[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 129 (Friday, August 4, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1629-E1633]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


  DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND 
               RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 1996

                                 ______


                               speech of

                          HON. MAJOR R. OWENS

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, August 2, 1995

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the State of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 2127) making 
     appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human 
     Services, and Education, and related agencies, for the fiscal 
     year ending September 30, 1996, and for other purposes:

  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, in connection with the remarks I made on 
August 2, 1995, I wish to submit the following additional remarks and 
extraneous materials which include the following items:
  A. The letter of dying coal miner Jacob L. Vowell killed with 183 
others in a coal mining accident.
  B. The text of articles on OSHA which appeared in the Washington Post 
on July 23 and July 24.
  C. A summary of the quotes which were contained in the Washington 
Post articles.
   Letter of Dying Coal Miner Jacob L. Vowell Killed With 183 Others

       Ellen, Darling, goodbye for us both. Elbert said the Lord 
     has saved him. We are all praying for air to support us, but 
     it is getting so bad without any air.
       Ellen I want you to live right and come to heaven. Raise 
     the children the best you can. Oh how I wish to be with you, 
     goodbye. Bury me and Elbert in the same grave by little Eddy.
       Goodbye Ellen. Goodbye Lily. Goodbye Jemmie. Goodbye 
     Horace. Is 25 minutes after 2. There is a few of us alive 
     yet.
                                                  Jake and Elbert.
       Oh God for one more breath. Ellen remember me as long as 
     you live. Goodbye Darling.
       Letter written by Jacob L. Vowell while he and 26 others 
     barricaded inside a Tennessee mine after a May 19, 1902, 
     explosion. Although the makeshift barricade held out the bad 
     air for over 7 hours, the trapped mines were eventually 
     overcome by suffocating gases. The disaster claimed 184 
     lives.
               [From the Washington Post, July 23, 1995]

 The Hill May Be A Health Hazard for Safety Agency--Shift in Political 
                 Forces Brings GOP Push to Weaken OSHA

               (By Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss)

       Thomas Cass Ballenger, in his rolls as small-town 
     industrialist, civic benefactor and veteran congressman from 
     the western hills of North Carolina, always displayed a 
     talent for fund-raising. But the money never came easier than 
     during the congressional elections last fall, when he 
     traveled around his state soliciting contributions for 
     candidates who would serve as ground troops for the 
     Republican revolution.
       Whenever Ballenger spoke, checkbooks opened at the mention 
     of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), 
     a regulatory agency that had emerged as a symbol of 
     everything the business world disliked about the federal 
     government. His vision of a House of Representatives 
     controlled by Republicans, as Ballenger later described it, 
     went like this:
       ``I'd say, `Guess who might be chairman of the committee 
     who'd be in charge of OSHA?''
       ``And they'd say, `Who?'
       ``And I'd say, `Me!'
       ``And I'd say, `I need some money.'
       And--whoosh!--I got it. This was my sales pitch: 
     `Businessmen, wouldn't you like to have a friend overseeing 
     OSHA?' ''
       Indeed they would
       They liked the idea so much that they gave Ballenger more 
     than $65,000 to distribute to Republican candidates, 
     including five from North Carolina who went on to win seats 
     previously held by Democrats. The partisan transformation of 
     the Tarheel delegation was an essential part of the 
     Republican takeover of the House, and it led, among other 
     things, to a new and decidedly pro-management chairman for 
     the House subcommittee on work-force protections--Cass 
     Ballenger. A panel that for years had been controlled by the 
     son of a Michigan auto worker killed in an industrial fire 
     was now headed by a deceptively easygoing, 68-year-old good 
     old boy from Hickory who was educated at Amherst, inherited 
     his family's box company and made his fortune producing 
     plastic bags for underwear.
       Ballenger and his allies are now fulfilling a promise made 
     during the campaign. With the strong lobbying support of 
     business coalitions, including corporations who are both 
     repeated OSHA violators and leading financial contributors to 
     the GOP, they are pushing the first viable legislative effort 
     to diminish OSHA's powers since its creation a quarter-
     century ago. The Safety and Health Improvement and Regulatory 
     Reform Act of 1995 would shrink the size of the investigative 
     staff, shift the emphasis to consultation, eliminate separate 
     research and mine-safety operations, and curtail the agency's 
     powers to penalize workplaces that fail to meet federal 
     health and safety standards.
       Most of the attention in the House this seminal political 
     year has been focused on the ``Contract With America,'' the 
     balanced budget and Speaker Newt Gingrich's pronouncements. 
     But the OSHA measure is at the center of a quieter struggle, 
     albeit one with major philosophical and economic 
     consequences. The refashioning of OSHA--in combination with 
     attempts to repeal wage and union security laws enacted over 
     the decades by Congress's old Democratic majority--amounts to 
     what labor scholars call the most serious effort to rewrite 
     the rules of the American workplace in the postwar era.
       The vast bureaucratic system constructed from those laws 
     was based on a question of trust: Whom do you trust with a 
     worker's welfare--the employer or a federal regulator? The 
     time has come, members of the Republican Congress argue, to 
     reword the answer. ``I think employers now take a different 
     approach with their workers than they have in the past,'' 
     said Rep. Lindsey Graham, a freshman Republican from South 
     Carolina and a member of Ballenger's subcommittee. ``My job 
     is to get the government up to speed with the times. And the 
     times for me are to reevaluate the role of a the federal 
     government in private business. If you believe that is the 
     mandate, OSHA is a great place to start.''
       Although OSHA was established during the presidency of 
     Richard M. Nixon and has been run by Republican-appointed 
     administrators for 18 of its 25 years, it is scorned by House 
     Republicans as the archetype of a liberal program gone 
     astray. They describe it as a place where swarms of 
     inspectors swoop down to intimidate innocent merchants, 
     professionals and manufacturers, drown businesses in 
     paperwork and are more interested in imposing fines than 
     ensuring safety.
       ``They need to do what the hell they're told,'' said 
     Charles W. Norwood Jr., a dentist from Georgia and the most 
     intense of the Republican freshmen I his dislike of OSHA. 
     ``They've been sitting in their little cubicles for 25 years 
     thinking they knew what was best for every industry in this 
     country. They don't. And they don't want to know. All they 
     want to know is what they can get away with to collect money 
     from us.''
       Many Democrats find their predicament ironic. Year after 
     year they complained that OSHA was ineffective and needed 
     more inspectors and tougher standards. I the last session of 
     congress, before they lost control, they pushed legislation 
     that would strengthen the agency in the very places where 
     Republicans seek to weaken it. But now they are caught in a 
     rear-guard action defending the status quo, arguing that 
     OSHA, for all its faults, has been a savior for American
      workers. They cite statistics showing that OSHA saves an 
     estimated 6,000 lives each year and has led to significant 
     decreases in workplace injuries and illnesses. Behind the 
     cover of reform, they say, Republicans are exacting 
     corporate revenge, using the paperwork complaints of small 
     businesses to enrich the management class at the expense 
     of blue-collar workers.
       The arguments mark a profound shift of political forces. 
     For years business had felt an obligation to pay homage to 
     the Democratic masters of Congress, even where their 
     interests differed. The Republican takeover created 
     opportunities to bring politics in line with corporate 
     objectives, none more important than rewriting labor laws and 
     loosening the grip of government regulations. In moving from 
     a marriage of convenience to one of shared passions, the 
     business world has showered the Republican Congress with 
     financial rewards. In a single evening last May, at the ``New 
     Majority'' dinner to 

