by Bryant Simon
As a stopgap strategy until it managed to get the law off the books, the ACU published a pamphlet, advising employers on what to do “When OSHA Knocks at Your Door.” Emmett Roe seemed to have followed the conservative group’s advice in Moosic in the 1980s. The ACU urged business owners to stop OSHA inspectors from entering their plants without a warrant. While the inspector went to court to get the proper documents, the company could quickly address any possible safety violations. Once the inspectors got inside in the building, the ACU advised non-cooperation and foot-dragging. “It is important to remember,” the group reminded supporters, “that the smallest victory may provide the key that finally puts an end to the bureaucratic nightmare that OSHA has brought on this country.”23
It didn’t take long for politicians from both parties to pick up on the grassroots rumblings about OSHA. Still, historians of recent America almost always depict Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 as a breaking point with the New Deal regulatory past. No doubt this makes schematic sense, but the insistence on critical elections like 1980 and on sharp turning points obscures some key continuities from the American past, like Jimmy Carter’s mixed message on workplace safety, government regulation, and the broader social contract.
On the campaign trail in 1976, the Georgia peanut farmer talked about increasing the minimum wage and strengthening OSHA.24 He hit at his Republican opponent, President Gerald Ford, for adopting “only three new sets of [safety] standards” while in office. He hinted that Ford had watered down health and safety protections in exchange for hefty donations from large corporations. Carter promised, in contrast, to guarantee “each and every American the right to a safe and healthy place of work.” “Our occupational and safety efforts,” he pledged, “must continue until our working citizens are safe in their jobs.”25
Once he entered the White House, Carter followed through on several of his pro-labor promises. He appointed Dr. Eula Bingham, a University of Cincinnati professor of environmental health, to run federal OSHA. Although she had never belonged to a union or worked for one, Bingham brought to the post a long record of support for government action to create safer workplaces. Her academic research focused on the deleterious effects of pollution and chemical carcinogens on the environment and on laborers and dovetailed with her advocacy. Leading up to her appointment as the OSHA head, she served on a number of government commissions and safety boards, including as a scientific and policy advisor for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health from 1972 to 1976.
During her term at OSHA’s helm, Bingham set new workplace standards, guaranteeing workers’ “right to know” about exposure to lead, arsenic, cotton dust, and other dangerous substances. Under her leadership, OSHA inspected more establishments and levied more fines than the previous administration had. In addition, it referred twenty-eight cases to the Justice Department for criminal action.26 Early in her tenure, she took a shot at Nixon’s concept of New Federalism and asserted the power of the national government. She reminded the state OSHAs, like North Carolina’s—“not very politely,” according to one source—that federal OSHA and federal standards remained preeminent.27 Mark Schultz, who headed a North Carolina–based worker safety group, called Bingham “a real health and safety advocate.”28
Yet only months into his administration, plagued by inflation and a sharp downward slide in his approval ratings, Carter and his aides started to chip away at OSHA, increasingly letting the marketplace rather than health mandates determine safety standards. In 1978, the President’s Council on Wage and Price Stability called on OSHA to reevaluate its methods of dealing with noise in the workplace and search for the most cost-effective, though not necessarily the healthiest, solutions. The acting director of the council, William Lilley, stated: “While the Council certainly supports the goal of improved worker health, it is important that any regulation . . . be noninflationary by designing them to be as efficient and as effective as possible.” He continued, “The council is very concerned that these regulations, by dictating the method companies must use to protect workers and by mandating uniform standards and solutions on every company in every part of the country, will necessarily impose costs on the economy which far exceed the benefits which might result.”29 Carter’s leading economic advisors repeatedly counseled him to do something about OSHA specifically, calling it “the leading national symbol of overregulation.” “To not act decisively,” they insisted, “would be perceived outside the labor movement as a retreat from your commitment to major regulatory reform . . . [and] your anti-inflation program.”30
