Book Burning Begins at OSHA

Trump’s purge of documents containing “offensive” words from government websites is the new book-burning.

But this book burning doesn’t just harm readers; it kills workers.

We know that Trump and his minions feel that any publication referencing DEI is like garlic to vampires.  We’ve started to see examples of websites being expunged in a number of agencies, ranging from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to documents referencing sexual violence and AIDS Relief on the CDC website, to information on the US Army’s website concerning the U.S. Army Women’s Museum (hear that Joni Ernst?)

Now the book burners have descended on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. While some of the censorship deals with the mortal (and silly) threat of DEI, many of the bannings are far more serious: they threatens workers’ lives.

An email went to all OSHA employees earlier this month listing the publications to be removed from the OSHA website and directing Regional and Area office staff to remove any physical copies from their warehouses and dispose or recycle them.

With no detailed guidance, OSHA staff — understandably terrified by the mass disciplinary actions and terminations at USAID and other agencies for “insubordination” —  seem to be going overboard on Trump’s order “to align agency or department programs, activities, policies, regulations, guidance, employment practices, enforcement activities, contracts (including set-asides), grants, consent orders, and litigating positions with the policy of equal dignity and respect identified.”

Now the book burners have descended on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. While some of the censorship deals with mortal (and silly) threat of DEI, many of the bannings are far more serious: they threatens workers’ lives.

Any publications with the words “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “accessibility” and “vulnerable” are coming under potential attack, no matter what context the words are used in.  There may be other target words as well. A recent article in Popular Information listed 27 terms from the National Security Agency’s banned words list including not just “transgender,” “diversity” and “inclusion,” but also such leftist, Marxist terms as “pronouns” and “racism.”

This might be a good topic to ask Labor Secretary nominee Lori Chavez DeRemer at her confirmation hearing tomorrow.

What’s now missing from OSHA’s website?

First, the obvious removals. OSHA had a factsheet on “Restroom Access for Transgender Workers” that is no longer to be found. And in case you were wondering, not being able to use the restroom is a health and safety issue, whether you’re a farmworker, warehouse worker, meat processing worker or a transgender worker.

(Note: Throughout this post I have linked to the original documents from the Internet Archive’s The Wayback Machine, a private service that stores snapshots of thousands of websites, so you can see what’s missing. The links are still on the OSHA website, but if you click on them, you’ll get a “Message #404” Server Error. Some documents have been taken down, and then put back up, so your milage may differ.)

At least two of OSHA’s QuickTakes newsletters have been taken down.  Not sure about the reasoning for one of them (maybe Black History Month?), but the other contains the subversive announcement that “The U.S. Department of Labor is committed to improving the well-being of underserved, marginalized and excluded communities and ensuring that all workers’ voices are heard.

And then it gets sillier:  there are some OSHA Alliance agreements where groups who have a formal cooperative relationship with OSHA used the word “diversity” in their written agreements.

For example, an Alliance with “Partners for Safe Trenching and Excavation Operations” (the Associated General Contractors, International Union of Operating Engineers, Laborers’ International Union, National Utility Contractors Association and others) was taken down because it commits to “Ensure information developed encourages and reflects the diversity of the workforce and are accessible in multiple languages and formats.”

2017 evaluations of Oregon’s state plan and California’s state plan have also been taken down — probably because of references to “vulnerable” workers.

And then there’s a factsheet on Workplace Mental Health. It contains a sentence reading “People of any age, gender, and background can have thoughts of suicide”

Censorship Kills

But the purge quickly go from silly to deadly — deleting documents that can actually protect workers’ health and save their lives.

For example, “OSHA best practices for protecting EMS responders during treatment and transport of victims of substance releases” has been deleted. This document discusses the measures that EMTs, police, firefighters and other emergency medical responders on the front line of a hazmat response must take to keep from becoming additional victims. Why? Who knows? Maybe because of this sentence: “EMS responders are a diverse group?” Or because it implies that hazardous chemicals are bad for you?

