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By Root 328 0

they had been working toward for years. They had almost busted the worker protections once before, when the Newt Gingrich House cut off all funding for writing such rules in the mid-nineties. But Clinton’s Labor Department managed to keep the process alive. When Judge Vittone gaveled the Department of Labor ergo hearings to an end, the twelve-year process was over and the rules could be implemented. But Bill Clinton had little time left in office, and the rules had to be listed in the Federal Register. It seemed that big business had stalled long enough to kill the ergo rules.

Bill Clinton stepped in and saved them. While he waited for the Supreme Court to decide who would follow him into the White House, Clinton took the final step in the bureaucratic process. He ordered the rules posted in the Federal Register. Within a few weeks there finally would be federal protection from the kind of repetitive physical labor that has left Carrie Ann Lewis with “the arthritic wrists of a sixty-year-old.” The business community reacted as though ergonomics rules were something Clinton had thought up while he was packing up his files. Gene Scalia returned to the op-ed pages. The National Coalition on Ergonomics—a creation of Scalia’s that is funded by big corporate interests—cranked up its “grassroots” operation. As they say in Amarillo, big bidness went “balls to the wall” fighting the new rules.

“They really wanted this,” said a member of the late Senator Paul Wellstone’s staff. “We heard they had a bill drafted before the session began. It didn’t take long to see how determined they were.” All the business community needed was a signal from the White House. As soon as Karl Rove moved into Hillary Clinton’s old office, they got it. “These regulations would cost employers, large and small, billions of dollars annually while providing uncertain benefits,” said a White House press release. “If implemented, they would require employers to establish burdensome and costly new systems to track, prevent and provide compensation for an extremely broad class of injuries, whose cause is subject to considerable dispute.” The press release was business-lobby boilerplate straight from the National Coalition on Ergonomics.

You have to give Eugene Scalia credit for making it possible for the White House (or anyone) to claim that the very idea of repetitive-motion injuries in the workplace is “subject to considerable dispute.” The Department of Labor reports that there are 1.8 million American workers disabled by injuries caused by physical stress on the job each year. Those workers had been waiting a decade for the rules. Whether the injuries are called musculoskeletal disorders, carpal tunnel syndrome, or repetitive-motion injuries, the cause is not under “dispute” by those who are not in the pay of big business. The National Academy of Science had already done two studies, ordered by Congress, on the connection between types of work and workplace injuries. (A second study was necessary because conservative members of Congress didn’t agree with the conclusions of the first study they had commissioned. They didn’t agree with the conclusions of the second one either, but since a third would only have confirmed numbers one and two, they gave up.)

With the backing of the business community and the Bush administration, the House moved to kill the ergo rules. House whip Tom DeLay—also known as “the Hammer” and “Tom DeReg”—hasn’t found a government regulation he liked since he gave up killing bugs in Sugar Land. In fact, the former exterminator still stands foursquare for bringing back DDT. Just the man to kill ergo in the House.

In the Senate the late Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy were still standing for the democratic wing of the Democratic Party and were willing to filibuster any attempt to bust the ergo regs. Beyond Kennedy and Wellstone, a number of Democrats still retain some quaint attachment to working people—or at least they worry that organized labor will fail to support them in the next election. A few Republicans—Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania