Struggling for Safety

AFTER surviving for seven days in the smoky depths of the fire-ravaged Sunshine silver mine near Kellogg, Idaho, two young miners, Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson, were amazingly rescued last week. "I'm not normally a religious man, but I sure prayed," Flory said. But 91 others were killed in the nation's largest silver mine. This week Congress will begin hearings to examine what started the fire. One suspicion is that spontaneous combustion occurred in the old mine timbers.

It takes a disaster like this to focus attention on one of the nation's most scandalous problems: on-the-job accidents. Last year they caused 12,200 deaths. In addition, of the nation's 79 million workers last year, 2,200,000 were disabled and another 5,300,000 suffered lesser injuries or illnesses. Roofers fell off buildings, sheet-metal workers sliced off fingers, welders inhaled toxic fumes, and there were electrocutions, burnings, radiation poisonings and inhalation of cancer-inducing asbestos particles and chemical fumes.

Congress last year put into effect the Occupational Safety and Health Act (O.S.H.A.). It covers all industries except mining, which is regulated by two other safety acts. The Bureau of Mines, which is in charge of mine safety, is looking into devices to keep trapped miners alive, including Westinghouse-developed modular steel shelters that carry oxygen and food, ride on wheels and follow workers almost everywhere that they go underground. The new, broader occupational safety law laid down strict regulations for every employer and empowered federal inspectors to levy fines of as high as $10,000 and six months in jail for each violation. Up to February of this year, 20,688 factories, stores and offices had been inspected, but only 23% were found to be completely within the limits of the law. Fines of $1,444,686 have been proposed, and one firm, Greenfield & Associates of Lavonia, Mich., was fined a total of $16,000. These fines can be contested before a three-man commission; it already has a five-month backlog of 842 cases.

Worst First. Typically, the inspector uses noisemeters to tell whether the thrumming of machines could harm workers' ears, checks other instruments to detect potentially explosive gas leaks, and looks for missing guards on presses that can chop off an arm in a second. What have inspectors found? No eye washes in battery-charger areas, storage racks piled so high that they could fall on a worker, and no protective hearing devices.

Administrators of O.S.H.A. in the Labor Department have a budget of only $38.5 million; for next year the proposed budget is $97 million. AFL-CIO officials say that at least $166 million is needed to deploy a minimum of 1,550 inspectors instead of the current 500. The Labor Department, working on a "worst-first" basis, is concentrating its inspectors on the policing of industries that have extremely high accident rates: longshoring, roofing and sheet metal, meat packing, mobile-home manufacturing and lumber and wood producing. Indeed, accidents are so common on the docks that, on the average, one out of every eight longshoremen a year suffers at least a temporarily disabling injury.

O.S.H.A. is stirring heated debates in Washington. TIME Correspondent Mark Sullivan reports: "It is a liberal law being administered by a conservative Administration. President Nixon would like to turn over supervision of safety laws to the states. The unions and the Democrats would rather see the power remain in Washington." If states do develop tough industrial safety standards--Texas, Alabama, Colorado and Wyoming have notably weak codes --the Government will pay 50% of the operating costs and 90% of the start-up expenses. So far only one state, South Carolina, has requested funds.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the new federal law on grounds that reporting requirements are burdensome for small businesses which have few safety hazards. Chamber spokesmen also argue that the standards covered in the law's 248 finely printed pages could cause "economic holocaust" by forcing companies to scrap costly machines and dies.

The National Safety Council criticizes O.S.H.A. for other reasons. Says Robert Currie, assistant to the general manager of NSC: "I don't think you will see any significant payoff in terms of injuries prevented. A good safety program goes far beyond the law's requirements." Such sound programs are already in force at some companies, including Aerojet General, Du Pont, General Dynamics, Boeing, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Westinghouse and Firestone. Other employers could wisely copy from them. Unless many more do so and unless the Federal Government gets tougher, the toll of lives from on-the-job accidents is apt to rise even higher.

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