Kucinich Takes To The House Floor To Fight For Workers' Rights
The following is a press release from May 18, 2004, by Kucinich's office in Congress
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Kucinich Takes To The House Floor To Fight For Worker's Rights
Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), today, took to the House floor to stand up for worker’s rights and spoke in opposition to Republican attempts to weaken Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Kucinich gave the following speech on the House floor:
“I rise today in strong opposition to HR 2731, the mis-named and ill considered “Occupational Safety and Health Small Business Access to Justice Act”.
“In 2002, 5,524 workers were killed on the job because of traumatic injuries. In 2002, almost 60,000 workers died from occupational diseases. And in 2002, over 5 million workers were injured or fell ill on the job.
“For some perspective, approximately 56,000 Americans died between 1958 and 1975 in the Vietnam War. The American workplace leads to the same number of deaths in a single year.
“With this in the background, it’s mystifying to me that today we are considering a bill to significantly weaken OSHA and make the workplace less safe, as HR 2731 would do by requiring OSHA to pay attorney’s fees in any case in which it does not prevail.
“The effect of this bill will be to discourage OSHA from bringing enforcement actions against dangerous workplaces. OSHA will have to calculate the odds of winning against the cost to its budget if it loses. That will render the federal cop on the workplace-safety beat timid.
“Let’s be clear. No one would suggest the government should pay the attorney’s fees of criminal defendants, such as accused murderers, merely because they have been acquitted. So just as the concept underlying this bill would make our streets more dangerous if applied to the criminal code – something no one in this House would support -- it would make our workplaces more dangerous if applied to the OSHA Act. I ask my colleagues: should the level of protection the law provides Americans vanish the moment a worker walks from the street to the shop room floor? That’s the twisted concept promoted by this bill.
“And make no mistake, though current law may not consider deaths resulting from willful disregard of basic safety procedures a criminal matter, such shameful instances are absolutely criminal.
“I think it is clear that this bill is nothing more than a ploy. It was carefully designed to weaken enforcement of workplace safety laws, to further distance exploited workers from the justice they and their families deserve under the law, and it will severely handicap OSHA by discouraging it to cite employers unless the Agency is utterly certain it will win.
“Given the importance of the OSHA’s core mission of protecting life itself, and that workers have no private right of action under OSHA – a fact that again mirrors the criminal code that rejects the rationale underlying this bad bill -- there is every reason to be more, not less, cautious with fundamentally altering the nature of OSHA enforcement.
“But HR 2731 does not make a cautious change. It will severely endanger the safety of American workers. It should be discarded.”
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