[[Page E 1630]]
     raise money for the next congressional election, companies lobbying for 
     labor law changes gave more than $1 million.
       With the stakes so high, the debate over OSHA has crackled 
     with fiery rhetoric and melodramatic anecdotes.
       From the business world comes a bumper sticker that only 
     slightly exaggerates the prevailing sentiment: ``OSHA is 
     America's KGB--It Turns the American Dream into a 
     Nightmare.'' In the matter-of-fact words of Rep. John A. 
     Boehner of Ohio, a former plastics salesman who now serves as 
     chairman of the House Republican Conference and the 
     leadership's liaison to business: ``Most employers would 
     describe OSHA as the Gestapo of the federal government.'' 
     Business leaders pass along tales of bureaucratic 
     overzealousness, such as the case in Augusta, Ga., where a 
     nonprofit group was fined $7,500 by OSHA for using mothballs 
     to chase squirrels out of the attic and failing to post a 
     notice describing the chemicals contained in the mothballs.
       From labor comes a sarcastic title for Ballenger's bill--
     the Death and Injury Enhancement (DIE) Act of 1995. Democrat 
     Major R. Owens of New York, ranking minority member of 
     Ballenger's panel, reads off the names of men and women 
     killed in the workplace and likens the toll to the death 
     count in Vietnam. Unionists recount workplace tragedies that 
     might have been avoided if not for management carelessness, 
     such as the case in Grand Island, Neb., where a maintenance 
     man at a meatpacking plant had his ``head popped like a 
     pimple,'' in the indelicate phrase of a coworker, when he 
     tried to retrieve his pliers from a carcass defleshing 
     machine that turned on because it lacked the required safety 
     locks.


                          see what can happen?

       Cass Ballenger saw more than a few workplace injuries 
     during his years as a manufacturer in Hickory, an industrial 
     town whose streets are lined with hosiery mills. When he 
     switched his family business from boxes to plastic bags, he 
     often worked the machines himself. A contraption called the 
     scoring machine was particularly troublesome, he said. ``The 
     clutch on it was mechanical and the dang thing always 
     slipped. You'd be wiping grease off it and the cloth would 
     get caught in the gears and, thwack, it would just cut your 
     fingers off.''
       That was before the days of OSHA, Ballenger noted, and 
     employers and workers relied on ``simple common sense.'' 
     Ballenger kept all his digits, but when someone at his plant 
     lost a finger, he would say, `` `See what can happen? Put the 
     guard back on and don't do that again.' You'd learn not to do 
     that anymore.''
       From the first time inspectors visited his factory, 
     Ballenger's relationship with OSHA was quarrelsome. ``They 
     came into my plant and they told me that my loading dock was 
     unsafe because it didn't have a barrier to keep people from 
     falling off,'' he recalled in a recent interview. ``And so I 
     said, ``Well, let me ask you something, if you put a barrier 
     up, how do you load? They thought about it and said maybe 
     they were wrong.''
       Ballenger is a southern storyteller who acknowledges that 
     he occasionally delves into hyperbole to make points. Whether 
     the loading dock inspection happened precisely as he 
     remembered it is unclear. There are no records of the event. 
     But it is important for two reasons. First, in the business 
     world's catalogue of nonsensical OSHA actions, which is an 
     assortment of documented cases and utter myths, the loading 
     dock episode is prominently featured, told and retold in 
     various versions around the country. Second, it shaped 
     Ballenger's perceptions from then on as he dealt as a 
     lawmaker with OSHA.
       North Carolina is among two dozen states where federal OSHA 
     standards are enforced at the state level. When Ballenger was 
     in the legislature in Raleigh, he sat on the committee 
     overseeing OSHA and constantly fought with the state labor 
     commissioner, John Brooks. ``Every time John came in and 
     said, `We are underfunded and need more inspectors,' and told 
     us how it was awful that we didn't think about the health and 
     safety of the workers of North Carolina,'' Ballenger said, he 
     would be thinking, ``Here's this horse's ass who runs a lousy 
     operation asking us for more money.''
       There was a personal aspect to Ballenger's animosity that 
     extended beyond the loading dock incident. He accused Brooks 
     of conducting ``political raids'' on his bag plant, 
     inspecting it three times only because he was a prominent 
     Republican in what was then a Democratic state government. 
     Brooks called the accusation groundless: Factories were 
     chosen for inspection by a random computer system. ``There is 
     no human way to tamper with that system,'' Brooks said, 
     ``Cass knows that and was offered the opportunity to see it 
     working.''
       ``If you believe that,'' Ballenger responded, ``I've got a 
     bridge I'd like to sell you.''
                        sympathetic to the cause

