Left in the Dust: The dismantling of a U.S. workplace safety rule, and the political battle behind i
Source: Reuters
The dismantling of a U.S. workplace safety rule, and the political battle behind it
In the waning days of his presidency, Barack Obama pushed a measure to limit workplace exposure to beryllium. After Donald Trump gained the White House, the GOP moved to strip key portions of the rule saying it burdened businesses with little benefit to laborers. An inside look at the political battle.
By JULIA HARTE and PETER EISLER Filed Jan. 22, 2019, noon GMT
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Davis was one of an estimated 11,500 shipyard and construction workers who U.S. regulators say are exposed each year to beryllium: a toxic, carcinogenic element laced through the coal waste often used in abrasive blasting grits. These workers lie at the heart of a little-known regulatory drama unfolding behind the Trump administrations push to relax safety rules it deems burdensome to U.S. businesses.
Just after the election, the Trump administration and its congressional allies began moving to unravel key provisions of a federal rule, issued in the last days of the Obama presidency, that sharply limited workplace exposure to beryllium and required certain industries to carefully monitor health risks.
Beryllium inhalation has long been known to cause lung cancer and berylliosis, a debilitating, potentially fatal respiratory illness. Yet efforts to set an updated workplace exposure standard had been stymied for decades by debates over what the new exposure limit should be. The Obama rule was based on a compromise developed by labor and industry stakeholders.
The Trump administration has left the new beryllium exposure limits intact. But in June 2017, it announced plans to exempt shipbuilding and construction operations from the rules ancillary provisions, which require air quality testing, new workplace hygiene measures and employee health monitoring for beryllium-related illnesses.
That decision, scheduled to take effect in June 2019, would remove the estimated 11,500 workers from the protections, a government analysis shows.
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Read more:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-beryllium-rule/