Title: Chair's Message

Author:

Section/SPIG: Occupational Health and Safety

Issue Date:

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In preparing for this, my first column as your new Section Chairperson, I had a chance to look at some of the wrap-up, end-of-the-year actions by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and I was thoroughly disturbed by what I saw. It was a paradigm, I believe, of what OSHA has become under the Bush Administration.

On Dec. 30, 2003, OSHA, under Director John Henshaw, announced that it was dropping its rulemaking for two glycol ethers (2-ME and 2-EE) and their acetates (2-MEA and 2-EEA), better known as glycol ethers or Cellosolves. There was much concern about Cellosolves and Cellosolve acetates in the 1980s and 1990s, and studies among paint strippers and in the semiconductor industry showed evidence of serious reproductive disorders among male and female workers.

In light of OSHA’s action, what are the standards which govern workers exposed to Cellosolves? These standards are the old OSHA standards for these substances (Table Z-1), namely PEL’s of 200 ppm for 2-EE, 100 ppm for 2-EEA, 25 ppm each for 2-ME and 2-MEA, developed long before the recent reproductive studies at IBM and the Digital Equipment Corporation.

Let’s compare these to ACGIH’s current standards for these same chemicals: ACGIH has set the TLV for 2-EE at 5 ppm, a factor of 40 times smaller than OSHA’s PEL, based on 2-EE’s reproductive effects. The TLV for 2-EEA is also 5 ppm, compared to OSHA’s 100 ppm. For 2-ME and 2-MEA the TLV’s are both 5 ppm, only (!) a factor of 5 times smaller than OSHA’s PEL’s (ACGIH TLV and BEI booklet, 2001).

OSHA’s rationale for leaving these old, outdated standards in place is the “decline in production and use of ethylene glycol ethers and their acetates” (OSHA Trade Release, 12/30/03). In Henshaw’s words: “The evidence that we’ve collected, including the comments we received after reopening the record last year [my emphasis], indicates that there is little future potential exposure to the four glycol ethers because their use has largely been phased out. Based on that evidence, we’ve concluded that the rule is no longer appropriate and that we can focus our resources on regulatory efforts that will have a greater impact on workplace safety and health.”

That’s quite a shameful rationale, in my opinion. Henshaw is saying, it seems to me, that since fewer working people are using these toxic materials, we don’t need to bother lowering the standard for them – it would be an inefficient use of OSHA’s resources. But what are the potential effects to these workers? A higher rate of miscarriages (in the late 1980s a study found a 40 percent higher rate among females in the semiconductor industry), more stillbirths and birth defects among the children of these workers. Indeed this is part of the terrain for the trials now going on in the semiconductor industry – a fact Mr. Henshaw must surely be aware of.

In 1989, when the senior George Bush was President, his assistant secretary for OSHA, John Pendergrass, updated OSHA’s regulations by simply adopting wholesale the existing ACGIH standards. Why doesn’t his son, George W. Bush, do the same, through his head of OSHA? This would remove the gross disparities between the two sets of standards and give exposed workers a modicum of protection based on recent science.

By the way, how does Henshaw know that workers are not being exposed to the chemicals? Because the industrial users of these chemicals told him (see emphasis on the above Henshaw quote). Would you trust the semiconductor industry to give a reliable report today, given the lawsuits they are facing? I wouldn’t. How about a series of OSHA inspections to ascertain that the information they got was reliable? Henshaw doesn’t speak of this. He also doesn’t cite production and industrial use statistics for these chemicals, which should reflect and support his statement.

Perhaps some of our OHS members need to look into this, and into the conditions of use they have observed or were reported to them. I’d like to hear from you about the situation today with the glycol ethers on our OHS Listserve at <occ-hlth-l@liststar.apha.org>.

I’d like to hear your thoughts as well about how we can more effectively do the work that OSHA isn’t doing (and in many respects has never done) and substantively improve working conditions in some/many plants and industries in this country.

One way we can help, as so many of us know, is to help labor unions not only in their health and safety efforts, but in their ongoing efforts to survive and protect their members’ living and working conditions. Long experience tells us that it is hard to protect the health and safety of unorganized workers; workers need unions to protect, among other things, their workplace health and safety.

On this note, I’d like to bring to your attention the bitter, four-month-long strike now being conducted by 70,000 supermarket workers in Southern California over their health benefits. To find out more about the circumstances of this strike, and the major cuts being proposed by employers on these workers’ health plans (65 percent cuts in funds for new employees), do go to the United Food and Commercial Workers website <www.ufcw.org>. There you will also find a petition of support for these workers by health professionals, <http://www.ufcw.org/hold_the_line/petition_hcprof.cfm>. I signed the petition, and I hope you will as well – and pass the word on to your colleagues.

These workers have been on strike through Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. They need your help. And by helping them and their union you are also helping support the fine work by their devoted UFCW health and safety staff members, who are also, I am proud to say, active members of our OHS Section.