Occupational Safety and Health Independent Review of OSHA Citations Act of 2004

Mr. Speaker, lately, in a rare turn of events, House Democrats have adopted the old adage of Republican leaders and, in floor communications, they have posed the famous question from Reagan, Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?

Well, when the quote came, I think Democrats have found a moment of despair. We will welcome their call for comparison of today's economic, international and domestic status to that of 4 years. Yes, we are better off now.

Just look at the war on terror. The attacks on September 11 awakened the Nation to the threat of terror. Republicans have a clear strategy to keep Americans safe and to spread freedom and peace throughout the world.

In the past 3 years, we have seen great progress. Afghanistan is free, Libya is now disarmed, Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. Iraq is becoming a free country, making the heart of the Middle East more stable and America more secure.

The Republican-controlled House quickly passed legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. All border activity has been consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security, a single agency, doing away with the fallible INS, or Immigration and Naturalization Service, that allowed the September 11 hijackers to slip through our borders, rent apartments, find employment and train in flight schools, only to have their visas approved by INS after they carried out attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The Department of Homeland Security is implementing background checks on 100 percent of applications for U.S. citizenship and has registered over 1.5 million travelers into the United States VISIT program.

Over 500,000 first responders have been trained in weapons of mass destruction, awareness and response since September 11, 2001.

The USA PATRIOT Act has broken down unnecessary barriers between intelligence and law enforcement officers, ensuring that the best available information about terrorist threats is provided to people who need it most.

After two rounds of across-the-board, Republican-led tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, America's economy is strong and growing stronger, and we have overcome the triple shock of terrorist attacks, corporate scandals and recession.

Americans are seeing the benefit of the Republican progrowth agenda. In the eighth straight month of growth, the economy created 288,000 jobs in April, bringing the total increase since August to more than 1.1 million jobs created.

The real gross domestic product has grown at its fastest rate in almost 20 years over the last three-quarters. Productivity has grown at its fastest rate in 40 years. Homeownership is at an all-time high, 68.6 percent, with substantial gains among minority homeowners. We have the highest total number of people working in the history of America. Let me repeat that. We have the highest number of workers in the entire history of America on the payroll today. Unemployment today is at its lowest rate, lower than at the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The average earnings by American workers is up, higher than it has ever been before. These are high-paying jobs that are coming to America. Manufacturing jobs have also increased for the first time in a long time, 1.1 million jobs in total since August.

Now, we have had some really good news on the economy, but we need to do much more; and we will talk about that later. First, let me talk about health care. Republicans have been working to see that the rising costs of health care are capped and lowered, accessibility to quality care is expanded, and jobs for more Americans are created in the process.

Millions of Americans are benefiting from lower prescription drug costs and increased access to health care. In December 2003, a prescription drug benefit was signed into law that will make Medicare prescription drug coverage available to millions of seniors and people with disabilities for the first time since Medicare's inception.

Health savings accounts were signed into law to give employees more control over their health care decisions and the opportunity to save tax-free income for future health care costs.

The number of children enrolled in the State Children's Health Insurance Program increased from 4.6 million in 2001 to 5.8 million in 2003.

Now, let us talk about education. Under President Bush and the Republican-led Congress, No Child Left Behind was signed into law to ensure that all students become proficient at reading and math and to close the achievement gap that exists between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Students, teachers, and parents have seen the prospective effects of accountability, challenge, and incentive.

No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, funding for K through 12 has increased by 35 percent, and title I funding has increased 41 percent, the largest investment in education to date. While only 11 States are in full compliance with previous Federal education accountability standards in January of 2001, NCLB ensured that by June 2003 all 50 States had approved accountability plans to ensure that students become proficient in reading and math. Under NCLB, math scores have increased by 9 points for fourth graders and by 5 points for eighth graders since the 2000 National Assessment of Education Progress.

Under a Democrat watch, we would not be better off. With the Democrats in the majority, 34 million working families would not have received an average of $1,549 in tax relief each year; 47 million families would not have received the $1,000 child tax credit last summer for each child; 35 million Americans would still be paying the unfair double taxation on dividend income, discouraging them from investing in our economy; the defense of our homeland would still be spread among 22 different Federal agencies; 50,000 highly trained Federal screeners would not be protecting America's airports; 24 million Iraqis would still be living in fear under Saddam Hussein's hostile regime; more than 15 million Afghan citizens would still live under the oppressive brutal regime of the Taliban; two-thirds of al Qaeda's top leaders would still be on the loose, plotting attacks, while congressional Democrats treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem; millions of seniors would not benefit from access to discounted prescription drugs, and an eventual prescription drug benefit under Medicare; and millions of American employees would not be able to save pre-tax income towards future health care costs in personal health savings accounts.

The largest number in education to date, a 42.5 percent increase in funding, would never have seen its day in American classrooms; and only 11 out of 50 States would meet acceptable accountability standards in education today.

But things are better off under Republicans this year than they were 4 years ago. Now, every day we hear about how American jobs are going overseas. We have a chart here that reflects some of the issues that are going to be coming up and that I want to start talking about. But there is a reason why jobs have been going overseas. It is not Benedict CEOs, as we have heard before. It is not the wage levels in America. The responsibility lies right here in Congress.

Over the last generation, Congress has passed laws that have come back to haunt this generation and future generations, unless we act now. Republicans have divided these barriers that prevent Americans from keeping and creating jobs into eight categories. We have already acted on two of these categories. The first one was health care security. We have voted to limit health care costs and help provide health care security in America. This week we have dealt with the cost of bureaucratic red tape in our Bureaucratic Red Tape Termination group of bills, these five bills which I will discuss later on.

In the weeks that follow, House Republicans will bring up to the floor and vote on issues that address lifelong learning, so that we can have a skilled and talented workforce that focuses on math, science, and engineering skills.

We are going to deal with trade fairness and opportunity, so that we have fair trade policies to help assure jobs here in America. We are going to deal with tax relief and simplification so we can provide tax relief and tax simplification for Americans. We are going to move forward on an energy self-sufficiency and security plan. And we are going to encourage research and development by bringing legislation to the floor for research and development innovation. And we are going to end lawsuit abuse and deal with litigation management, which is the last issue we will deal with.

This is how we will make America more competitive. This is how we are going to ensure that our children and grandchildren have a strong economy, with opportunities to get a job if they want or start a business if they choose.

This week, we focused on bureaucratic red tape, and I want to read some facts. There are 65 words in The Lord's Prayer. There are 286 words in the Gettysburg Address. There are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. And there are 26,911 words in the Federal regulation governing the sale of cabbage. This was made in a speech by FDIC Vice Chairman John M. Reich. He said this because he wanted to emphasize that bureaucratic red tape termination is vital for U.S. competitiveness in a global economy.

Bureaucratic red tape termination means less government not only by granting the freedom to allow Americans to pursue their dreams, but it also means providing space for businesses to thrive. Instead, our Federal Government has become a creeping ivy of regulations that strangle enterprise. Unrealistic, impractical, unnecessary environmental prohibitions, OSHA mandates and the like are literally driving our industries and small businesses and our health care system to a grinding halt.

How can we expect our economy to develop when bureaucracy prevents businesses from starting or expanding; when doctors cannot even keep up with the ever-changing codes, and teachers are forced to spend more time filling out paperwork than teaching in the classroom? The total compliance burden on our economy of environmental,

economic, workplace, and tax compliance regulations is $850 billion; $160 billion on manufacturers alone, which is the equivalent of a 12 percent excise tax.

Of the $860 billion, we can see in the chart that it is spread between four categories: tax compliance, the total is $132 billion; workplace compliance is $84 billion; environmental regulations are $201 billion; and economic regulatory costs are $444 billion.

Now, if we compare that $860 billion to the gross domestic product of Mexico, we can see that the $860 billion is higher than the $574 billion that is the entire gross national product of Mexico. Our regulatory burden is higher than the $701 billion, which is the entire gross national product of Canada. It is a tremendous burden on our businesses.

The regulatory costs compared with individual income taxes and corporate taxes and corporate pretax profits, here again is the $860 billion of regulatory costs, the total individual income taxes that were paid last year were $949 billion, the corporate income taxes were $201 billion, and the corporate profits were $699 billion. So we can see this is a tremendous regulatory burden on our businesses, and it is keeping us from creating and holding jobs here in America.

But the Bush administration has made great strides in curbing the growth of regulations and is making a concerted effort to review existing regulations to the extent possible. They have utilized the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and its administrator, Dr. John Graham, more than any other administration. We must support them in our efforts and encourage them to do even more.

Congress should also do a better job of oversight. Too often my colleagues and I are overburdened with committee work and we do not have the time or the staff to completely review how agencies operate within what cumbersome and unnecessary regulations they are placing on our citizens. I hope, myself, to work with leadership and refocus the committees' efforts to take time to review what is in place as we do the work that must be done immediately.

I have come up with a bill called CARFA, that I will explain more later, but it is called the Commission on Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies. It is a base realignment-type committee, a BRAC-like effort. BRAC was used for the military to determine which bases should be closed. CARFA would be used by this commission to find out which parts of the Federal Government should be closed, but I will explain more about that later.

House Republicans are taking on these problems of regulations and overburdening of rules. Over the last generation, legislation has been passed with good intentions, but the disastrous consequences have come in the form of these regulations and policies. These regulations and policies have made it difficult to stay competitive; and Congress, the Republicans in Congress, intend to do something about it.

