Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the amount of time left?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I take issue with the last statement. We are on the first quarter of a four-bill marathon. They have been put together by the majority. We choose to discuss them as we see fit. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. PAYNE) to close out this first quarter of this four-bill marathon. (Mr. PAYNE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, point of information.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there is one remaining bill that we have not discussed.

Mr. OWENS. Are you wiping one bill from the calendar? Point of inquiry. Will somebody explain what happens to the remaining bill?

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 2731. This bill is the most alarming of the four before us today. By mandating that OSHA pay the attorney fees of any employer with a total net value of under $7 million and no more than 100 workers if they prevail upon appeal, H.R. 2731 would drastically undermine the enforcement of OSHA's mission. As I stressed in my opening statement, more than 90 percent of all private firms in the U.S. would qualify for attorney fees upon successfully prevailing in an appeal. What could be more universal than that? H.R. 2731 would have an incredibly chilling effect on implementation of the act. What would this bill mean for American workers? It would mean that unscrupulous employers could risk workers lives with impunity. Focusing on the issue of worker protection, again, I would like to relate some very personal testimony delivered at a forum I held on May 12 on worker deaths, and some of the photos of the people who testified are in front of us. Patrick J. Walters, whose photo is on the top row, was 22 years old, a plumber's apprentice who was literally buried alive in a trench collapse in June 2002. Patrick had been sent down into a 10-foot deep, rain soaked trench without any training or safety equipment. Moeves Plumbing, a Cincinnati-based employer, had been repeatedly cited already by OSHA over the years for failure to follow basic safety standards for trench work. Although cited and fined for trench safety lapses in 1983, 1984, 1985, Moeves Plumbing took no remedial steps. Clint Daley, another Moeves employee had been buried in 1989 in circumstances identical to Patrick's. In Daley's case, OSHA agreed to a settlement based on a promise by Moeves to take required safety action, an example of that voluntary compliance business. Two weeks before his death, an OSHA inspector found Patrick and another Moeves employee working in an unstable, unsafe trench that was 15 feet steep. Again, OSHA warnings went unheeded by Moeves and this caused certain, but tragic, results. After Patrick's death, an attorney for Moeves Plumbing negotiated down the citation from a willful violation to an unclassified. OSHA also reduced the fine down to $30,000 to be paid over 4 years. At the May 12 forum, Patrick's mother, Michelle Marts, wondered aloud, ``What is it going to take to stop Moeves Plumbing from sending another boy like our son to his death? Patrick did not have to die this way. This absolutely could and should have been prevented. We do not want this to happen to any other family.'' Joey Israel was a 22-year-old laborer who fell eight stories to his death from Philadelphia's Victory Building on December 31, 2003. Employed by HydroProof Systems, he had been promoted from entry-level employee to laborer only 2 weeks prior to his death. All that is known for certain is that before careening to his death, Joey had been told to pull up a 23\1/2\ pound electrical cord hanging from the window. After repeated phone calls to OSHA to ascertain the status report on Joey's case, OSHA responded by stating that HydroProof had not violated any safety rules. Joey's twin sister, Jaime, insisted upon a personal meeting with the OSHA investigator. She was told that not one of the eight men who were on the job the day her brother was killed had been questioned by OSHA nor had the employer been questioned about the incident. When Jaime questioned how her brother could have been sent alone some 25 feet up in the air on this job, without any prior training or interview, she was told, ``That's the beauty of America.'' Jaime responded at the May 12 forum with the following quote: ``What an awful thing to be told to a mother who just lost her son and a sister who just lost her brother. I believe this is the downfall of America, where, daily, employers risk the lives of untrained men and women who are doing what they have to do to support their families, to make a quick buck and, in a sense, kill for profit. My brother lost his life for a lousy $60 a day, is that what the lives of our loved ones are worth to their employers?'' Scott Shaw was a 38-year-old husband and father of two young sons who was killed on September 7, 2002. Scott died when he fell into the Schuylkill River, moving from the Hopper Barge to the Work Barge. OSHA investigated and found that Scott's company had committed six serious violations. One of these violations focused on the fact that one barge was 8 feet higher than the