A loser for Labor
President Donald Trump has had poor luck with labor secretaries. His first nominee, fast-food mogul Andrew Puzder, came under fire for his labor practices, including hiring an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, and was forced to withdraw when it became clear the Senate would not confirm him.
Trump’s next pick, Alex Acosta, had to resign in mid-July over his handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes prosecution when he was U.S. attorney in Florida more than a decade ago.
And now President Trump is poised to nominate Eugene Scalia, whose anti-regulatory advocacy two decades ago helped fuel today’s opioid epidemic.
Scalia, the son of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, was recognized by the Wall Street Journal for having “devoted almost a decade to representing corporate clients fighting rules put in place by the Obama administration that were designed to protect employees in the workplace”—a curious attribute for a future labor secretary.
In 1993, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began work on a new ergonomics standard to address hazards that cause work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs), including carpal tunnel syndrome, back pain and tendonitis. Automakers, garment factories, and meat-packing and poultry plants were seeing alarming rates of disabling WMSDs. So OSHA set out to require employers to implement a new standard to reduce these injuries.
But industry lobbyists bemoaned the costs and derided OSHA’s efforts as over-regulation. Side-stepping supportive studies, industry naysayers fought the efforts tooth and nail.
One of their champions was Eugene Scalia, a labor and employment attorney in Washington,
D.C., who went on to work for the Department of Labor under President George W. Bush. Scalia helped lead the assault on the ergonomics regulation, ridiculing it in a report for the conservative Cato Institute as a “folly” based on “thoroughly unreliable science.”
OSHA nevertheless promulgated the new standard in the waning days of the Clinton administration, estimating it would over 10 years prevent 4.2 million work-related musculoskeletal injuries.
But just months after the standard’s January 2001 effective date, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the rescission resolution, invalidating the standard and barring OSHA from issuing a substantially similar one. Why should we care?
Because the scourge of WMSDs hasn’t subsided. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that musculoskeletal injuries are the nation’s most prevalent occupational injury, totaling in 2017, 34 percent of serious nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses in manufacturing.
Each of these cases involves often debilitating long-term pain that is frequently managed with opioids. Industry opposition to the ergonomics standard led to unabated painful musculoskeletal injuries, numbering hundreds of thousands each year. Those debilitating injuries fed the high incidence of opioid prescription, contributing undeniably to the crisis we face today.
Eugene Scalia was at the forefront of those actively fighting that ill-fated regulation two decades ago. Workers, their families and their communities now bear the awful consequences.
That’s not the best credential for a future labor secretary.