Safety and health in the workplace has always been a vital concern to working people and their unions.

Deadly fumes, toxic gases, unmarked chemicals in the workplace, unsaf walkways, open electrical lines.

All occupational hazards and disease have only been controlled by concerted and continuous action of labor organizations.

Today, on Labor's Corner, we'll take a look at the fight for our lives.

[Music Plays] This is Labor's Corner, a weekly forum for discussing issues faced by today's working people and their unions.

Presented by WQEX in conjunction with the Philip Murray Institute of Labor Studies at Community College of Allegheny Count and the University of Pittsburgh Labor Archives, Labor's Corner is a Pittsburgh first dedicated to presenting the worker's point of view.

Welcome to Labor's Corner.

I'm Charles Mccollester Associate director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

The topic of our show tonight is the continuing struggl for workplace safety and health.

Joining me at the studio are John Molovich, safety and health technician with the United Steelworkers international headquarters, and Craig Negley, otherwise known as Moon Nellie.

Moon is chairman of the United Steelworkers Local 1196 Safety and Health Committee for the Allegheny Ludlum Works in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania.

He's also a maintenance repairman in the continuous slab caster department.

Welcome to both you tonight on Labor's Corner.

Thank you.

Due to the efforts of the steelworkers in particular and the labor movement in general, we've just in August seen the extension of the federal hazard communication standard to all non manufacturing areas.

Also before the state legislature, there is a very strong move this year to extend OSHA protections to public employees.

I'd like to ask Moon what his experience has been as a part of an industry that has been long covered by OSHA.

What his experience has been with the OSHA and and what assistance these laws have been for workers on the shop floor.

Generally, they're a big asset to our our people up there because they're very effective.

We try to take care of everything by ourselves as much as we can.

But there's a lot of instances where you hit an impasse, and when we hit an impasse, we call on our backup people like John Molovich from down at the Steelworkers International Building.

And if we still can't get any kind of movement, then we'll go on and call OSHA in after we do our homework and make sure that we have everything ready.

You know that it is a violation.

So your first effort is, is to get the get the thing settled immediately on the shop floor.

Right that's what we like to do.

We like to take care of everything as much as we can by ourselves.

John, the steelworkers have really been, I think, at the cutting edge of this whole struggle for workplace safety.

Can you just tell us a little bit about how the whole struggle for OSHA began, and what the steps have been to get us to the present?

Well, Charlie, the steelworkers union has long lobbied long and hard for comprehensive occupational safety and health law.

As a matter of fact, from the mid 60s to the final conclusion in 1970 of the passing of the Occupational Safety and Health Act under the leadership of the union, lobbied long and hard to get this legislation passed.

We have supported OSHA since day one and continue to support OSHA, even though in the current climate with the current administration, we have some severe problems with enforcement of the law.

The law has not changed by one word.

However, they have done some things administratively to to try to cut back somewhat on the coverage that is guaranteed by the law.

We continue to resist that.

We will resist that until such time as OSHA changes its ways.

Also, the Steelworkers union were was very prominent in the passage of many of the standards that OSHA has promulgated over the years, some very significant standards that comes to mind.

The lead standard, the coke ovens standard, the hazard communication standard.

We're now working on lobbying OSHA to pass a confined space entry standard, and also a lockout standard to protect maintenance workers, primarily in some of the industries, such as Moon works in from accidents.

Well, I know the hazard communication standards for many years did not extend beyond the manufacturing codes in the for OSHA, and that that itself has been a legal struggle of the steelworkers to extend the protections when dealing with hazardous or toxic chemicals to all workers.

And recently that has actually come about now.

That's correct!

Charlie, when the law was first where the standard was first promulgated, it excluded non manufacturing sectors.

There were only standard industrial classification codes 2339 were covered originally.

We challenged OSHA in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and were ultimately successful in having the standard remanded back to OSHA to cover non manufacturing as well as manufacturing.

There were also some very restrictive provisions in there as it relates to the trade secret provisions.

Prior to our lawsuit, the way the standard was written, most of the chemical manufacturers could have had a lot of their product behind this trade secret.

We challenged that and as a result, the court again remanded the standard bac to OSHA to broaden the coverage, so to speak, and to restrict companies from hiding behind the trade secret banner.

I think the extension of the right to know into all workplaces has been one of the most significant victories of the Steelworkers.

We'd like to break here to show you a program on safety and health produced by the steelworkers union.

It's called The Fight for Our Lives.