other. Also, workers had to climb on rubber tires while jumping from barge to barge. However, OSHA combined these violations into one citation with six items. OSHA's total fine for these violations was only $4,950. His wife, Holly, testified that ``Scott didn't have a life jacket on. He wasn't required by his company to wear one. There were no life preservers on the barge. Scott's death was needless. The company Scott was working for neglected to follow safety regulations. ``As a teacher and as a parent, I know that it is important that a child understand there are consequences to their actions, and they must accept responsibility for what they have done. Adults must face their responsibility, and must be held accountable for their actions. Please don't let another family suffer as we have. The more that companies are actually punished, the more they realize they must practice workplace safety, and must protect their workers.'' I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to understand the seriousness of these discussions today. This is the final quarter of the marathon four bills today. I hope that the fact that they have been packaged together has not caused anybody not to listen. I hope that they understand that we are talking about life-and-death matters. I urge my colleagues to oppose the needless deaths of Americans by opposing H.R. 2731. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is left.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am here to protest, first of all, the package, the packaging process, the rules process. Lumping five bills together, four of them dealing with OSHA matters, there is an effort to trivialize, to minimize and to make invisible this particular, very serious action being taken against working families and organized labor. Working families need the protection of the government in the workplace. They are vulnerable and they are often victimized. The overwhelming number of business people in America are fair-minded, the small business people as well as corporations, but there is a percentage, which is far too large, that is greedy, selfish and always seeking to get more profits by exploiting workers. The highest cost of most of these businesses is the labor costs. To drive down the labor costs they will do almost anything. It is not enlightened self-interest, because they are really making profits, but they want more and more. This package that is being presented on OSHA I call the ``more injuries and more deaths package'' because the end product of chipping away at OSHA provisions is to create a situation where more workers out there are left vulnerable to injuries and to death. This majority party started its offensive against the working class or working families with a very brutal and obvious attack. The first big action of this majority party when the administration was changed in the White House was to repeal the ergonomics standards that it had taken 10 years to put in place. Ergonomics standards in OSHA dealt with injuries suffered by large numbers of workers in a new environment, a high-tech environment, with different kinds of injuries being generated, but they wiped that out overnight. That was an obvious, brutal, in-your-face attack on working families and organized labor. Since then, they have sought to chip away, in every way possible, in a long history from 1995, when the change in the majority took place, a steady history of trying to pass bills to cripple OSHA; and they have become less and less strident as time goes on. We have beat back a number of them, but they have come back in other forms, and what we have in this package is the elephant which has been knocked to his knees. The repeal of the ergonomics standards knocked OSHA to its knees. That elephant is now being fed spoonfuls of poison. These are spoonfuls of poison. They seem common-sensical, they seem trivial, but it is just one way to poison the animal. It will die just the same. OSHA is made weaker and weaker. The budget has gotten smaller. The number of inspectors, which always was inadequate has been cut. We never intended to cover inspections adequately, but we did do a better job before this present majority took over. So the cornerstone of the majority Republican Party policy is being enumerated here in terms of workers--we really want them to be more vulnerable; we really want them to have lower costs. We are not going to talk about minimum wage. We are not going to deal with these things which benefit workers. We are going to continue to encourage outsourcing so that more and more jobs are going overseas, and employers can threaten the workers with outsourcing if they act up. We are going to continue to foster policies which make corporations more and more profitable despite this recession ending, which shows that profits are going up. Corporations, while there is unemployment, remain the same. Wages are not going up. We are making a clear statement, we want more of the same and we are going to reduce the labor force even further to peasants and serfs who are unable to take care of themselves in the workplace. The greatest increase in jobs inside this economy, inside America, is going to take place and is