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The Daily Routine
Posted by The Exploited Intern on Aug 05 2010
Blog >>

I bet you wake up in the morning, enjoy your favorite breakfast of cereal and coffee, and head off to work –with the relative certainty that you will return home in the evening. However, on April 5th, 29 Americans woke up and left for work just like any other day, but never returned to their families because they were killed by an explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.

Those 29 were just a fraction of the 5,000 U.S. workers that die a year on the job. I recently attended a bill mark up hearing with the Education and Labor House Committee for the Miner’s Safety and Health Act of 2010, HR 5663. This bill introduces new policies to protect miners and other American workers, such as toughening enforcement against employers who commit serious violations and raising penalties to $12,000 for severe OSHA violations and $120,000 for willful and repeat violations. HR5663 also increases protection for whistle blowers by prohibiting employers from retaliating against workers for reporting job hazards, illnesses, or injuries, and giving workers the right to refuse unsafe work and still keep their job.

This new legislation sounded reasonable to me, but apparently not to the GOP. Yes, the GOP agreed, we know we need to protect the coal miners, but what about the employers? Apparently, it isn’t fair to employers to increase fines for violations that they KNEW about, didn’t fix, and then as a result one of their employees was seriously hurt or killed. Right, of course, actually seriously punishing an employer for knowingly ignoring a serious violation that resulted in a serious injury is so unfair. I mean, if the worker wanted to protect him or herself, he or she could always say “Um… so about this job you want me to do, the way you want me to use the equipment is really unsafe, so I would like to skip it, and live instead.”

Of course, workers can’t really say that, and still have the assurance of having a job the next day. HR 5663 can change that. Hopefully HR5663 will be passed so the usual morning routine will always be followed by the happy return home after a long day’s work.

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