President Obama has chosen his new OSHA secretary. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jordan Barab.

The Credentials

First, the resume. Jordan Barab’s string of jobs includes Senior Labor Policy Advisor for Health and Safety on the House Education and Labor Committee (his current position), health and safety consultant for the AFL-CIO, head of safety for AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) and member of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. In 1998, President Clinton appointed Barab Special Assistant to the OSHA secretary.

The Man

Although he’s been around a long time and clearly knows his stuff, Barab wasn’t chosen because of the jobs he’s held. He’s heading to OSHA because of who he is and what he represents.

Barab’s predecessor, the labor lawyer Edwin Foulke, Jr., was criticized for being in the pocket of big business. Describing Foulke as a tool of the corporations he was charged with overseeing is unfair. However, Foulke’s agenda—promote voluntary compliance and eliminate “inefficient” regulation, among other things—was clearly a reflection of the Bush Administration’s pro-management tilt in the health and safety realm.

Jordan Barab comes from a different universe. He’s an activist with a passion for health and safety. He’s perhaps best known for his workplace health and safety blog, Confined Space, in which he savaged the Bush OSHA program for not doing enough to protect workers.

The Passion

The best way to capture the essence of Jordan Barab is by citing his own words. The following excerpt comes from a 2004 speech that Barab delivered to the American Public Health Association while accepting an award for his blog.

I started Confined Space . . . to have a personal outlet for the outrage that I constantly feel. . . The idea of writing the Blog came to me shortly after the space shuttle Columbia disaster in January 2003 that killed 7 astronauts. . . .

At some point it dawned on me that the astronauts were really just workers – space workers – but not terribly dissimilar to the more than 100 other workers who died tragically that week on the job in the United States. They were all just doing their jobs. The only difference is that the other 100 only got a couple of paragraphs in the local newspaper. No outrage, no anger, no call to action. They weren’t glamorous enough. In fact, they were generally people who do ordinary, dirty jobs on construction sites, roads and factories. Most of them died alone, only noticed and remembered by their immediate family, friends and co-workers.

You will only need a few moments on Google to find the names, pictures, hometowns and dates of death of every American killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past three years. But you can search long and hard, and ultimately in vain for the names of the more than 5,000 Americans killed in the workplace last year. . . .

Irving Selikoff once said, “statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away.” Well, our job is to put those tears back. . . .

So how do we spread the outrage, put back the tears and politicize workers?

First, we need to take advantage of every teachable moment. Last year, we had 5,559 “teachable moments” when workers lost their lives in the workplace (not counting the 50,000 to 100,000 workers who die each year of occupational diseases.) We need to take those moments to educate not just our members and our students, but also journalists. Our best hope is the media.

No longer can we tolerate headlines – even in a rural, low-circulation newspaper -- that claim that a workplace death resulted from a “freak accident” when the unprotected walls of a 12-foot trench cave in on top of a worker.

No longer can we let journalists get way with calling the death of a worker a “mystery” when he suffocates in an unmonitored, unventilated manhole.

No longer can we let journalist blame a severed limb or crushed head on “employee error” because someone accidentally turned on the machine while he was inside. . . .

We need to use these teachable moments not just for journalists, but also for politicians. . . . We need to make sure that every time a worker dies, someone in the local paper is quoted asking the local and state politicians what they are doing in Washington – or even in the statehouse – to make sure these tragedies don’t happen again. Are they supporting higher fines, jail terms, stronger standards, more inspectors?

We also need to mobilize families. Some of the most moving mail I’ve received as a result of Confined Space is from the wives, siblings and children of workers killed on the job. They are angry about the death their loved ones. And they find some solace in knowing that there’s someone else out there who is just as angry. . . .

We need to make it clear that the right to a safe workplace wasn’t bestowed upon us by concerned politicians or employers who were finally convinced that “Safety Pays.” The right to a safe workplace was won only after a long and bitter fight by workers, unions and public health advocates. It was soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands of coal miners, factory and construction workers. And the current movement to transform the agency into nothing but a coordinator of voluntary alliances is a betrayal of that promise and those lives.

Conclusion

President Obama had a lot of choices for head of OSHA. The candidates considered brought an array of assets to the table—scientific and technical expertise, political savvy, government experience, etc. That’s not to say that Jordan Barab doesn’t possess any of these qualities. But in choosing Barab, President Obama opted for passion.

Will Barab’s almost religious devotion to the cause translate into safer and healthier workplaces? Or is OSHA and the working men and women it serves actually better off with more traditional bureaucratic leadership? The answer to that fascinating question will become clear in the months ahead.

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