Congress has voted to remove new OSHA rules intended to reduce the number and severity of repetitive motion injuries affecting America's workforce. Labor leaders condemned the move as a "slap in the face" of working people.
OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, had issued the rules in November. The United States Senate voted 56 to 44 Tuesday night to revoke them. Six Democrats joined a united Republican contingent to scrap the rules and hand business a stunning victory over the interests of workers in the first major action of the 107th Congress. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives took the same action on a 223-206 vote.
(Note: To see a record of how the nation's legislative representatives voted you can click here to see the vote tally as kept by the AFL-CIO.)
Business groups lobbied heavily for the repeal. Repetitive motion is the leading cause of workplace injury, idling approximately 600,000 workers per year. The vote invoked the Congressional Review Act for the first time in history and permanently stripped authority from OSHA to determine work design standards, often called ergonomic standards.
"American machines receive regularly scheduled preventative maintenance," commented Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernard Brommer, "but today a majority of the U.S. Senate voted against preventing workplace injuries that
hurt and disable working Americans. The vote to repeal the new OSHA ergonomics standard is a slap in the face to Minnesotans and all Americans who work for a living."
Senator Paul Wellstone joined other Democrats who decried the measure from the floor of the Senate before the vote. "This is a class issue," the Star Tribune reported Wellstone as saying. "We have abandoned all sense of accountability for the nation's biggest job safety and health problem."
Ironically, the new OSHA ergonomic standards sacked by Senate action were initiated by Republican Labor Secretary, Elizabeth Dole in the early 1990s. An OSHA cost-benefit analysis projected savings of $9.1 billion from reductions in workday losses and worker compensation claims compared to a possible cost of $4.5 billion to enforce the standards.
Share
Congress has voted to remove new OSHA rules intended to reduce the number and severity of repetitive motion injuries affecting America’s workforce. Labor leaders condemned the move as a “slap in the face” of working people.
OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, had issued the rules in November. The United States Senate voted 56 to 44 Tuesday night to revoke them. Six Democrats joined a united Republican contingent to scrap the rules and hand business a stunning victory over the interests of workers in the first major action of the 107th Congress. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives took the same action on a 223-206 vote.
(Note: To see a record of how the nation’s legislative representatives voted you can click here to see the vote tally as kept by the AFL-CIO.)
Business groups lobbied heavily for the repeal. Repetitive motion is the leading cause of workplace injury, idling approximately 600,000 workers per year. The vote invoked the Congressional Review Act for the first time in history and permanently stripped authority from OSHA to determine work design standards, often called ergonomic standards.
“American machines receive regularly scheduled preventative maintenance,” commented Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernard Brommer, “but today a majority of the U.S. Senate voted against preventing workplace injuries that
hurt and disable working Americans. The vote to repeal the new OSHA ergonomics standard is a slap in the face to Minnesotans and all Americans who work for a living.”
Senator Paul Wellstone joined other Democrats who decried the measure from the floor of the Senate before the vote. “This is a class issue,” the Star Tribune reported Wellstone as saying. “We have abandoned all sense of accountability for the nation’s biggest job safety and health problem.”
Ironically, the new OSHA ergonomic standards sacked by Senate action were initiated by Republican Labor Secretary, Elizabeth Dole in the early 1990s. An OSHA cost-benefit analysis projected savings of $9.1 billion from reductions in workday losses and worker compensation claims compared to a possible cost of $4.5 billion to enforce the standards.