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HOW DONALD TRUMP UNDERMINED THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF AMERICAN WORKERS
 
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Lawrence S. Wittner
August 13, 2024
ArtVoice
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_ The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by
dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping
their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to
Donald Trump, as President. _

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During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump
was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health
and safety of the nation’s workers.

Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted
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targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded
the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans
lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made
workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety
regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly
disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of
federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest
level in that agency’s 48-year history
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According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take
165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.

Furthermore, the administration
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rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records,
proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace
safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also
proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety
and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety,
and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos
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a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and
neurological damage to children.

In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture
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Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited
increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter. In an industry already
notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational
injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this
was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety. Even so, the
Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’
safety and health before issuing the rule.

Downplaying workplace hazards
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the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust,
infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause
silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an
increased risk of lung cancer. Eager to reduce business expenditures
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also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction
workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen. In
addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback
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the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule,
thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first
responders.

The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and
safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the
coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces. Trump refused
to issue binding rules
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businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus
drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly
vulnerable workers. Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an
executive orde [[link removed]]r to
require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open. This fact,
plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of
Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed,
led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry
workers and to the deaths of hundreds.

Other groups of workers
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also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and
safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the
Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective
equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United,
by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down
with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it.
In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture
Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted
Covid.

By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking,
food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of
Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for
violations of health and safety regulations. JBS (the biggest
meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51
billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield
(owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with
more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only
$13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid). Both companies refused
to pay the fines. Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and
rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named
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Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the
pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures
contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the
United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
annual number of worker deaths _on the job_ rose between 2016
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year of the Obama administration) and 2019
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pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333. In addition, an
estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational
diseases.

Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed
by occupational injuries and illnesses
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AFL-CIO reported: “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all
industries, including state and local government, had work-related
injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.”
Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the
current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of
workplace injuries, this number understates the problem. The true toll
is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5
million injuries and illnesses a year.”

The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous
machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last
breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald
Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety. But it
might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls
this November.

_Dr. Lawrence Wittner_ [[link removed]]_, syndicated
by __PeaceVoice_ [[link removed]]_, is Professor of
History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of __Confronting the
Bomb_
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University Press)._

* Donald Trump
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* workers
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* Health and Safety
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