Cheap, Disposable Labor
Feb 24th, 2006 at 6:52 am by Susie
The Republican quest for throwaway workers continues, and BushCo’s OSHA is more than happy to help:
Scientists working for the chromium industry withheld data about the metal’s health risks while the industry campaigned to block strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemical, according to a scientific journal report published yesterday.
The allegations, by researchers at George Washington University and the Washington-based Public Citizen Health Research Group, are based on secret industry documents obtained by the authors.
They come just days before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is to announce its new standard for workplace exposure to hexavalent chromium — a known carcinogen handled by 380,000 U.S. workers in the steel, aerospace, electroplating and other industries.
Documents in the report, published in the peer-reviewed online journal Environmental Health, show that the industry conducted a pivotal study that found a fivefold increase in lung cancer deaths from moderate exposures to chromium but never published the results or gave them to OSHA. Company-sponsored scientists later reworked the data in a way that made the risk disappear.
OSHA has not said what the new limit will be. But sources close to the agency have been told to expect a standard that would allow five times more exposure than it had initially proposed — a shift that would be a victory for the industry, saving it billions of dollars in upgrades and plant closures.
I expect businesses will soon drop health insurance completely and offer free cremation instead.
Thresholds Of Decency…
In our complex 21st century, tens of millions of us experience what has traditionally been meant by the word community in the organizations where we work. It is in that context that we depend on other people we know for……
When a killer whale washes up on shore, up on the Northwest coastline, it has to be treated as a toxic waste site. Being at the top of the ocean’s food chain, all the industrial poisons we dump into our rivers (which flow downhill to the ocean) get concentrated in the top predators.
Soon, we will need a Yucca Mountain site to bury the cremated ashes of American workers.
Using OSHA’s own research, if OSHA adopts the 5 micrograms of hexavalent chromium per cubic foot of air exposure standard, 10 to 45 excess deaths per 1,000 workers will occur. And that’s BEFORE you factor in the 5-fold increase in lung cancer found in the suppressed industry research.
45 excess deaths per 1,000 workers times the 380,000 workers in the industry means OSHA is willing to sentence 17,100 workers to death.
http://mainstusa.blogspot.com/2006/02/osha-prepared-to-sentence-at-least.html