We divided these into eight categories, and we are going to continue for the next 6 weeks, after we return from recess, to take one issue a week in order to reach the compliance that we need. Our goal is more high-quality, high-paying jobs today and for future generations.

The Heritage Foundation asserts that regulatory costs are killing our jobs. They say that reducing the regulatory burden would do much to speed the economic recovery and create jobs as well as help consumers. There are opportunities for reform in a number of areas, ranging from the burdensome telecommunication rules that are slowing progress for the next generation of Internet technologies, to unnecessary costly environmental regulations that make economic growth difficult. It goes to outdated workplace regulations that also discourage job creation.

OMB, or the Office of Management and Budget, recently reported to Congress that the annual cost to society of major Federal regulations, just issued between 1992 and 2002, in other words for a decade, are estimated to range between $38 billion and $44 billion. Now these are dollars that are going to compliance and not towards investment. This estimate suggests that Americans spend about $1.50 in compliance costs for every dollar in tax costs devoted to regulation.

For firms employing fewer than 20 employees, the annual regulatory burden in 2000 was estimated to be $6,975 per employee, nearly 60 percent higher than the $4,463 estimated for firms with more than 500 employees. In other words, it is the most difficult for small businesses.

Instead of spending more on wages or health care for these employees, they have to spend nearly $7,000 per employee just complying with the paperwork that the Federal Government requires.

Over the last decade, small firms have accounted for 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy. During and coming out of the last two recession periods, 1990 through 1992, and 2000 through 2001, small businesses created all of the new net jobs.

According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the budgetary cost to taxpayers for funding regulatory agencies topped $25 billion in 2002 alone. The Code of Federal Regulations extends 19 feet. If you can imagine that, that is more than three times my height. If it was stacked from the floor up towards the ceiling, 19 feet high. From 1991 to 2000, the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations increased 28 percent.

This Republican Congress has made regulatory reform a priority. It started back in the 104th Congress when we passed the Federal bureaucratic reforms under the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, which was part of the contract with America. That, among other things, has Federal agencies assess the risk and cost imposed by regulations.

To mark the passage of H.R. 1375, the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act, had a myriad of bills and amendments that aimed at cutting red tape. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average number of rules issued each year, proposed and final, declined sharply during the Reagan administration, and dropped even further during the Bush administration, rose slightly during the Clinton administration, and has declined even further during the first 3 years of George W. Bush.

The average number of rules issued each year during the current Bush administration is 6,712. It is just over half as many issued, on average, each year during the Carter administration; that was 12,325. They have utilized the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs to do this through Dr. John Graham, and the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy has gone out of its way to stand up for small businesses and encourage fellow agencies to reduce the red tape and the regulatory burdens.

Bolstered by the President's commitment to remove regulatory barriers that can stifle entrepreneurial growth and job creation, it has incorporated the views of small businesses into hundreds of agency decisions. Those efforts have changed regulations and curbed new mandates resulting in over $31 billion of savings. Those savings have been reinvested back into the economy, and we are starting to see the improvement with a number of jobs. I support the administration's efforts and encourage them to do more.

Let me talk about competitiveness, because compliance costs can be regarded as the silent killer of manufacturing competitiveness. According to the Heritage Foundation, a global CEO survey shows six of ten company heads view regulations as a serious threat to the growth of their business, topping exchange rates, corporate governance issues, and even terrorism. Small business is leading America's economic recovery, but an overwhelming burden of Federal paperwork rules and regulations threatens their competitiveness and their ability to spur job creation.

Regulation imposes its heaviest burden on small- and medium-sized businesses because it is even harder for them to handle the necessary paperwork and overhead costs, and the attorney and the accountant fees that go along with it. Richard Vedder, an economist at the Center For the Study of American Business, finds that Federal regulations cause $1.3 trillion in economic output to be lost each year.

In order to give an idea of what a trillion dollars is, let us assume you started a business the day after Christ

rose from the dead, and you made a million dollars that day and each day until today. In other words, your profit was a million dollars a day for nearly 2,000 years; by that time you would not yet have made a trillion dollars. You would only be three-quarters of the way to earning a trillion dollars.

So the cost of $1.3 trillion to economic output is a tremendous cost to our economy. This is roughly equivalent to the entire output of the Midatlantic region which includes Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

According to a study done by the Manufacturing Alliance, entitled ``How Structural Costs Imposed on U.S. Manufacturers Harm Workers and Threaten Competitiveness,'' in terms of compliance, three areas of regulation are hit particularly hard: consumer safety, workplace safety and environmental protection.

The total compliance burden is the $850 billion we have been talking about. And again, for manufacturers, that is equivalent to a 12 percent excise tax. That means we are 12 percent less competitive. If we could cut that in half, we could make ourselves 6 percent more competitive worldwide.

The burden on the pollution abatement expenditures alone reduces the cost of competitiveness by 3.5 percentage points, in comparison with our nine largest trading partners.

In a recent working paper by the Mercatus Center, which surveyed 100 manufacturing companies and estimated that the total cost of complying with the 25 statutes and executive orders, just 25 statutes and executive orders that encompass workplace regulation, it was about a $32 billion cost in the year 2000. That is equivalent to a 1.6 percent excise tax on manufactured goods.

In addition to the problem of adding to the number of uninsured and employers losing work due to the inability to provide coverage, health care costs are making America uncompetitive in the global market as well. While I do not advocate socialized medicine, most foreign nations provide health care coverage through their government and this is a huge cost that our companies have to worry about, but foreign companies do not have to worry about.

The National Association of Manufacturers calculated that the benefit costs put American companies at a 5.5 percent disadvantage compared to our nine largest trading partners. Not only does the United States spend more on health care annually, but 7.7 percent of our gross domestic product is the private sector contribution to health care coverage, and that far exceeds those of our foreign competitors. If we add the public sector to that, it is 14 percent of our gross domestic product.

America has been blessed with the best health care system. However, we must keep working to make it available and affordable, and the bureaucratic red tape tied to it is driving the cost of health care up. The Kansas Hospital Association has told me that for every hour of health care they provide, there is an additional hour required for paperwork compliance. We must improve access to health care and reduce the demands on paperwork so the quality of health care does not diminish.

Now, this week we have dealt with four OSHA bills and one paperwork reduction bill and we are committed, the Republicans are committed to reduce the cost of bureaucratic red tape. Congress established OSHA in 1970. OSHA, which is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA's mandate was to ensure for all workers safe and healthful working conditions, I am quoting from the original law which says, ``by encouraging employers and employees in their efforts to reduce the number of occupational, safety and health hazards at their place of employment.''

Yet, unsurprisingly, OSHA's 30-year record has been marred by failure. According to the regulatory analysis performed by the Cato Institute, while OSHA's supporters cite evidence attesting to the agency's effectiveness, the vast majority of studies have found no statistical significance in the reduction of workplace fatalities or injuries due to OSHA. Interventionists are hard pressed to maintain that OSHA meets even the minimum criteria for any government program. That criteria is, does it have any desirable effect on the problem it is supposed to solve.

OSHA's failure has been bad for business. A 1995 study by the Employment Policy Foundation found that 19 percent of the productivity slow-downs in the 1970s was directly attributable to regulations imposed by OSHA, and nearly half of those slow-downs in long-term productivity can be explained by rising governmental regulatory activity.

OSHA's poor track record even forced Vice President Gore to admit that the agency ``does not work well enough.'' Yet despite its failures, OSHA continues to intimidate businesses with the heavy hand of regulation, and it continues to make us worse off. As with almost any form of persistent government meddling, regulation stifles the very forces that drive growth and enhance prosperity here at home.

OSHA was created to ensure a safe and healthy workplace for workers throughout our Nation. Over the past 30 years, America's workplace has become safer and more secure than any time in our history, much of it through initiatives through the private sector. But in the last 3 decades, OSHA has developed an affliction which many Federal agencies share. Those same Federal agencies, while created to do good, have become unwelcome visitors, bearing gifts such as regulation and misguided oversight. The affliction to which I am referring is an insatiable appetite for too much control of the day-to-day lives of American workers and the companies they have worked hard to build.

This is particularly true in the residential construction industry. A few months ago, OSHA seemed to unfairly target the residential industry in Sedgwick County, Kansas. In June, I was contacted by the home builders from Wichita who were terrified by the prospect of having to stop work in order to avoid fines by OSHA. OSHA had targeted three counties in Kansas and they flooded these OSHA employees into those areas.

My constituents told me that OSHA was planning to fine builders for having plastic coffee cups on the ground and workers' failure to wear ear plugs while operating a wet-vac. These fines could be as high as $50,000, and would effectively put these small businessmen out of business.

OSHA claimed these reports were exaggerated, but there is no way I can exaggerate the impact of OSHA's hostility and excessive regulation on the fragile economy in Wichita. Allow me to explain, and prevent further harm to the small business sector.

As the Air Capital of the World, nowhere else do you find so many top-name general aviation aircraft manufacturers located in such close proximity. We also manufacture structural components for large commercial airlines. It has been said that what Detroit is to the automobile and what Silicon Valley is to the computer chip, Wichita, Kansas, is to the airplane.

Wichita proudly claims as corporate residents the Boeing Company, Cessna, Raytheon, Bombardier Aerospace's Learjet division. As a result, Wichita supplies components of two-thirds of the world's commercial airlines and manufactures 60 percent of the world's general aviation aircraft.

