Lateefah Simon: “Take a look at what happens there. Those are not just statistics. We are talking about the lives of people. That has…”

“Take a look at what happens there. Those are not just statistics. We are talking about the lives of people. That has been a dramatic change for coal miners in southern Illinois, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Why change this when both the industry and the coal miners say this makes sense? Let me give it from the viewpoint of OSHA. First of all, OSHA has just recently reviewed 33,000 pages of regulations and targeted more than 1,000 of those for elimination. Has OSHA been excessive, had too much minutiae in what they have been doing? No question about it. We have had too much regulation. But they are dealing with it and I am impressed by Joe Dear, who now heads OSHA, and what he is doing. We had a witness who testified about problems with OSHA. I asked that witness to come that afternoon and asked the head of OSHA to come to my office. He was there. They are moving. Trenches? 1990, trench deaths have fallen by 35 percent, since they put in their regulation on trenches. Grain dust, a major problem in Midwest States, deaths from explosions in grain elevators. The grain dust--since 1988, according to the grain industry, the fatality rate in the industry has dropped by 58 percent. And the injury rate has dropped by 41 percent. I would add here, even with the changes that we have made in OSHA, we still have, among the Western industrialized countries, the highest fatality and injury rate in manufacturing and in construction of any Western industrialized nation.”