‘Cut red tape?’ People are dying in the workplace!
The horrific death of Carlos Gabrielli on a Westerleigh construction site should shock us all to the core. His throat slashed by an electrical saw after a slip and fall, he died in an ambulance after his coworkers frantically tried to stanch the bleeding with the shirts off their backs in the immediate aftermath of the gruesome accident.
As the Advance notes in its coverage, this was only the second of three dreadful workplace accidents in Staten Island last week. One day later, a crane collapsed at the construction site of a new Amazon warehouse in Rosebank. One worker’s leg reportedly “snapped in half.” Three days before that, a 25-year-old electrician was knocked unconscious at a construction site in Bloomfield after a small panel explosion exposed him to a 500 volt arc of electricity.
These kinds of workplace accidents, unfortunately, are not rare. On average, thirteen workers die on the job every day in this country. Most of these deaths are completely preventable. And yet the complex web of state and federal agencies and insurance programs meant to protect worker’s safety and incomes are persistently under-funded and under attack.
Our workplace safety laws – the federal Occupational Health & Safety Act (OSHA) and a patchwork of state worker’s compensation laws – are badly out of date and under attack from deep-pocketed corporate interests who want to slash benefits and shirk responsibility in the name of cutting “red tape.”
A new book, Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace by workers rights attorney Jonathan D. Karmel is a compelling call for action on a national health crisis that’s hiding in plain sight. The book’s everyday horror stories could compete with the past week’s news in the Advance.
These are just a few: Yvonne Shurelds suffered an “internal decapitation” when the forklift that she was not properly trained to operate backed up into a metal bar. Her employer was fined $7,100 for safety violations. Hannah Phillips lost her arm to a meat grinder at a Kroger grocery store when her ill-fitting uniform snagged on the power switch. She feels “lucky” because the amputation was below the elbow and she was able to get off worker’s comp when she landed a $10.50 an hour job (with no health insurance) at a non-union Honda plant. Paul King was electrocuted on the roof of Terminal 3 at Logan airport while doing routine maintenance work. He was not trained as an electrician and his employer – a subcontractor of a subcontractor – did not provide him with protective gear or electrical test equipment. It contested its $54,000 OSHA fine, and neglected to include his last deadly hours of work in the final paycheck it sent to his widow.
Seemingly every widow in these stories is tormented by unannounced visits from inspectors, hoping to find her remarried so the state can discontinue its paltry workman’s comp survivor benefits. None of these families left behind gets a big payout, or even returns to the standard of living they had scraped together before the fateful accidents.
The workers comp system was a “grand bargain” that preceded the New Deal by decades. In exchange for providing some insurance for workers who lose life and limb, it shields employers from greater liability for their callous disregard for their human resources. Workers compensation laws generally prevent survivors from directly suing an employer for damages. Successful suits must include a third party like a subcontractor or machinery manufacturer.
Karmel suggests a list of reforms that’s longer than an amputated arm.
A “know your rights” posting requirements at every workplace – like we have for the minimum wage – is long overdue. A mandate that medical professionals who treat injured workers have no affiliation with the employer and a Medicare-style insurance system to pay for their treatment is pretty common sense. The fact that attorney’s fees for these cases have been reduced or remained stagnant is ridiculous if one believes that “you get what you pay for.”
Karmel also calls for enhanced civil penalties and criminal prosecution under OSHA. Usually the idea that stiffer sentences act as deterrence against future crimes beggars belief. Who calmly weighs the consequences during a crime of passion or desperation? But corporate crimes – which unsafe workplaces must be viewed as – are coolly calculated in boardrooms as matters of dollars and sense (and the continued comfort of the far-removed executives).
Financial OSHA penalties, which were set as a specific hard-dollar amount in 1970, have been raised just once – 28 years ago. Obviously, a company that kills an employee through willful negligence should pay more than a pittance in fines. Those statutory fines should not only be exponentially increased, but indexed to inflation like almost every other federal regulatory penalty is.