As you are aware, the aviation industry is the first to feel the effects of an economic downturn and the last to recover from it, and that is exactly what happened after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Wichita and surrounding area lost more jobs as a percentage of the total number of jobs than any other community in the United States. That resulted in the layoff of over 12,000 aircraft manufacturing workers.

The last thing Wichita needs is a Federal agency running around harassing small business and operating as though it would rather push paper and impose fines than working with employers to create a safe and healthy work environment.

In the case of the residential construction companies, OSHA chose surprise visits, ill-conceived compliance guidelines, and an adversarial demeanor to achieve everyone's goal of a safer, more secure workplace. Many small contractors were forced to stop working in order to avoid unfair fines which could have been as much as $7,000 per infraction, no matter how insignificant the infraction was.

Under this approach, OSHA was doing more to hurt employees than to help them by threatening the ability of the men and women in the residential construction industry to make a living. The work environment was safer; it was safe because there was nobody there. They were afraid to go to the work site in fear of being find by OSHA.

The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood) has been a leader in the fight to keep American businesses competitive without sacrificing workplace safety and health protections. As a part of our Bureaucratic Red Tape Reduction Week, the gentleman brought to the floor this week several bills which are aimed at establishing the basic principles of fairness, reducing regulatory burdens and expediting administrative reviews that will increase business productivity among America's small businesses.

These four bills are H.R. 2728, the Occupational and Safety Health Small Business Day in Court Act; H.R. 2729, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission Efficiency Act; H.R. 2730, the Occupational Safety and Health Independent Review of OSHA Citations Act; and H.R. 2731, the Occupational Safety and Health Small Employer Access to Justice Act. I am pleased to say that the House passed all four measures despite overwhelming Democratic opposition to the measures.

As we continue to focus on Bureaucratic Red Tape Termination week, I would like to share with my colleagues legislation that I will be introducing to assist small businesses in their latest battle against Big Government. My legislation accomplishes five goals. First, the bill will streamline the amount of time businesses have to contest citations and the amount of time OSHA has to issue citations. Today, businesses have 15 days to contest citations while OSHA has 6 months to issue them. Under my bill, OSHA will have 30 days to issue citations and provide employers with 30 days to contest it.

Secondly, this legislation allows businesses the right to correct OSHA violations without immediate monetary penalty. Under my plan, safety would be improved because employers would be given the incentive to promptly correct conditions that violate OSHA standards, except in the case of willful violations where the employer had knowledge of the violation and made no reasonable effort to correct it.

This section of the bill would give employers 72 hours to correct a violation following an OSHA inspection. Once corrected, the employer must provide an abatement certification to OSHA of the correction. Upon completion of the correction and certification, OSHA would not issue a monetary penalty for the citation, although the citation would be kept on record.

Third, my bill addresses the multi-employer citation policy issue by more narrowly defining the multi-employer citation policy at OSHA.

OSHA's recent enforcement of this policy has potentially overstepped their statutory authority that was authorized by Congress in the Occupational Safety and Heath Act. The legislation that I will be proposing clarifies to whom OSHA can issue citations on work sites where multiple employers are operating and allows OSHA to issue citations for a violation only to the employer who has exposed their employee to that given condition.

Fourth, my legislation will change the criteria for issuing subsequent repeat citations by stating that ``other than serious'' citations cannot be used as a basis for repeat or subsequent citations.

Finally, the bill will require OSHA inspectors to provide to employers a written statement or summary at the conclusion of the inspection that lists the items which OSHA inspectors noticed during the inspection. OSHA must then use these summary items as the basis for their citations. Requiring a summary at the end of the inspection would provide employers with prompt notification of hazardous conditions on their job site, thereby improving safety on the work site by providing employers with the opportunity to correct hazardous conditions immediately.

Currently, employers are often unaware of what the inspector's concerns were until they receive the citation, sometimes up to 6 months after the inspection. The bill also includes the added benefit of providing OSHA with the incentive to ensure that their inspectors are well versed and educated on OSHA regulations prior to conducting the site inspection.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that OSHA's first approach to those who provide jobs in our communities should be cooperative and not combative. This agency should be driven to work with, and not against, America's businesses.

Since 1971, OSHA's safety guidelines have accomplished some decline in occupational injuries and illness rates, and workplace fatalities have been cut in half. And I am convinced that it is possible to continue job protection for the American worker while at the same time create a climate for more jobs and economic growth.

The fifth bill that was passed this week to reduce bureaucratic red tape and paperwork was called the Paperwork and Regulatory Improvements Act. It was H.R. 2432, and it requires the Office of Management and Budget, in concert with the Internal Revenue Service, to conduct a review and then report to Congress on possible actions to reduce tax paperwork burden imposed on small businesses. H.R. 2432 provides Congress with a needed permanent analytic capability to serve as a check and balance on the executive branch's cost-benefit estimates of its proposed and final regulations and their consistency with congressional intent. Under the current law, OMB is required to submit an annual regulatory accounting statement with the President's fiscal budget.

To date, the usefulness of these reports has been undermined since they have not been integrated with the budget. In other words, they do not permit Congress to review simultaneously the on-budget and off- budget costs associated with each Federal agency and each Federal agency program that imposes regulatory or paperwork burdens on the public. H.R. 2432 improves the utility of these reports to Congress by ensuring we have this simultaneous review.

Currently, there is no end to regulatory burdens imposed on the public including both large and small businesses, but H.R. 2432 requires the first-ever multi-agency study of regulatory budgeting to determine if agencies can better manage regulatory burdens on the public. This is a good government bill which makes incremental improvements in the existing processes governing paperwork and regulatory reviews, including strengthening tools for those of us here in Congress.

Mr. Speaker, tonight I also want to discuss another tool that I think can be used in eliminating unwanted and unneeded regulation and regulatory bodies in our Federal Government, and that is the creation of the Commission on the Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies or CARFA.

It is certainly no secret that the Federal budget is filled with examples of duplicative, inefficient, and failed Federal agencies and programs. Many of these programs and agencies share regulatory oversight which very often ties the hands of businesses and employers due to the outrageous compliance costs these businesses must bear. I have introduced legislation that I believe would eliminate much of the fraud, abuse, and unnecessary regulation that persists in our Federal Government in a politically visible manner.

It has become increasingly clear that Congress's normal procedures cannot address the spending and waste problems that persist within our Federal Government. Time and again we see congressionally authorized programs become institutionalized, ultimately becoming a permanent fixture at the expense of taxpayers. This ties up precious Federal resources that could be used towards paying down the national debt or higher congressional priorities. By cutting out unnecessary Federal programs and agencies, we will send a strong message that we are serious about exercising fiscal responsibility and controlling government spending.

A first step towards a stable financial future for this country certainly can be found in H.R. 3213, the CARFA bill, which is also known as the Commission on the Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies Act. CARFA is based on a process with an established record of successful program elimination and

prioritizing of spending. The Base Realignment and Closure Commission, or BRAC as it is called, is similar only it deals strictly with military bases, whereas H.R. 3213 will establish a commission to conduct a comprehensive review of Federal agencies and programs and recommend the elimination or the realignment of duplicative, wasteful, and outdated functions.

CARFA provides for a disciplined spending review process for nondefense, nonentitlement programs. Congress will simply have to vote up or down on the commission's recommendations in their entirety. The congressional log-rolling that normally bogs down the process will be short-circuited. In this way, real reform can emerge and the deficit and debt program can be brought under control. H.R. 3213 offers Congress and the administration a unique opportunity rather than simply re-fund and increase funding for every Federal program. CARFA will eliminate unproductive, duplicative, and outdated programs.

Here is how CARFA would work. The commission would consist of 12 members appointed by the President no later than 90 days after the enactment of this bill. Members would be appointed for the life of the commission and would be required to meet no later than 30 days after the date on which all the members of the commission have been appointed. CARFA's duties would then include conducting a top to bottom review of all Federal programs and agencies, excepting the Department of Defense and any agency that solely administers entitlement programs.

CARFA would seek to identify those programs or agencies that could be considered duplicative in mission, grossly wasteful or inefficient, outdated, irrelevant, or simply failed. The assessment of these programs would be based primarily on the achievement of common performance measures, financial management, and other factors determined by the President. No later than 2 years after the enactment of this act, the commission would be required to submit to the President and Congress a plan with recommendations of the agencies and programs that should be realigned or eliminated and propose legislation to implement this plan. CARFA would require congressional consideration of the review's findings under the expedited legislative rules. In short, Congress would be voting up or down to continue or stop wasteful spending.

CARFA's main focus would be to make our government smarter and more effective and also to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to support programs such as the Federal Tea-taster, who until 1995 headed the Board of Tea Experts, which was created by the Imported Tea Act of 1897. Until this program's elimination just 8 short years ago, the Federal Government was spending $120,000 in salary and operating expenses per year to taste tea.

Obviously, this is only one example of the type of program that CARFA would target, but I am convinced that our Federal Government is replete with programs such as this that make a mockery out of our hard-earned tax dollars and that dramatically increase the costs of doing business in this country. Other examples of government waste that CARFA would target include surplus lands owned by the Department of Energy, which if sold would save taxpayers $12 million over 5 years. In addition, eliminating four duplicative bilingual education programs at the Department of Education would save taxpayers $800 million over a 5-year period. We could save $1 million every year by simply eliminating overlapping responsibilities and reducing administrative positions at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The examples of inefficiency and wasteful government practices that CARFA could target are far too numerous to cite in this short amount of time. However, it is clear to me that the need for CARFA is very real.