“It is a major goal of my administration,” Carter declared midway through his presidency, “to free the American people from the burden of over-regulation.”31 Reflecting the growing faith in cheap in Washington, the president’s anti-inflation program pointed right at OSHA, saying it needed to “seek to minimize . . . costs.” Regulations, it further contended, must “achieve their goals at the lowest possible cost.”32 In a sign of how quickly the center of gravity had shifted away from New Deal thinking about the utility of higher wagers to trigger greater demand toward the idea of providing cheap goods as a solution to declining incomes, Carter spoke during the 1980 election of deregulation as one of his “greatest achievements.” “We believe,” he said on the campaign trail, anticipating Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address and promoting the presumed social value of cheap, “we ought to get the Government’s nose out of the private enterprise of this country . . . so that the customers get a better deal and the business community gets a better deal as well.”33
Unlike his predecessor, Ronald Reagan didn’t send any mixed signals when it came to OSHA or deregulation or the virtues of low prices and the power of the market to fix economic problems. In 1976, the Californian told the television news magazine 60 Minutes, “Right now business is regulated in America by government more than it is in any other country in the world.” In the very next breath, he quipped that OSHA seemed determined to “make a worker completely safe by taking away his job.”34 Campaigning against Carter four years later, he promised to “review . . . thousands and thousands of regulations,” eliminating all that were unnecessary and burdensome “to the shopkeepers and the farmers . . . as well as to business and industry.” OSHA ranked at the top of Reagan’s hit list of “meddlesome” agencies. Without saying a word about the need for workplace safety, he repeatedly complained that OSHA harassed employers with costly inspections and cumbersome regulations. At one point in 1980, he “seriously questioned” the need for OSHA. In another speech, he advocated sending OSHA, in its entirety, back to the states to administer. Though he never mentioned specifics, Reagan made it clear that he thought worker safety rules did more harm than good by “shackl[ing] the economy.”35
After defeating Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan attacked government regulations, in the words of the New York Times, with a “meat cleaver.”36 In his inaugural address, he promised to curb the federal bureaucracy and stressed the market as the surest remedy to the country’s economic ills. Within days, he appointed his vice president, George H.W. Bush, to head the carefully named Task Force on Regulatory Relief.37 He tagged devoted deregulators to head key regulatory agencies. Reagan put Mark Fuller, a leading free market advocate, in charge of the Federal Communications Commission. James Watt, the president’s choice to oversee the Environmental Protection Agency, pledged to tear down any obstacles in the way of economic growth, promising supporters that under his watch the country would “mine more, drill more, [and] cut more timber.”38
The Reagan administration brought the same approach to OSHA. The president named Raymond Donovan, a New Jersey construction executive, to head the Department of Labor. In the years leading up to his appointment, OSHA had cited Donovan’s firm for code violations 138 times. Inspectors classified fifty-eight of these infractions as “serious,” which according to OSHA’s definition meant there was “a substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result.” Fu
rther setting the tone, in 1981 the administration’s deputy assistant secretary of labor argued that “in recent years OSHA has brought to a new height the adversarial relationship between government and business.” “OSHA has performed as a policeman in the past,” he commented, pledging a more cooperative relationship with business that would, in turn, allow the economy to grow, create jobs, and deliver cheap goods to consumers.39
To run OSHA itself, Reagan appointed another construction industry executive, Thorne G. Auchter. The first director of the workplace safety agency to come from the ranks of business, the thirty-five-year-old Jacksonville, Florida, resident occupied the vice president’s office of his family-owned business, the Auchter Company, one of Florida’s largest commercial, institutional, and industrial construction companies. In 1980, the firm held over $100 million in contracts. Civic-minded, in a business sort of way, Auchter served on the board of directors of the Northeast Florida Association of General Contractors and as the vice chairman of the Jacksonville Economic Development Council. He brought with him to his new post not just connections but also, like Donovan, a wealth of experience with OSHA. In the eight years prior to his selection, government regulators had inspected his company’s work sites fourteen times, charging it with six serious violations and forty-two lesser ones, for a total of $1,200 in penalties. Auchter’s background and experience with OSHA, Industry Week reported, had “some in business . . . smiling while labor was frowning.” Newsweek called the businessman-turned-government-official a “front-line soldier in . . . the war on deregulation.”40
