Make Health and Safety a Part of Global Struggles Against Imperialism,Racism,and Other Oppressions

Introduction

Let me thank the Section for all the good work that you/we do. For example, one of the members of our section, Jane Thomason with the California Nurses Association (CNA), is going to head off to Standing Rock in a few days. I thank you, and specifically the people who nominated me, for this award, which I believe is less about me, and more about the community of occupational safety and health activists that we continue to build and maintain, based in California, but joined by many of you across the country. We are scattered, or you might say, strategically located, among different unions, community groups and NGOs, government agencies, projects like the Labor Occupational Health Program and the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, universities, and some are even working for employers. I particularly want to remember Julia Quint, our premier scientist, who was so much more to us, who died almost a year ago, and to thank Garrett Brown, my co-conspirator for 20 years at the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA), and Suzanne Marria, and the Labor Occupational Health Program and Worksafe crews.

Her History

I grew up in the 1950s, which was an industrial bloodbath, and I learned about workplace injuries through the experiences of the adults I knew. I became independently involved in radical social movements when I was in junior high school, and this work has continued all my life. I learned about health and safety from the predominantly rank-and-file movements of workers—the Black Lung Association, the Dodge Revolutionary Unity Movement, health-care workers organizing 1199 in New York, and many others. And I continue to learn from workers organizing around their own health and safety, from Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, who organize in garment and other sectors, to the highly organized health-care unions.

When I got an apprenticeship in 1973 in the International Association of Machinists local 289, I was the first woman, and the first dyke, in the trades for the City of Seattle since World War II, and the first woman in local 289 which covered the Pacific Northwest. For the almost four years of my apprenticeship, I was harassed, and at times threatened. Mechanics were still blowing clouds of asbestos containing dust out of the drums when we did a brake job. In one shop, the apprentices washed the floor with solvent every Friday. I drove home from work those days somewhat impaired and with a big headache. I used to read the national International Association of Machinists paper, which at one point stated that the average age at retirement for a machinist was 63.5 years, and the average age of death was 64, and I said to myself, well, that’s a bad deal.

I worked at the shipyards in San Francisco as an outside machinist. Over the weekends, laborers clad in Tyvek suits and respirators would converge on a ship pulled up to the pier and gut it. We would come into work Monday mornings and every surface was covered with a layer of dust some of which was asbestos lagging.

In 1983, I went to work for the post office as a mail-processing equipment mechanic and became involved with the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), eventually becoming the local’s health and safety representative. With the letter carriers, we created a campaign around health and safety that resulted in willful serious citations from OSHA, a regional audit, the resignation of the San Francisco post office’s safety director, and the San Francisco general mail facility having to move a bunch of newly installed large mail-processing machines, so that we could reach the exits.

So it happened that while we were raising a ruckus about health and safety, and postal inspectors were following me around, I was involved in planning the Stop AIDS Now or Else Blockade of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1989. (We unfurled a banner across the span that got on the front page with the slogan AIDS = Genocide, Silence = Death, Fight Back.) So these two parts of my life were not compatible, and I ended up quitting the post office. After Cal/OSHA decided my years of union health and safety experience didn’t qualify me to take the test for a safety inspector, I took some prerequisites at the community colleges and went to the University of California Berkeley program for industrial hygiene, and that’s how I started my illustrious career, working briefly at Labor Occupational Health Program and then Cal/OSHA.

Let me stop and say that it took some courage for me to go to public health school at the age of 40, with 20 years as a blue-collar worker. I knew while I was working that I was being exposed to asbestos and solvents. The best foreman I ever had was dying of liver disease having been a carburetor repairman working up to his elbows in chlorinated solvents, and by the way, he was denied workers comp. Like almost every worker I had to put it to the back of my mind in order to stay on the job. So the idea of focusing on these exposures now was frightening, as it was for a worker I met during a Cal/OSHA inspection who learned that he and his son to whom he had taught the trade had overexposures to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium.

California Health and Safety History

The 1970 U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act was achieved by workers’ struggles and paid for many times over with workers’ lives. It created a national floor for safety and created a law enforcement model. OSHA and Cal/OSHA are underfunded and imperfect instruments, under the political control of, at best, corporate democratic administrations. And yet, I think the biggest contribution I have made to occupational safety and health is through our enforcement efforts, either in conducting inspections or through developing and implementing regulations. In almost every inspection, OSHA gets something fixed in the workplace.