       From the time he reached Washington in 1987 as a House 
     freshman, boasting that he was the only member who had been 
     cited for workplace violations, Ballenger worked on OSHA 
     legislation with a group of Republicans on the old Education 
     and Labor Committee. Their efforts were defensive, trying to 
     stop the Democrats and their labor allies from expanding the 
     agency's powers. ``Then, all of a sudden, oops! We got 
     control,'' Ballenger said of the 1994 elections.
       His first task as chairman of the work-force protections 
     subcommittee of the renamed Economic and Educational 
     Opportunities Committee was to pick a team of Republicans 
     lawmakers to help him remake OSHA. ``I wanted people 
     sympathetic to the cause,'' he said. ``I was looking for pro-
     business people.''
       Harris W. Fawell of suburban Chicago had been working with 
     Ballenger on OSHA bills during the Democratic era and would 
     be helpful this time around. Bill Barrett of Nebraska carried 
     the complaints of the meatpacking plants in his district. Tim 
     Hutchinson of Arkansas, whose district included the chicken 
     giant Tyson Foods, would look out for the poultry processors. 
     Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who came out of the furniture 
     industry, ``hated OSHA with a passion,'' Ballenger thought. 
     James C. Greenwood of suburban Philadelphia was the most 
     moderate of the veterans, but Ballenger respected him. ``I 
     asked him where he would stand on OSHA,'' Ballenger recalled. 
     ``And he said, `I'll be with you.' ''
       Then Ballenger recruited three freshmen. He brought in 
     David Funderburk, one of the gang of five from North 
     Carolina. ``Oh, I knew Funderburk. Hoo, boy!'' said 
     Ballenger, explaining that he considered his Tarheel 
     colleague even more conservative than he was. When Lindsey 
     Graham, a freshman from South Carolina, signed on, Ballenger 
     hailed his as ``a good old southern boy--you can count on 
     them every time.'' And finally there was Charles Norwood, the 
     dentist from Augusta who arrived in Washington last winter 
     with OSHA dead in his sights. ``Everybody knew about 
     Charlie,'' Ballenger said, smiling.
       For all the decades that the labor subcommittees were 
     dominated by Democrats, Republicans who were assigned to the 
     panels tended to include a disproportionate share of 
     moderates. Now, in the first year of Republican rule, Cass 
     Ballenger looked at his group and declared that he was about 
     to have some fun. ``My subcommittee is so conservative it 
     makes me look liberal,'' he said. ``We could kill motherhood 
     tomorrow if it was necessary.''
       One of his freshmen put it another way. ``This has been a 
     subchapter of the AFL-CIO for 20 years,'' said Lindsey 
     Graham. ``Now everybody here talks slower--and with a 
     twang.''


                             pushed too far

       Graham and Norwood, whose congressional districts sit next 
     to each other along the South Carolina-Georgia border, 
     provide much of the new twang. They grew up in Democratic 
     families and became the first Republican congressmen from 
     their districts since Reconstruction. In their own ways, they 
     represent the social, economic and philosophical forces 
     behind the Republican revolution and the movement away from 
     government regulation.
       The 40-year-old Graham grew up in the textile town of 
     Seneca, where his parents ran the Sanitary Cafe, a bar 
     outside the factory gate. It was a beer and hot dog place 
     with a juke box that played ``Satin sheets to lie on satin 
     sheets to cry on.'' When the factory shift changed at 3 every 
     afternoon, young Graham would see the mill workers ``come in 
     with their shirts covered with cotton, white as they could 
     be. There'd be a finger missing on every other person.''
       Although he considered his home town an ``Andy Griffith of 
     Mayberry type place,'' he also saw the failings of the old 
     system. The textile plant treated its workers like children, 
     he said, and placed a greater emphasis on productivity than 
     safety. Graham understood that it was necessary for the 
     government to come in then and make workplaces safer, just as 
     he realized that the segregated system his parents were part 
     of--they made black workers buy beer from a takeout window 
     out back--was wrong and required the force of government 
     action to eradicate.
       But by the time Graham ran for Congress last year, he had 
     long since become convinced that the pendulum had swung too 
     far toward federal intervention. He though the role of the 
     government in mandating affirmative action and regulating 
     workplaces had ``gone from being helpful to being the biggest 
     obstacle dividing and polarizing the nation by race and by 
     employers and employees.'' It was his generation's mission, 
     Graham said, to ``correct the excesses of government from the 
     past generation.''
       One day during his congressional race, Graham had what his 
     campaign manager, David Woodard, called ``an epiphany.'' 
     Graham had delivered a noon speech at a small-town Rotary 
     Club, where he received a tepid response. Concerned that he 
     had not figured out how to tap into the old southern 
     Democratic establishment, Graham then paid a visit to a 
     textile mill on the edge of town. He later told Woodard that 
     the plant manager was so agitated he threw a sheaf of papers 
     to the ground and bellowed, ``No more damn Democrats. They've 
     got all these inspectors on me. All these crappy regs!''
       Afterward, Graham placed an excited call to his campaign 
     manager. ``He said, `We may not have the Rotary, but we have 
     the people running the mills,' '' Woodard recalled, ``From 
     then on, he picked up the theme.''
       Norwood, a 54-year-old dentist, sounded that theme from the 
     day he announced for Congress in suburban Augusta, calling 
     himself a businessman ``who just got pushed too far'' by 
     government regulators. It started a decade earlier when OSHA 
     began taking an active role in the dental profession to 
     ensure that employees and patients were not endangered
      by blood-borne pathogens such as the AIDS virus. Dentists, 
     Norwood said, did not 