taking place in the construction industry; and what they are doing is having large companies subcontract to smaller companies, and the smaller companies become the protectorate of the set of bills that we have here. They have less than 100 employees. They can then proceed to get away with the kinds of violations that we would never allow a larger company because it has different responsibilities. So this effort, in the name of small businesses, is also an effort which goes after the most vulnerable workers. Construction, the dirtiest work, the most dangerous work, has taken place with immigrant workers and with people who are at the very lowest levels, unable to get any kind of job anywhere else. The number of deaths and injuries that have taken place in the last few years has increased dramatically in this area while the overall number might have gone down a little. This area is an area where we have had a series of articles appearing in the New York Times which highlight the fact that the OSHA regulations, at present, are minimal. They do not deal with the serious situation that the workplace has in terms of safety and even in terms of death. We had a hearing just last Wednesday, and I am going to later on read some testimony from those people, but I want to conclude by saying we have a Democratic package for working families in this Nation which includes ending the current tax incentives for shipping jobs overseas, enacting a robust highway bill that would create over 1.8 million good- paying jobs, providing a tax credit for small businesses so small businesses can lower their health care costs, extending Federal unemployment benefits for 2.5 million out-of-work Americans, raising the minimum wage, ensuring that individuals develop the skills that the employers need by increasing job training. That, in contrast, to a package which is seeking to drive down the working conditions and place the workers in a more vulnerable position so that profits for unscrupulous small businesses can be greatly increased. This package does that. We ought to pay a lot of attention to it and not rush it through this process today.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. First, I would like to comment on voluntary compliance. It has been mentioned here several times. Voluntary compliance programs are usually directed at large employers, not small. This is not where the deaths are occurring. In construction, half of all deaths occur among small firms in construction, many with fewer than 10 workers. Big corporations have understood for some time now that it is to their advantage to have a workplace that is safe, with maximum benefits and working conditions. And big corporations are seldom guilty of willful violations; it is the small employers. I must say that an attempt has been made here to make it appear that small employers have some special virtues, but small employers can be demons often. I recall my father working in a mill where the straw boss, they called him, told the workers if they would go to the toilet, which was pretty much in the middle of the floor anyhow, a cubicle that you could see the feet and it was open at the top, if you go to the toilet and he does not smell anything, come on out. I can recall working at a restaurant when I was in college where the employer, the owner of this small business, felt he had a right to pat any woman on the behind regularly, and they were too afraid to complain because they wanted to keep their jobs. You might say that those were extreme conditions, that is all over; that happened when you were in college many years ago. But in New York we have sweatshops which are as bad as any sweatshops the city has ever known in the 1930s, the 1920s or any other time. It is just that the people in the sweatshops now happen to be Asians mostly, Asian workers who are being exploited. There is no great virtue in small businesses automatically. Yes, the majority comply, but there are too many who still do not comply, too many who, as I said before, are interested only in squeezing the maximum profits from the situation; and their biggest cost is the labor cost, labor cost in terms of wages, labor cost in terms of conditions that must be established by law for workers. We refuse to discuss the minimum wage on this floor. We refuse to discuss it in the context of a bill to increase the minimum wage. But today if we are going to talk about workers and worker safety, I think we ought to point out that it is the workers who are making the least amount of money whose safety is jeopardized most. They are the vulnerable ones in conditions that nobody else wants to work in, immigrant workers who take the lowest pay and working conditions where no one else will work. This is the second quarter of a four-quarter marathon, as I said before. I have heard it called the More Injuries and More Death Marathon Act. It is a covert approach to what the majority Republicans tried when they first took power in 1995. This is covert. This is guerilla warfare, one might say, undermining OSHA from the back, undermining OSHA with sweet words. Back on June 14, 1995, we had the first taste of what the majority Republicans really wanted to do about