Labor Bills
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The OSHA bill (H.R. 2067), titled Protecting America’s Workers Act, would back up a promise by U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to the AFL-CIO that “the DOL will once again be back in the enforcement business.”
As a U.S. senator in 2007, Obama co-sponsored a similar bill. The current bill has 115 co-sponsors in the House, including 36 new ones since May – one of which is Chandler, who signed on as a co-sponsor on May 11. Hearings were held on the bill in March and April. The sudden increase in co-sponsors and also the hearings suggest that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic-controlled House want to move the bill to a floor vote before the November elections.
One of the first 15 co-sponsors was U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville, who signed on last year. The key issue with the bill is stiffer penalties, because OSHA wants employers to have second thoughts about violations, and, according to the congressional testimony of an OSHA official, “Nothing focuses attention like the possibility of going to jail.”
The OSHA Proposal
Under the proposed bill, for the first time since the OSHA law was enacted in 1970, corporate officers, directors and others responsible for their employees’ safety on the job could go to prison for willful violations of OSHA rules. Until now at least, the maximum fine is a misdemeanor – which would be changed by the proposal to a felony, and repeat offenders could get 20 years in prison.
Further, the burden of proof would be changed in criminal charges from “willful” to “knowingly,” making it easier to send CEOs to prison, because it is easier to prove “knowingly.” Also under the bill, monetary fines would be increased. The maximum fine for a “serious” violation would go to $12,000 from $7,000, and the maximum fine for a “willful” violation would go to $120,000 from $70,000 – and a repeat willful violation could go as high as $250,000.
In support of the increases, OSHA argues that fines have not been increased in 40 years, and that the fines are exempt from the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act, which applied to most other government agencies. The exemption has reduced the real dollar value of fines by 39 percent. In addition to criminalizing the nation’s workplace injury and illness rules and making a big leap in civil penalties, the proposed bill would significantly expand the unions’ and employees’ rights in inspections (at job sites) and enforcement.
All of this comes at a time when workplace injuries and illnesses declined throughout the last decade, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the year 2008, for which the most recent figures are available, injuries and illnesses were at the lowest level ever recorded. Instead of working cooperatively with employers to help reduce accidents and illnesses, OSHA is taking a different route of fear and punishment.
Chandler, who faces a competitive re-election bid from challenger Andy Barr, R-Lexington, is a member of the congressional Blue Dog Coalition, a 53-member group of so-called fiscal conservatives, of which only about one-third are from southern states. On the union-backed OSHA bill, 63 percent of the Blue Dogs have signed on as co-sponsors.
Public Employee Unionization
The bill (H.R. 413) is misnamed the Public Safety Employer-Employee Coordination Act. It has nothing to do with coordination: it’s all about forcing state and local governments to recognize public employee unions and to negotiate collective bargaining contracts with them, after an election and employees have voted in a union.
The bill would, in effect, eliminate home rule on that issue, and increase costs to cities an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent, without any appropriations to pay for it – another backdoor, unfunded mandate.
The current bill has 225 co-sponsors in the House, including 37 new ones since April – one of which is Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield, of Hopkinsville, who signed on as a co-sponsor on May 18.
Yarmuth became a co-sponsor on Jan. 21. Reps. Geoff Davis, R-Ft. Thomas, and Chandler, became co-sponsors last year on Sept. 17 and Oct. 7, respectively.
A hearing on the bill has been held. The bill is in the House Committee on Education and Labor. A similar bill, H.R. 980, passed the House 314-97 two years ago (with every member of the Kentucky delegation in the House voting for it), but it stalled in the Senate on a procedural vote.
This year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., sponsored an amendment (S. Amdt. 4147) in the Senate that would have attached provisions of the House’s collective bargaining bill to H.R. 4849, but the amendment failed, which suggests that enactment of the bill is not a done deal by a long shot, even though the Democrats control both chambers.
The Collective-Bargaining Plan
H.R. 413, co-sponsored by Whitfield, Yarmuth, Davis and Chandler, would establish a process to force all states and their political subdivisions (a) to recognize unions and (b) to negotiate collective bargaining contracts with police, fire and emergency medical personnel.
The states would have two years to enact legislation to grant collective bargaining rights to those public employees. If the Kentucky General Assembly failed to act, the feds would come in and manage the process though the Federal Labor Relation Authority (FLRA). Currently, no state prevents its employees from belonging to a union. In Kentucky, the law is silent. Therefore, several school boards and cities in the commonwealth already have collective bargaining with certain employee groups.
The proposed federal law is basically a moot point in Louisville and Lexington, because those cities have collective bargaining with firefighters and police officers. But for the rest of the state – excluding the few entities with contracts – the proposed federal law would ignore home rule and force unionization.
The states would be allowed to exempt jurisdictions with a population of fewer than 5,000 or fewer than 25 full-time employees. The proposed act would take off the table state right-to-work laws and pension benefits, which hardly matters, according to The Washington Post, because, “the bill empowers an already strong lobby that could pressure state legislatures to allow pension-bargaining anyway – or enact benefits by statute.”
Other than RTW laws and pensions, the act would force states to put virtually everything else up for negotiations, threatening Kentucky’s merit system. The bill prohibits lockouts and strikes, but that too hardly matters, given the unions’ history of striking.
Lowell Reese is publisher of Kentucky Roll Call. He may be reached at reese@kentuckyrollcall.com