Title: OHS Section Commentary
Author:
Section/SPIG: Occupational Health and Safety
Issue Date:
Maggie Robbins
maggie@hesperian.org
Thoughts on the Loss of the AFL-CIO Health & Safety Department
Our efforts to improve working conditions related to OHS have just become more difficult. With the loss of the small, but dedicated, skilled, and effective H&S Department of the AFL-CIO, we have lost the single clear voice advocating for workers’ health and safety in the United States. (Our colleague Jordan Barab had written well about this at
<http://spewingforth.blogspot.com/2005/03/new-afl-cio-wither-safety-health.html>.)
This loss reinforces the need for the rest of us to create and expand our linkages to each other, and to the broader social justice and human rights causes in the United States and globally. Our country, to survive, needs to create and maintain good jobs. This includes safe jobs, but also jobs with decent pay, decent working conditions, and where workers have the right, and the ability, to speak for their interests on the job without fear of being harassed, fired, or worse. (The ILO has articulated this concept nicely; see <http://www.ilo.org/public/english/decent.htm>.) This isn’t just about work for some abstract people somewhere in the United States, it is about each of us at our work, our families at their work, our neighbors, and the people who help us get to work each day, who educate our children, and who help us have food on the table at night.
We must struggle as health and safety professionals, academics, researchers, and workers, to maintain our working conditions, our rights, and our freedoms, as we continue working for the rights of others. We need to keep speaking up about the need for improving OHS research, training, regulations, and enforcement. We need to keep asking the right research questions on causes and solutions for dangerous workplaces. We need to keep reporting the harm we find, even if our employers or funders don’t want to hear it. We need to keep defending our colleagues attacked for their pursuit of safer workplaces. We need to keep talking to the press, to our peers, to the government, to employers, and to workers about the dire need for safer workplaces, for better treatment and compensation for injured workers, for more workers’ control over conditions in the workplace, and for expanding workers’ rights. We can’t shrink from what we know is a hard row to hoe just because the ground is getting still harder.
The debate going on within and about the union movement in the United States right now is important. How can the union movement reverse its numerical and density declines? How can working people, unionized or not, gain or regain influence over the policies and laws of our government and the actions of our employers? How can we create more and better jobs for people without jobs? How can we reverse the power of multinational corporations to direct state, national, and international economic policies in their favor?
(Jordan also collected some of the opining on this debate at
<http://spewingforth.blogspot.com/2005/06/so-what-hells-going-on-with-labor.html>.)
The rises and falls of the U.S. labor movement have been analyzed in great detail by others with more historical perspective than I have. My short-term view of the labor movement since I began paying attention to it about 20 years or so ago tells me this. The crisis in the labor movement has been growing for decades, since before I was born. And this decline is both a cause of and a result of the lack of a movement in the United States that articulates and advocates for the human rights and dignity of ordinary people. Most U.S. workers do not have a clear and broad analysis of why their work and economic life has become more insecure, nor how to change this. It seems like a zero-sum game in which if you win, I lose. If workers in Alabama win a factory, workers in the Chicago lose one. If workers in California demand higher wages and health insurance, workers in India will take their jobs away. If we push for safer, cleaner factories here, we will lose them to some place else that will accept the dirt and danger. The labor movement overall is providing neither analysis nor solutions to these framings of the issue. The solution of voting for the latest union-neutral, free-trade-loving Democrat does not ring true. Or at least not true enough to inspire a movement.
Active worker involvement, judgment, and action are essential to achieve and maintain safe working conditions. Creating and supporting active, confident, self-directed rank-and-file leaders is not familiar to the staff and leaders in many of our unions, and therefore is not a priority. The unions’ week-to-week priorities are focused on the next bargaining session, the next grievance meeting, or the next political fight, not on the long-term work of developing and supporting rank-and-file leaders and self-directed activism. Some unions are really good at “mobilizing” their members to the fights the staff and officers decided upon. These may be important fights, and may even be related to health and safety, but these methods do not organize workers to become activists in their own right. To create a groundswell of support for safer workplaces, we need knowledge and activism at the worksite level across the country. All the expert testimony and well-documented reports in the world do not win us better OHS laws and enforcement unless there is a worker movement to get them through Congress and the President. This is equally true for defending other workers’ rights. The lack of this kind of union movement, on top of the lack of compelling analysis to guide the political demands of workers, was painfully visible as we watched the re-election of the current anti-union, anti-health, pro-corporate administration.
At the end of the day, whether some affiliates leave the AFL-CIO in July or not, it can’t help but underline the crisis we find ourselves in as working people. Whatever comes of it, our job this year and next will not be too different. As one of our own, Linda Rae Murray, has reminded us in the past, “We need to be clear who the enemy is.” It is not John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO or Andy Stern of SEIU, or any of the other union leaders at the top or in the trenches. It is greed in the form of unbridled capital accumulation. It is greed in the form of denying the human rights and dignity of workers in the United States and globally. It is greed that cynically pits one group of workers against another while raking in record profits for the political and corporate elite. This is the enemy. The rest of us are Lilliputians trying to tether this mighty giant. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.