(By Mark Gruenberg, PAI Staff Writer) 

WASHINGTON (PAI)–The nation’s unions are asking the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to cut worker exposure to silica.  And while they praise OSHA’s proposal to cut exposure in half, some say OSHA doesn’t go far enough.

Their testimony came during three weeks of public hearings on the standards, ending April 4.  The hearings are a key stage before OSHA gets to work on finally drafting a rule to cut worker exposure to the cancer-causing substance.

The controversy over exposure to silica actually started with a federal study in 1974, though an Internet search of material on the issue disclosed a Labor Department publication warning of silica’s hazards – in 1936.  And one witness said silica’s danger to breathing was known during the Roman Empire.

One of those who gave testimony before OSHA last month was Tom Ward, apprentice and training director for Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 2- Michigan. His dad, a sandblaster, died from silicosis at age 39 in 1983. Others sick from silicosis also gave testimony. “We dropped some common sense on them, and I think we really made an impact,” Ward said.

Ward said so much of the opposition is about cost to mitigate the spread of silica, but he maintained that engineering controls are already built into equipment that’s already in use, or feasible attachments are on the market to significantly limit silica exposure. “Opposition based on cost – it’s a lie,” Ward said.

OSHA wants to cut lifetime worker exposure to crystalline silica to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air.   Silica exposure leads to renal disease, silicosis and lung cancer.

The cut to 50 micrograms still leaves exposure too high, said AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario.  It’s based on 1968 exposure data and technology, she pointed out.  Both measurements and technology to prevent exposure are vastly improved since then – and data show silica-related disease occurs with much smaller exposures, she warned.  She urged OSHA adopt an even lower limit.

Unionists testified about the impact of exposure to silica, and what a new tougher standard would mean to them.  And it’s not just workers in construction and factories, either, they told OSHA.

“Whether it is fixing a roadway or sidewalk, repairing or installing water and sewer lines, or performing maintenance on a bridge, AFSCME members are engaged in activities that risk exposure to silica,” union health and safety specialist Diane Matthew Brown said.

Steelworker Local 593 member Alan White, a now-disabled foundry worker from Buffalo, told OSHA what it’s like, after 16 years on the job, to learn your job made you sick from silicosis.   He was one of nine Steelworkers testifying.

“I worked with or around silica containing products without knowing the dangers or any precautions to make a safer environment for myself,” White said.  “I learned that a dust mask was hardly, if ever, needed to do most jobs there. An employee who wore a respirator…in the foundry was repeatedly called crazy,” he added.  “Never were there any warnings and no information was freely available about the products we worked with.”

Other witnesses and experts, from the Bricklayers, Operating Engineers,

Laborers, AFSCME, AFGE and the Auto Workers, told similar stories to OSHA:

“It’s been four decades. Four decades. Workers are still getting sick and dying from silicosis and there is no denying it anymore. Enough is enough. Workers in the construction trades are counting on us to enact the new standards. They need protection.  NOW,” Bricklayers President James Boland, leading a five-man delegation, testified.

There is a strong pushback against the new proposed silica standard from employer groups in such industries as sand and gravel, brick, fracking where silica dust is prevalent, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups.

White got the mask when he joined the foundry in 1995.   “We were taught that while cleaning or doing other jobs that if we were overcome by dust or other smoke, we should go outside and get some air then come back when we felt better.  An employee who wore a respirator…in the foundry was repeatedly called crazy,” he said.  “Never were there any warnings and no information was freely available about the products we worked with…Only recently, three years after I left the foundry, was there a brief class on respirators.  Not ever a mention of silica, or its dangers.

“It’s easy to think that if there were a stricter OSHA standard for silica in place when I worked in the foundry, I might not be sick.  You’re right.  There are other things you should know in order to have an understanding of some things a stricter standard can help workers and also their employers avoid, based on what happened in my firsthand experience.

“There was the growing problem of being out of breath sooner than I used to… Then, I received a big surprise during the conversation with the first doctor when I found out I have silicosis and I will lose my job. He and the other doctors all agreed the diagnosis is silicosis.