The “Small entity compliance for the respiratory protection standard” which helps small employers figure out OSHA’s respirator standard has also been burned, as have the documents “Assigned protection factors guide for the revised respiratory protection standard” (which helps OSH professionals match the appropriate respirator to the hazard) and “Spirometry testing in occupational health programs: Best Practices for Health Care Professionals, OSHA Publication 3637-03” (which helps clinicians evaluate lung function [spirometry] testing to evaluate lung condition/disease).

Why?  Most likely because these documents contain the banned word “gender.” But the word “gender” as used here isn’t used to promote some nefarious LBGTQA+ conspiracy to corrupt impressionable American workers.  “Gender,” in these cases, references the physical differences (and increased risk) that exist between men and women and the different facial sizes that need to be considered in fit testing respirators.  If respirators don’t fit, they don’t work. Workers get expose, sick and killed.

Workplace violence is one of the leading causes of worker injury in health care institutions, but that didn’t keep OSHA’s new overlords from taking down “Caring for our Caregivers: Workplace Violence: A road map for healthcare facilities.”  Possibly because it mentions a Veterans Administration Threat Assessment process that references a study that ” incorporated veteran-specific risk factors, both static (e.g., gender, prior assault status) and dynamic (e.g., recent alcohol abuse, homelessness, and employment status).”

Or maybe because it highlights a hospital where “Managers purposely selected a diverse group of trainers.”  It also discusses sexual assault which is clearly no longer a bad thing in Trump’s Washington.

Don’t Say Ergo

And then there’s a major bias against ergonomics publications that seems to hearken back to Newt Gingrich times. Gingrich, when he came to power in the 1990s, declared OSHA’s ergonomics standard to be the nation’s Public Enemy No. 1. The standard was issued in the waning days of the Clinton administration and then repealed by Republicans at the beginning of the Bush administration.

But many of the ergonomics publications that have been censored were first issued during the George W. Bush administration after Bush and Congress repealed OSHA’s ergonomics standard.  Instead of a mandatory standard, then Secretary Chao launched “voluntary initiatives” on ergonomics, including many of the fact sheets and guidance that are now banned. Unfortunately for America’s workers, they also reference the greater risk and prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders related to gender — specifically women.

Workers at risk from crippling back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders will no longer have access to important information in publications such as “Guidelines for retail grocery stores: ergonomics for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders,” “Ergonomics for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders: Guidelines for Shipyards” and “Guidelines for nursing homes: ergonomics for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders.”

All of these documents include this fatal sentence: “In addition, development of MSDs may be related to genetic causes, gender, age, and other factors.” So clearly they had to go.

The nursing home guidance wanders into even more dangerous ground,  recommending that “Low profile medication carts with easy open side drawers are recommended to accommodate hand height of shorter nurses.” Yes, nurses come in diverse sizes and heights. Ensuring they can reach their patients’ medications is a classic DEI plot.

“Trump has purged important worker safety and health information and guidance that assists employers, workers, clinicians and safety and health professionals in understanding and identifying and protecting workers from serious hazards and complying with OSHA standards and regulations. The DEI purge makes workplaces unsafe and puts workers in danger.” — Peg Seminario, Former AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director

The Department of Labor Website

I’m not as familiar with everything on the Mother Ship’s webpage (the Department of Labor) or other DOL agencies, but DOL’s Equity Action Plan is obviously gone, as are two other important pages from the main DOL website: Worker.gov and Employer.gov which are both “temporarily unavailable while we perform maintenance.”

Worker.gov contained information for workers about what to do if they feel unsafe at work, if they weren’t paid, treated unfairly, fired or retaliated against. Employer.gov contained information for employers about “Workplace Inclusion” and “Union and Protected Concerted Activity.”   Their covers had photos of black, brown and white workers mixing together.

Few of these banned subjects are really about offensive words or gender ideology. But they are all about preventing illness, injuries and deaths by getting vital lifesaving information to workers and health and safety professionals.