OSHA. The gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) introduced H.R. 1834, and that was a massive overhaul of OSHA to weaken the law and favor law-breaking employers. If you were to go back and retrieve that bill, you could see that most of it was put there in one bill, and it was a frontal assault. It had the same objectives that today's assault has. There have been 14 of these significant bills introduced since the 104th Congress, I think half of which have been introduced by the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) which are significant in terms of looking at the record of how OSHA has been under attack. Since this House went under the leadership of the Republicans, OSHA has been the target, it has been an obsession, and none of these bills are in favor of increasing any measures to protect workers. We cannot review and view these bills today in the context of just one bill at a time or even the four bills. The four bills have to be reviewed in the context of the overall policy of the Republican majority toward working families, the overall assault against working families. We have to have this in context. We have to look at the figure of the 6,000 Americans per year. That figure has been there for some time, averaging about 6,000 per year who die every year on the job. The little display up front is an example of a centerpiece for a quilt we want to make as a memorial to these workers. We do not want either party to forget what is happening to working families in this country. In many respects, the failure to increase the minimum wage is one of them, but certainly with respect to health and safety, we must do more to make it known and to put it on the front burner in the minds of Americans as evidence of what is happening in the workplace. This is not unrelated to other developments like outsourcing, a major development which goes after workers at higher levels, technicians, computer people, scientists, engineers. Their salaries and their working conditions are such that they are found to be offensive and not producing ample profits, so their jobs are going to be taken away completely and contracted out to other nations. There are a large number of businesses that cannot be contracted out and most of them are small businesses. Construction is one. We can never take construction overseas; that has to happen here. The construction industry, in particular, needs the protection of people who want to weaken OSHA. The construction industry, in particular, is a culprit in employing and exploiting workers at the very bottom. We must keep this package in context. We must understand that the covert warfare taking place here, what I call the poisoning of OSHA, the slow draining of power from OSHA, is accelerated by these seemingly harmless four bills. The Labor Secretary in this administration is openly hostile to labor and to working families. We have a situation where traditionally the Department of Labor has always been considered the advocate for working families and for workers, but this particular Department of Labor, this Secretary, is just the opposite and this administration has no place for labor to have their grievances aired. So we bring them here today at this time and take advantage of the fact that there is at least time to discuss conditions under which people work. The policy of denigration, intimidation and oppression of the workforce is a policy which yields high productivity. That high productivity has already been achieved, but they want to go beyond that and get higher levels of exploitation and squeeze more from workers to increase the profits. As I said before, all small business owners are not model Americans. They do not seek to protect and take care of their workers in the best possible way. We are going to have a monument. This is going to be part of an overall quilt which gives you the number of workers per State, gives you the number each year, since 1993 to the present. Like the Vietnam Wall memorial, it dramatically brings home in an individual way the fact that life is sacred. The lives of workers are as sacred as the lives of anyone else. I said before, we are losing more workers per day than we are losing on the battlefields of Iraq. I do not want the Iraq battlefield casualties to increase. We would like the casualties in both places to decrease. But the life of a worker who is killed in a situation which has willful violations and the death is totally unnecessary, that life must be given more concern by both parties here in this House. Workers and their families are under attack. We must come to their defense. One way to defend them is to recognize these four bills for what they are worth. They are the very destructive poisoning of the effectiveness of OSHA. Mr. Speaker, I submit for printing in the Congressional Record the opinions and the statements by four groups: The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the Teamsters and the National COSH Network. These groups oppose this bill. I submit for the Record their statements in opposition. American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, Washington, DC, May 14, 2004. Dear Representative: I am writing to express