Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [24]
Admittedly, an obscure field of law.
Scalia believes ergonomics—the shop-floor science that aims to make heavy and repetitive production-line work less destructive to workers’ bodies—is a threat to American business. He has been very well paid to make that argument. As Upton Sinclair, the great muckraker, once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Scalia worked with another Gibson, Dunn lawyer, Baruch Fellner, but Scalia was the star. The king of denial of bad backs. Wherever there was an attempt to address ergonomic injuries—at a House subcommittee meeting, a Department of Labor hearing, a courtroom in D.C., California, North Carolina, or Washington State—Gene Scalia was there. The terror of wimps claiming repetitive-stress injuries. Any bureaucrat writing rules to protect the men and women who move the nation’s freight, build its buildings, type its memos, and process its foods would first have to get past Gene Scalia.
For big bidness, Scalia was the go-to guy in the fight against ergonomics regulation. In 1988 B.C. (Before Clinton), Elizabeth Dole, not normally considered a commie, ordered the Labor Department to write a set of rules to protect workers from debilitating injuries. She had been appointed labor secretary by George the First and was succeeded in 1991 by Lynn Martin, who continued the work on the “ergo” rules, as did Clinton’s labor secretaries Robert Reich and Alexis Herman.
It took twelve years to get ergonomics regulation through the bureaucratic process. The Commerce and State Departments can rewrite the rules for export-import bank lending in a few weeks. Writing rules to protect the backs, shoulders, and wrists of working people takes longer. More than one thousand witnesses testified either for or against the proposed rules; seven thousand written comments were submitted to the Department of Labor; and hearings were held all over the country. Everybody got input, everybody got to sit at the table—company reps, flaks, union guys, big bidness, small bidness, chiropractors, disabled workers—you name the interested party, they were there. Gene Scalia was always there.
In March 2000, in its boxy, modern office building on Constitution Avenue, the Labor Department began its final forty-seven days of ergonomics hearings, the end of the process started in 1988. As the first session began, an OSHA panelist warned that anyone sitting in the front row was in danger of “getting run over by an attorney rushing to the podium.” Eugene Scalia provided the punch line for that joke; he was the first witness of the day and literally sprinted to the front of the chamber, set up his flip chart like someone on speed, and was so aggressive he seemed to frighten himself. Dark features, thinning hair, cut-the-bullshit attitude. Scalia ignored the Labor Department judge and the chair of the panel to shoot his questions at individual members. “I haven’t got much time up here,” he said. When the judge warned him to let a witness complete his answer, Scalia complained the long responses were a waste of his time. When a bureaucrat said a question was unclear, Scalia fired back, “Why don’t you just answer the question?”
At the end of the day Scalia got another chance to perform and challenged rules to protect pregnant women in the workplace. He complained that under the proposed rules, employers would have to consider obesity and height in workplace assignments, clearly a task he considers beyond human ingenuity. Worse, he suggested, perfectly healthy workers could “claim that they are injured in order to avoid work and obtain benefits.”
Just as