The strict time limits governing the commission which would expire shortly after submitting its findings would ensure that its costs are kept to a minimum. I believe that the savings that would occur as a result of the commission's findings will more than justify the minimal expenses the study might incur. In addition, it is worth noting that CARFA requires that all funds saved by implementation of this plan can only, only, be used for supporting other domestic programs or paying down the national debt.

H.R. 3213 offers Congress and the administration a test: Can we address a real and present problem by adopting a method that has been successful in the past? CARFA is a realistic plan that will make genuine reform possible. We welcome support of this politically viable solution to government spending gone awry. If the CARFA commission comes to fruition, it will give Congress arms-length distance to do the right thing and vote down ridiculous, redundant, and outdated programs. Over 65 of my colleagues in the House have agreed to cosponsor this legislation, and our numbers are growing stronger. We hope to see the CARFA commission hard at work cutting wasteful spending and eliminating burdensome overregulation by this time next year if not sooner.

So in summary, Mr. Speaker, we have seen that, over the last generation, Congress through good intentions has created barriers to keeping and creating jobs in America. Republicans in the House have come up with a plan of dividing these barriers into eight issues, and over a period of 8 weeks we are going to address each one of these issues with the purpose of creating high-quality, high-paying jobs right here in America and bringing jobs home, jobs that we have lost due to the acts of Congress and the regulations and policies and rules that have followed these acts of Congress.

Again, Mr. Speaker, those eight issues are health care security, bureaucratic red tape termination, lifelong learning, trade fairness and opportunity, tax relief and simplification, energy self-sufficiency and security, spurring innovation, and ending lawsuit abuse.

Last week we dealt with health care security by passing health care liability reform and by passing Flexible Savings Accounts and Medical Savings Accounts.

This week we have dealt with bureaucratic red tape termination. We passed four bills relating to OSHA and the Paperwork and Regulatory Improvement Act 2030.

Next week we are in recess, so the following week we are going to deal with lifelong learning. It is our intent during that week to focus on those types of training and education that we believe will bring more jobs into America. We want to focus on math, on science, on engineering. We want to develop a system where we can teach our young men and women to be technical in their training, so they can be innovative and ready to accept the jobs that will be created by reducing these other burdens. So lifelong learning will be the week next after we are on recess.

So, Mr. Speaker, these eight issues are going to be dealt with. They are not easily overcome by businesses, small and large, because they are things they cannot control. Businesses can control wages, they can control overhead, but they cannot control their health care costs, they cannot control the bureaucratic red tape that burdens them down every day, they cannot control the trade issues and policies, they cannot control the energy policy we have and they cannot control the lawsuits that come and haunt them. So we intend to address these issues.

This is the debate that we should be having on the floor of the House now. This is how we are going to secure a future for our children and our grandchildren. We are going to, if successful, create a strong economy in the future, where they can either start a business or get a job.

For those who are in opposition to these issues, I want to ask you, why would you oppose an energy policy that would create 700,000 more jobs in America? Why would you oppose reducing red tape so we can create additional work in areas where we do not have jobs now? Why would you want to oppose lawsuit reform, because right now it is driving jobs overseas?

The Republicans in the House want to bring jobs back into America. This is our plan. It is the most aggressive and organized plan that we have ever had for bringing jobs back to America. I am very proud to head up this effort through a Jobs Action Team.

Mr. Speaker, I think we are going to be successful in bringing jobs back.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First, I would like to comment on voluntary compliance. It has been mentioned here several times. Voluntary compliance programs are usually directed at large employers, not small. This is not where the deaths are occurring. In construction, half of all deaths occur among small firms in construction, many with fewer than 10 workers. Big corporations have understood for some time now that it is to their advantage to have a workplace that is safe, with maximum benefits and working conditions. And big corporations are seldom guilty of willful violations; it is the small employers. I must say that an attempt has been made here to make it appear that small employers have some special virtues, but small employers can be demons often.

I recall my father working in a mill where the straw boss, they called him, told the workers if they would go to the toilet, which was pretty much in the middle of the floor anyhow, a cubicle that you could see the feet and it was open at the top, if you go to the toilet and he does not smell anything, come on out.

I can recall working at a restaurant when I was in college where the employer, the owner of this small business, felt he had a right to pat any woman on the behind regularly, and they were too afraid to complain because they wanted to keep their jobs.

You might say that those were extreme conditions, that is all over; that happened when you were in college many years ago. But in New York we have sweatshops which are as bad as any sweatshops the city has ever known in the 1930s, the 1920s or any other time. It is just that the people in the sweatshops now happen to be Asians mostly, Asian workers who are being exploited.

There is no great virtue in small businesses automatically. Yes, the majority comply, but there are too many who still do not comply, too many who, as I said before, are interested only in squeezing the maximum profits from the situation; and their biggest cost is the labor cost, labor cost in terms of wages, labor cost in terms of conditions that must be established by law for workers.

We refuse to discuss the minimum wage on this floor. We refuse to discuss it in the context of a bill to increase the minimum wage. But today if we are going to talk about workers and worker safety, I think we ought to point out that it is the workers who are making the least amount of money whose safety is jeopardized most. They are the vulnerable ones in conditions that nobody else wants to work in, immigrant workers who take the lowest pay and working conditions where no one else will work.

This is the second quarter of a four-quarter marathon, as I said before. I have heard it called the More Injuries and More Death Marathon Act. It is a covert approach to what the majority Republicans tried when they first took power in 1995. This is covert. This is guerilla warfare, one might say, undermining OSHA from the back, undermining OSHA with sweet words.

Back on June 14, 1995, we had the first taste of what the majority Republicans really wanted to do about OSHA. The gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) introduced H.R. 1834, and that was a massive overhaul of OSHA to weaken the law and favor law-breaking employers. If you were to go back and retrieve that bill, you could see that most of it was put there in one bill, and it was a frontal assault. It had the same objectives that today's assault has.

There have been 14 of these significant bills introduced since the 104th Congress, I think half of which have been introduced by the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) which are significant in terms of looking at the record of how OSHA has been under attack. Since this House went under the leadership of the Republicans, OSHA has been the target, it has been an obsession, and none of these bills are in favor of increasing any measures to protect workers.

We cannot review and view these bills today in the context of just one bill at a time or even the four bills. The four bills have to be reviewed in the context of the overall policy of the Republican majority toward working families, the overall assault against working families.

We have to have this in context. We have to look at the figure of the 6,000 Americans per year. That figure has been there for some time, averaging about 6,000 per year who die every year on the job.

The little display up front is an example of a centerpiece for a quilt we want to make as a memorial to these workers. We do not want either party to forget what is happening to working

families in this country. In many respects, the failure to increase the minimum wage is one of them, but certainly with respect to health and safety, we must do more to make it known and to put it on the front burner in the minds of Americans as evidence of what is happening in the workplace.

This is not unrelated to other developments like outsourcing, a major development which goes after workers at higher levels, technicians, computer people, scientists, engineers. Their salaries and their working conditions are such that they are found to be offensive and not producing ample profits, so their jobs are going to be taken away completely and contracted out to other nations.

There are a large number of businesses that cannot be contracted out and most of them are small businesses. Construction is one. We can never take construction overseas; that has to happen here. The construction industry, in particular, needs the protection of people who want to weaken OSHA. The construction industry, in particular, is a culprit in employing and exploiting workers at the very bottom.

We must keep this package in context. We must understand that the covert warfare taking place here, what I call the poisoning of OSHA, the slow draining of power from OSHA, is accelerated by these seemingly harmless four bills. The Labor Secretary in this administration is openly hostile to labor and to working families. We have a situation where traditionally the Department of Labor has always been considered the advocate for working families and for workers, but this particular Department of Labor, this Secretary, is just the opposite and this administration has no place for labor to have their grievances aired. So we bring them here today at this time and take advantage of the fact that there is at least time to discuss conditions under which people work.

The policy of denigration, intimidation and oppression of the workforce is a policy which yields high productivity. That high productivity has already been achieved, but they want to go beyond that and get higher levels of exploitation and squeeze more from workers to increase the profits. As I said before, all small business owners are not model Americans. They do not seek to protect and take care of their workers in the best possible way.

We are going to have a monument. This is going to be part of an overall quilt which gives you the number of workers per State, gives you the number each year, since 1993 to the present. Like the Vietnam Wall memorial, it dramatically brings home in an individual way the fact that life is sacred. The lives of workers are as sacred as the lives of anyone else.

I said before, we are losing more workers per day than we are losing on the battlefields of Iraq. I do not want the Iraq battlefield casualties to increase. We would like the casualties in both places to decrease. But the life of a worker who is killed in a situation which has willful violations and the death is totally unnecessary, that life must be given more concern by both parties here in this House.

Workers and their families are under attack. We must come to their defense. One way to defend them is to recognize these four bills for what they are worth. They are the very destructive poisoning of the effectiveness of OSHA.

Mr. Speaker, I submit for printing in the Congressional Record the opinions and the statements by four groups: The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the Teamsters and the National COSH Network. These groups oppose this bill. I submit for the Record their statements in opposition.

American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial

Organizations,

Washington, DC, May 14, 2004.

Dear Representative: I am writing to express the strong

opposition of the AFL-CIO to H.R. 2728, H.R. 2729, H.R. 2730

and H.R. 2731, four bills that would erode worker protections

under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. These bills,

which are scheduled for a floor vote the week of May 17,

2004, would change established law and procedures to benefit

employers and stifle OSHA enforcement. They would do nothing

to enhance workers' safety and health protection, while

weakening the OSH Act.

