Public Welfare Foundation grantees testified on Capitol Hill about the need to boost efforts by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) to prevent unsafe conditions that result in worker deaths or injuries. On the 20th observance of Workers Memorial Day, April 28, close surviving relatives told members of Congress that government is not always helpful to families trying to determine how their loved one died on the job.
“It is like homicide,” said Tammy Miser of Lexington, KY, “whether the incident was voluntary or involuntary, the family strives to find out certain information.” Her brother, Shawn Boone, was killed in an aluminum dust explosion in Huntington, Indiana in 2003. She told Sen. Patty Murray of Washington (shaking hands with Miser, far left), who chairs the Employment and Workplace subcommittee of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that families are seeking answers to “simple questions like: Did my son suffer? Was my dad alone when he passed? How did my sister die? Has it happened before in other workplaces? Can we keep it from happening again? Why was this allowed to happen?”
Miser testified that families want better information related to federal, state or local investigations into the accidents that killed their loved ones; stiffer penalties for serious violations found by OSHA (she and other witnesses said that the average OSHA fine is about $900); and an advisory committee appointed by the Secretary of Labor that would solicit recommendations from families on preventing workplace accidents.
Frustration with the investigation process after her brother’s death led Miser to start a volunteer organization, United Support & Memorial for Workplace Fatalities, that helps families cope with the loss of a relative on the job and tries to help improve worker safety and health. In 2008, the Public Welfare Foundation gave USMWF a two-year grant of $162,000 that will allow Miser to become the full-time executive director of a sustainable grassroots organization.
Appearances by Miser and others before Senate and House committees confirm the increasingly important role of family member advocacy to help ensure worker health and safety, as noted in the Pump Handle blog maintained by another Foundation grantee, the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and in a Las Vegas Sun article by Alexandra Berzon, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner for a series on deaths of construction workers.
