If You Like Workplace Fatalities, You'll Love This GOP Plan To Kill OSHA!
Make falling to your death from a burning building because your boss locked the doors great again.
Every safety regulation is written in blood.
In 1911, 146 garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, because their boss had the brilliant money-saving idea of locking the doors to the stairwells and exits in order to prevent them from taking unauthorized breaks. The streets were littered with the bodies of people who threw themselves out of the windows, hoping that would be a safer escape.
One of the witnesses to that horrific moment in American history was Frances Perkins. Already a suffragist, consumer and labor rights activist, and sociology professor, Perkins was so horrified by the fire that she committed herself to improving labor standards in New York and elsewhere. In 1934, after FDR appointed her Secretary of Labor, she became the first woman in a presidential Cabinet (and to this day, the longest serving Secretary of Labor in US history).
As Secretary of Labor, Perkins created the Bureau of Labor Standards in order to improve working conditions for the American labor force. In 1971, the Bureau of Labor Standards became the more comprehensive Occupational Safety and Health Administration, better known as OSHA.
Over the years, OSHA has instituted regulations that have protected American workers from getting hurt or killed on the job
So, naturally, a Republican wants it gone.
For the third time in as many years, Rep. Andy Biggs has introduced the NOSHA Act, an act that would abolish OSHA in favor of letting states set their own safety standards.
Of course, many states will not have the funding necessary to do that job, but that’s kind of whole the point, isn’t it?
The states with the highest rates of worker deaths in 2021 were
Wyoming (10.4 per 100,000 workers)
North Dakota (9.0 per 100,000 workers)
Montana (8.0 per 100,000 workers)
Louisiana (7.7 per 100,000 workers)
Alaska (6.2 per 100,000 workers)
New Mexico (6.2 per 100,000 workers)
How many of those states do we actually think would prevent more deaths by managing workplace safety themselves?
“OSHA’s existence is yet another example of the federal government creating agencies to address issues that are more appropriately handled by state governments and private employers,” Biggs said the last time he introduced his ridiculous bill. “Arizona, and every other state, has the constitutional right to establish and implement their own health and safety measures, and is more than capable of doing so. It’s time that we fight back against the bloated federal government and eliminate agencies that never should have been established in the first place. I will not let OSHA push Arizona around with their bureaucratic regulations and urge my colleagues to support my effort to eliminate this unconstitutional federal agency."
So far it’s never gone anywhere, but given the fact that Presidents Trump and Musk have been going around obliterating every government agency they can think of, it’s a whole lot more on the table than it was before.
During his first term, Trump gutted OSHA, and he’s promised to do worse in his next. Which will be very hard, because in his first term, his administration killed a yearslong project that was specifically dedicated to preparing hospitals, nursing homes and other medical facilities … for a pandemic.
Because when will one of those happen, right?
Also, on Monday, Trump demanded that every regulatory agency kill 10 regulations for every new one they implement, which should work out just great. Surely no one will die or be left bankrupt or get food poisoning or anything like that. Surely businesses will do what’s necessary to protect their employees and customers, even if it would cost more than the lawsuits would if they didn’t bother.
Just like some people who run the country don’t care if people are killed on the job if they think they can get away with blaming it on “DEI” or whatever buzz term they’re on by then.
Every safety regulation is written in blood. Each of those regulations exists because someone died or was severely hurt or made severely sick by something that regulation would have prevented. The first job safety regulation, the Massachusetts Factory Act of 1877, was passed after The Pemberton Mill Collapse — caused because the greedy new owners of the mill made it “profitable” by shoving more machinery into it than it could handle, and it collapsed, killing 145 workers (mostly women but some children) and injuring 300 more. (Lawrence would later be the site of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, better known as the Bread and Roses Strike, a year after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned.)
No one is coming up with random unfair regulations just to hurt the feelings of “job creators” or because they want to destroy American businesses. But OSHA exists because companies locked people in buildings to ensure they weren’t taking unauthorized breaks, because they overloaded buildings with more machinery than they could handle. It has provided a recourse for employees who believe their safety isn’t being considered by their employers, and, according to a report published by the AFL-CIO, it has saved almost 700,000 lives and likely prevented millions of injuries since it was implemented.
In 1970, about 38 workers died a day from workplace safety issues. In 2023, that number reduced to 15. Injuries and illnesses went from “10.9 incidents per 100 workers in 1972 to 2.4 per 100 in 2023.”
Doesn’t seem like an America we’d want to go back to.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Andy Biggs walks into a bar. He later dies from alcohol poisoning from tainted hootch that was unregulated. No one cares and the world is a better place with his passing. The end.
Just speaking on Triangle Shirtwaist...
My high school algebra teacher was an older Jewish woman who came to Tennessee from New York City, a few years after WWII. (Her husband was a chemist at Oak Ridge.)
One day in her class in my junior year, we had a fire drill. We had all been through plenty of fire drills by then and didn't take it seriously. We chatted, laughed, milled around, enjoyed the fresh air and went back to class once the all clear bell sounded.
Back in the classroom, she was FURIOUS with us and gave an angry lecture about how deadly building fires could be. I think she might have even been on the verge of tears.
I'm not sure how many of us really took her lecture to heart, but we behaved during fire drills after that.
It wasn't till years later I realized something -- a older Jewish woman from New York probably grew up hearing about the horrors of Triangle Shirtwaist. I found her obituary and she was born in Queens in 1918, so I think that makes sense.
Incidentally, she was one of my favorite teachers. She wasn't one of the fun, cool ones, but she was a great math instructor, and is one of the reasons I did well in college calculus and engineering classes, and still love math today.