H.R. 2731, Occupational Safety and Health Small Employer

Access to Justice Act--This bill requires taxpayers to pay

the legal costs of small employers (defined as employers with

100 or fewer employees and up to $7 million net worth) who

prevail in any administrative or enforcement case brought by

OSHA or any challenge to an OSHA standard brought by the

small employer against OSHA, regardless of whether the action

was substantially justified.

Under the Equal Access to Justice Act, small businesses are

already able to recover litigation costs where the government

position was not substantially justified. There is no reason

to expand these provisions and create new and broader rules

for purposes of the OSH Act. The bill will drain resources

away from an agency that has perpetually struggled to do its

job with the limited resources available to it. If enacted

into law, H.R. 2731 would have a chilling effect on both OSHA

enforcement and OSHA standard setting, because attorneys'

fees would be available to prevailing employers in both types

of actions. OSHA would be hesitant to cite small employers

for violations of the OSH Act unless there is absolute

certainty that the enforcement action will be upheld in its

entirety. No rational public policy would be furthered by

discouraging OSHA from issuing citations that are

substantially justified, but as to which the government

ultimately is unable to carry its burden of proof of every

issue. Rather, the inevitable result of such a rule, which

would penalize the government every time it loses, would be

to chill the issuance of meritorious citations in close cases

on behalf of employees exposed to unsafe working conditions.

Similarly, unless OSHA is certain that a standard will not be

challenged (which they are routinely for any number of

reasons), it would be very reluctant to development and issue

rules any hazard no matter how grave the threat of the hazard

to workers. This bill would further weaken OSHA enforcement

efforts and standard setting to the detriment of American

workers.

Establishments with fewer than 100 employees make up 97.7

percent of all private sector establishments. These

businesses have a higher rate of fatal occupational injury

than do establishments with 100 or more workers. Hampering

OSHA's enforcement ability in these small establishments

would be devastating to workers, resulting in even higher

rates of worker fatalities, injury and illness.

Also significant is the fact that under H.R. 2731,

employers will be able to recover partial attorneys fees if

they partially prevail in an OSHA proceeding. So, for

example, the notorious Eric Ho, who exposed his employees to

asbestos and made them work at night behind locked gates

without providing them any sort of respirators or training,

would be able to recover attorneys fees under this bill,

because the OSHA Review Commission dismissed two of Ho's

corporations as defendants and dismissed 10 of 11 willful

violations of OSHA's respirator and training standards.

Secretary of Labor v. Ho, Nos. 98-1645 & 98-1646 (OSHRC,

Sept. 29, 2003).

OSHA needs more, not fewer, resources available to deal

with employers like Eric Ho and to enforce the OSH Act's

protections. H.R. 2731 should be rejected.

H.R. 2730. Occupational Safety and Health Independent

Review of OSHA Citations Act--This bill would work a radical

change in the implementation and enforcement of the OSH Act,

and would undermine the Secretary of Labor's authority to

interpret and enforce the law. The bill would overturn a 1991

Supreme Court decision and say that deference should be given

to the OSHA Review Commission, and not the Secretary of

Labor, in interpreting OSHA standards. The AFL-CIO vigorously

opposes this bill and urges its defeat.

In Martin v. OSHRC (CF & I Steel Corp.), 499 U.S. 144

(1991), the Supreme Court made clear that the Secretary of

Labor, and not the Review Commission, should be given

deference when interpreting OSHA standards and regulations.

In the Court's view, the Secretary of Labor should receive

deference because Congress, when enacting the OSH Act,

designated the Secretary as the policymaking official, and

gave the Secretary the authority and responsibility to

implement and enforce the law. Thus, because the Secretary of

Labor is the person who adopts standards and brings

enforcement actions against employers, she has a much broader

and deeper understanding of OSHA's rules as compared to the

Review Commission, which sees only a small fraction of OSHA's

enforcement cases.

Policymaking, and interpretation of OSHA policies, should

stay with the Secretary. The Commission should not be able to

undo by fiat the Secretary's reasonable interpretations of

her rules. H.R. 2730 should be rejected.

H.R. 2729. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission

Efficiency Act--H.R. 2729 expands the number of members on

the OSHA Review Commission from three to five, and mandates

that all members have legal training. Another provision,

removed during the Committee markup on May 5, 2004,

authorized the Chairman of the Commission to delegate to any

panel of three or more members any or all powers of the

Commission and allowed two members to constitute a quorum on

such sub-panels.

The Review Commission has operated with three Commissioners

since it was first formed in 1970. There is no need to expand

the Commission beyond its current membership, and no need to

exclude individuals with relevant training, but not legal

training, from eligibility for these positions. Moreover, it

is no coincidence that Republican members are pushing to

expand the number

of seats on the Commission at a time when a Republican

president would fill the seats.

Proponents say the bill is needed to address the problem of

the Commission at times lacking a quorum to do business. But

with the removal of the provision on sub-panels during the

Committee markup, it is difficult to see how H.R. 2729 would

solve the quorum problem. Three Commissioners would still be

required to have a working quorum. There is no reason to

think that the Commission will be able to retain three active

Commissioners any better than it has been able to retain two.

H.R. 2729 is a solution in search of a problem. It should

be defeated.

H.R. 2728, Occupational Safety and Health Small Business

Day in Court Act--This bill would excuse employers from the

fifteen-day deadline for contesting OSHA citations and

``failure to abate'' notices if they can show ``mistake,

inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect'' as the reason.

The bill's practical effect would be to make numerous excuses

into legal reasons for missing the fifteen-day deadline by

which employers currently must respond to OSHA citations.

This action will only encourage more litigation. The idea of

the fifteen-day requirement is to give all parties a

reasonable timeframe in which to take action, and to ensure

that the case is moved along as quickly as possible so the

cited hazards will be corrected in as timely a manner as

possible.

It is also important to note that the bill excuses

employers from missing their 15-day deadline but does not

extent these same provisions to employees or their

representatives who challenge the period for abatement in a

citation. The one-sided nature of this legislation shows that

it is about benefiting employers, not protecting employees.

Proponents of the bill have pointed to one court case as

justification for this legislation. In fact, the Commission

has a longstanding practice of reviewing any missed deadlines

on a case-by-case basis. H.R. 2728 is another solution in

search of a problem, and it should be defeated.

As demonstrated above, these bills undermine the intent of

the Congress when it enacted the OSHAct more than 30 years

ago. Generally speaking, these policies and procedures have

been serving workers well for over 30 years. American workers

deserve a safe and healthy workplace and the full protection

the OSHAct can offer. These bills would surely diminish the

protections provided to workers by the OSHAct. For these

reasons, the AFL-CIO opposes these four bills, and we

strongly urge you to vote against each of them.

Sincerely,

William Samuel,

Director,

Department of Legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne), my colleague on the Workforce Protections Subcommittee, be allowed to control the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to close for the opposition on H.R. 2729.

As I stated at the outset, neither H.R. 2729 nor any other of these four bills before us addresses the important health and safety concerns of American working men and women. In essence, H.R. 2729 gives us the worst of both worlds, a bigger government bureaucracy designed to accomplish less on behalf of the American worker. Moreover, this bill would mandate legal training as a qualification for appointment to the commission. This diminishes what ought to be a primary qualification as a commissioner and that is expertise in the field of occupational safety and health.

Having stated these clear reasons for opposition to this bill, which I urge my colleagues to follow, I would like to turn my attention once more to the urgent concern about the safety of American workers. That concern is over the protection of workers' lives on the job. At present, OSHA does little more than slap the wrists of employers that are egregious safety offenders. As the New York Times noted in its compelling series on worker deaths, OSHA has a 20-year track record of failing to seek criminal prosecution in a staggering 93 percent of cases they investigated where willful and flagrant safety violations by employers killed workers.

And after you institute this proposal for H.R. 2729, it is just one more little reason why they would have less vigor in prosecuting anybody.

Congress has an important role to play in holding both OSHA and unscrupulous employers accountable. One problem is that under the current statute, OSHA can only issue a misdemeanor penalty for an employer who has willfully caused the death of a worker. A misdemeanor has no deterrent value whatsoever. If you harass a wild burro on Federal lands, you face a stiffer penalty than if you kill an American worker. What signal does this send to a small number of unscrupulous employers who actually build up a history of willfully causing worker deaths? Are we saying to these wrongdoers, do not worry about protecting the lives of your workers because Congress cares more about wild burros than about the men and women in your employ? Pestering a wild burro in a national park can send you to prison for an entire year, but killing a worker only lands you there for 6 months.

More importantly, what signal does that send to grieving family members who are left behind? You cannot receive any justice because Congress does not have a fundamental respect for the lives of your loved ones.

Along with Senator Jon Corzine, I have introduced a bill to make killing a worker a felony offense. I tried to get this bill included in one of these four bills because it is germane, in my opinion; but it was ruled out of order. Rather than a radical departure from current law, this bill is just a moderate adjustment that is long overdue. H.R. 4270 and S. 1272 correct a glaring oversight in Federal policy, and I will describe it in more detail later on.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 645 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to my friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

Mr. Speaker, the resolution before us is a rule for consideration of a package of bills, H.R. 2728, H.R. 2729, H.R. 2730, H.R. 2731 and H.R. 2432, which are all being brought to the floor today by the House Republican leadership, that will help to cut the cost of burdensome regulations for American small businesses and help create new jobs in America.