Finally, he calls for a streamlined process to replace the “complex and oppressive legal system that requires employees to bear the burden of establishing their entitlement to benefits.” That sounds to me that we should just federalize the system under a well-funded OHSA (and stop electing Republicans to Congress).
[This op-ed originally appeared in the Staten Island Advance.]
Drop all the bridge tolls, tax the billionaires
The toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is too damn high.
I realize that it’s a time-honored tradition for Staten Islanders to beat our breasts and complain about how “forgotten” and taken for granted we are. Don’t let me steal your birthright from ya, but there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have to go over the river and through the woods and across two expensive bridges to get to Grandma’s house in New Jersey. They feel your pain.
A $17 bridge toll, a free ride for tourists on the ferry and $2.75 for a subway train that’s as likely to break down as get you to work on time is an inequitable system for all parties involved.
Writing in these pages, columnist Tom Wrobleski points to the toll-free East River bridges and notes, “They’re one of the few examples of government totally overlooking a revenue source.”
He suggests “toll equity.” I would humbly propose that our problem is one of a lack of imagination and memory.
Once upon a time, all bridges were intended to be free to cross. Tolls were merely temporary fees charged to travelers to pay back the bond money borrowed to fund their construction. The Brooklyn Bridge was a legendary expenditure of time and money to construct. The bridge was never for sale, but horse-drawn carriages had to rent it for the first few years until toll revenue had paid off its creditors. Now it, like the other East River crossings that were built before 1909, is free to commuters.
What changed? A man named Robert Moses began consolidating power as a public works planner in the 1920s.
When it comes to Moses’ legacy, there are two camps. Some give him all the credit for the highways, byways and thousands of acres of parkland scattered throughout our region. The rest of us curse his name during our interminable commutes.
Moses hated buses and trains and wasn’t that fond of the idea of black and brown people having too many of options for traveling beyond their neighborhood slums. His dollars-over-pennies “master planner” budgeting is why traffic is so awful. One example: the reason traffic backs up for a couple of miles before the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, as thousands of cars cram into the one-and-a-half lanes that lead from Brooklyn into Queens, was that Moses was convinced that the vast majority of drivers would always and forever need to get into lower Manhattan instead. (And that we’d all be driving instead of taking buses, boats and trains in to work.)
Moses couldn’t win an election to save his life. But he concurrently headed up various New York public authorities between 1924 and 1981. The authorities were governed by mayoral, county and gubernatorial appointees – none of whose terms expired at the same time – making Moses uniquely immune to direct accountability to voters.
To keep his appointed boards of governors in check, Moses hid behind his fiduciary responsibility to the bondholders who financed the impressive highways and bridges he built.
And he kept on borrowing money to build them and raising the tolls on them in order to maintain that responsibility to the bondholders that he used as an excuse to disagree with and flat-out ignore the governors and mayors that we-the-people elected under the misguided notion that they should be accountable to us and not some megalomaniacal man who didn’t even drive a car.
Restoring the tolls on the free bridges along the East River has been a favorite solution of tax-loathing billionaires like former mayor Mike Bloomberg ever since the city of London introduced “congestion pricing” under socialist mayor Ken Livingstone in 2003.
But all of these bridges really should be free from tolls, and our mass transit system deserves a massive reinvestment and a radical expansion. Staten Islanders deserve everything from high-speed ferries on the South Shore to an R train that crosses the Verrazano and a PATH train that connects a West Shore light rail line to Bayonne, Jersey City and lower Manhattan.
My preferred solution is to do something much closer to the spirit of socialism and tax the crap out of the billionaires who rely on the bridges, subways and buses to help the rest of us schlubs drag our sorry butts to work every day.
[This op-ed originally appeared in The Staten Island Advance.]
I NEED YOUR ARTICLE ON THE FERRY CRASH