Remarks at the Silica Final Rule Announcement, International Masonry Institute Training Center, Bowie, MD, March 24, 2016
[as prepared for delivery]
Good morning, and thanks to everyone for joining us today for an historic announcement.
Tom, thank you for that kind introduction. Thank you for your courage in sharing the anguish of losing your dad so tragically and unnecessarily. I don’t blame you for being outraged, as you said in the video. Today, we’re taking a step that I hope honors your father’s memory as best we can. We can’t bring him back, but we can do everything in our power to make sure others don’t suffer the way he did.
I also want to acknowledge a man I’ve gotten to know, a fellow native of Buffalo, New York. About 20 years ago, Alan White was struggling, a single dad who needed public assistance to make ends meet. Then he got a job at a local foundry – the same one where his dad and his brother once worked. Alan has done everything right. But despite working hard and playing by the rules, he was stricken with silicosis. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to get out of bed or even take out the garbage, but he has handled his situation with remarkable courage and grace. I’m glad he could be here to join us today. Alan, will you stand and be recognized?
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We’re here to re-affirm a very basic value proposition: that everyone should be able to come home safe and healthy at the end of a hard day’s work…that no one should have to give his or her life to earn a living. Silica has been undermining that fundamental right for too long.
In the early 1930s, in the thick of the Great Depression, thousands of people desperate for a job – many of them African-Americans from the South – traveled to a town called Gauley Bridge, West Virginia for migrant work on a tunnel project called Hawk’s Nest. They were ordered to drill through a mountain made up entirely of silica, without any meaningful protection at all. It turned out that the employer knew how dangerous it was – when engineers and company representatives went to the site, they wore masks. The employers figured that the long latency period between exposure and illness would make it hard for them to be held accountable.
But the silica exposure was so intense that there was no latency -- workers were dying right there on the spot, many of them hundreds of miles away from their families. It was a horrific scene. Bodies were discarded in nearby fields, without proper identification or notification to loved ones, with cornstalks as gravestones. The total number of deaths was easily in the hundreds, possibly in the thousands. And just for a little added insult, there was blatant racism in the distribution of modest monetary rewards to survivors and widows.
The Gauley Bridge disaster led to a public outcry and congressional hearings. It eventually led Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to convene a National Conference on Silicosis in 1936, which included a representative from the AFL – I think it was Rich Trumka.
As the video explained, Secretary Perkins’ panel of experts concluded that with proper control measures, silicosis can be prevented. But their findings didn’t yield much progress to speak of. The reforms that followed were on the margins. For decades in the middle of the 20th century, at the federal level there were only voluntary standards, and standards for federal contractors that were difficult to enforce.
In 1971, with the establishment of OSHA, we finally got the first national standards that came with mandatory, enforceable exposure limits. It was a step forward, but not the major stride we needed. The 1971 standards certainly weren’t meant to stay in place for 45 years without being updated. The truth is: they were out of date the moment they went into effect…and we’ve been falling behind ever since.
The public health community understood the problem. As Dr. Howard can tell you, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health actually recommended all the way back in 1974 that OSHA raise the standards to the level that we’re finally requiring today.
Our standards haven’t evolved with the science. Researchers continued to discover other dangers from taking a power tool to a piece of stone and releasing specks of dust one-one hundredth the size of a grain of sand. We know now that they not only cause silicosis, but also lung cancer, kidney disease, emphysema and other diseases.
In fact, an understanding of the health hazards associated with breathing in dust is nearly as old as civilization itself – going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. So, we’ve known about the dangers not just for decades, not just for centuries, but actually for millennia. And we’ve known how to control it for at least 80 years, since Frances Perkins’ conference.
Now at long last, we’ve mustered the will to do something about it. Today, finally, we’re rising to the challenge and taking the bold action this problem demands.
On behalf of Tom Ward and his family…on behalf of Alan White…on behalf of the hundreds and hundreds who died at Gauley Bridge…on behalf of the 2.3 million hard-working people exposed to silica at work…the Labor Department is announcing a final silica rule that updates the standards, saving more than 600 lives per year and protect the health of thousands of others.
The new rule will substantially reduce the permissible exposure limit, setting it at 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air – that’s half the current exposure limit for general industry and five times more stringent than the current exposure limit for construction. This new, lower limit can be achieved using practical, common controls -- like wetting down the dust or improving ventilation -- to limit exposure. As Tom Ward says: “Turn the water on, turn the vac on.” This isn’t rocket science, and it isn’t cost-prohibitive. You can get some of the needed equipment at a well-stocked hardware store.
I also want to emphasize that the rule provides flexibility to employers – small businesses in particular – as they implement the new standard. We’ve done something new and different here, giving the construction industry two completely different ways to comply. For their most common tasks, we’ve specified exactly the best way to protect workers doing those tasks. If employers follow that option, that’s all they have to do to limit exposures for those tasks.