H. Res. 645 provides for the separate consideration of each of these five measures. Each bill covered under this rule will have its own debate time and the opportunity to be voted on by this body.

Finally, the rule also provides, at the close of consideration of these measures, the Clerk of the House will be directed to combine the text of each of these bills that passes the House under this rule as one engrossed bill and send it to the other body.

Mr. Speaker, we are here today to consider a rule for a number of common-sense bills that will eliminate unnecessary paperwork and bring some much-needed flexibility to the regulatory process for American small business. This legislation will also improve worker safety by making it easier for employers to work voluntarily and proactively with OSHA to ensure safe and secure workplaces.

While this may seem like a complicated rule, its effect is quite simple: It will help to cut down on wasteful costs that many small businesses face as a result of burdensome, one-size-fits-all government regulations.

The bills brought up for consideration under this rule will allow small businesses to focus more of their time and energy on competing in the marketplace, providing their customers with better goods and services and creating new jobs all across America, rather than spending their time filling out forms or arguing with some distant, nameless, faceless bureaucrat.

One of the Republican Party's top priorities is to create an environment that empowers small businesses and their employees to succeed, which has been proved by the House's agenda over the last few weeks. Last week, the House took up and overwhelmingly passed legislation to allow low- and middle-income Americans to keep more of what they earn by permanently extending the 10 percent tax bracket created by President Bush's 2001 tax relief plan.

The House also took up the opportunity to pass legislation that improves upon and strengthens Flexible Spending Accounts, addresses the skyrocketing cost of medical liability insurance and allows small businesses to join together to provide their employees with health insurance through Association Health Plans.

This week, the House will be considering yet another tax relief bill on behalf of working families and will expand and make permanent the child tax credit. And we will also be considering these five bills to make it easier for our Nation's small businesses to create jobs that will help sustain our economy's growth.

H.R. 2728, the Occupational Safety and Health Small Business Day in Court Act, amends the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to provide flexibility to employers filling out responses to OSHA citations. Currently, the law sets a strict and arbitrary deadline of 15 days for businesses to respond to an OSHA citation, despite the fact that since the 1980s, a Federal rule of procedure has granted employers relief in cases where an employer filed a late notice of contest because of ``mistake, inadvertence, surprise or excusable neglect.'' H.R. 2728 would simply codify this common-sense practice in law and give OSHA some direction in handling cases where a business misses its 15-day window.

H.R. 2729, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission Efficiency Act, would create greater efficiency at the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission by adding two additional members to this board so that it may complete its work in a more timely fashion on behalf of employers and employees all across the United States.

Under current law, the membership of the Commission is set at three appointed members. Two members are required to constitute a quorum, and the Commission can only take action on an affirmative vote of two members, regardless of whether these seats are vacant or filled.

For over two-thirds of its existence, the Commission has been paralyzed by frequent vacancies that have resulted in several critical and well-documented inefficiencies, rendering the entire regulatory scheme devised by Congress for resolving OSHA disputes unworkable.

By creating two new seats on the Commission, Congress can protect against the chance that an extended vacancy on the Commission will prevent this body from resolving disputes in a timely fashion.

H.R. 2730, the Occupational Safety and Health Independent Review of OSHA Citations Act, will provide for the fair and independent review of citations issued by OSHA. Legislative history and practice have made it clear that while OSHA is responsible for rule-making, enforcement and adjudication of issues pertinent to workplace safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission is intended to provide an independent review of OSHA's functions and act as a check on any prosecutorial excess.

This bill would simply restore responsible checks and balances to the current system by making it clear that the Commission's legal interpretations are given the proper judicial deference.

H.R. 2731, the Occupational Safety and Health Small Employer Access to Justice Act, provides for the payment of attorney's fees and costs to very small employers when they prevail in legislation prompted by the issuance of citations by OSHA.

The reason for this legislation is simple: The government should not be able to intimidate small businesses into blindly following their mandates simply because the business thinks it cannot afford to fight in a case where it might otherwise prevail.

This bill will put American small businesses on a more level playing field with large and powerful government bureaucracies and give them the courage to speak up for themselves when they are right by removing the financial penalties that currently exist for defending themselves.

Finally, H.R. 2432, the Paperwork and Regulatory Improvement Act, reduces Federal regulatory paperwork and red tape by requiring OMB to devote more effort to identifying ways to simplify Federal laws. This bill would also make permanent GAO's authorization to analyze major rules proposed by Federal agencies and require OMB to integrate its regulatory accounting reports with its annual budget report, so that lawmakers can compare the on-budget and off-budget costs associated with each agency requiring paperwork by the public.

Like all the other bills being considered on this rule today, it would help create jobs and allow America's business men and women to spend less of their own time on resources, on complicated regulatory and taxes paperwork that hurts the economy, instead of running their own businesses.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud of this legislation that Congress has passed and will continue to pass to promote the Republican competitiveness agenda. I think it is important that we come to the floor today with a full discussion on legislation that will give Americans more time to spend running their businesses or with their families or however they choose to spend it.

I think it is important to remember that every single time that we pass one-size-fits-all legislation giving a great deal of authority to the Washington-based bureaucracies, our small businesses bear the brunt of this inefficiency.

OMB recently report to Congress that the annual cost of major Federal regulations issued between 1992 and

2002 are estimated to cost between $38 billion and $44 billion. This means that Americans spend about $1.50 in compliance cost for every one dollar in tax cost devoted to regulation. Moreover, it means that every dollar of direct budget expenditure devoted to regulatory activity, the private sector spends $45 dollars in compliance. This overregulation of businesses puts us at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world and places an unnecessary limit on our economy.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, the code of Federal regulations extends 19 feet, and from 1991 to 2000 the number of pages in the CFR increased by 28.1 percent. I am glad Congress is looking at ways to pare back this overwhelming bureaucracy, and I urge all of my colleagues to support this rule for these five bills to keep American businesses competitive in the global marketplace and to keep American jobs here at home. I urge all of my colleagues to support this rule and the underlying bill.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman talking about the true colors that the Republican Party presents not only today but every single day that we are on this floor of the House of Representatives, because our special interest is our taxpayers and the working men and women of this country who keep it going and will continue to work for the special interests of the Republican Party to ensure that America has not only a sound economy but opportunities to where people can live the American dream.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), the gentleman that leads our party in this effort, the gentleman who is the chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia Beach, Virginia (Mr. Schrock).

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we began this debate today by talking about doing the things the Republican Party has as an idea and a vision, about making businesses more efficient and effective and working closer on the things that will encourage not only us to be more productive but to employ more people. The gentleman from Florida earlier asked a very simple question: Who would possibly support this bill? Who are they? Well, I provided the gentleman a list of some 38.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his clarification and accept that.

I would like to run through very quickly the organizations that do support this commonsense OSHA reform, and I am just going to run through a few:

The National Center For Assisted Living, National Council on Chain Restaurants, National Federation of Independent Businesses, United States Chamber, National Restaurant Association, National Retail Federation, National Soft Drink Association.

And, Mr. Speaker, I will submit this list at this point for the Record.

Committee on Education and the Workforce, House of

Representatives,

May 18, 2004.

Organizations Supporting Common Sense OSHA Reforms

Dear Colleague: The House today will consider four common

sense OSHA reform measures (H.R. 2728, H.R. 2729, H.R. 2730,

and H.R. 2731) to ensure OSHA enforcement efforts are fair

for small businesses that make good faith efforts to comply

with all health and safety laws. These reforms will improve

worker safety by making it easier for employers to work

voluntarily and proactively with OSHA to ensure safe and

secure workplaces. Following are a list of organizations

supporting these reforms:

Air Conditioning Contractors of America

American Bakers Association

American Hotel & Lodging Association

American Farm Bureau Federation

American Furniture Manufacturers

Associated Builders & Contractors

Associated General Contractors of America

American Health Care Association

American Trucking Associations

Food Marketing Institute

Independent Electrical Contractors

International Foodservice Distributors Association

IPC--The Association Connecting Electronics Industries

Management Advisers, LLC

Mason Contractors Association

National Association of Home Builders

National Association of Manufacturers

National Beer Wholesalers Association

National Center for Assisted Living

National Council of Aagricultural Employers

National Council of Chain Restaurants

National Electrical Contractors Association

National Federation of Independent Business

National Funeral Directors Association

National Oilseed Processors Association

National Ready Mixed Concrete Association

National Restaurant Association

National Retail Federation

National Roofing Contractors Association

National Small Business Association

National Soft Drink Association

Printing Industries of America Inc.

Retail Industry Leaders Association

Society of American Florists

Society for Human Resource Management

The American Coke and Coal Chemicals Institute

The Brick Industry Association

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Developing better cooperation between OSHA and employers

will improve workplace safety, enhance business

competitiveness, and foster more job creation to spur the

economy. We encourage you to help improve workplace safety

and enhance small business competitiveness by voting YES on

these important OSHA reform measures. For more information,

please contact the Education & the Workforce Committee at x5-

4527.

Sincerely,

John Boehner (R-OH),

Chairman, Education & the Workforce Committee.

Charlie Norwood (R-GA),

Chairman, Workforce Protections Subcommittee.

