Court orders DOL to give PEF complete information PEF wins access to DOL employee-injury records By SHERRY HALBROOK The state Supreme Court has ruled the state Department of Labor (DOL) broke state law when it withheld from PEF information about employees’ job-related-injuries. “This decision is a victory for basic worker rights that will benefit all public employees in New York state, said PEF President Roger Benson. PEF sued the DOL in April after the state’s Industrial Board of Appeals (IBA) upheld the Labor Department’s right to deny the union the full information provided in the injury and illness logs. “It was outrageous for the Labor Department, which is responsible for enforcing the state’s Public Employee Safety and Health Act (PESH) to violate its own employees’ rights under that law,” Benson said. Key to injury prevention PEF Executive Board Member Ron Goldstein, co-chair of the DOL Statewide Health and Safety Committee, requested the records so they could be reviewed by the committee. “I wanted to see how many injuries were happening and how they happened, and how much time on the job was being lost because of them,” Goldstein said. “I hoped that we could set goals for reducing them. But how can you tell if there’s a pattern of similar injuries, if you can’t tell who was hurt, what they were doing or how it happened? “All we want to do, is save the employees’ pain and injury and save the department money,” he said. But so much information was eliminated from the records provided by DOL, that the committee “has no way to know if people are tripping on electrical cords, tipping over file cabinets by opening too many drawers at the same time, or slipping on ice in a parking lot,” Goldstein said. Judge: DOL unpersuasive In his decision, Justice Anthony Kane of the state Supreme Court, Albany County, said, “ ... In essence, the DOL, in redacting the (employees’ names and job titles) from the logs, is frustrating the underlying purpose for which the logs are maintained, to wit, to protect the health and safety interests of public employees, and renders access to such logs practically meaningless.” Kane ruled the DOL was arbitrary and capricious in denying full access to the records and said “ .... the IBA’s determination to affirm the DOL’s discretion in determining that an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy would exist if the identity of the employees contained in the forms were disclosed is not warranted by the record, has no reasonable basis, was contrary to the PESH Act, constitutes an erroneous interpretation of law and it is hereby annulled.” Kane said he found it “significant” that other state departments, such as the Department of Correctional Services and the Office of Mental Health have provided full access to their employee injury logs when requested. “I want to thank PEF staff for their efforts,” Goldstein said. “We never could have come this far without the technical expertise of PEF’s Safety and Health Department and the legal skills of its Office of General Counsel,” he said. “They deserve a lot of the credit for this victory.” The Communicator Home Page