[[Page E 1631]]
     need to be inspected or told how to maintain safe offices.
       Norwood became so upset by the federal health and safety 
     standards, which he said required his dental team to use 200 
     pairs of gloves each day and set up laundry services within 
     his office, that he began placing an explicit ``OSHA 
     surcharge'' on the bills he sent to patients. The charges 
     amounted to about $10 per visit. When patients complained, 
     Norwood told them to call their congressman. Then he decided 
     that he wanted to be the congressman. Although he had never 
     run for political office, Norwood had developed a state and 
     national network of dentists from his earlier position as 
     president of the Georgia Dental Association. He raised more 
     than $90,000 from his dental colleagues.
       Much like Ballenger in North Carolina, Norwood was 
     motivated in part by a personal experience. The Department of 
     Labor had once investigated him for not paying overtime to 
     his office aides after a disgruntled former employee filed a 
     complaint. Norwood said it would have cost him more to fight 
     the complaint than settle it, but he never forgot the $10,000 
     the incident cost him nor the role of the federal 
     investigators. From then on he referred to them as ``storm 
     troopers.''
       One morning on the campaign trail, Norwood turned to his 
     young aide, Gabe Sterling, and asked him to find out who was 
     in charge of OSHA. Sterling called Washington and learned 
     that it was an undersecretary of labor named Joseph Dear. 
     From then on, wherever he spoke to businessmen in his 
     district, Norwood would say, ``You know, that fellow who runs 
     OSHA, that Joe Dear, well when I get up to Washington I'm 
     gonna call that Joe Dear at 5 every morning and explain to 
     him the problems with OSHA.''
       It did not take long for Chairman Ballenger to realize that 
     he had a firebrand on his subcommittee. There was no need to 
     reform OSHA, Norwood told Ballenger. They should just close 
     the place down, fire everyone who worked there and then start 
     over. ``The only way to do it is to get rid of that crowd,'' 
     he said.
       Ballenger might have agreed, but he knew it would have been 
     counterproductive. ``I said `That's stupid. You can't win 
     that way. You gotta have a bill,' '' Ballenger recalled. I'm 
     smart enough, or dumb enough, to realize that if we don't 
     pass the bill, we haven't done a darn thing.''
                                                                    ____


               [From the Washington Post, July 24, 1995]

             OSHA's Enemies Find Themselves in High Places

               (By David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf)

       At 3 in the afternoon of Jan. 30, not long after the 
     Republican majority assumed control of Congress, about 50 of 
     the GOP's powerful allies in the business world gathered in 
     the Washington boardroom of the National Association of 
     Manufacturers. Oil was there, and chemicals, along with 
     freight and construction and steel and small business. They 
     convened as members of a lobbying group known as COSH, the 
     Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health, and they sensed 
     that their time was at hand.
       ``We're in a position to get something for employers,'' 
     said coalition official Pete Lunnie, opening the meeting.
       As he spoke, Lunnie recalled later, he was struck by how 
     unusual it all seemed, especially the optimistic tone. For 
     several years, the business community had been on the 
     defensive, trying to prevent the labor-oriented Democratic 
     Congress from strengthening the powers of the Occupational 
     Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency that 
     business leaders thought was already excessive in its 
     regulatory zeal. The low point had come on April 8, 1992, 
     when an executive had flown cross-country to testify before 
     the House Education and Labor Committee, only to be ignored 
     by the panel's chairman and never called on during a five-
     hour hearing. Lunnie sent out a membership memo the next day 
     deriding what he called the ``crude affront.''
       But now business had friends everywhere. Two former members 
     of the House labor panel had become powers in the leadership: 
     Majority Leader Richard K. Armey of Texas and House 
     Republican Conference Chairman John A. Boehner of Ohio. 
     Boehner, a former plastics salesman, had been deeply involved 
     in OSHA issues in past years and could be counted on again. 
     And in place of William D. Ford, the old Democratic chairman 
     who had snubbed COSH earlier, the key labor subcommittee was 
     now headed by Cass Ballenger, a manufacturer from North 
     Carolina with a long history of antipathy toward federal 
     regulators.
       At the strategy session in Washington, Lunnie asked the 
     participants to identify the industry's most pressing 
     problems with OSHA. ``Cass wants our input,'' he said. They 
     spent more than two hours enunciating a catalogue of gripes, 
     from which Lunnie and his core group of lobbyists produced a 
     consensus list of 30 recommendations for revising OSHA. In 
     late February, they typed out the suggestions on a single-
     spaced piece of paper, which they presented to Ballenger. 
     when Ballenger's work-force protections subcommittee came out 
     with the Safety and Health Improvement and Regulatory Reform 
     Act of 1995 in early June, there was little doubt among 
     congressional insiders about who benefited from each section 
     of the 47-page document. Virtually everything on COSH's wish 
     list was there.
       The coalition was the largest of many business groups and 
     lobbyists who found their way to Ballenger's office as the 
     bill was being drafted. ``Id say that any businessman who 
     happened to come up here to see someone in the House would 
     come by my office and say, `When you draw this thing up, will 
     you look at this please?' Ballenger said recently. ``We had 
     several groups that came up with finished bills they wanted. 
     The North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry, of 
     which I've been a member for 30 years, came up with a 
     complete bill. COSH had ideas. We had ex-heads of OSHA come 
     in here and give us advice. They all knew exactly what I 
     should do.''