Mr. Speaker, I would say to my colleagues who are listening to this debate, who want to do the right thing for small businesses, that it is always interesting to me that as we enter debates on the floor of the House of Representatives, and one of the biggest debates we have had has been about manufacturing, yet almost every single time as the Republican Party stands up for those organizations that are engaged in manufacturing, about jobs in this country, we vote for those bills and our colleagues on the other side vote against them. Yet all we hear about is loss of jobs.

I would like to say that today this vote is about small business and the ability for small business to compete effectively, efficiently, and to give them more fair footing. I support this rule and I support this underlying legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

The previous question was ordered.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 2731. This bill is the most

alarming of the four before us today. By mandating that OSHA pay the attorney fees of any employer with a total net value of under $7 million and no more than 100 workers if they prevail upon appeal, H.R. 2731 would drastically undermine the enforcement of OSHA's mission.

As I stressed in my opening statement, more than 90 percent of all private firms in the U.S. would qualify for attorney fees upon successfully prevailing in an appeal. What could be more universal than that? H.R. 2731 would have an incredibly chilling effect on implementation of the act.

What would this bill mean for American workers? It would mean that unscrupulous employers could risk workers lives with impunity. Focusing on the issue of worker protection, again, I would like to relate some very personal testimony delivered at a forum I held on May 12 on worker deaths, and some of the photos of the people who testified are in front of us.

Patrick J. Walters, whose photo is on the top row, was 22 years old, a plumber's apprentice who was literally buried alive in a trench collapse in June 2002. Patrick had been sent down into a 10-foot deep, rain soaked trench without any training or safety equipment. Moeves Plumbing, a Cincinnati-based employer, had been repeatedly cited already by OSHA over the years for failure to follow basic safety standards for trench work. Although cited and fined for trench safety lapses in 1983, 1984, 1985, Moeves Plumbing took no remedial steps.

Clint Daley, another Moeves employee had been buried in 1989 in circumstances identical to Patrick's. In Daley's case, OSHA agreed to a settlement based on a promise by Moeves to take required safety action, an example of that voluntary compliance business. Two weeks before his death, an OSHA inspector found Patrick and another Moeves employee working in an unstable, unsafe trench that was 15 feet steep. Again, OSHA warnings went unheeded by Moeves and this caused certain, but tragic, results.

After Patrick's death, an attorney for Moeves Plumbing negotiated down the citation from a willful violation to an unclassified. OSHA also reduced the fine down to $30,000 to be paid over 4 years.

At the May 12 forum, Patrick's mother, Michelle Marts, wondered aloud, ``What is it going to take to stop Moeves Plumbing from sending another boy like our son to his death? Patrick did not have to die this way. This absolutely could and should have been prevented. We do not want this to happen to any other family.''

Joey Israel was a 22-year-old laborer who fell eight stories to his death from Philadelphia's Victory Building on December 31, 2003. Employed by HydroProof Systems, he had been promoted from entry-level employee to laborer only 2 weeks prior to his death. All that is known for certain is that before careening to his death, Joey had been told to pull up a 23\1/2\ pound electrical cord hanging from the window. After repeated phone calls to OSHA to ascertain the status report on Joey's case, OSHA responded by stating that HydroProof had not violated any safety rules.

Joey's twin sister, Jaime, insisted upon a personal meeting with the OSHA investigator. She was told that not one of the eight men who were on the job the day her brother was killed had been questioned by OSHA nor had the employer been questioned about the incident. When Jaime questioned how her brother could have been sent alone some 25 feet up in the air on this job, without any prior training or interview, she was told, ``That's the beauty of America.''

Jaime responded at the May 12 forum with the following quote: ``What an awful thing to be told to a mother who just lost her son and a sister who just lost her brother. I believe this is the downfall of America, where, daily, employers risk the lives of untrained men and women who are doing what they have to do to support their families, to make a quick buck and, in a sense, kill for profit. My brother lost his life for a lousy $60 a day, is that what the lives of our loved ones are worth to their employers?''

Scott Shaw was a 38-year-old husband and father of two young sons who was killed on September 7, 2002. Scott died when he fell into the Schuylkill River, moving from the Hopper Barge to the Work Barge. OSHA investigated and found that Scott's company had committed six serious violations. One of these violations focused on the fact that one barge was 8 feet higher than the other. Also, workers had to climb on rubber tires while jumping from barge to barge. However, OSHA combined these violations into one citation with six items. OSHA's total fine for these violations was only $4,950.

His wife, Holly, testified that ``Scott didn't have a life jacket on. He wasn't required by his company to wear one. There were no life preservers on the barge. Scott's death was needless. The company Scott was working for neglected to follow safety regulations.

``As a teacher and as a parent, I know that it is important that a child understand there are consequences to their actions, and they must accept responsibility for what they have done. Adults must face their responsibility, and must be held accountable for their actions. Please don't let another family suffer as we have. The more that companies are actually punished, the more they realize they must practice workplace safety, and must protect their workers.''

I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to understand the seriousness of these discussions today.

This is the final quarter of the marathon four bills today. I hope that the fact that they have been packaged together has not caused anybody not to listen. I hope that they understand that we are talking about life-and-death matters.

I urge my colleagues to oppose the needless deaths of Americans by opposing H.R. 2731.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is left.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne).

(Mr. PAYNE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. McCarthy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews).

(Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich), the distinguish candidate for President.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to thank the members of the minority on the committee for their work on this bill. I want to thank the majority for giving us an opportunity to talk about the very real problems that are faced by workers in the workplace.

Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record an item titled Summary of the AFL-CIO Death on the Job Report, and the second item for the record, Profile of Workplace Safety and Health in the United States.

Summary of the AFL-CIO Death on the Job Report

The report is a national and state-by-state profile of

worker safety and health in the United States. A combination

of too few OSHA inspectors and low penalties makes the threat

of an OSHA inspection hollow for too many employers. Millions

of workers are still left with no OSHA coverage.

Here are some of the ``highlights'' of the report:

15 workers were fatally injured and more than 12,800

workers were injured or made ill each day during 2002. These

statistics do not include deaths from occupational diseases,

which claim the lives of an estimated 50,000 to 60,000

workers each year.

A 62 percent increase in the number of trench fatalities,

from 33 in 2002 to 53 in 2003.

Fatal injuries among Hispanic or Latino workers decreased

about 6 percent, although the 840 fatalities recorded for

Hispanic workers is the second-highest annual total for the

population. States that saw an increase in the number of

Hispanic worker fatalities in 2002 include Alabama, Arkansas,

Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, New

Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia,

Washington and Wyoming.

The number of fatal work injuries among foreign-born

Hispanic workers increased to 577 in 2002 from 527 in 2001.

Musculoskeletal Disorders continue to account for more than

one-third of all injuries and illnesses involving days away

from work and remain the biggest category of injury and

illness. The occupations that reported the highest number of

MSDs involving days away from work in 2002 were nursing aides

and orderlies (44,421); truck drivers (36,814); and laborers,

nonconstruction (24,862).

As documented in a December 2003 New York Times series,

prosecutions of recklessly negligent employers are extremely

rare. Of the 170,000 workplace deaths since 1982, only 16

convictions involving jail time have resulted--although 1,242

cases involving work deaths were determined by OSHA to

involve ``willful'' violations by employers (violations in

which the employer knew that workers' lives were at risk).

Penalties for significant violations of the law remain low.

In fiscal year 2003, serious violations of the OSH Act

carried an average penalty of only $871 ($856 for federal

OSHA, $885 for state OSHA plans).

2,240 federal and state OSHA inspectors responsible for

enforcing the law at 8.1 million workplaces. At its current

staffing and inspection levels, it would take federal OSHA

106 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction

just once.

Between FY 1999 and FY 2003 the number of employees who

work in workplaces inspected by federal OSHA inspections

decreased by nearly 12%. The average number of hours spent

per inspection also decreased between FY 1999 and FY 2003,

from 22 to 18.8 hours per safety inspection and from 40 to

34.7 hours per health inspection. The number of citations for

willful violations decreased from 607 in FY 1999 to 391 in FY

2003. The average penalty per violation and per willful

violation increased in FY 2003 from the FY 2002

level, while the average penalty per serious violation

decreased to its lowest level since 1999.

After three and a half years under the Bush administration,

rulemaking at OSHA and MSHA has virtually ground to a halt.

In December 2003, the administration published its latest

semiannual regulatory agenda, which sets forth its regulatory

priorities and plans for the coming year. Having already

withdrawn 22 pending OSHA regulatory actions from its

regulatory agenda, in its May 2003 regulatory agenda the Bush

administration withdrew the glycol ethers standard and the

tuberculosis standard, leaving few major initiatives on the

regulatory schedule.

OSHA still has taken no action on the Employer Payment for

Personal Protective Equipment standard, which has been

through the rulemaking process and is ready for final action.

The only major regulations still on the regulatory agenda

are for silica, beryllium and hearing conservation for

construction workers. But there is no commitment for OSHA to

propose these rules. This will be the only administration in

history not to issue a major safety and health regulation

during its four years in office.

17 MSHA standards to improve safety and health for miners

have been withdrawn, including the Air Quality, Chemical

Substances and Respiratory standard.

Adjusting for inflation, the FY 2005 proposed OSHA budget

represents a $6.5 million cut over FY 2004 appropriations.

The FY 2005 OSHA budget proposes increasing programs for

voluntary compliance with employer assistance while cutting

training and outreach programs for workers and freezing

standard-setting and enforcement programs. At OSHA, the

president proposes to cut worker safety training programs by

65 percent and to shift these funds to employer assistance

programs.

