He’s an important leader who has to juggle dozens of issues with a cold professionalism, but get AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka talking about workplace safety and he can’t help but think of his dad, a former coal miner, who died of black lung disease.
“Here’s something that genuinely bothers me. Every day in this country 150 workers die from injuries received on the job or occupational health or disease,” he said. “They die quietly, like my dad who died from black lung.”
Six years into the Obama administration, he’s still waiting for new regulations.
“For most of the first term, and the beginning of the second term, he was baited by Republicans talking about too many regulations. And he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ And so the regulations just stopped,” said the labor leader in a pre-Labor Day session with reporters organized by the Christian Science Monitor.
“We haven’t seen the needed regulations to keep pace with the change in the environment of the workplace,” added Trumka.
He and other labor leaders have been calling for more — and more quickly approved — worker safety regulations for years, complaining loudly about how long it takes for the administration to issue rules that he says will save lives.
The nation’s top labor leader had good words for those who enforce labor safety laws and mines, but said that they were working with a weak hand and poor funding.
Referring to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, for example, Trumka said, “The resources that they have are totally inadequate. I think it would take them 400 to 500 years to inspect every workplace in the country just one time, which isn’t much of a deterrent.”
While he said the president has lately become “overtly more pro-worker,” he said time is short for new regs on mines and issues like silicosis. “If it doesn’t get done by the end of the administration, then it’s not likely to happen because the new president, if it were a Republican, would just whack all of those and we’d have to start all over again.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