During his stint in government, Auchter promised to battle against what he called OSHA’s longstanding “bias” against business, replacing it with what he described as a more neutral stance. Within days of taking charge, the construction executive, who had handled special events for Reagan’s 1980 Florida campaign, made it clear what he meant by an even-handed approach when he recalled half a million dollars’ worth of OSHA-produced brochures on the hazards of brown lung—a crippling respiratory disease triggered by breathing cotton dust that could be prevented by the installation into the mills of expensive filtration equipment. He labeled the training manuals “offensive” and “obviously favorable” to labor, even though he admitted to one reporter that he hadn’t read them very closely. His gripe seemed to be with the cover, which pictured a thin and weary-faced worker and evoked the political aesthetics of Farm Security Administration photographs from the Great Depression era. According to Auchter, the image generated pro-labor sentiments. Eventually, the booklet found its way back into circulation without the front page. The repackaging cost the Department of Labor $15,000. It also cost it a number of seasoned employees. Within a couple of months of what labor leaders called Auchter’s “book burning,” a California factory inspector quit his job, saying he “couldn’t function in that type of environment.”41
Following Reagan’s as well as Carter’s leads, Auchter ordered the implementation of cost-benefit analysis as the key criteria for workplace safety measures. Under this scheme, regulations had to show that their benefits didn’t just protect workers but also were worth it, that the costs did not pose a threat to ongoing profits. If there was a cheaper way to fix a safety problem, like disposable masks in dusty factories rather than expensive ventilators or earplugs in noisy machine shops as opposed to putting up sound-deafening enclosures, then that was the director’s first choice.42
There was another aspect to Auchter’s “neutral” approach: business interests came first. He believed only business could solve the nation’s economic problems. Mirroring the thinking of Jim Hunt and other North Carolina business progressives, he thought that the government’s role was to make that happen and then get out of the way.
During Auchter’s OSHA tenure, he told the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers that he preferred voluntary compliance over federally mandated regulations. He wanted industry to monitor itself. This would cost less and work better. If business regulated itself, down the line, perhaps, there would be no need for OSHA. The quicker this happened, the better, Auchter seemed to think. Perhaps this explains why he stood by without raising his voice while Congress repeatedly cut his agency’s budget. During his stint in Washington, federal support for OSHA, adjusted for inflation, fell by 39.1 percent. Staff positions and the number of field inspectors were cut, even as the number of factories, often in out-of-the-way and difficult to regulate places, rose across the country. With its stripped-down personnel, OSHA responded promptly only to “imminent danger” complaints—those likely to cause immediate death or injury. OSHA no longer automatically inspected a plant accused by workers of committing safety or health violations. Instead, it sent the employer a letter, like it would to Imperial in 1987, and waited for a response. Follow-up inspections fell by 82 percent. Between 1980 and 1984, “serious” citations issued by the agency dropped by 50 percent, the total dollar amount of fines plunged by 80 percent, and the average penalty paid per violation declined as well.43 During this same period, the number of fatalities in American workplaces dipped, in part because of the larger economic restructuring going on and the disappearance of so many jobs in construction, railroads, and heavy manufacturing. But during these same years of the Auchter reign, the number of injuries and lost workdays for all laborers increased, suggesting a deterioration in overall workplace safety.44
Workers and their battered unions sensed the changes. Between 1980 and 1982, inspections initiated by complaints from employees fell by 58 percent. Women and men on the shop floor felt the weight of the government’s silence and feared losing a job in a contracting economy, so they kept quiet.
