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Sluggish protective equipment rule brings union lawsuit

Date Posted: February 2 2007

The United Food and Commercial Workers and the AFL-CIO sued the U.S. Department of Labor in a federal court last month to force the agency to complete rulemaking governing personal protective equipment (PPE) for workers.

The lawsuit came about because OSHA has rules requiring employers to buy PPE for workers who deal with specific hazardous substances, lead among them. But it does not have a rule requiring all employers to buy PPE for all workers when dealing with all hazardous substances.

OSHA first promised such a rule in July 2000, the suit says. But OSHA kept missing its own self-imposed deadlines, and meantime, 50 workers have died and 400,000 have been injured due to a lack of safety equipment on the job, added UFCW President Joe Hansen and AFL-CIO President John J, Sweeney.

"The new rule would not impose any new obligations on employers to provide safety equipment. It simply codifies OSHA's longstanding policy that employers, not employees, have the responsibility to pay for it," UFCW and the federation said.

"Nothing is standing in the way of OSHA issuing a final personal protective equipment (PPE) rule to protect worker safety and health except the will to do so. It is long overdue that the agency take action on protective equipment. Now, we are asking the courts to force OSHA to act," Hansen said.

In so many words, union and the federation want to force the agency, and specifically the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to carry out its promise made more than four years ago to write, in plain language and in black-and-white, a requirement that all employers must buy those gloves and goggles and other personal protective safety equipment for all their workers in all cases where it's needed.

"Too many workers have already been hurt or killed," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. "The Bush Department of Labor should stop looking out for corporate interests at the expense of workers' safety and health on the job."

A Labor Department spokesman told the Construction Labor Report that the lawsuit "clearly deals with complicated issues that will affect different employers and employees in a variety of ways. The Department takes pride in its excellent safety and enforcement record for workers, but on this issue a number of public comments we received took issue with the factual assumptions in our proposed rule."