the strong opposition of the AFL-CIO to H.R. 2728, H.R. 2729, H.R. 2730 and H.R. 2731, four bills that would erode worker protections under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. These bills, which are scheduled for a floor vote the week of May 17, 2004, would change established law and procedures to benefit employers and stifle OSHA enforcement. They would do nothing to enhance workers' safety and health protection, while weakening the OSH Act. H.R. 2731, Occupational Safety and Health Small Employer Access to Justice Act--This bill requires taxpayers to pay the legal costs of small employers (defined as employers with 100 or fewer employees and up to $7 million net worth) who prevail in any administrative or enforcement case brought by OSHA or any challenge to an OSHA standard brought by the small employer against OSHA, regardless of whether the action was substantially justified. Under the Equal Access to Justice Act, small businesses are already able to recover litigation costs where the government position was not substantially justified. There is no reason to expand these provisions and create new and broader rules for purposes of the OSH Act. The bill will drain resources away from an agency that has perpetually struggled to do its job with the limited resources available to it. If enacted into law, H.R. 2731 would have a chilling effect on both OSHA enforcement and OSHA standard setting, because attorneys' fees would be available to prevailing employers in both types of actions. OSHA would be hesitant to cite small employers for violations of the OSH Act unless there is absolute certainty that the enforcement action will be upheld in its entirety. No rational public policy would be furthered by discouraging OSHA from issuing citations that are substantially justified, but as to which the government ultimately is unable to carry its burden of proof of every issue. Rather, the inevitable result of such a rule, which would penalize the government every time it loses, would be to chill the issuance of meritorious citations in close cases on behalf of employees exposed to unsafe working conditions. Similarly, unless OSHA is certain that a standard will not be challenged (which they are routinely for any number of reasons), it would be very reluctant to development and issue rules any hazard no matter how grave the threat of the hazard to workers. This bill would further weaken OSHA enforcement efforts and standard setting to the detriment of American workers. Establishments with fewer than 100 employees make up 97.7 percent of all private sector establishments. These businesses have a higher rate of fatal occupational injury than do establishments with 100 or more workers. Hampering OSHA's enforcement ability in these small establishments would be devastating to workers, resulting in even higher rates of worker fatalities, injury and illness. Also significant is the fact that under H.R. 2731, employers will be able to recover partial attorneys fees if they partially prevail in an OSHA proceeding. So, for example, the notorious Eric Ho, who exposed his employees to asbestos and made them work at night behind locked gates without providing them any sort of respirators or training, would be able to recover attorneys fees under this bill, because the OSHA Review Commission dismissed two of Ho's corporations as defendants and dismissed 10 of 11 willful violations of OSHA's respirator and training standards. Secretary of Labor v. Ho, Nos. 98-1645 & 98-1646 (OSHRC, Sept. 29, 2003). OSHA needs more, not fewer, resources available to deal with employers like Eric Ho and to enforce the OSH Act's protections. H.R. 2731 should be rejected. H.R. 2730. Occupational Safety and Health Independent Review of OSHA Citations Act--This bill would work a radical change in the implementation and enforcement of the OSH Act, and would undermine the Secretary of Labor's authority to interpret and enforce the law. The bill would overturn a 1991 Supreme Court decision and say that deference should be given to the OSHA Review Commission, and not the Secretary of Labor, in interpreting OSHA standards. The AFL-CIO vigorously opposes this bill and urges its defeat. In Martin v. OSHRC (CF & I Steel Corp.), 499 U.S. 144 (1991), the Supreme Court made clear that the Secretary of Labor, and not the Review Commission, should be given deference when interpreting OSHA standards and regulations. In the Court's view, the Secretary of Labor should receive deference because Congress, when enacting the OSH Act, designated the Secretary as the policymaking official, and gave the Secretary the authority and responsibility to implement and enforce the law. Thus, because the Secretary of Labor is the person who adopts standards and brings enforcement actions against employers, she has a much broader and deeper understanding of OSHA's rules as compared to the Review Commission, which sees only a small fraction of OSHA's enforcement cases. Policymaking, and interpretation of OSHA policies, should stay with the Secretary. The Commission should not be able to undo by fiat the Secretary's reasonable interpretations of her rules. H.R. 2730 should be rejected. H.R. 2729. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission Efficiency Act--H.R. 2729 expands the number of members on the OSHA Review Commission from three to five, and mandates that all members have legal training. Another provision, removed during the Committee markup on May 5, 2004, authorized the Chairman of the Commission to delegate to any panel of three or more members any or all powers of the Commission and allowed two members to constitute a quorum on such sub-panels. The Review Commission has operated with three Commissioners since it was first formed in 1970. There is no need to expand the Commission beyond its current membership, and no need to exclude individuals with relevant training, but not legal training, from eligibility for these positions. Moreover, it is no coincidence that Republican members are pushing to expand the number of seats on the Commission at a time when a Republican president would fill the seats. Proponents say the bill is needed to address the problem of the Commission at times lacking a quorum to do business. But with the removal of the provision on sub-panels during the Committee markup, it is difficult to see how H.R. 2729 would solve the quorum problem. Three Commissioners would still be required to have a working quorum. There is no reason to think that the Commission will be able to retain three active Commissioners any better than it has been able to retain two. H.R. 2729 is a solution in search of a problem. It should be defeated. H.R. 2728, Occupational Safety and Health Small Business Day in Court Act--This bill would excuse employers from the fifteen-day deadline for contesting OSHA citations and ``failure to abate'' notices if they can show ``mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect'' as the reason. The bill's practical effect would be to make numerous excuses into legal reasons for missing the fifteen-day deadline by which employers currently must respond to OSHA citations. This action will only encourage more litigation. The idea of the fifteen-day requirement is to give all parties a reasonable timeframe in which to take action, and to ensure that the case is moved along as quickly as possible so the cited hazards will be corrected in as timely a manner as possible. It is also important to note that the bill excuses employers from missing their 15-day deadline but does not extent these same provisions to employees or their representatives who challenge the period for abatement in a citation. The one-sided nature of this legislation shows that it is about benefiting employers, not protecting employees. Proponents of the bill have pointed to one court case as justification for this legislation. In fact, the Commission has a longstanding practice of reviewing any missed deadlines on a case-by-case basis. H.R. 2728 is another solution in search of a problem, and it should be defeated. As demonstrated above, these bills undermine the intent of the Congress when it enacted the OSHAct more than 30 years ago. Generally speaking, these policies and procedures have been serving workers well for over 30 years. American workers deserve a safe and healthy workplace and the full protection the OSHAct can offer. These bills would surely diminish the protections provided to workers by the OSHAct. For these reasons, the AFL-CIO opposes these four bills, and we strongly urge you to vote against each of them. Sincerely, William Samuel, Director, Department of Legislation.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), my colleague on the Workforce Protections Subcommittee, be allowed to control the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to close for the opposition on H.R. 2729. As I stated at the outset, neither H.R. 2729 nor any other of these four bills before us addresses the important health and safety concerns of American working men and women. In essence, H.R. 2729 gives us the worst of both worlds, a bigger government bureaucracy designed to accomplish less on behalf of the American worker. Moreover, this bill would mandate legal training as a qualification for appointment to the commission. This diminishes what ought to be a primary qualification as a commissioner and that is expertise in the field of occupational safety and health. Having stated these clear reasons for opposition to this bill, which I urge my colleagues to follow, I would like to turn my attention once more to the urgent concern about the safety of American workers. That concern is over the protection of workers' lives on the job. At present, OSHA does little more than slap the wrists of employers that are egregious safety offenders. As the New York Times noted in its compelling series on worker deaths, OSHA has a 20-year track record of failing to seek criminal prosecution in a staggering 93 percent of cases they investigated where willful and flagrant safety violations by employers killed workers. And after you institute this proposal for H.R. 2729, it is just one more little reason why they would have less vigor in prosecuting anybody. Congress has an important role to play in holding both OSHA and unscrupulous employers accountable. One problem is that under the current statute, OSHA can only issue a