But union leaders, staunch liberals, and health and safety advocates did not keep quiet about Auchter and his business-first regime. “The Reagan Administration,” charged the leaders of AFL-CIO, “has substituted dollar costs for human values in the administration of occupational safety and health laws. No longer is the safety and health of workers the prime concern, but rather the protection of management from being requested to shoulder its obligations to provide a safe and healthful workplace for America’s working men and women.”45 Ralph Nader charged Auchter with “shackling” OSHA. His ally, Philip J. Simon of the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, felt like a witness to the “unraveling of the health and safety net.” Others accused Auchter of avoiding a full-on frontal assault on OSHA that surely would have stirred organized labor’s ire, opting instead for a quieter plan of a “thousand cuts,” each compromising just a little bit more the safety of workers. Alarmed by the changes, Auchter’s predecessor, Eula Bingham, complained in 1981, “The trend is to stop protecting workers and let the free marketplace determine safety standards. I thought the country decided 10 years ago (with OSHA’s establishment) that that doesn’t work.”46
The attacks on Auchter were, nonetheless, slightly misplaced. It wasn’t that they were wrong about him or his faith in cheap, free market solutions, but they exaggerated the commitment to worker safety in the initial law and even under the Carter administration. Still, they captured Reagan and his allies’ hostility toward OSHA. Perhaps most important, they sensed that the cuts combined with the public attacks on the regulatory state emboldened employers, encouraging them to see workplace safety as a negotiable item, as a luxury of prosperity and steady profitability, but little more than an afterthought in an age of inflation and rising competition.47
The OSHA budget cuts at the national level seeped down to North Carolina. In part, this reflected changing federal budget priorities. But, at the same time, the emerging consensus taking shape in Washington around having less government was also happening in Raleigh. North Carolina Democrats and Republicans joined the crusade to reduce taxes and pare down the spending in all areas except for roads, prison and school construction, and industrial recruitment.48 The rat-a-tat of fire against regulation and against OSHA delegitimized the notion of worker safety as a right and made it difficul
t to defend it against the zeal for budget cuts. It turned advocates of safe factories into special interests—selfish, privileged voices who placed parochial concerns ahead of creating jobs and lifting the country and the state out of their inflation-blasted financial hole. This was already the long-held position of North Carolina’s business progressives in both parties. For decades, they had focused on jobs ahead of wages and deemed industrial recruitment a competitive sport, a way to top the North in something other than football or basketball. They never intended for worker safety to get in the way. By the mid-1980s, they didn’t have to, not any more than some of the state’s best college teams had to worry about NCAA sanctions in those days when recruiting a star quarterback or point guard often involved an envelope stuffed with cash or the keys to a brand-new car.
When the fire broke out in Hamlet, John Brooks headed the state’s Department of Labor. By then, he had held this elected office since 1977. In fact, Brooks was, at the time, the longest-serving labor commissioner in the state’s history. Despite his success at the ballot box, Brooks didn’t fit the mold of a typical North Carolina politician. He wasn’t a banker in a Brooks Brothers suit with a buttery accent and country club connections or a small-town lawyer with a disarming and stunning recall of the articles of the Constitution. He wasn’t quick to quote the Bible or reel off the results from the latest NASCAR race at Wilkesboro or Rockingham. He wasn’t a backslapper or one of those guys who held court at a Raleigh hotel bar when the legislature was in session. His critics thought of him as tireless yet abrasive and often tone-deaf. A graduate of the University of Chicago and former aide to the Democratic governor and one-time presidential candidate Terry Stanford, Brooks wore thick glasses and off-the-rack gray suits, making him look more like a nerdy economics professor than “the bad boy of state politics,” as a leading business periodical once dubbed him.49 He earned this nickname because of his reputation as a quiet pro-labor voice in a steadfastly anti-union state. While in office, Brooks expanded job training, made sure amusement rides and elevators got inspected, and stepped up minimum wage and maximum hour protections. Despite his standing as a friend to workers, Brooks remained a cautious advocate of labor; he never pushed back hard against the state’s pro-growth, business political interests, and he never questioned the state-run status of North Carolina OSHA. Even if he had, it probably wouldn’t have changed the balance of power very much. That’s in part because the commissioner of labor never had a lot of power to begin with or much of a statewide profile. At the same time, Brooks stayed close to the North Carolina consensus on labor and OSHA because he wanted to keep his position, and this was one of those jobs that was, once you had it, relatively easy to hold on to if you didn’t rock the boat or get blindsided by tragedy.50