House Committee Approves Landmark Miner and Worker Safety Legislation

“The legislation passed by the House Education and Labor Committee represents an important step forward in strengthening safety laws for our nation’s miners,” said Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.

“This bill will compel operators who don’t take the safety and health of miners seriously to do so,” she added. “In addition, by also strengthening the OSH Act, this bill will improve safety and health for all workers.  Every worker deserves to come home safe at the end of a shift.”

The Robert C. Byrd Miner Safety and Health Act (H.R. 5663) would provide stronger tools to ensure that underground coal mine operations with troubling safety records improve conditions, empower workers to speak up about safety concerns and give the Department of Labor the tools it needs to ensure that all workers go home safely at the end of the day.

“Too many families have suffered a tragic loss because of callous mine operators, ineffective protections and outdated laws. It is time to provide effective protections so that every worker can return home safely at the end of their shift. Congress has an obligation to make sure that is the case,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the committee. “This legislation addresses serious gaps in the law and makes comprehensive, common-sense reforms to strengthen our nation’s safety laws.”

The legislation approved by the committee would give miners working in underground coal mines additional protections against retaliation if they speak up about dangerous conditions. In May, the House Education and Labor Committee heard testimony in Beckley, West Virginia from miners and families of those who died in the Upper Big Branch Mine about serious shortcomings in miner protections, including threats and intimidation of miners who brought up safety concerns to their bosses.

The Upper Big Branch explosion also highlighted serious flaws in existing laws that undermine MSHA’s ability to bring tougher sanctions against the nation’s most dangerous mines. The bill would revamp the criteria for “pattern of violations” sanctions to ensure that dangerous underground coal mine operations fix chronic problems.

“The safety and health of our nation's miners is too important not to act,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., chair of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. “The Occupational Safety and Health Act, in particular, has not been significantly amended in 40 years and is badly outdated and needs to be brought into the 21st century. The bill that has been voted out of this committee will save lives and I am looking forward to its passage on the floor.”

Revamping the OSH Act

In response to a number of recent deadly explosions at refineries, power plants and food processing facilities, the bill also extends similar worker protections to all workplaces in order to hold employers accountable if they knowingly put their workers in danger.

“Every day, 14 workers don’t come home from work. While they don’t make headlines like trapped miners do, their lives and limbs are no less valuable,” said Miller.

In a White Paper issued in November 2008, ORC Worldwide, a global human resources consulting firm whose Washington, D.C., office provides specialized occupational safety and health services to businesses and other organizations, commented that “for the 21st Century workplace, [the Act] has become in several significant ways an outdated model for protecting today’s workers from occupational safety and health hazards.” 

In comments sent to Miller before the markup and passage of H.R. 5663, ORC Worldwide noted, “H.R. 5663, like its predecessors, would do little to modernize the basic framework of the OSH Act to meet the safety and health challenges of the 21st Century workplace and work force. In addition, ideally, ORC would have liked to have seen Congress go beyond focusing primarily on the enforcement-related provisions of the act and also seek to provide OSHA with additional incentives, tools and resources to assist the vast majority of employers that are earnestly interested in protecting their workers but that may lack the capacity and competencies to do so effectively.” (To view the complete statement from ORC Worldwide, click here.)

To ensure that all workplaces have basic protections, whistleblower protections would be strengthened, criminal and civil penalties would be increased and hazard abatement would be sped up. In addition, victims of workplace incidents and their family members would be provided greater rights during investigations and enforcement actions. OSHA would be allowed to assert concurrent enforcement jurisdiction in states with OSHA state plans, if the state is failing to maintain protections for workers that is at least as effective as federal OSHA.

One of the major amendments to the bill was offered by Congresswoman Dina Titus, D-Nev., and examines the management of occupational safety and health in states with OSHA state plans. Titus noted that such state plans are required to provide occupational safety and health regulations that are “at least as effective” as those of federal OSHA. Nevada recently came under fire for non-compliance.