“Watching your wife and other loved ones cry as they figure out what silicosis is was a big hit and then, shortly afterward, there was the radical pay cut from a transfer out of the foundry to a department where I knew nothing because I chose my health over money. “  Had his foundry not been unionized, with USW to go to bat for him and get him a transfer to another decent job there, White would have been fired, he added.

“Establishing a new silica standard is, of course, a matter of permissible exposure limits (PELs) and risk factors and technical controls, economic feasibility and sampling methodology and proper medical evaluations,” said Steelworkers Safety and Health Director Michael Wright.  “But it is also a matter of human beings – of human health and human welfare of fairness and of justice,” Wright added (his emphasis).

Other witnesses and experts, from the Bricklayers, Operating Engineers,

Laborers, AFSCME, AFGE and the Auto Workers, told similar stories to OSHA:

• “It’s been four decades.

Four decades. Workers are still getting sick and

dying from silicosis and there is no denying it anymore. Enough is enough. Workers in the construction trades are counting on us to enact the new standards. They need protection.  NOW,” Bricklayers President James Boland, leading a 5-man delegation, testified.

Bricklayers members Tom Ward and Dale McNabb from Michigan, Tommy Todd from Oklahoma/Arkansas/Texas, Sean Barrett from New England and Dennis Cahill from Arizona/New Mexico told stories of silica exposure, a poison that injured and killed thousands of workers.  OSHA’s proposals,        they said, “are reasonable, feasible and necessary to protect workers.”

• John A. Adams, president of AFGE Local 2778 in Atlanta, told OSHA that silica exposure occurs in many workplaces outside construction and industry – such as the dental lab in the Atlanta VA hospital which employs his members.

One worker toiled for 46 years in the lab, was exposed to silica dust, cobalt and various chemicals and never told to wear a respirator. “He died of respiratory failure and pathology report showed silicosis,” Adams            said.

“Sandblasting of casting can cause exposure to the investment material or

the sand itself . Sand is almost 100% crystalline silica,” Adams explained. “Leaks in a blasting box can cause an exposure. Exposure is also caused by opening the door to the blasting box before the dust had settled.  Dust in a blasting box must be removed by a dust collection system to prevent dental lab workers from being exposed to silica.”

• “Silica dust is a killer. It causes silicosis, a disabling lung disease that literally suffocates workers to death. It causes lung cancer, other respiratory diseases, and kidney disease as well,” the United Auto Workers testified.  “If finalized, OSHA’s silica rule would help protect more than two million workers exposed to this deadly dust and save hundreds of workers lives each year.  The current OSHA standard is based only on information that was available in 1968.  It allows very high levels of exposure and has no requirements to train workers or monitor exposure levels.  Simply enforcing the current rule, as some in industry have called for, won’t protect workers.”

One of UAW’s nine workers, Robert Hitchcock of Local 211 in Defiance, Ohio, said his employer, GM, “already protects workers at the proposed standard through new ventilation, preventive maintenance, air monitoring and, when needed, the use of air-cooled respirators.”  If GM can do that, others can, too, he said.  Richard Boecker, the local’s safety rep, added the union contract mandates a health surveillance air sample program.

UAW Local 523 President Jeff P’Poole in Kentucky said that melting silica in electric arc furnaces to produce silicon metal “generates dust and smoke so thick for some workers they cannot see.”

John Scardella, program director for the Steelworkers’ Tony Mazzochi center for job safety, emphasized issuing a new tougher rule wasn’t enough.  Workers must be taught about the hazards in advance, trained in how to combat them and get refresher courses, he said.

All workers should be “trained in the knowledge of specific operations that could result in exposure, specific procedures employers implemented to protect employees, the content of the standard and the medical surveillance program required by the standard.  Employee participation in any safety training program is the best practice for adult learners to retain important safety information,” he said.  Training should “be in a manner in which all employees are able to understand.”