                            delivering gifts

       The work of revising OSHA and rewriting U.S. labor laws had 
     already begun in Ballenger's shop even before the heavy 
     lobbying started. Weeks before the congressional elections 
     last fall, Jay Eagen, who was then the ranking minority aide 
     on the Education and Labor Committee, had a hunch that the 
     Republicans might gain control of the House and began 
     organizing a plan of action. The staff drafted a document 
     called Agenda 104, named for the 104th Congress. It outlined 
     the issues facing the committee and identified those of 
     highest priority. Labor laws and OSHA topped the list.
       When Ballenger assumed control of the subcommittee, he 
     delved deeply into the drafting process, choosing among 
     legislative options presented by aides in daily briefings 
     along with memos from corporate backers. Some industry 
     lobbyists were brought in to press a point or explain its 
     ramifications; others were enlisted to draft specific 
     provisions or vet them. While COSH and other groups enjoyed 
     broad access to the process, one lobbyist had the inside 
     track: Dorothy Livingston Strunk.
       A coal miner's daughter from Pennsylvania who arrived in 
     Washington with only a high school diploma, Strunk had 
     undergone a long rise through the ranks to emerge as one of 
     the most powerful voices in the workplace safety field. For 
     years she had been a top Republican aide on the labor 
     committee. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated her to 
     run the Mine Safety and Health Administration, but her 
     appointment was killed in the Senate after strong opposition 
     from the United Mine Workers. During the Bush administration, 
     she moved over to OSHA, where she rose from deputy to acting 
     director.
       Now she is a lobbyist for United Parcel Service, a company 
     whose Santa Claus-like public image as the deliverer of 
     presents covers an intensely political enterprise. During the 
     1994 election cycle, UPS, which is one of the nation's top 
     five employers and has offices in every congressional 
     district, emerged as the nation's No. 1 PAC contributor, 
     giving more than $2.6 million. Like many major PAC givers, it 
     has leaned heavily Republican since the GOP takeover, 
     contributing $210,000 to Republican House members in this 
     non-election year alone. About 9 percent of that amount went 
     to members of the labor panel, including $5,000 to Ballenger.
       The relationship between UPS and OSHA has been lengthy and 
     costly. The agency says it has received more worker 
     complaints against UPS than against any other employer, 
     resulting since 1972 in 2,786 violations and $4.6 million in 
     fines--cases that the delivery service says were mostly 
     minor. According to UPS data supplied to the Teamsters Union, 
     in 1992 company workers suffered 10,555 lifting and lowering 
     injuries that required more than first aid. The corporation 
     pays out an average of $1 million a day in workers' 
     compensation.
       UPS has an intense interest in revising the OSHA standards, 
     particularly the sections dealing with cumulative stress 
     disorders caused by repetitive motion or lifting. More than 
     180,000 of its workers perform such tasks, driving the boxy, 
     brown UPS trucks or handling packages. In Strunk, UPS had a 
     lobbyist who knew OSHA regulations inside out and someone 
     with unusual access to the committee where she once had 
     worked. Aides to other members of Congress said that when the 
     bill was being drafted, it was not uncommon for them to enter 
     the committee offices and see Strunk emerging from a back 
     room meeting with Gary L. Visscher, the staffer assigned to 
     write the OSHA bill. When the first
      version of the bill made the rounds in April, it was often 
     referred to as ``Dottie's draft.''
       Her influence is clear in Ballenger's bill. Strunk and 
     other lobbyists from the construction and trucking industries 
     pushed for restrictions on the only tool OSHA now has to 
     prevent cumulative trauma disorders such as carpal tunnel 
     syndrome and back strain. The agency has struggled for years 
     to issue an ergonomics standard that would cover those health 
     problems, but in the meantime has invoked a ``general duty 
     clause'' in its statute to deal with ``recognized hazards'' 
     of the workplace not specifically addressed.
       The general duty clause is used against a wide range of 
     otherwise unregulated risks, but starting in the 1980s it 
     became a popular OSHA device to prevent cumulative trauma 
     disorders. By 1990, more than 800 ergonomic violations were 
     imposed by OSHA--one quarter of its general duty clause 
     cases--costing employers more than $3 million in fines. Four 
     UPS facilities were among those cited for package sorting and 
     loading practices. Facing more than $140,000 in fines, the 
     company contested the charges, arguing that there was no 
     specific standard they failed to meet, and OSHA backed off 
     for lack of sufficient evidence.
       The Ballenger bill offered an opportunity for industry to 
     achieve what had eluded it 

[[Page E 1632]]
     for 25 years. Staff members presented a number of options to narrow the 
     general duty clause, adding language to limit its 
     application. At a crucial meeting in the chairman's office, 
     Strunk presented a historical perspective: The original 
     drafters, she said, wanted the clause to be used sparingly, 
     but over the years enforcers had used it liberally. No matter 
     how they tightened the wording, she said, inspectors could 
     still interpret it more broadly. Ballenger was in no mood to 
     take chances. His bill effectively eliminated the general 
     duty clause by preventing OSHA from imposing penalties where 
     no specific standard exists. Strunk declined requests to 
     discuss her lobbying role on the bill.
       Without the general duty powers, OSHA supporters maintain 
     that specific ergonomics standards are needed to deal with 
     the fastest-growing occupational injury. Half of today's work 
     force uses computers, requiring repetitive motion similar to 
     that of slaughterhouse workers cutting meat and grocery store 
     clerks using price scanners. But the Ballenger bill makes it 
     less likely that tough ergonomics standards could be imposed. 
     The measure reverses OSHA policy by requiring regulators to 
     justify the costs to business of implementing any new rule on 
     an industry-by-industry basis. On top of that complex 
     undertaking, the drafters were persuaded by the argument of 
     an Ashland Oil official to have such analyses reviewed by 
     panels of experts, not excluding those from companies with 
     interest in the outcome.
                             the fine print

