Date: 2005-07-12
Speaker: GENE GREEN (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

Mr. Speaker. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time opposing this rule. I would like to express my disappointment that the Committee on Rules refused to allow a vote on an amendment that has bipartisan support. an amendment that would require to list contract workers on their injury site log. This was not a major expense or an inconvenience for employers. yet the Committee on Rules defeated it on a partyline vote. The bills that are up today are not major legislation. They may correct individual problems. and each of them need to be debated. and they should be. But not to allow other needed OSHA reforms is a travesty of this House because of the situation I am getting ready to talk about. Our amendment was defeated on a partyline vote. even though we have bipartisan support on the original legislation that was introduced in March of this year. Mr. Speaker. 15 people lost their lives during an explosion and fire at a refinery in Texas City. This is a picture of the site. and I include for the RECORD a copy of the Baytown Sun article on the deadly accident. This picture shows the site in Texas City. The bills that are allowed under this rule will do nothing to help the 15 people killed in this accident. Nothing. That is what the travesty is on this floor today. A series of news articles quickly discovered that it is extremely difficult to assess the safety of such facilities due to the way employers are required to keep their site logs of injuries on the work site. While all deaths and injuries are reported to OSHA. only those involving direct employees of the sitecontrolling company are required to be maintained on the site incident log. This means that the incidents involving contract workers or parttime workers do not show up on the injury log employers are required to keep by law. Unfortunately. because current law does not require them to do so. the site log will look just the same as it did the day before March 23. It will show no lives were lost. Those 15 workers who died on this site were contract workers. and they should be reported. Residents and communities surrounding these facilities have a right to know if they live near a place that could endanger them if something were to go wrong. If we had full disclosure of these incidents. the free Market system may be able to work. Workers are less willing to work in hazardous environments. so facilities would have incentives to improve safety. Right now. it is nearly impossible to determine exactly how many accidents have occurred at a particular site without crossreferencing contracts between employers and contractors. OSHA has known these reporting requirements were a problem for 14 years. and yet here we are today dealing with three pieces of legislation that deal with nothing to do with contract workers. In 1989. one of the most serious plant explosions in our country occurred at a plant in Pasadena. Texas. and I am honored to represent that area. This accident killed 23 workers and injured 232 others. As a result. OSHA called for a study regarding the use of contract labor in the petrochemical industry. This study was conducted while the first George Bush was President. and this study found there was a lack of adequate injury and incident data. It states that current data reporting procedures do not capture the full range of injury or illnesses experienced in the industry because the injury statistics do not include the experience of contract workers. . This amendment does not require an industry to do anything more than record injuries and accidents on their site log regardless of whether they are their employee or someone working on their site. I am not here to. bash employers or OSHA. The bottom line is that neighbors and employees have the right to know. These bills that we are considering today may very well weaken job safety. but I do not think they are that major. We should be working on a bipartisan basis to solve problems and prevent deaths and injuries like what happened on March 23. 2005. in Texas City. Texas. That is why these three bills are woefully inadequate to deal with the problems that we have with onsite job injuries right now. [From the Baytown Sun. June 29. 2005]