Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2728, Occupational Safety and Health Small Business Day in Court Act of 2004

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 2728, OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH SMALL BUSINESS DAY IN COURT ACT OF 2004, H.R. 2729, OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH REVIEW COMMISSION EFFICIENCY ACT OF 2004, H.R. 2730, OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF OSHA CITATIONS ACT OF 2004, H.R. 2731, OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH SMALL EMPLOYER ACCESS TO JUSTICE ACT OF 2004, AND H.R. 2432, PAPERWORK AND REGULATORY IMPROVEMENTS ACT OF 2004 -- (House of Representatives - May 18, 2004)

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Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am here to protest, first of all, the package, the packaging process, the rules process. Lumping five bills together, four of them dealing with OSHA matters, there is an effort to trivialize, to minimize and to make invisible this particular, very serious action being taken against working families and organized labor.

Working families need the protection of the government in the workplace. They are vulnerable and they are often victimized. The overwhelming number of business people in America are fair-minded, the small business people as well as corporations, but there is a percentage, which is far too large, that is greedy, selfish and always seeking to get more profits by exploiting workers.

The highest cost of most of these businesses is the labor costs. To drive down the labor costs they will do almost anything. It is not enlightened self-interest, because they are really making profits, but they want more and more.
This package that is being presented on OSHA I call the "more injuries and more deaths package" because the end product of chipping away at OSHA provisions is to create a situation where more workers out there are left vulnerable
to injuries and to death.

This majority party started its offensive against the working class or working families with a very brutal and obvious attack. The first big action of this majority party when the administration was changed in the White House was to repeal the ergonomics standards that it had taken 10 years to put in place. Ergonomics standards in OSHA dealt with injuries suffered by large numbers of workers in a new environment, a high-tech environment, with different kinds of injuries being generated, but they wiped that out overnight. That was an obvious, brutal, in-your-face attack on working families and organized labor.

Since then, they have sought to chip away, in every way possible, in a long history from 1995, when the change in the majority took place, a steady history of trying to pass bills to cripple OSHA; and they have become less and less strident as time goes on. We have beat back a number of them, but they have come back in other forms, and what we have in this package is the elephant which has been knocked to his knees.

The repeal of the ergonomics standards knocked OSHA to its knees. That elephant is now being fed spoonfuls of poison. These are spoonfuls of poison. They seem common-sensical, they seem trivial, but it is just one way to poison the animal. It will die just the same.

OSHA is made weaker and weaker. The budget has gotten smaller. The number of inspectors, which always was inadequate has been cut. We never intended to cover inspections adequately, but we did do a better job before this present majority took over.

So the cornerstone of the majority Republican Party policy is being enumerated here in terms of workers-we really want them to be more vulnerable; we really want them to have lower costs. We are not going to talk about minimum wage. We are not going to deal with these things which benefit workers. We are going to continue to encourage outsourcing so that more and more jobs are going overseas, and employers can threaten the workers with outsourcing if
they act up.

We are going to continue to foster policies which make corporations more and more profitable despite this recession ending, which shows that profits are going up. Corporations, while there is unemployment, remain the same. Wages are not going up. We are making a clear statement, we want more of the same and we are going to reduce the labor force even further to peasants and serfs who are unable to take care of themselves in the workplace.

The greatest increase in jobs inside this economy, inside America, is going to take place and is taking place in the construction industry; and what they are doing is having large companies subcontract to smaller companies, and the smaller companies become the protectorate of the set of bills that we have here. They have less than 100 employees. They can then proceed to get away with the kinds of violations that we would never allow a larger company because it has different responsibilities.

So this effort, in the name of small businesses, is also an effort which goes after the most vulnerable workers. Construction, the dirtiest work, the most dangerous work, has taken place with immigrant workers and with people who are at the very lowest levels, unable to get any kind of job anywhere else. The number of deaths and injuries that have taken place in the last few years has increased dramatically in this area while the overall number might have gone down a little.

This area is an area where we have had a series of articles appearing in the New York Times which highlight the fact that the OSHA regulations, at present, are minimal. They do not deal with the serious situation that the workplace has in terms of safety and even in terms of death.

We had a hearing just last Wednesday, and I am going to later on read some testimony from those people, but I want to conclude by saying we have a Democratic package for working families in this Nation which includes ending the current tax incentives for shipping jobs overseas, enacting a robust highway bill that would create over 1.8 million good-paying jobs, providing a tax credit for small businesses so small businesses can lower their health care costs, extending Federal unemployment benefits for 2.5 million out-of-work Americans, raising the minimum wage, ensuring that individuals develop the skills that the employers need by increasing job training.

That, in contrast, to a package which is seeking to drive down the working conditions and place the workers in a more vulnerable position so that profits for unscrupulous small businesses can be greatly increased. This package does that. We ought to pay a lot of attention to it and not rush it through this process today.

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