misdemeanor penalty for an employer who has willfully caused the death of a worker. A misdemeanor has no deterrent value whatsoever. If you harass a wild burro on Federal lands, you face a stiffer penalty than if you kill an American worker. What signal does this send to a small number of unscrupulous employers who actually build up a history of willfully causing worker deaths? Are we saying to these wrongdoers, do not worry about protecting the lives of your workers because Congress cares more about wild burros than about the men and women in your employ? Pestering a wild burro in a national park can send you to prison for an entire year, but killing a worker only lands you there for 6 months. More importantly, what signal does that send to grieving family members who are left behind? You cannot receive any justice because Congress does not have a fundamental respect for the lives of your loved ones. Along with Senator Jon Corzine, I have introduced a bill to make killing a worker a felony offense. I tried to get this bill included in one of these four bills because it is germane, in my opinion; but it was ruled out of order. Rather than a radical departure from current law, this bill is just a moderate adjustment that is long overdue. H.R. 4270 and S. 1272 correct a glaring oversight in Federal policy, and I will describe it in more detail later on.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in opposition to H.R. 2730. This bill does no more than any of the others before us today to address any critical safety and health needs of American workers. H.R. 2730 gives the Occupational Safety Review Commission policy- making authority by permitting courts to give deference to the commission with respect to interpretations of OSHA standards. In this way H.R. 2730 weakens the fundamental powers of the Secretary of Labor. Those of us on this side of the aisle maintain that the Secretary of Labor is best able to regulate and enforce safety standards. We asked the question, and never got any answer, as to whether the current administration supports H.R. 2730 given its stated purpose. Having stated this clear reason for my opposition to the bill, which I urge my colleagues to follow, I would like to turn my attention once more to another urgent safety concern. This pertains to the highly disproportionate death rate of Latino workers in this country. As I referenced in my opening statement, a recent series of articles by the Associated Press documented the toll this rising death rate is taking in the Latino community. I would like to relate several egregious cases of Latino worker deaths and put a human face on this alarming social problem. Case number one, Miguel Victor Canales. Miguel Canales was killed 4 years ago while securing shingles to the roof of a new luxury home being built in Arlington, Virginia. Miguel fell off the roof because another employee had failed to install a safety brace. Miguel's stepson was a coworker who witnessed the fatal accident. Miguel's death so traumatized the stepson that he was unable to speak for the following 6 months. The employer, Octavio Estevez, was an unlicensed subcontractor without workers compensation insurance. Octavio Estevez had routinely failed to pay his employees their rightfully earned wages. After his death, Estevez refused to pay Miguel's prior earned wages to the surviving family members. The employer relies on day laborers and refuses to provide them with any safety equipment or training. The second case is Joel Bajorques. Joel was a 21-year-old from Guatemala who was killed when he fell off a roofing job in Rockville, Maryland, into a vat of hot tar. This took place on a commercial project undertaken by a roofing company. Joel died from severe third degree burns over his entire body. As unbelievable as it may seem, Joel's death was ruled to be the result of natural causes. Joel's surviving parents and siblings in Guatemala had depended upon his wages to help support the entire family. Since Joel's death in 2002, another worker at the same company has been killed in the exact same way. Case number three: Juan Vasquez, a Guatemalan worker, was killed using a jackhammer during his first day on the job. He was working at a private home in Bethesda, Maryland, when a brick wall collapsed on him. He had not been given even a hard hat. His employer refused to cover any of the funeral expenses or to provide any compensation to his surviving wife and two young sons. As a result, Juan's family had to borrow more than $6,000 to pay for shipping the body home and burial expenses. Case number four: Urbano Ramirez was a Mexican farm worker killed by heatstroke while harvesting cucumbers in North Carolina. The exact circumstances of his death are as follows. Urbano felt faint and was told by a foreman to go sit under a tree. Neither he nor any of the other workers had been provided with water. When the foreman had the workers change fields that day, Urbano was left behind and forgotten. His body was not found until 10 days later. Failure to provide workers with water violates an OSHA standard. In the end, the grower was only fined $1,800 for this OSHA violation that caused the death of Urbano Ramirez. Let me