       The Ballenger bill is pro-business in its contours, turning 
     a feared regulatory agency into what labor critics say would 
     amount to a consultant to employers. It would funnel half the 
     budget into training programs and incentives for voluntary 
     action. Large numbers of employers would be exempted from 
     random inspections and given wider latitude to avoid 
     penalties, while the rights of workers to file OSHA 
     complaints would be diminished.
       As in the case of UPS and ergonomics, the fine print of the 
     bill shows the influence of many industries. Chemical 
     companies reach one of their longtime goals by keeping states 
     from exceeding OSHA standards on workplace safety, such as 
     the labeling of toxic substances. Another provision, inspired 
     by Dow Chemical Co., would free employers regulated by OSHA 
     from other federal rules that are ``potentially in 
     conflict.'' The proposal is supposed to prevent double 
     regulation, but critics say it would allow industry to bypass 
     more extensive rules of other agencies if they can be shown 
     to be remotely similar.
       The iron and steel lobby got Ballenger to drop a 
     requirement that records be kept for work-related illnesses, 
     such as hearing loss, that do not call for medical treatment 
     and lost time. OSHA uses such logs to target troubled 
     industries for inspection--a threat to noisy plants because 
     of OSHA plans to tighten standards for hearing loss.
       Perhaps the most contentious section of Ballenger's bill 
     would abolish the federal agency charged with mine safety and 
     transfer its reduced regulatory powers to a weakened OSHA. 
     The Mine Safety and Health Administration is regarded as a 
     regulatory success story, bringing about a sevenfold drop in 
     mine fatalities since 1968. Ballenger's bill would water down 
     its enforcement powers against unsafe mines and loosen the 
     training and inspection requirements. Instead of four 
     inspections per year, underground mines would face one. The 
     requirement for two surface mine inspections a year would be 
     dropped.
       Ballenger explains the decision as a budget-driven effort 
     to save money and streamline federal authority. But larger 
     economic constituencies loomed in the background. The most 
     influential adviser advocating the merger was Dorothy Strunk, 
     who after leaving government worked for a Washington law firm 
     that represented mining interests. The proposal is supported 
     by some owners and operators of the rich east Kentucky coal 
     fields, whose small mines are among the most dangerous and 
     the latest targets of the mine safety agency.
       And the northeast corner of Ballenger's congressional 
     district, Mitchell County, is the nation's principal producer 
     of feldspar, a sand-like mineral mined on the surface and 
     used in ceramic and glass products. Ballenger met with an 
     official of Unimin Corp., one of the mining outfits there. 
     ``He said what really bugged him was, being above ground and 
     so forth, he gets inspected by both OSHA and MSHA. So he's 
     got two sets of rules to work off.''


                        how do you defend that?

       While there was basic agreement among subcommittee members 
     and industry allies about the scope of the OSHA bill, there 
     were some moments of tension. Georgia's Charles W. Norwood 
     Jr., supported by some lobbyists, thought the bill seemed too 
     timid, that it was just tinkering with the system instead of 
     reinventing it. In May, a few weeks before the measure was 
     presented, Norwood and his freshmen compatriots requested a 
     meeting with Ballenger. They asked John Boehner from the 
     House leadership to attend and help them make their case.
       Boehner had spent much of the previous four years working 
     on OSHA revisions that went nowhere in the face of Democratic 
     opposition. He agreed with Norwood in principle that the 
     committee staffers drafting the bill with Strunk's guidance 
     ``seemed too locked in on what is, instead of what could 
     be.'' On the
      other hand, he had heard about Norwood's sentiment to just 
     close down OSHA, and realized that was not politically 
     possible.
       When the meeting began, Boehner said later, he was more on 
     the side of Norwood and the freshmen. But soon enough he 
     found himself defending Ballenger and explaining to Norwood 
     why certain things could not be done.
       ``Charlie wanted to prevent OSHA from entering the 
     workplace where there was a serious accident or death if the 
     employer's lost-work ratio was below the industry average.'' 
     Boehner recalled. ``It was one of those issues where you had 
     to walk Charlie through the politics of it, the practicality 
     of it. The politics of it are: `Charlie, how do you defend 
     that? ' If you're going to have OSHA and your goal is to 
     create greater safety in the workplace and somebody dies in 
     the workplace, you have to let them in.''
       Norwood contended that unions were using OSHA as an 
     organizing tool. Company managers back in Georgia had 
     complained to him that whenever a union was trying to 
     organize a plant, OSHA would somehow show up and do an 
     inspection because an employee had called in a violation. 
     Boehner and Ballenger satisfied Norwood with two other 
     provisions. Under the revised bill, if OSHA makes an 
     inspection after a death or injury, it can only issue fines 
     directly related to that incident. The bill also requires an 
     employee who sees a workplace violation to take it to the 
     management first. Only if there is no response in 30 days can 
     the complaint go to OSHA.
       During his campaign for Congress last year, Norwood had 
     vowed to call OSHA chief Joseph Dear every morning at 5 to 
     tell him what was wrong with his agency. He never followed 
     through on that threat, but he did invite Dear to Meet with 
     him in his congressional office. Norwood complained that the 
     blood-borne pathogen standards were so strict that dentists 
     felt they could not give children their extracted teeth. It 
     was a story that Norwood and other dentists had been telling 
     for years, so common that it even had a name--The Tooth Fairy 
     Story. Like so many of the OSHA ``horror stories,'' as they 
     are called, it fell somewhere between reality and myth. Some 
     dentists did stop giving out extracted teeth, but there was 
     nothing in the law preventing them from doing so.
       Norwood also asked Dear about another common story--that 
     OSHA regulations prohibited roofers from chewing gum on the 
     job. Dear said that there was no such regulation. Norwood, 
     according to his staff, later said that he had caught Dear in 
     a lie. Again, there was a fine line between truth and myth. 
     OSHA standards did say that workers could not chew gum in one 
     case: when they were working ``in an area where the level of 
     asbestos is so high that chewing gum could result in the 
     ingestion of asbestos.''
       While Norwood and other Republicans on the subcommittee 
     have relied on their catalogue of horror stories to make 
     their case against OSHA, the struggle has a stone economic 
     and political component. Corporations lobbying on OSHA and 
     other labor laws dominated Norwood's list of post-election 
     contributions to pay off his campaign debt. Nearly two-thirds 
     of the money he raised came from corporate members of those 
     lobbying coalitions. More than a third of the $58,000 he has 
     reported raising from PACs for his next election come from 
     these same groups. He sponsors a monthly breakfast round 
     table for business leaders in Augusta, GA., where members can 
     become squires for $250 and knights for $500.
       Dentists, who have played an active role in the anti-OSHA 
     movement, gave more than $90,000 to Norwood's last campaign--
     one-quarter of his contributions from individuals. In turn, 
     he fought to essentially exempt dentists from safety 
     inspections: They fell into the category of small business 
     that would no longer be visited by the green-and-yellow-
     jacketed OSHA investigators.
       Subcommittee member Bill Barrett's largest source of money 
     was from the meat and
      sugar industries, both of which have had OSHA violations in 
     his rural Nebraska base. His largest contribution came 
     from ConAgra, the agribusiness giant, which also accounted 
     for the largest OSHA violation in his district in the last 
     five years. ConAgra's Monfort meat-packing plant in Grand 
     Island was hit with fines of more than $625,000 after a 
     series of incidents there, including the death of a 
     maintenance man who was beheaded by a defleshing machine 
     that should have been secured with a safety lock.
       More than one-third of the PAC money raised by Chairman 
     Ballenger for his 1994 campaign came from corporations that 
     were lobbying for labor law and OSHA changes. The most 
     generous was UPS's PAC, at $10,000. The single largest 
     contributor to the National Republican Congressional 
     Committee from North Carolina was Glaxo Inc., a major North 
     Carolina pharmaceutical firm which has a long history of 
     working in tandem with Ballenger to fight OSHA. When 
     Ballenger was in the North Carolina legislature, Glaxo was 
     fighting a revision in the law which would have required it 
     to have a locked mailbox at the plant gate containing all 
     reports on chemicals shipped into the plant each day. ``You 
     had to change it every day if you received chemical shipments 
     every day,'' Ballenger recalled. The company considered it a 
     paperwork headache. ``Luckily,'' said Ballenger, ``I killed 
     the hell out of it.''
     
