In honor of the dishonor of naming former President Ronald Reagan to the Labor Hall of Fame (better known today as the Labor Hall of Infamy), I’m posting a video provided by SEIU Health and Safety Director (and labor video historian) Marc Catlin which shows a prime example of the anti-worker Reagan legacy.
The video shows a 1981 press conference by Thorne Auchter, Reagan’s head of Federal OSHA. A week after Auchter became Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health in 1981, he decided that the OSHA publication about the health effects of cotton dust had an “inflammatory” cover because the cover of the publication displayed a photograph by Earl Dotter of cotton dust victim Louis Harrell.
Assistant Secretary Auchter ordered the remaining publications destroyed and reissued the document with no photo on the cover — which soon came to be known as the “White Album.”
About the same time, he also ordered the recall of three films produced by the OSHA under Eula Bingham, including the powerful film, Can’t Take No More.
Watch it and weep.