also review how OSHA is faring in addressing the skyrocketing rate of Latino worker deaths. To date, OSHA has limited its efforts to creating a Spanish language Web page and distributing Spanish language pamphlets to Mexican consulates. Yet very few vulnerable immigrant workers are likely to be reached in this manner. OSHA's Hispanic Task Force is mainly comprised of regional administration with no prior knowledge of issues confronting Latino workers. In fact, for the past 3 years, the Bush administration's budget has zero-funded the only OSHA program, called Susan Harwood Grants, to provide union and community- based outreach on safety issues to immigrant workers. Members on this side of the aisle successfully opposed these cuts. Clearly, OSHA needs to step up to the plate on this issue and take serious, concerted steps to address the crisis posed by Latino worker deaths. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the number of minutes remaining for this debate.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt). (Mr. HOLT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews). (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I mentioned before that I wanted to make an amendment to any one of these four bills because they are all about OSHA, and I thought my amendment was germane. I would like to describe what that amendment would have been. It is a bill now, H.R. 4270, and it would amend the OSHA Act in three ways. First, it would strengthen sanctions for a worker's death or deaths caused by an employer's willful violations of basic OSHA safety standards. The current sanction is a mere misdemeanor with no more than 6 months in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. Some jurisdictions seek stiffer penalties for failure to return a library book. My bill would change this penalty to a felony with up to, but no more than, 10 years in prison. Second, my amendment would increase the penalty for illicitly warning of an OSHA inspection, from up to 6 months imprisonment to up to 2 years. Third, my amendment would increase the penalty for lying to or misleading OSHA, from up to 6 months imprisonment to no more than 1 year imprisonment. In all instances, fines would be decided upon in the same way judges decide other fines, in accordance with title 18 of the criminal code. This bill, H.R. 4270, and in the Senate it is S. 1272, sponsored by Senator Corzine; this bill corrects a glaring oversight in Federal law and policy: the inability to pursue a felony conviction of an employer who willfully causes the death of workers. To quote a New York State supreme court justice, a felony sentence would serve as a warning to other employers; employers who, in pursuit of their own economic interests, care to be cavalier about the lives of others. When sentencing a man responsible for the collapse of an illegally conducted scaffold that killed five immigrant workers in Manhattan, this same supreme court justice remarked, ``The collapse of this scaffold was not a tragic accident; rather, it was a tragic certainty.'' She went on to say that the case had given her an education as to how ``astonishingly ineffectual'' the Federal Government has been in protecting the workers' lives. This judge, Rena Uviller, emphasized that OSHA penalties for willful safety violations that result in worker deaths merely amount to a $10,000 fine and a misdemeanor sentence of no more than 6 months' imprisonment upon the first conviction. The maximum penalty for a second-time offender is a $20,000 and no more than 1 year imprisonment. In concluding her sentencing, Judge Uviller sent a message to us on this floor today by observing, ``Why Congress has adopted such a spineless response to industrial malfeasance is best left to the voters to assess.'' Why has Congress adopted such a spineless response to industrial malfeasance, to owners, managers, bosses who willfully violate the regulations and thus cause the death of a worker? I think this would have been a germane amendment. I am sorry that in the committee it was dismissed. My amendment addresses the needs of workers. Every other one of these four bills focuses on the needs of employers, ways in which you might frustrate the efforts, dilute the efforts of OSHA so that employers and small business owners would benefit greatly while workers suffer more. I think it is very important that we note that we have failed in a four-bill marathon of more than 4 hours to allow the minority to address any of the interests and concerns of the working families of America. This is a clear indication of exactly where the majority stands with respect to working families. They have other programs that they offered, one called HOW, H-O-W, Hire Our Workers, which runs counter to the kinds of activities they have conducted over the last 10 years with respect to the dilution of the powers of OSHA and, at the same time, the dilution of the powers of the organization process of unions. I think it is important to note that the business of today has to be the business of being concerned about workers. It cannot be merely the four bills which seek to make OSHA safer for employers. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.