Specialties, Samples and Endorsements

Let's Talk:  Focus, Fees and Process

Health and Safety: The Life and Death Issues, cont'd.

Because of their exposure and the kinds of work they do, laborers exhibit a host of occupational diseases and health problems: chronic lung disease, hearing loss, bone and joint disease, muscular and orthopedic problems, heart disease, various cancers, high blood pressure and stroke. The list goes on and on. These workers desperately need specialized help and preventive medicine—the kind of care which doesn't come cheap.

Like everyone else, they face skyrocketing health insurance costs. Last year alone [1990] in the Mid-Atlantic states, these costs escalated 24.5%. As the Fund's Executive Director Knut Ringen says, "If you have 25% inflation, there is no way you can plan, you can only react. This is like living in a third-world country where the economy has gone out of control." Next year, the outlook is the same, so laborers will spend $1 of every $4 they earn on health care—more than they spend on rent, housing or food. Laborers are on the same treadmill most of us are, but they have a much-reduced work life.

Since the average LIUNA laborer dies before age 65, this means that many don't even receive Social Security. Not to mention Medicare or other retirement benefits. Yet these workers have paid a high percentage of their income into the Social Security fund. If they work construction for 30 years, as many do, they are virtually burnt out by the time they reach 50. When they need help with retirement, there is none available—at least from federal sources. Their union is their only source of retirement benefits.

If there is any good news in this, it is that the union's death rates are less than half that of the industry as a whole. There are good reasons for this, among them first-class training programs, responsible contractors, excellent management and supervision. But the most important reason is that the Laborers' Health and Safety Fund of North America has been in existence and on the job for three years. In its short life, the Fund has begun to make an extraordinary difference. It has affected the lives of every member of the union, and not just in health issues. 

John Moran has been directing the Occupational Safety and Health Division since October 1989. He has many years of work in the federal government, doing research on occupational safety and working with private firms. John is one of the country’s foremost authorities on hazardous waste abatement.

What we bring to the table is a very obvious perspective and a lot of technical competence. We are professionals, we are Safety and Health pros who have been in the business for a long time. We have also been in the federal government, we have been in the regulatory process. I can pick up the phone and call the guys who are running OSHA or the EPA so, generally, there is a recognition and the word is spread that when we get involved in something you better take it seriously.

Normally, if we find a lot of deficiencies and problems, we will work with the contractor and just go through the list of regulations and discuss what ought to be done that isn't being done. We also discuss ways to work together to get it all done. We want to give them the technical information and the technical resources we have, to say to them: "Here is an approach that some-one else has used, and we have the networking to solve this kind of a problem. Here is some reference material, and—if you aren't familiar with a good respirator program—here is a government document which, by the way, I happen to be responsible for having written." We provide health and safety assistance to them so that they understand the problem and they understand why they have to do what we are suggesting. We don't want to go in and close down jobs.

If we resolve the situation satisfactorily, that resolution is important to every site like this across the country. Everybody can learn from that process. We "translate," get the word out about those local decisions, through testifying at OSHA hearings, on the Hill, meeting with senior agency officials on senior level committees, things like that. In fact, the local decisions are integrated into the national level by our carrying them to those hearings and processes. I think that what is unique about our testimony in this crazy town [Washington, DC] is that we emphasize what’s happening in the real world of construction because I and my people are out there getting our boots dirty.