[Music Plays] Workplace safety and health has been a constant struggle, a struggle in which working men and women literally have been fighting for their lives.

All of the advances in occupational safety and health have resulted directly from the efforts of working people and their unions.

The United Steelworker of America has fought for better working conditions since the union's early days.

The late international president I. W. Abel, was one of our strongest advocates and the guiding force in passage of both the U.S.

Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Mine Safety and Health Act.

The achievement of legislatio that brought about what is known now as OSHA, the National Industrial Safety Act, and all of the agencies that was established with the establishment of that law or the enactment of that law, and the great things that have come out of it, and bringing about better work conditions and safer workplaces.

A safer workplace is a continuing concern of coke oven workers and with good cause.

Studies in the 1970s shows that coke oven workers had cancer rates from two and a half to ten times greater than other industrial workers.

That threat has now been reduced.

Thanks to the hard work of US members who achieved the OSHA coke ovens standard in 1976 and parallel Canadian standards shortly thereafter, these regulations cut exposure to coal tar and coke dust, and provided new engineering controls and protective equipment on the batteries.

In the 1970s the union also worked to achieve new controls for lead.

A new US led standard was finally issued in 1978, but the victory was not without its costs.

Even as he was dying from complications due to lead poisoning.

Steelworker local president AQ Evans lobbied and testified for the regulation.

The standard brought new rights to thousands of lead workers.

In succeeding years Steelworkers helped win new U.S.

and Canadian provincia standards for arsenic, asbestos, benzene, and other safety and health hazards.

These advances required the involvement of all levels of the union, but the real credit for most workplace improvements belongs to our local union safety and health committees.

A pretty heater or something like that.

How much of the dust goes up in the air?

That's just giving us the, you know.

Yeah.

From the heater A lot of that dust goes up here.

That's one reason they got rid of it.

Did you guys ask them to do any watering?

It said it's no danger unless its disturbed!

But there are men on the furnaces.

They don't like it.

They don't like working around it.

Being as its, similar to what you have to watch because of what's going to hurt you is the pieces you can't see.

We have to really keep an eye on things.

But a lot of times we come in and we're the first ones to recognize where there's an occupational hazard or a disease prone area.

And I would trust, you know, listening to some of the men, the work of the local union safety and health committees is critical to keep an eye out for hazards and to push for better worker protection.

Workers awareness o occupational dangers and disease dates back to ancient history.

[Music Plays] Not only have workers been the ones to identify hazards, they often have devise means to combat them.

Slaves in early Rome forced to work in mercury mines, wore masks of their own design in an attempt to ward off toxic fumes.

Metal miners in 16th century Central Europe described radiation induced lung disease in 1777.

The Danish chimney Sweepers guild demanded better protective clothing and other improvements.

Only two years after the first definitive medical report on occupational cancer implicated coal soot.

This was the first effort by a workers organization to control occupational cancer.

In 1845, female textile workers in Massachusetts, represented by one of the first North American labor unions, marched and agitated and petitioned the state legislature for shorter hours and better ventilation in the mills in order to combat a wasting sickness, which they correctly attributed to cotton dust.

It took almost 100 years for the medical profession to catch up to the Massachusetts women by identifying their disease as businesses.

Another 33 years elapsed before the first effective cotton dust regulation in North America.

The story of the textile industry illustrates the leading role women have played in the fights for improved safety and health, with more and more women in the workplace.

Issues like video display terminals, reproductive hazards and hazards in the health care industry are now top priorities for many union safety and health committees.

Some companies have tried to exclude women from certain jobs on the grounds that reproductive problems might result, but men can suffer reproductive problems to.

Our union wants the workplace cleaned up to protect all workers reproductive health.

Another major struggle in the fight for our lives takes place in the mining industry.

Many of the strikes in the early days of the industry included in their list of issues such things as unsafe blasting, inadequate roof supports, and hazardous drilling practices.

With passage of the US Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 and new legislation in Canada, conditions have improved significantly.

Workers have always strived for better safety and health conditions, but real reform came with the rise of strong unions.

Early steelworkers knew how the 87 hour workweek destroyed their health and increased their accident rate.

Opposition to those killing hours helped to spark the Great Steel Strike of 1919.

Many issues were still unresolved as the great wave of industrial unionism swept North America in the 1930s.

I got a job firing kill in a brickyard outside of canton for $0.16 an hour, 12 hours a night, seven nights a week.

And if you need any motivation, that's the sort of thing that'll give it to you.