Employers do not voluntarily comply no matter how reasonable, friendly, or scientific you are. The San Francisco Airport Commission in 1994 refused to give police officers hepatitis B vaccine, although the Bloodborne Pathogens Standard had required it for over two years, and the officers had had exposures. The Airport Commission was holding out on vaccination as a bargaining item in the upcoming contract. In another example, a few years ago, a University of California hospital had to be cited and fought us for two years after that over their policy that required emergency department nurses taking home contaminated scrubs to launder. (With the support of the union, the California Nurses Association, the policy was eventually changed.)

One of our major achievements in California was the aerosol transmissible disease standard. After the feds dropped their proposed TB standard, then chief John Howard assigned Bob Nakamura and me to look into developing a standard in California. The aerosol transmissible disease project lasted six years and involved several hundred stakeholders, ten formal advisory meetings, and many more presentations and professional meetings. Many of the people in this room and this section worked on this standard, and only time prevents me from calling them out.

The Aerosol Transmissible Disease Standard isn’t perfect, particularly because we had to adopt, with some important modifications, the dominant infection control paradigm which divides aerosol transmissible diseases into the airborne category, which requires isolation and the use of respirators, and the droplet category which does not, although respirators provide better protection against inhalation of any aerosol. But the standard does include specifications for airborne infection isolation and respirators, training, medical services, and post-exposure follow-up. Soon after the standard became effective, Garrett Brown, with the assistance of the California Department of Public Health, issued the first set of serious citations due to exposures of employees to meningitis, two of whom became seriously ill related to the hospital’s illegal and irresponsible lack of exposure investigations, notifications, and post-exposure prophylaxis.

I think I have never been so proud of our community of OHS folks as when we confronted the federal globally harmonized system amendments to the hazard communications regulation. We were told that we had to modify California’s regulation to be consistent with the federal OSHA which had abolished the one positive study rule, the floor or source lists, and the requirement that manufacturers and importers have written hazard determination procedures. Over the next few months, as it became clear that director Christine Baker was being pressured by manufacturers to adopt the federal rule without any modification, a coalition of occupational health and safety folks emerged. The national unions intervened with OSHA. At the end of the two-year process, California did the best federal OSHA would permit us to do and retained some version of each of those requirements, although, as a state plan, they only apply to California manufacturers and importers. We were not allowed to fix other problems. Ultimately, the globally harmonized system has to be fixed nationally. Important regulations are still pending, notably reducing exposures to lead.

Workers Have a Right to Government Protection

OSHA was never enough of a program to effectively protect workers, but what do you expect from a law signed by Nixon? And while we have made some good regulations in California over the years and conducted some great inspections, the number of people available for inspections is woefully low. Under current conditions, OSHA and Cal/OSHA do not provide a credible threat.

We are now at the beginning, I hope, of a broad-based challenge to white supremacy, war, and capitalism that may finally go beyond what was achieved by previous mass movements. Today’s movement holds promise to reinvigorate occupational safety and health, but it is by no means a certainty. Union density is very low. Most of the people I organize with supporting the movement for Black Lives, in Gay Shame, in environmental justice, and in the Palestine solidarity movement, have never been in a union.

It is hard for progressive activists to see any value in the government, while police and the national guard attack the protestors at the Dakota Access Pipeline, as the police kill unarmed people of color, as the government fights wars everywhere, as governments refuse to take meaningful action to protect the environment. The right-wing campaigns defaming social security, the campaign waged by Democrats and Republicans against single-payer community controlled health care, the anti-regulatory pronouncements of everyone from Reagan to Obama, and the laws that have effectively prevented federal OSHA from issuing many needed regulations do not lead our social movements to view regulation or regulators as our friends.

But regulation is necessary. The imbalance of power between workers and employers requires government to intervene. Workers can not remain mobilized on the same issues forever. We need to be able to rely on what we have already accomplished so that we can move on to other issues. OSHA regulations should do that.

This then becomes our challenge—to continue, as most of us here do, to participate in or actively support worker struggles and struggles against imperialism, racism, and other oppressions, and to raise and support occupational safety and health issues as part of those global struggles. I am personally very grateful for the work of the California Nurses Association, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and other unions in bringing the labor movement into these issues, and bringing these issues into the labor movement. The need for occupational safety and health is still here. Workers are still being injured, getting sick, and dying. Our lives are at stake. OSHA may need re-empowerment, or we may need a different agency or paradigm. But we must force the government to act on behalf of workers or we must replace it with one that will.