OUCH! — Back injuries are among the most common job-related injuries.
Labor Department refuses to share complete records
Union sues state over injury, illness data
By SHERRY HALBROOK
The state agency responsible for enforcing labor laws and protecting the safety and health of public employees, is refusing to comply with those same laws.
The state Labor Department (DOL) staunchly refuses to give PEF full access to logs of work-related illnesses and injuries suffered by DOL employees.
After exhausting administrative remedies, PEF now is pressing its case in state Supreme Court.
“We are appealing this ruling because we believe that denying full access to employee injury and illness logs is a threat to basic worker rights, affecting all public employees statewide,” says PEF President Roger Benson.
“Full access to these records is critical to workplace safety and to determining that employers are complying with record-keeping regulations,” he adds.
Logs important tool
The dispute began in December 1998, when a PEF representative asked DOL to bring the logs to the next meeting of the joint health and safety committee for discussion.
DOL responded by providing only partial information about employees’ job-related injuries and illnesses.
“An important purpose of these logs, which are required under state and federal law, is to provide a database so that employers and employees or their unions can see what patterns of injuries or illnesses are occurring to people in certain occupations or at certain worksites,” says PEF Director of Health and Safety Jonathan Rosen.
“We need to talk to the people who have become ill or injured to learn how to prevent future injuries or illness,” he adds.
The logs do not include employees’ medical records or histories and PEF is not asking for that information.
Rosen says many other state agencies have provided PEF with complete logs.
Feds take PEF’s side
PEF appealed the DOL response by filing a complaint under the state’s Public Employment Safety and Health Act (PESH) with DOL, which is charged with enforcing the act. The complaint was “not sustained.”
That decision was appealed to the state’s Industrial Board of Appeals, which denied the appeal.
DOL says it won’t share the names, occupations and work units information from the logs with PEF because it is required to protect employee privacy under the state’s Public Officers Law.
PEF argues that the PESH and federal access requirements mandate complete disclosure of the logs.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which administers OSHA and oversees federal funding for New York’s PESH program has weighed in on the issue. And it has repeatedly told DOL that it must make the complete logs available to PEF or risk losing eligibility for federal funding.
Other employers watching
While the legal arguments may focus on technical points of law, “workplace safety for all New York public employees is the real issue,” Benson says.
“When the state Labor Department,
which is charged with protecting the occupational safety and health of New York’s public employees, refuses to share this important information with its own employees, the standard is lowered for all public employers in the state,” the union president says. “And that is potentially dangerous.”