[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 10501]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          WORKERS MEMORIAL DAY

  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, Saturday, April 28, is Workers Memorial Day. 
Tomorrow, working men and women around the world will gather to 
remember their millions of brothers and sisters who have been injured 
or killed on the job. I join them in their grief-and in their 
determination to secure a safer future.
  Work-related accidents kill Americans with a regularity that calls us 
to question the very word ``accident.'' Fifteen deaths every day, and 
more than 11,000 injuries: They are grimly predictable and often 
preventable.
  Today is for men like Eleazar Torres-Gomez, a laundry worker who was 
dragged by a conveyor belt into a 300-degree industrial dryer, where he 
burned to death. Sadness at his death is matched by an equal anger-
especially when we learn that, in the two years preceding it, his 
employer was cited more than 170 times for unsafe, illegal working 
conditions. We remember Eleazar today.
  Today is for the 12 miners killed last year in Sago, West Virginia, 
when an explosion trapped them underground for two days. Only a few 
years before, the Mine Safety and Health Administration struck down 17 
new safety rules for trapped miners--rules that might have saved the 
miners in Sago. We remember them today.
  Today is for the 28 union construction workers killed in Connecticut, 
20 years ago this month, when the apartment towers they were building 
collapsed with a roar, within seconds, into ruined concrete and steel. 
In the wake of their deaths, we outlawed the dangerous lift-slab 
construction method that led to the collapse. But we can never replace 
those lives; today we remember them, too.
  How can we honor them? I know this much: Words alone would be an 
insult. The men and women we remember this Saturday risked their lives 
so we could lie down and wake up in health and safety and comfort, and 
merely speaking our gratitude would be emptier than doing nothing. We 
owe them action.
  We owe them action equal to the historic Occupational Safety and 
Health Act (OSHA), which was passed 37 years ago tomorrow and has saved 
an estimated 350,000 lives. We need to cover more workers--because more 
than 8.5 million are not protected by OSHA. We need more resources for 
inspection and enforcement--because, at the current rate, federal 
inspectors are only able to examine workplaces, on average, once every 
133 years. We need stiffer penalties for employers who knowingly put 
their workers' lives at risk--because employers like those who 
compromised Mr. Torres-Gomez's life now face a maximum penalty of a 
simple misdemeanor.
  And we need the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to take 
its work more seriously--because, according to a New York Times report 
released this week, ``the agency has killed dozens of existing and 
proposed regulations and delayed adopting others.''
  Taking these vital steps for workers adds up to more than increased 
resources or stronger oversight--ultimately, it translates to respect. 
We owe their memories nothing less. Five thousand seven hundred workers 
were killed on the job last year, and our economic prosperity is built 
on their flesh and blood.
  More than half a century ago, George Orwell remarked on the disregard 
that so often greets manual labor: ``It keeps us alive, and we are 
oblivious of its existence. . . . We are capable of forgetting it as we 
forget the blood in our veins.''
  Today we pledge ourselves as the exception to that rule. And if we 
mean our words, we will be the exception tomorrow, and the day after 
that. For America's working men and women deserve nothing less than our 
eternal gratitude and diligence in preventing future workplace 
tragedies.

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