Today, a lot of numbers will be thrown around – the staggering number of workers who died gruesome deaths on the job last year, the paltry fines that employers responsible for those deaths paid, the months and years we've waited for Congress to revisit the Occupational Safety and Health Act to make it more relevant to our modern workforce.
There's good reason to reflect on those numbers. They tell us something important about our society and our relationship to work. They tell us that we have a long way to go before the real value of workers' time, effort, and dedication to their jobs is respected and honored.
40,000 Verizon workers are on strike. The contract dispute is complicated, but one of the core issues is the company's threat to move jobs from one location to another, like so many interchangeable, faceless component parts of a massive machine. The corporate mindset that undergirds the threat is the flipside of looking at workers as "assets." An asset can be something uniquely powerful and a source of strength when appreciated for its intrinsic value; or, an asset can be reduced to a dollar figure on a balance sheet, and it becomes just another fungible instrument of commerce.
Too many employers look at workers as assets in that second sense. It's an attitude that ensures fatality rates remain stubbornly high. There's a vicious cycle at work: skimpy paychecks and bad working conditions lead to high turnover rates, high turnover rates lead short-sighted employers to think of workers as interchangeable cogs, their lack of respect for workers leads to unsafe working conditions, and the cycle starts all over. It churns and grinds and wears down many workers to the point where the fight to reclaim dignity and respect looks almost unwinnable.
Might a higher ethical standard for employers break that cycle? Sure, but where to begin? I got an interesting glimpse into one path forward last week at a screening of A Day's Work, co-sponsored by the University of Baltimore's Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics, CPR, and Baltimore's Public Justice Center. The film centers on the death of Day Davis, a 21-year-old temp worker who was killed 90 minutes into his first shift on the first day of his first real job because his employers failed to give him basic safety training. It is a powerful documentary that explores the health and safety implications of the temp work economy (CPR's take on that, here), which by some accounts is responsible for all net job growth since the Great Recession.
The audience was mostly students from UB whose business ethics coursework drew them to the screening. They were amazed when I shared some statistics about how infrequently OSHA and its state-plan partners inspect dangerous worksites, the penalties that follow even the most egregious fatality cases, and the fact that our laws are so outdated that OSHA's attorneys have to grapple with multiple conceptions of what the definition of "employer" is, even under their single authorizing statute.
Remarkably, those same students – future business leaders – got just as fired up as I did about the need for stronger criminal enforcement to put more pressure on employers and ensure all their workers go home safe and healthy at the end of every day.
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Matt Shudtz | April 28, 2016
Today, a lot of numbers will be thrown around – the staggering number of workers who died gruesome deaths on the job last year, the paltry fines that employers responsible for those deaths paid, the months and years we’ve waited for Congress to revisit the Occupational Safety and Health Act to make it more relevant […]
Mollie Rosenzweig | April 22, 2016
Just as we predicted back in December, foods created with CRISPR technology (short for clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats) are entering the food supply beyond the reach of federal regulators. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would not regulate white button mushrooms that scientists altered to stop them from browning. […]
Brian Gumm | April 21, 2016
Lisa Heinzerling, a Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar and Georgetown University Professor of Law, published a piece this week on The Conversation that explores the ongoing political debate over environmental regulations. In particular, Heinzerling calls out the often misleading claims about the costs of safeguards that protect our air, water, health, and wild places: […]
Robert L. Glicksman | April 21, 2016
Yesterday, I joined four other witnesses in testifying about the Endangered Species Act (ESA) at a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing. Most of the witnesses and House members who attended focused on a variety of complaints about the ESA’s provisions governing listing and delisting of species and called for changes to the law […]
Matthew Freeman | April 20, 2016
Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar (and board member) Rob Glicksman is on Capitol Hill testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee on the Interior this afternoon at 2 pm ET. The hearing will focus on “barriers to delisting” of species under the Endangered Species Act. He’ll cover four major points in his testimony, which he […]
James Goodwin | April 19, 2016
Several weeks ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivered perhaps the most important speech on the U.S. regulatory system in recent memory at a forum on regulatory capture organized by the Administrative Conference of the United States. In it, she described how the regulatory system was not working for the people as it should be – or […]
Evan Isaacson | April 19, 2016
Yesterday, the Chesapeake Bay Program released its latest estimate of nutrient and sediment pollution in the Bay watershed. The annual model run of the program's Watershed Model shows that the estimated nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment loads decreased by three percent, three percent, and four percent, respectively, compared to 2014 levels. These are important improvements, but […]
Eric Panicco | April 18, 2016
Eric Panicco, a candidate for Master of Arts in Sustainability at Wake Forest University, is undertaking an independent study for CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro. On August 3 of last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Clean Power Plan. It was a historic moment for President Obama, one he commemorated by observing, “We’re […]
Matthew Freeman | April 15, 2016
Center for Progressive Reform President Robert Verchick has an op-ed in The New Orleans Advocate this morning about Gulf Coast efforts to prepare for the effects of climate change that we’re too late to prevent. A New Orleans resident himself, Verchick and his family suffered through Katrina, so he knows what he’s talking about when […]