[[Page E 1633]]



                           The Working Stiffs

       The complaint from labor and Democrats for years was that 
     OSHA was doing too little. Of the 70,000 hazardous chemicals 
     used by industry, the agency had set standards for only 25, 
     an average of one each year. Only in the last two years had 
     it begun moving seriously on ergonomics issues. Despite 
     business complaints about swarms of OSHA storm troopers 
     invading plants, inspections have actually been few and far 
     between. The typical company in North Carolina, for instance, 
     would be inspected once every seven years. In the aftermath 
     of one of the most calamitous workplace disasters of the 
     decade, the Sept. 3, 1991, fire at Imperial Food Products in 
     Hamlet, N.C.; in which 25 people died because there was no 
     sprinkler system and the fire doors could not be opened from 
     the inside, it was determined that OSHA had never inspected 
     the plant.
       There were significant gains in some areas, however, which 
     have strengthened the resolve of OSHA supporters this year as 
     they fight for the agency's life. THe impact of OSHA 
     intervention in certain high-risk industries is clear. There 
     have been 58 percent fewer deaths in grain handling and 35 
     percent fewer deaths in trench cave-ins since OSHA cracked 
     down on those industries. The number of textile workers 
     suffering from brown lung--a crippling respiratory disease--
     fell from 20 percent of the industry work force in 1978, when 
     OSHA set limits on worker exposure to cotton dust, to 1 
     percent seven years later.
       Democrat Major R. Owens of New York, the ranking minority 
     member of Ballenger's subcommittee, is fond of quoting 
     Speaker Newt Gingrich's line that ``politics is war without 
     blood.'' The Republican attempts to change the American 
     workplace, Owens says, amount to a declaration of war on the 
     nation's working men and women.
       But Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Ballenger's 
     activist freshmen, said the Democrats and labor are deluding 
     themselves if they believe they have the working people on 
     their side in the fight against government regulations. When 
     Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich testified before the 
     committee, Graham asked him one question: ``How do you 
     reconcile your agenda with my election? '' Graham, who won 60 
     percent of the vote in a district where the average income 
     was $13,200, said he counted the times Reich used the phrase 
     ``working stiff'' in his presentation.
       ``He used the words `working stiff' 21 times,'' Graham 
     said. ``I wrote it down every time he said it. Well the 
     working stiff, the little guy, elected me. They picked me! ''
                                                                    ____

              [From the Washington Post, July 23-24, 1995]