Since we have had a running commentary here about staying on the point, I would like to comment directly on H.R. 2731 by quoting from the Brotherhood of Teamsters objections:

``Finally, we oppose H.R. 2731, the Occupational Safety and Health Small Employer Access to Justice Act, which would require that OSHA, the taxpayer, pay the legal costs when it loses a case against a small business that prevails in administrative or judicial proceedings, regardless of whether the government's position was substantially justified. We view this as another effort to impede OSHA's and the Department's efforts to enforce the law and provide an avenue for workers to seek redress.

``We see no justification for such an arbitrary departure from the current practice of each party paying for its own litigation costs for only one class of public prosecutions. We know of no other agency, charged by statute to enforce the law, which is impeded from fulfilling its responsibility with respect to a meritorious complaint because it cannot guarantee the outcome.''

If OSHA is forced to guarantee the outcome, it ties OSHA's hands and will rob workers of protections by discouraging OSHA from executing its required responsibilities. Like all of the other items in this marathon package, which I call the More Injuries and More Death Marathon, it stacks the deck against the workers and in favor of the employers.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the ranking member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, for an opening statement.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the amount of time left?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this particular bill, H.R. 2728, and the other three bills to be considered in succession, H.R. 2729, H.R. 2730 and H.R. 2731. As I said earlier in the debate on the rule, this package I would label as a ``more injuries and more deaths package.'' This package I would label as ``a spoon feeding of poison'' to OSHA.

If we compare OSHA to a giant elephant, as has just been boasted by a couple of Members, they knock the elephant to its knees immediately by repealing the ergonomic standards, and now they want to slowly kill the elephant with spoonsful of poison.

Deliberately, it is made to appear these are trivial bills, common- sense bills, they have no real value; but why are they on the floor? I think they are significant only if we take this within the context of what the majority party has been trying to do with OSHA since it took control of the House, if we take it in the context of how the protection of owners and businessmen is the obsession of the majority party. We never get any bills from them which seek to protect workers.

There are quite a number, 14, of significant bills that have been offered since the 104th Congress, starting with the gentleman that just spoke before. The gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) has offered more than anyone else, and each one of those bills seeks to, in some way, weaken OSHA and to favor law-breaking employers.

These bills will do nothing to strengthen the occupational safety and health standards for American workers. Rather, they will do quite the reverse, by undermining, sometimes suddenly and other times blatantly, the overall effectiveness of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

I would like to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970 to assure ``every working man and woman in the United States safe and healthful work conditions.'' I believe that bears repeating.

OSHA's founding and fundamental purpose, as spelled out in the statute, is to ensure that each and every individual working in the United States carries out his or her work in safe and healthy circumstances.

The bill was not written to overburden business. It has never overburdened business. Every attempt has been made to bend over backwards to limit the burden on business and no attempt is made to protect workers.

This is the yardstick by which we must measure the likely outcomes of each of the bills before us today. Let us briefly review such outcomes.

H.R. 2728: By extending the customary 15-day period for an employer to appeal an OSHA citation, this bill would encourage litigation, and litigation is on the side of the employer not the employee. It would delay the correction or the abatement of whatever hazards have occurred in the workplace related to that citation. As such, it can only place workers at greater risk of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, which runs expressly counter to the purpose of the OSHA Act originally.

H.R. 2729, and I want to talk about all these bills in context first before I deal specifically with each one: By expanding the size of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission from three to five members, this bill simply creates a bigger bureaucracy in search of a mission. Moreover, the bill adds legal training as a qualification for appointment to the commission. It makes OSHA less effective, not more effective.

It diminishes the chances that candidates considered for selection will have the requisite expertise in occupational safety and health. They have got to have legal expertise but they do not have to have expertise and experience directly in relation to occupational safety and health. That expertise is critical to further the assurance of safe conditions for America's working men and women.

H.R. 2730: By extending deference to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission over the Secretary of Labor, this bill contorts and confuses enforcement responsibilities of both the Secretary and the Review Commission. Such confusion will only hinder efforts to fulfill the statutory guarantee of safe and healthy conditions for all workers in this country.

It seems like a small matter, but it is another spoonful of poison which, in the end, can be very effective in killing the elephant.

H.R. 2731: By requiring OSHA to pay attorney fees for any employer with 100 or fewer workers and a net worth of under $7 million, that prevails, even partially, upon appeal, this bill would have a chilling effect on OSHA enforcement efforts. It would almost freeze those efforts. Given that worker death rates are much higher in such firms in comparison to those with more than 100 workers, this bill would encourage litigation and seriously jeopardize progress towards improving the safety and health conditions of American workers.

Moreover, the bill would freeze safety enforcement efforts in the lion's share of private companies in light of the fact that more than 97 percent of all private employers have fewer than 100 employees on the payroll.

I might add that the practice now is for larger employers who are subject to other kinds of regulations and other OSHA standards often to subcontract to small employers and avoid being regulated in the proper way for health and safety.

These bills run counter to the real interests of working Americans, and I urge my colleagues to oppose it. As the senior Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, I have heard firsthand from workers around the country about very real and pressing safety and health concerns many face on the job on a daily basis. If neglected or unaddressed, these risks can have severe, and even fatal, consequences.

H.R. 2731: Requiring OSHA to pay attorney fees for any employer with 100 or fewer workers is one of those bills that certainly would create a situation where the likelihood is that less regulation would take place and more workers would be at risk.

In a May 12th forum, which we entitled ``A Job to Die For: Inadequate Enforcement of U.S. Safety Standards,'' I heard from witnesses on the front lines of an epidemic with fatal consequences. Worldwide, this epidemic is deadlier than war. From Brazil to Bangladesh, it claims 6,000 lives a day, which means four lives a minute. In this country, it claims 6,000 lives a year, which computes to one life every 90 minutes.

This epidemic takes a devastating toll on American families and communities. I think my colleagues can see from the arithmetic, we lose more workers per day from deaths in the workplace than we are losing in Iraq. I think that later on we are going to talk about how this phenomenon must be brought to the attention of the American people, starting with the Members of this body in both parties.

This is not a trivial discussion today. This is not a discussion to be quickly passed over. It is at the core of an effort to make the workplace safe and to create better conditions for working, and better respect for working families.

Working families are expected to produce the soldiers that go off to fight our wars. Ninety percent of those in Iraq are from working families, but yet we have an attempt to oppress working families with many measures. We will not even consider a minimum wage increase. We are constantly trying to change workplace safety conditions through these various measures for those members of our society who also shoulder the burden when it is time to go off and fight for the country and defend the country.

I am referring to wrongful deaths in the workplace when I talk about the

6,000 lives lost in this country per year. Individual worker deaths are not random, isolated events. Rather, they are often tragic certainties that are almost always preventable. Unlike a disease that is triggered by a mysterious or elusive virus, this outbreak is caused by the willful and reckless safety violations of certain employers. Let me repeat, the willful and reckless safety violations of certain employers.

Much has been said about the fact that most employers care about their employees. And that may be true, but there is a large, large percentage that care only about the profits, and they are constantly squeezing the workers and jeopardizing the safety and health of workers in an attempt to increase their profits. Such business owners pursue profits and their own economic interests at the expense of basic safety practices, and all too often this comes at the actual expense of workers' lives.

We have learned that for Latino workers the risk of workplace fatalities keeps rising. They right now happen to be the most vulnerable. Recent immigrants are forced to take the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. As highlighted in the recent investigative series by the Associated Press, immigrant workers born in Mexico are now 80 percent more likely to be killed on the job than their U.S.-born peers. This is almost three times greater than the disproportionate risk of workplace fatalities for the rest of the population. Even by conservative estimates, a Mexican worker is killed on the job every day in this country.

The Federal Government is astonishingly ineffectual at combating this epidemic of wrongful deaths, both with respect to immigrant workers born in Mexico and all other workers. The current administration is replacing standard OSHA inspections with voluntary compliance programs that ignore the work sites where deaths are most likely to occur.

And much is being made by the majority party of volunteering and trusting employers. The OSHA was developed by legislation because it was clear that employers could not be trusted to safeguard the health and safety of workers. The current administration is replacing standard OSHA inspections with voluntary compliance that ignores the work sites where deaths are most likely to occur. You can find that the majority of American employers do care about their employees and safety, but that minority is the problem; and they are not being properly scrutinized.

Moreover, OSHA has increased the percentage of its budget dedicated to voluntary efforts by 8 percent. These discussions and negotiations of voluntary efforts have run off with the slight increases that have been made in the OSHA budget while they have reduced the funds devoted to safety enforcement by 6 percent.

At the same time, the U.S. continues to lag behind other Western nations in preventing workplace deaths. A construction worker in the U.S. is four times more likely to be killed on the job than a worker in Belgium. In comparison with their British counterparts, American construction workers are twice as likely to be killed on the work site.

These are critical health and safety issues we should be addressing today as opposed to the four bills that would further undermine OSHA's effectiveness in protecting American workers. We have the most productive workers in the world. We ought to appreciate that and try to protect those workers, not squeeze them more, not make them sweat more, and not endanger their lives more.

I urge my colleagues to vote against H.R. 2728, H.R. 2729, H.R. 2730 and H.R. 2731.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

(Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I take issue with the last statement. We are on the first quarter of a four-bill marathon. They have been put together by the majority. We choose to discuss them as we see fit.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. PAYNE) to close out this first quarter of this four-bill marathon.

(Mr. PAYNE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.