But we also know businesses can be innovative and creative. So we’ve given these construction employers the same option general industry and maritime employers have: to do what they think works best for their businesses, as long as they periodically monitor exposure and ensure their approach keeps exposures at or below the 50 microgram limit. I think this demonstrates that we’re listening to employers, that we’re not imposing one-size-fits all solutions, that we want to make our rules as easy to follow as possible.
The final rule is the product of an extensive public outreach effort and active engagement of all stakeholders. We’ve approached this rulemaking with a keen ear and an open mind. We’ve built a big table and invited everyone to pull up a chair.
Before proposing the rule in 2013, we consulted with small businesses and with labor and public health groups, incorporating their recommendations into the proposal. And since issuing the proposal, we’ve solicited and received volumes of feedback. We held 14 days of public hearings, giving more than 200 stakeholders the chance to offer testimony, and we provided lengthy comment periods before and after the hearings.
And we didn’t just listen; we responded. The final rule includes many changes and improvements from the proposal – on engineering controls, protective clothing, housekeeping and medical surveillance, among other issues – that are a result of the input we heard. We also changed some of the compliance dates in response to concerns about the time employers need to adapt. OSHA will be “all in” during this transition time to help employers. We’ll have lots of compliance assistance material, and our technical experts will be on call to help employers.
You’re going to hear some arguments about the cost of this new rule. But the truly prohibitive cost is the cost of doing nothing. In fact, OSHA estimates that the total net benefits of the final rule come to $7.7 billion a year.
You’re also going to hear some people say this problem is already taking care of itself – that fewer people are dying of silicosis, so why do we need an updated rule? Well, I don’t apologize for thinking that “fewer people dying” is not a morally acceptable standard.
And you’ll probably hear a lot of “calamity-howling” – over-the-top, outlandish rhetoric about how this new regulation represents an existential threat to industry, killing jobs and wreaking economic havoc. But we see these kinds of hyperbolic, unsubstantiated claims every time the government acts decisively on wages, worker safety or labor standards of any kind.
In the wake of the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, one senator said the law “could be read to require…[a] ban [on] all occupations in which there remains some risk of injury” and “could…close every business in this nation.” One mill owner called OSHA’s cotton dust standard part of an “unending war of a free people…against those tyrannical power-hungry politicians intent on the establishment of a totalitarian government.” More recently, a current member of Congress suggested to me in a hearing that our silica regulation would encourage and embolden Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine. I’m still trying to follow that logic.
The evidence is overwhelming that the current silica exposure limits are not up to the task. Why would we continue to live by a standard that is outdated by nearly half a century? Why would we ignore the huge body of scientific knowledge we’ve accumulated since then? Why would we continue to study the issue, without taking action, when we’ve already studied it quite literally to death for so many people? We don’t live by early 1970s standards when it comes to seatbelts and airbags. And what about smoking? Does anyone think we should return to the laws, standards and cultural attitudes that prevailed around cigarettes in the early 1970s?
Breathing in silica dust continues to kill and debilitate, even when exposures are at permitted levels. This is not a question of better enforcement of the existing standard – that’s not enough for the millions of hard-working people like Alan White, or folks who could end up like Tom Ward’s dad if they continue to inhale high dust levels. We need to raise the bar by lowering permissible silica exposure. We need to finish the work that Frances Perkins started eight decades ago. We need to vindicate the senseless and disgraceful loss of life at Gauley Bridge.
I categorically reject the claim that the sky will fall if we give our workers the strongest possible protections. History simply doesn’t support that conclusion. I believe – and we are demonstrating – that we can have healthy workers and competitive businesses and a thriving economy. To suggest otherwise is a false choice.
I’ve seen this before – where some people insist, for example that we can have either safe communities or constitutional policing…or in the mortgage context, that we can have either a sound business environment for lenders or common-sense protections for homeowners. I reject those false choices, and I reject the jobs-or-safety false choice too.
I reject it because so many employers are already doing the right thing – turning on the water and turning on the vacuum. I reject it because I have faith in the ingenuity of these employers, in their ability to find even better and more cost-effective ways to comply with these rules – as they always have when OSHA issues a new standard. I reject it because our employers demonstrate every day that occupational safety and economic growth are not mutually exclusive…that in fact, they complement and reinforce one another.
Every day, proud and resilient men and women do strenuous work to operate foundries; to build our homes brick-by-brick; to maintain our sidewalks, railroads, highways and shipyards. They deserve better than to have their lungs irreversibly compromised or destroyed. They deserve the opportunity to support their families and live out their highest and best dreams. They deserve a chance to live into retirement – and to spend that retirement playing with grandchildren instead of tethered to an oxygen tank. They deserve the most exacting standards feasible to protect their health and safety.
This rule is decades in the making and long overdue. It can save lives. It will save lives. And I’m proud to be a part of it. Thanks so much.
