Whistle-Blower: Agency Tasked with Protecting American Workers Fails to Protect its Own

By Carole Bass, AlterNet. Posted July 27, 2008.

In less than an hour, Adam Finkel will be teaching a class on environmental risk assessment. But first, he's hustling off to audition for a tenor solo in Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana. The song, he explains, is the musical equivalent of a "dying swan: You basically stand there and scream for five minutes."

A cynic might say that's the perfect role for Finkel. He has spent the past five years standing up alone and screaming.

In 2002, Finkel was a high-ranking official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency charged with protecting Americans from hazards on the job. Finkel was worried about hazards to some of OSHA's own inspectors, who faced the possibility of serious lung disease from exposure to the toxic metal beryllium.

He leaked the story of OSHA's refusal to offer the inspectors a blood test that would reveal whether they were at risk of disease. The day the article appeared, Finkel was essentially demoted. He filed a whistle-blower complaint, won a $500,000 settlement and left OSHA. Ever since then, he has been performing a long, loud solo protest aimed at getting the agency to do its job.

"Once I lived on lakes; once I looked beautiful, when I was a swan," the tenor bellows in Carmina Burana's "Song of the Roasted Swan." Then comes the chorus: "Misery me! Now black and roasting fiercely!"

But Finkel is an optimist, not a cynic. Although he's now in academia, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, he still believes that government can be a force for good. Despite his bitter experience at OSHA (which denies retaliating against him), Finkel believes "more than ever" in the agency's mission, proclaimed by Congress in 1970: "... to assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the nation safe and healthful working conditions." He believes it is possible to blend good science and good politics, producing rules that protect workers. And he believes that, whether solo or in the chorus, Adam Finkel can still play a role.

What's Wrong With OSHA

During his workplace ordeal, Finkel may have felt like a swan being roasted on a spit. But he emerged relatively unscathed: He lost his job, but he kept his life and his health.

Between 50,000 and 60,000 Americans a year are not so lucky, dying prematurely from work-related illnesses, according to expert estimates. From time to time, spectacular accidents -- a crane collapse, a sugar refinery explosion -- focus public attention on OSHA's failure to protect workers. But on-the-job accidents claim only about one-tenth as many victims as do occupational diseases.

The vast majority of those diseases, Finkel says, stem from exposure to toxic chemicals. The ailments are sneaky: They may masquerade as ordinary asthma, or lie latent for decades before emerging as cancer. Only rarely are they diagnosed as work-related.

Preventing those illnesses is the mandate Finkel is still trying to get OSHA to fulfill. His story illustrates some of the central challenges in the quest for healthy American workplaces. As the nation transitions to a 21st century economy, researchers are increasingly focused on the health effects of intangible factors like job stress, contract work and the night shift. Yet OSHA still relies on mid-20th century knowledge about chemical hazards.

Finkel, a boyish-looking 49-year-old whose brown hair flops across his forehead, likes to say that he was "born to protect." Certainly, he was born to achieve. The only child of older parents, he left his West Philadelphia home for Harvard at age 16. He went on to earn a master's degree in public policy and a doctorate in science, both from Harvard, and went to work at OSHA in 1995.

Launched 37 years ago, the agency now bears responsibility for health and safety at more than 7 million workplaces across the country. Even in the best of times, OSHA has struggled with political opposition, court challenges and limited resources. Under the Bush administration, the agency's would-be enforcers and regulators face additional obstacles. In the past seven years, OSHA has issued only one new health standard; that came under court order.

As OSHA's director of health standards, Finkel was in charge of establishing permissible exposure limits for toxics in the workplace. Note the word "permissible" -- not to be confused with "safe." Ever since a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1980, OSHA has set exposure limits that are calculated to kill at least one of every 1,000 people exposed for a working lifetime. By comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency aims to reduce the same toxics in air and water to a risk level of one in 1 million. Finkel lays out that discrepancy in a PowerPoint presentation that he calls, for short, "What's Wrong With OSHA." He lists poison after poison -- including cancer-causing benzene and the neurotoxin methylene chloride -- for which OSHA's allowable limit inside a workplace is roughly 1,000 times what the EPA permits outside. One slide graphs, state by state, how long it would take OSHA to inspect every workplace. (The answer: between 22 and 227 years.) It takes two slides to list all the health and safety regulations begun during Bill Clinton's presidency and withdrawn under Bush.

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Carole Bass is a 2008 fellow of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which funded the research for this article.