                Quotes of Representative Cass Ballenger

       In regard to the idea of Republican run House:
       ``I'd say, `Guess who might be chairman of the committee 
     who'd be in charge of OSHA?'
       ``And they'd say, `Who?'
       ``And I'd say, `Me!'
       ``And I'd say, `I need some money,' And--whoosh--I got it. 
     This was my sales pitch: `Businessmen, wouldn't you love to 
     have a friend overseeing OSHA?''
       Talking about the sooring machine:
       ``The clutch on it was mechanical and the dang thing always 
     slipped. You'd be wiping grease off it and the cloth would 
     get caught in the gears and, thwack, it would just cut your 
     fingers off.''
       Before OSHA: employers and workers relied on ``simple 
     common sense.''
       After an employee of his lost a finger:
       `` `See what can happen? Put your guard back on and don't 
     do that again.' You'd learn not to do that anymore.''
       About the first OSHA visit to his factory:
       ``They came into my plant and they told me that my loading 
     dock was unsafe because it didn't have a barrier to keep 
     people from falling off. . . . And so I said, `Well, let me 
     ask you something, if you put a barrier up, how do you loan?' 
     They thought about it and said maybe they were wrong.''
       Speaking about John Brooks, state labor commissioner:
       ``Every time John came in and said, `We are underfunded and 
     need more inspectors,' and told us how it was awful that we 
     didn't think about the health and safety of the workers of 
     North Carolina.''
       Thinking about John Brooks:
       ``Here's the horse's ass who runs a lousy operation asking 
     us for more money.''
       Speaking of the 1994 elections:
       ``Then, all of a sudden, oops! We got control.''
       About picking his team for the subcommittee:
       ``I wanted people sympathetic to the cause, I was looking 
     for pro-business people.''
       Exchange with Rep. Greenwood concerning OSHA:
       ``I asked him where he would stand on OSHA, and he said, 
     `I'll be with you.''
       On recruiting freshman members:
       Republican Funderburk. ``Oh, I knew Funderburk. Hoo, boy!''
       Republican Graham. ``a good old southern boy--you can count 
     on them every time.''
       Republican Norwood. ``Everybody knew about Charlie''
       About the subcommittee:
       ``My subcommittee is so conservative it makes me look 
     liberal. We could kill motherhood tomorrow if it was 
     necessary.''
       After Norwood's suggestion to just ``shut down OSHA'':
       ``That's stupid. You can't win that way. You gotta have a 
     bill. I'm smart enough, or dumb enough, to realize that if we 
     don't pass the bill, we haven't done a darn thing.''
       Ballenger on the drafting or H.R. 1834:
       ``I'd say that any businessman who happened to come up here 
     to see someone in the House would come by my office and say, 
     `when you draw this thing up will you look at this please?' 
     We had several groups that came up with finished bills they 
     wanted. The North Carolina Citizens for Business and 
     Industry, of which I've been a member for 30 years, came up 
     with a complete bill. COSH had ideas. We had ex-heads of OSHA 
     come in here and give us advice. They all knew exactly what I 
     should do.''
       Ballenger on meeting with an official from Unimin Corp.:
       ``He said that what really bugged him was, being above 
     ground and so forth, he gets inspected by both OSHA and MSHA. 
     So he's got two sets of rules to work off.''
       Ballenger on Glaxo and OSHA regulations:
       ``You had to change it every day if you received chemical 
     shipments every day,'' Ballenger recalled. The company 
     considered it a paperwork headache. ``Luckily,'' said 
     Ballenger, ``I killed the hell out of it.''
                                                                    ____

                Quotes of Representative Lindsey Graham

       On Republican priorities:
       ``I think employers now take a different approach with 
     their workers than they have in the past. My job is to get 
     the government up to speed with the times. And the times for 
     me are to reevaluate the role of the federal government in 
     private business. If you believe that is the mandate, OSHA is 
     a great place to start.''
       About subcommittee:
       ``This has been a subchapter of the AFL-CIO for 20 years. 
     Now everybody here talks slower--and with a twang.''
       Talking about patrons of his parents Cafe:
       * * * young Graham would see mill workers ``come in with 
     their shirts covered with cotton, white as they could be. 
     There'd be a finger missing on every other person.''
       On role of government is mandating affirmative action and 
     regulating workplaces:
       [it] had ``gone from being helpful to being the biggest 
     obstacle dividing and polarizing the nation by race and by 
     employers and employees.''
       The `mission' for his generation:
       * * * to ``correct the excesses of government from the past 
     generation.''
       Plant manager from Rep. Graham's district:
       ``No more damn Democrats. They've got all these inspectors 
     on me. All these crappy regs!''
       Following this Graham placed a call to his campaign 
     manager:
       ``He said, `We may not have the Rotary, but we have the 
     people running the mills,' '' Woodward recalled.
       ``From then on, he picked up the theme.''
       Graham to Labor Secretary Reich on what the working people 
     want:
       ``How do you reconcile your agenda with my election?'' 
     Graham who won 60 percent of the vote in a district where the 
     average income was $13,200, said he counted the times Reich 
     used the phrase ``working stiff'' in his presentation. ``He 
     used the words `working stiff' 21 times. I wrote it down each 
     time he said it. Well, the working stiff, the little guy, 
     elected me. They picked me!''
                                                                    ____


            Quotes of Representative Charles W. Norwood, Jr.

       On OSHA inspectors:
       ``They need to do what the hell they're told. They've been 
     sitting in their cubicles for 25 years thinking they knew 
     what was best for every industry in this country. They don't. 
     And they don't want to know. All they want to know is what 
     they can get away with to collect money from us.''
       When speaking to businessmen in his district while 
     campaigning:
       ``You know, that fellow who runs OSHA, that Joe Dear, well 
     when I get up to Washington I'm gonna call that Joe Dear at 5 
     every morning and explain to him the problems with OSHA.''
       To Ballenger about how to deal with OSHA:
       There is no need to reform OSHA. * * * They should just 
     close the place down, fire everyone who worked there and just 
     start over. ``The only way to do it is to get rid of that 
     crowd.''
                                                                    ____


                Quotes of Representative John A. Boehner

       On OSHA:
       ``Most employers would describe OSHA as the Gestapo of the 
     federal government.''
       Boehner on OSHA meetings with Norwood and Ballenger:
       ``Charlie wanted to prevent OSHA from entering the 
     workplace where there was a serious accident or death if the 
     employer's lost-work ratio was below the industry average. It 
     was one of those issues where you had to walk Charlie through 
     the politics of it, the practicality of it. The politics of 
     it are: `Charlie, how do you defend that?' If you're going to 
     have OSHA and your goal is to create greater safety in the 
     workplace and somebody dies in the workplace, you have to let 
     them in.''
     

                          ____________________