As former AFL-CIO director Peg Seminario warns:

The Trump DEI purge is misguided, harmful, wasteful and wrong. It has purged important worker safety and health information and guidance that assists employers, workers, clinicians and safety and health professionals in understanding and identifying and protecting workers from serious hazards and complying with OSHA standards and regulations. The DEI purge makes workplaces unsafe and puts workers in danger.

Some Good News

Before you get too depressed, there is some potential good news:

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the nation’s premier health agencies to restore online access to several websites that monitor HIV, health risks for youths and assisted reproductive technologies, which were abruptly taken offline to ensure they complied with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on gender.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates granted a temporary restraining order requested by the nonprofit advocacy group Doctors for America, directing the administration to bring back public information maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration while a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decision to remove it is pending.

Bates is the same judge that rejected a union request for a Temporary Restraining Order last week to keep Elon out of the Department of Labor.

The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen

“The agencies’ actions create a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, halt or hamper key health research, and deprive physicians of resources that impact clinical practice,” attorneys for the doctors group at the nonprofit Public Citizen said in court papers. They argued that CDC and FDA officials violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that sets out specific steps for federal agencies that are implementing new policies, and the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires officials to “ensure that the public has timely and equitable access to the agency’s public information.”

History Repeats

What has been will be again,
 What has been done will be done again;
 There is nothing new under the sun.

— Ecclesiastes 1:9

Thorne Auchter was disturbed. A week after being sworn in as Ronald Reagan’s OSHA head, Auchter, a 35-year old former construction company owner, was looking at the cover of an OSHA publication on Cotton Dust. The cover of the publication displayed a troubling photograph of a cotton dust victim, Louis Harrell, taken by famed labor photography Earl Dotter. Auchter, believing the cover to be inflammatory, ordered the remaining publications destroyed and reissued the document with no photo on the cover.

Ronald Reagan’s presidency began the day before the recently issued Cotton Dust standard was heard at the Supreme Court (and eventually upheld). For the business community, the cotton dust standard was symbolic of all that was wrong with Eula Bingham’s OSHA, and government regulation in general. For cotton mill workers, the cotton dust standard meant and end to suffering. Exposure to cotton dust causes byssinosis, or brown lung disease, a crippling lung condition caused by repeated exposure to cotton dust. Symptoms include chest tightness, coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath.

But according to Auchter, if was better if people could not actually see the actual suffering that afflicted cotton workers.

As Auchter explained

That photo makes a dramatic statement that clearly establishes a biased viewpoint in the cotton dust issue. . . . While I certainly understand and sympathize with the victims of cotton dust exposure, I do not believe it’s fair or proper to lend the weight of the government on one side or the other in such a controversial area. [emphasis added.]

Right. Should government be pro-death, or anti-death in the workplace? Hard question for OSHA. Very controversial

Anyway, that wasn’t enough. Eula Bingham, Auchter’s predecessor from the Carter administration, had created the New Directions worker training program (now called the Susan Harwood Worker Training Grant Program).  Back then, the program allowed grantees to create films that not only educated workers about health and safety hazards, but recounted the tragic history of workplace safety and health, and advocated for strong protections.

Among the products of the New Directions program were the hard-hitting films The Story of OSHA, Worker to Worker and Can’t Take No More, the latter two narrated by oral historian Studs Terkel.  The films included rare archival footage and photos that illustrated the problems behind dramatic tragedies as well as the daily dangers that put workers at risk for long-term health problems. They also connects the workplace health and safety movement with the civil rights and environmental movements.

Auchter ordered New Directions grantees and unions that had borrowed the films from OSHA to return all copies, as well as copies of “controversial” publications. The internet may live forever, but this was 1981, before the internet, so hard copies were all that existed.

Happily for us today, many of the grantees and unions declined Auchter’s kind offer to dispose of the subversive materials,  despite his threat to withhold funding from organizations that did not return or destroy the materials.