspended by the
Bush administration.
Two years later, the Bush OSHA has concluded
that checking a box is too much to ask of employers.
"OSHA concluded that an additional
recordkeeping column would not substantially improve the national
injury statistics," says OSHA Administrator John Henshaw,
"nor would it be of benefit to employers and workers because
the column would not provide additional information useful to
identifying possible causes or methods to prevent injury."
Fancy that.
Throughout the 1990s, a controversy raged
in Washington over issuance of a rule to require employers to
address  ergonomics hazards. Heavily
lobbied and funded by UPS and other employers whose workers continue
to experience an epidemic of ergonomic injuries, Republicans
repeatedly included appropriations riders which prohibited the
Clinton administration from issuing such a rule. The Clinton
administration didn't fight too hard to advance the rule -- even
though there is widespread public understanding of the severity
and extent of ergonomics injuries, and an eagerness to prevent
them.
The Clinton administration finally issued
its ergonomics rule at the end of its second term, along with
dozens of other postponed regulations. As with virtually all
of those last-minute regulations, the Bush administration suspended
the ergonomics rule, and then revoked it. Voluntary measures
would be enough, the Bush guardians of worker well-being said.
All that was left was the reporting requirement,
which the administration now has quashed on the grounds that
it wouldn't do much.
It is true that a mere reporting requirement
wouldn't mandate workplace changes to reduce ergonomic risks,
though that's a strange argument for an administration that eliminated
regulations that would have mandated such risk reduction.
And although its impact would have been
modest, a reporting requirement would have helped alert employers
to hazardous workplace conditions, and it would have provided
better national data.
The administration apparently wants neither
of these things, since they might impel action by individual
employers and the federal government.
Anyone who has experienced the agony
of a repetitive stress injury, or knows anyone who has, can appreciate
the folly and cruelty of this approach.
"Just because the government is
not going to require employers to track these injuries, and just
because the government is not going to enforce a safety standard,
doesn't mean that workers will stop becoming ill or permanently
disabled on the job," notes AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
with disgust. Sweeney calls the administration's rule revocation
evidence of a "head in the sand" approach to ergonomic
injuries.
Every year, roughly a million people
in the United States suffer from workplace-related musculoskeletal
disorders (mostly ergonomics injuries) so severe they must take
time off from work, according to Peg Seminario, director of occupational
safety and health for the AFL-CIO. That's twice the number actually
reported by employers. The canceled ergonomics rule -- not the
reporting requirement, but the rule actually requiring employees
to reduce ergonomics hazards -- was projected to avert half of
those injuries, she says.
In fact, the injuries are so frequent
and serious, Seminario says, that employers who take steps to
avert them have rapid payback in worker's compensation savings.
The "arguments in the political
arena are totally contradicted by the experience in the real
world of the workplace," she says. Employers "see that
by taking fairly straightforward steps they can significantly
reduce and in some cases eliminate these injuries. In six months
or a year, they've got their investments paid for, because these
injuries are so costly."
"But the ideology and the opposition
to regulation [has been] stronger and [has] trumped the economic
reality," she says.
The stomped-out reporting requirement
is just the latest manifestation of the ideological campaign
against rules to protect workers in the United States.
More than 5,000 U.S. workers die annually
from traumatic injuries, and nearly 60,000 from occupational
disease.
These tens of thousands dying every year
-- along with the millions suffering workplace injuries annually
-- are the victims of unbridled corporate violence, aided and
abetted by government officials and Members of Congress who,
as Sweeney says, choose the head in-the-sand approach.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action. They are
co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.)
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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