Even before they had union contracts, steelworkers began organizing shop floor safety committees to address the unsafe working conditions and practices that were causing injury and loss of life.

Safety committees were and remain the front line of defense.

I able fought for increased awareness of health and safety issues and the participation of rank and file workers in enforcing existing standards and identifying new hazards.

The legislative effort, begun under the leadership of I. W. Abel and continued by his successor Lloyd McBride, was joined by thousands of union members.

Ultimately, it resulted in new rights and new protections under such laws as the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Mine Safety and Health Act, the US Toxic Substance Control Act, Bill 70, in Ontario, and Bill 17 in Quebec.

Quebec in particular has one of the strongest safety and health laws in the world.

It was achieved through decades of struggle by Quebec workers, particularly the asbestos miners.

Union action was also responsible for the Ontario law in 1974.

Uranium miners in Elliot Lake struck over safety and health problems, including the hazard of underground radiation.

The then district director, Lynn Williams, hammered out a settlement leading to better conditions in the mines and establishing a Royal Commission to investigate safety and health.

Armed with the Commission's report, Ontario Steelworkers one New legislation in 1979 protecting all workers in the province.

Today, workers in Quebec, Ontario and other Canadian provinces have the right to effective joint safety and health committees with real powers guaranteed by law.

It's by being better informed about what is happening that we will be able to play our role not only in the workplace, but also on the legislative level.

And you know very well that our fight, our pressure are representations to the various levels of government are fundamental to bring about the kinds of conditions that will allow our people to work in, in dignity and to work in being sure that their physical integrity is protected and respected.

The union also fights for better contract language.

On December 28th, 1979, six workers at the Indiana Harbor Works of Jack steel were killed when carbon monoxide gas leaked from a blast furnace stove.

That accident and others led the union to negotiate a comprehensive carbon monoxide control plan.

In the 1980 Basic Steel Agreement, requiring engineering studies, better training, improved equipment and emergency rescue plans.

The agreement led to a dramatic drop in carbon monoxide accidents.

Our contracts also include extensive language on joint safety committees, the right to refuse dangerous work, and the right to know.

These provisions go far beyond federal, state or provincial law.

Today, the attacks on safety and health are accompanied by phrases like cos effectiveness, regulatory reform and voluntary compliance.

Unions have responded with increasing sophistication.

Safety and health.

The United Steelworkers of America makes use of full time safety and health specialists, physicians, lawyers, educational programs, computerized data searches, all to make the latest information available to our membership.

But none of these resources, valuable as they are, can replace an active and informed local union safety and health committee.

Armed with a strong contract and a willingness to use it.

He's going to try to put the fight for safer conditions must be carried out at many levels, from contract negotiations to lawsuits to political campaigns, to the day to day work of the local union committee.

Without question, OSHA, MSHA and Canadian standards are important, but in many respect they are like minimum wage laws.

They provide a useful platform, but through the power of the union, we can do better.

It's hard to fight workplace hazards without good information, but as late as the mid 70s, companies could withhold crucial information from their workers and the union.

Chemical names were trade secrets.

Workplace sampling data was none of the union's business.

Workers did not even have the right to the information in their own medical files.

But our union and others negotiated new right to know language in our contracts.

We successfully fought to give workers access to their own medical files and to workplace sampling data.

Businesse today are looking for production and all these new chemicals and stuff that they're using.

We we got to be on top of it because you just don't know what the side effects are of.

Do we effective coalitions with environmental and community groups?

The labor movement passed right to no laws in state after state, prompted by this wave of local legislation.

OSHA finally issued its own hazard communication standard in Canada, the labor movemen secured legislation establishing the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System, which provides workers throughout the country with uniform chemical information.

Today's workplace is safer than 100 years ago, safer than 20 years ago.

But the fight for our lives goes on.

[Machines Clashing] As a result of technological developments, new chemicals and new processes are creating new hazards for workers.

This challenge can be met with better contract language, new health and safety standards, updated educational materials and most important of all, through the power of a strong and vital union.

The United Steelworker of America will continue to play an aggressive role in the struggle for better conditions.

We will continue to press for improvements in our labor agreements and for new legislation for the benefit of all workers as we proceed.

Our first line of defense and our strongest is the local union plant committee and our members.

You are our eyes and our ears and the plants and the offices and the mines and the hospitals and the clinics in every workplace where we are privileged to represent our members.

Whatever advances we achieve, significant though they may be, must by necessity be savored only for the moment.

