Jordan says it best:

Today, April 28, is Workers Memorial Day. Across the country, workers and labor unions will pause to remember the 15 Texas City employees and the more than 5,500 other workers killed in workplace incidents over the past year. Between 50 and 60 thousand workers perished from work-related illnesses caused by toxic materials like asbestos close to five million suffered injuries and illnesses. The toll is enormous: according to Liberty Mutual, the nation’s largest workers’ compensation insurance company, the direct cost of occupational injury and illness is $1 billion per week, with indirect costs many times higher.

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One of the first actions of the Bush administration was to repeal an OSHA standard that addressed the biggest source of injury facing American workers — ergonomic hazards. Year after year back, shoulder and wrist disorders make up one-third of all workplace injuries and illnesses. Instead of a standard that would have forced employers to address this workplace epidemic, OSHA substituted voluntary guidelines, along with a new innovation of the Bush administration: the Alliance – a voluntary information sharing partnership between industry associations and OSHA.

Setting up voluntary alliances as a replacement for mandatory standards has become a pattern for the agency and a means to accomplish the long-term goal of President Bush’s corporate supporters – making OSHA irrelevant.

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The political issues raging in this country – over court appointments, social security, terrorism and the war in Iraq – are important, but they tend to overshadow many of the concerns of the vast majority of people who are not politically engaged. But ask people if they think that workers injured on the job should suffer economically for the rest of their lives, ask people whether the jobs and chemicals should be considered safe until we manage to count the bodies or lungs of people who prove otherwise, ask people whether they think they have the power to make their workplaces safer or whether they think there is a role for laws and government enforcement – and you’ll probably get answers that don’t line up with those who are in power in Washington (or in most state capitals) today. The challenge is to organize them into a potent political force – not just in New York city and Boston, but in Wichita, Kansas, Houston Texas, Boise, Idaho and Atlanta, Georgia.