Worker's Memorial Day touches everyone
By Marianne Brown
On your job, have you ever experienced cuts and lacerations, bruises and contusions, strains and sprains?
If you have, you are not alone. According to California's Division of Labor Statistics and Research, 2,104 workers under the age of 18 and 65,552 workers ages 18-24 suffered work related illnesses or injuries in 1991.
These may be shocking statistics for you because most young people do not work in what are thought to be the "hazardous" industries such as agriculture, mining, construction and manufacturing. Instead, they are concentrated in three types of work: sales and service (especially food service), administrative support and laborers/handlers. It turns out these jobs also have their hazards. One case tells the story:
A 19 year-old college student was working part-time at a fast food restaurant. While operating an electric cabbage shredder, she caught her hand in the machinery. She had never been given any health and safety instruction, nor been warned about the hazards of this equipment. Since her initial emergency treatment, she has had four operations and undergone months of painful, exhausting physical therapy. Her hand is permanently disfigured. Formerly a starting guard on her school's basketball team, she is no longer able to play competitive sports. She received a one-time disability payment of $2,300.
This young woman's employer did not have a necessary guard on the cabbage shredder nor an Injury and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP) in place. Such programs have been required in all California workplaces since 1991, and would include training on how to operate the shredder safely. This tragedy could have been prevented, and the paltry Worker's Compensation award never would have been necessary.
Today, April 28, has been designed by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Relations (AFL-CIO) as Worker's Memorial Day to commemorate the tens of thousands of workers who are killed, injured or permanently disabled on the job each year. Young people of college age are included in these statistics. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated that for 1992, more than 64,000 young people were treated for occupational injuries in emergency rooms.
And, California reports indicate that 12 workers under the age of 20 died from occupational causes in 1991.
Today is the time to pause and remember those who have suffered or died on the job from the scores of federal workers who were killed in the Oklahoma bombing last week, to the more than 600 California workers who died on the job last year, to your peers who have suffered from work-related disabilities, even to the construction worker who was injured yesterday at UCLA by falling steel on a construction site near Dickson.
Today also marks the 24th anniversary of the implementation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the governmental agency established to ensure that employers provide a safe and healthful workplace for their employees. Federal OSHA is currently under attack from the new congressional majority, and here our state equivalent, Cal-OSHA, is the target of "reform" efforts that many believe will seriously weaken it. These proposals may affect you because Cal-OSHA regulates where you work now and where you will work after you graduate, if you stay in state.
If you would like to know more about your workplace health and safety rights and efforts under way to protect them, please join us today at noon at a Worker's Memorial Day gathering in 3517 Ackerman.
Brown is the director of UCLA-Labor Occupational Safety and Health (LOSH) Program,which is part of the UCLA Labor Center and the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.