The struggle for a safer workplace can never end.

[Music Plays] The video we just saw was premiered at a large health and safety conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

John, I'd like to ask you to tell us a little bit about the conference and about the growing movement worker movement for health and safety in this country.

Well, Charlie, the conference was our seventh International Safety and health conference, as you say.

It was held in Nashville, Tennessee.

It was very successful and that we had over 775 delegates attend the conference, which was a tremendous turnout.

And the conference dealt primarily with problems that are facing our members throughout the United States and Canada, both with the laws and with various industries throughout the country.

It's very, very successful.

Conference, as I said in.

This is really spreading beyond just the steelworkers, too.

There were a lot of other unions that joined in a conference right before your country.

That's correct.

The two days before our conference convened, the the national AFL-CIO had their annual safety and health conference at the same hotel in Nashville, Tennessee.

And we sort of dovetailed our conferences together.

And I think that the the struggle that John's laid out for us, that the video has shown about for health and safety legislation and the lawsuits that have brought a lot of these things into place are very important.

But if it doesn't happen at the shop floor, really, it doesn't really help workers if it doesn't take place in the real world.

What's what is the the role of that?

You see for the Union Safety committee.

And I think that the union safety committees are primary and very essential that they have a good working safety committee for the same affected.

We're the ones that are right there.

We have to be with our people.

We're on the front lines.

And there's a big problem with people not knowing what their real hazards are.

And that's where we come in.

And if there's a problem, we come in and we help them out and try to correct them when we can't get them corrected, and then we have to call on our backup, which would be drawn.

Malevich and people down at the International Safety and Health Department, or it would be into OSHA if we had, you know, had to go that route.

John, what kind of like practical backup does the steelworkers provide in terms of the kind of shop floor problems that moon runs into?

Well, Charlie, we have seven full time staff people in the safety and health department, and we get requests from all over the United States and Canada, from the various local unions and districts to come in and actually conduct plant tours.

I have some background with OSHA as an inspector, and I can go into the plants and, and the other people in the office do the same to make inspections of the workplaces, to try to point out the hazardous conditions or unhealthy conditions to the not only to the local unions but to the companies.

We also get involved in contract negotiations.

We get involved in arbitration cases.

We get involved in court cases, administrative law cases in front of OSHA and MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and these are just a few of these services we provide to the local unions throughout the United States and Canada.

I think, moon, in you situation, you have in some ways one of the best type situations where you have a strong union safety committee, but then you also have a mechanism that the company set up of a joint committee, where you can take the concerns of the workers on the shop floor and try to get them settled in house without having to go to fight the battle, either through OSHA or some other.

Means.

That true?

That's right.

We have a joint committee with the company and the union and our we have contract language that specifies that suggestions that we come through from the safety committee are to be seriously considered, as far, you know, like as far as engineering projects and stuff like that too.

So it ties in and makes it a lot, you know, a lot more helpful and a lot more efficient.

Well, I was recently at a conference where we surveyed about 15 different unions in different situations and about the compliance of employers with the Pennsylvania Right to Know law.

And we found out that the only situation where they were really complying was whether there was a strong local health and safety committee.

That sort of prodded the process along, and that worked with the management to make it happen, because it's the workers who know what chemicals they're dealing with.

They're the ones who are directly exposed to it.

Labor, I think, has reason to be proud of the role that they played in this struggle.

The union movement has been at the cutting edge of the struggle for workplace safety and in the chemical hazard, right to know movement.

These efforts of unions have helped not only workers, both union and nonunion, but also have established health and safety controls for the well-being of the entire society.

I'd like to really sincerely thank both Moon and John for taking part in tonight's program, and I'd like to thank all of you for joining us tonight on Labor's Corner.

Good night!

Hi.

This is a labor news update.

In November of this year, United Steelworkers International filed the latest in a series of complaints with the National Labor Relations Board against Products Incorporated.

The complaint involves several issues, one of which, the discharge of the grievance committee chairperson for unsatisfactory work, even though prior to her coming on to the grievance committee she had an excellent work record and to the refusal of the company to supply the union with copies of workers warning notices.

Penn, which employs 450 union members in the production of health and beauty aides in Vienna, has had a union contract for 20 years.

Yet they continue to be charged with harassing employees and union officers on their jobs.

The complaint is now under investigation, and the union is hoping that the NLRB will issue a formal complaint against the company before the end of this year.

I'm Roseanne Kosice, president of usually local 15018 for Labor's Corner.

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