Seminario added the final silica rule should establish regulated work areas to limit the number of exposed workers, and that firms must create a written compliance/ exposure control plan.  She also said there should be a stronger standard about which workers are exposed to silica dust, another to require engineering and work practice controls – not masks and respirators – to curb silica exposure and that employers must provide for medical examination of vulnerable workers.

Several witnesses said the feds had sat on a new silica standard for too long.  But business witnesses, and a mass letter-writing campaign they organized beforehand, argued for more delay in the rule – and no change.  OSHA got 1,665 written comments before the hearings, most of them from the mass campaign.

“It is tragic that it (the silica rule) was delayed by the administration for more than two years. Workers paid for that delay in death and disability,” USW’s Wright responded.

“We can‘t get those two years back.  But we can move quickly forward to get this rule in place and to lift the burden of silicosis and all the other health effects of silica from workers.  We urge OSHA to complete its work as rapidly as possible, and the administration to promulgate the final standard without delay.”

While the AFL-CIO “strongly supports” a proposed new rule that would limit workers’ exposure to silica dust, AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario outlined several areas that should be strengthened to provide better worker protection from deadly silicosis and other diseases caused by silica exposure.

Testifying before an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) hearing in March, Seminario noted that changes to the current exposure standard—now more than 40 years old—were first proposed in 1997 and that when the proposed new standard was sent for review to the Office of Management and Budget in 1991, it lingered there for two-and-a-half years.

Every year some 2 million workers are exposed to silica dust and, according to public health experts, more than 7,000 workers develop silicosis and 200 die each year as a result of this disabling lung disease. Silicosis literally suffocates workers to death. Silica is also linked to deaths from lung cancer, pulmonary and kidney diseases.

Seminario said that permissible exposure limit in the proposed standard while set at half the current level is still too high. She urged that a stricter standard be included in the final and said that other provisions in the standard should be strengthened, including:

*Establishing regulated work areas to limit the number of workers on the job who are exposed to silica dust;

*Requiring that the primary method to control silica dust is through engineering and work practice controls rather than through respiratory control—i.e., masks;

*Requiring employers create a written compliance/exposure control plan; and

*A stronger standard to trigger medical surveillance of workers exposed to silica.

Other areas she addressed included protecting the confidentiality of workers’ medical records, preventing employer retaliation against workers who seek medical care for exposure to silica and better training and information for workers.

The hearings continue next week and workplace safety and health experts from other unions, along with workers who have developed silica-related illnesses, will appear during the course of the hearings. But a number of employer groups in such industries as sand and gravel, brick, fracking where silica dust is prevalent, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups have or will testify against the proposed rule during the 14 days of hearings in Washington, D.C.

-From the AFL-CIO

Construction Industry Safety Coalition Calls on OSHA to Withdraw Silica Rule

Testifying on behalf of the 25-member Construction Industry Safety Coalition, a panel of experts called on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to withdraw its proposed rule on crystalline silica as it applies to the construction industry. In more than six hours of testimony, CISC said that OSHA had failed to demonstrate that its proposal meets the required standards of technological and economic feasibility. Specifically, the coalition said:

• OSHA has not identified and evaluated all of the construction tasks that would be affected by the proposed rule, thus significantly underestimating its cost to the industry.
• OSHA ignores information and data related to work patterns in different construction trades.
• OSHA’s assumption about compliance on multi-employer worksites does not account for exposure effects.
• OSHA does not take into consideration the dynamic nature of a typical construction site.
• OSHA is incorrect and unjustified in assuming for all exposure samples of less than full-shift duration that there is no exposure after the sampling period ends.
• OSHA’s proposed Table 1 unequivocally shows that contractor compliance with the proposed rule is infeasible in the construction industry.
• OSHA’s proposal concerning medical surveillance of employees is impractical in the transient construction industry.
• OSHA uses vague and ambiguous terms, such as “frequently,” “excessively,” and “practicable” that make it difficult, if not impossible for an employer to know if it is in compliance.
• OSHA proposes to ban dry sweeping and dry brushing without demonstrating how such activity increases the likelihood of exposure to silica.

OSHA fundamentally underestimates exposures and the effectiveness of environmental controls in the construction industry.