01.22.19

By: Julia Harte and Peter Eisler
Source: Reuters

Special Report: The political battle behind the dismantling of a worker safety rule

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (Reuters) - When Wardell Davis landed work with a Norfolk, Virginia, shipbuilding contractor in the fall of 2007, he felt lucky.

Then 24 years old, with no high school diploma, Davis had for years bounced between part-time jobs. The contractor, he says, promised better pay for grueling labor: blasting the hulls of U.S. Navy ships with coarsely ground coal particles to remove rust and paint. He recalls the fog of dust created as workers fired the crushed coal – a residue from coal-fired power plants – against the ship bottoms from high-powered hoses, moving through the tented blasting area in respirators and protective suits.

A year later, Davis found a better job with a plumbing and heating company. He became a father, but still found time to hit the YMCA most days for a swim, a lifelong passion. Then, in 2011, he began struggling to hold his breath under water; soon, he couldn’t hold it at all. He was dogged by a persistent cough, sweats and nausea.

In 2014, doctors at Norfolk’s Sentara Hospital found a “black foreign material” in his lungs. Davis successfully filed a disability claim for “pneumoconiosis/silicosis and/or interstitial fibrotic disease caused by exposure to abrasive blasting dust.” Four years and three biopsies later, Davis survives on a single lung.

Unable to work, he lives on disability payments, and has brought suit against abrasives manufacturers and safety equipment providers he alleges failed to protect him. They deny responsibility for his failing health.

“If I ever would have thought that this would have happened to me, I would’ve never ever worked there,” he told Reuters, his words punctuated by coughs. “Ever.”

Davis was one of an estimated 11,500 shipyard and construction workers who U.S. regulators say are exposed each year to beryllium: a toxic, carcinogenic element laced through the coal waste often used in abrasive blasting grits. These workers lie at the heart of a little-known regulatory drama unfolding behind the Trump administration’s push to relax safety rules it deems burdensome to U.S. businesses.

Just after the election, the Trump administration and its congressional allies began moving to unravel key provisions of a federal rule, issued in the last days of the Obama presidency, that sharply limited workplace exposure to beryllium and required certain industries to carefully monitor health risks.

Beryllium inhalation has long been known to cause lung cancer and berylliosis, a debilitating, potentially fatal respiratory illness. Yet efforts to set an updated workplace exposure standard had been stymied for decades by debates over what the new exposure limit should be. The Obama rule was based on a compromise developed by labor and industry stakeholders.

The Trump administration has left the new beryllium exposure limits intact. But in June 2017, it announced plans to exempt shipbuilding and construction operations from the rule’s “ancillary provisions,” which require air quality testing, new workplace hygiene measures and employee health monitoring for beryllium-related illnesses.

That decision, scheduled to take effect in June 2019, would remove the estimated 11,500 workers from the protections, a government analysis shows.

A 2016 U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration analysis found that the measures now being supplanted could have saved lives, estimating they would avert four deaths a year in the shipbuilding and construction sectors.

The protections would cost affected industries nearly $12 million a year, or about $1,000 per worker, according to the 2016 cost-benefit assessment. That analysis, a mandated component of the rule-making process, put the savings to society from averted deaths and illnesses at nearly $28 million, yielding a net economic benefit of about $16 million a year.

Without the benefits of the air testing and health monitoring requirements, the exposure limits for beryllium “are meaningless,” said David Michaels, who headed OSHA for seven years under Obama.

“If there’s no air testing or disease surveillance, there’s no way to know how much exposure workers are getting or who may be getting sick,” said Michaels, who now teaches at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

At the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees OSHA, spokeswoman Amy Louviere said it would be “inappropriate” to comment for this article because the rule-making process is ongoing. The White House did not respond to interview requests.