WASHINGTON—When it comes to job safety and health rules and enforcement, Republican oligarch President Donald Trump may be very bad news, in terms of both rules and leaders, for workers.
But maybe workers shouldn’t be surprised. In Trump’s first White House term, 2017-21, the unspoken directive to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was “do nothing.”
Fewer than four new safety rules were issued in those four years and on-site OSHA inspections virtually vanished during the coronavirus pandemic. “Inspections” were by phone, email or fax.
First, the vanishing rules, to the glee of the corporate class, which has hated OSHA for decades.
According to the law firm Fisher & Phillips, which appears to lean to the management side, the leading rule to bite the dust will be the one that lets independent observers, especially union job safety and health specialists, accompany OSHA inspectors at accident sites.
The criminal corporate class hates the unionists’ role, which can occur even at non-union sites of accidents, explosions and fires, because the union experts are likely to find violations which bosses are pressuring OSHA to conveniently “overlook.”
The walk-around rule “generated controversy” in executive suites and among corporate suits, the law firm said. “OSHA is expected to work towards reducing” the walk-around rule’s “influence, if not removing it altogether. We could also see the agency stand aside as legal challenges brought by business groups work their way through the court system,” the firm adds.
That’s not all.
The second big-time rule Trump’s OSHA would trash, the firm says, is one the agency is working on now, a standard to limit worker exposure to airborne disease pathogens. Just before he left office, Democratic President Joe Biden beefed up the money and the team working on that proposal. He transferred to it workers and money used to enforce a temporary agency standard against airborne coronavirus exposure. With that modern-day plague confined, Biden said that rule wasn’t needed.
Fisher & Phillips predicted OSHA will end yearly “data dumps” on workplace injuries and illnesses, by company and investigation, the law firm predicted. The last such dump, for calendar 2023, came from the Democratic Biden administration this past December, with 900,000 entries.
It also predicted the number of OSHA inspectors, already too few for the nation’s eight million workplaces, will drop. State enforcement, especially in blue states such as California, Maryland, Illinois and. New York, will become more important. And the firm predicted OSHA inspectors will concentrate on “high-risk industries” such as construction, while downgrading others.
And OSHA will either “hit pause” or delete a proposed rule forcing firms to cut worker exposure to hazardous high heat—think utility line workers and farm workers. The United Farm Workers, the Electrical Workers, the Communications Workers and the Utility Workers have argued for that for years.
Nominates denizens of corporate class
To manage all this enforcement and rulemaking, or lack of it, Trump nominated three denizens of the corporate class, including a potential OSHA chief, David Keeling, who worked for Amazon and a #3, Michael Asplen who ran a training institute for the nation’s biggest union-buster, Littler Mendelson.
In between them would be Amanda Wood Laihow, a former director of employment policy for the National Association of Manufacturers. Asplen would be a senior counsel.
Keeling was Amazon’s road and transportation safety chief from 2021-23. Amazon accounts for more than half of all injuries in the nation’s warehouses, though it employs a third of their workers.
That didn’t stop the Teamsters, a driving force behind Trump’s pick of former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., as Labor Secretary. They hailed Keeling, too, citing his 20 years at various positions with UPS, preceding his Amazon service. The Teamsters represent UPS workers.
“OSHA and the DOL, under the leadership of…Chavez-DeRemer, will continue to benefit from leaders who started in the trades and understand the risks facing working Americans today and necessary reforms and opportunities to protect them,” the union said.
Amazon is another matter. Its oligarch, Jeff Bezos, is infamous for his hatred of workers and unions. Indeed, unsafe warehouse conditions during the coronavirus pandemic, and a company coverup, led to the first union organizing success at Amazon.
The then-independent Amazon Labor Union cracked Amazon’s wall and won recognition at its JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y. Amazon is stiffing it in bargaining, though. ALU is now a Teamsters semi-independent sector.
There’s been no word, yet, on whether Elon Musk’s 22-year-old twerps of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have invaded OSHA’s offices, fired workers or, more importantly, made off with copies of its computer files about pending probes of both Musk’s firms and competitors.
Trump’s puppetmaster, multibillionaire Musk, is eyeing the Labor Department, including OSHA, for more cuts by his chainsaw. He’s also appealing a $49,650 OSHA fine against his Giga plant in Austin, Texas, Confined Space, published by former OSHA Deputy Administrator Jordan Barab, reports. OSHA inspectors hit Giga with the fine after contract worker Victor Gonzalez Sr. was electrocuted last August 1
“Elon has a long and sordid history of workplace safety and health failures,” Barab wrote. Firms can agree they broke the law and pay, bargain down the fine via a settlement—which often happens—or contest it through OSHA’s appeals process, which can take years, Barab noted.
“We don’t know yet why Elon has chosen to contest the citation. Maybe he can’t afford it?” Barab commented, tongue in cheek. “On the other hand, with his net worth–$350 billion–$50,000 would amount to about a quarter of a cent for most Americans.
“It will probably cost him more than $50,000 just to have his lawyers take a look at the case. So it’s more likely he fears the stigma of an OSHA citation, or he just thinks it wasn’t his fault that some careless worker got himself killed.”
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