Occupational Safety and Health Hazard
Abatement Board
Public Hearing on a standard for Workplace Safety and Security in the Public Sector
Testimony of Roger Benson, President
New York State Public Employees Federation, AFL-CIO
June 23, 2003
Chairman Carpenter, members of the Board, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. I am president of the NYS Public Employees Federation, representing 53,000 members across New York State. I come before you to strongly urge you to recommend that a standard for Workplace Safety and Security in the Public Sector be developed and implemented with all deliberate speed, as it is long overdue and desperately needed.
I also am co-chair of the State AFL-CIO Public Employee Health & Safety Committee. I would like to acknowledge the hard work of all the public employee unions in bringing this vital issue to the Board. Clearly, this endeavor is a priority to the 1.2 million affected public employees and their unions.
In my 6 year tenure as president of PEF, I have faced many challenges and many arduous and stressful days, not the least of which was September 11. However, I can say with absolute certainty that the most difficult day was that day before Thanksgiving in 1998 when I received a phone call notifying me of the death of Judith Scanlon, a PEF member and Intensive Case Manager in the Office of Mental Health. Judi was brutally murdered on the job by one of her clients using a hammer during a home visit.
While workplace safety has always been a priority of PEF, from that day on it was raised to a new level of importance for me. I have dedicated the strength of our union to do everything in its power to make PEF members’ workplaces as safe as possible.
Workplace injuries and data
The tragedy of Judi Scanlon would in and of itself be enough to justify development of a workplace safety standard, but unfortunately it is not an isolated incident for PEF.
Brian Rooney, a parole officer was shot to death execution-style because he dared to arrest a Queens drug lord for violating his parole. Another parole officer, Barry Sutherland, was shot and killed in New York City while chasing a parole absconder.
Many other PEF members have also been horrifically injured on the job including: Marcia Stulbaum, a social worker who was the victim of a brutal sexual assault while on duty at a state psychiatric hospital on Long Island; Rhonda BeDow, a psychiatric nurse beaten by a patient in Buffalo when he was denied a smoking break; Mary Lou Mann, a Nurse Administrator from Long Island who was out of work for two months due to back injuries from a patient attack; Stephanie Roper, another Nurse Administrator from Long Island who was attacked in five separate incidents, requiring five different surgeries to repair injuries to her neck, spine, wrist, and jaw, and who remains permanently disabled from these attacks; Charles Whitford, a vocational instructor in Elmira who was stabbed four times by a prison inmate; Ricky Fernandez, a psychiatric nurse from Albany who suffered a fractured nose after being attacked by a patient. Many of these individuals will be telling their stories over the course of these hearings.
These names represent only a small fraction of the number of public employees hurt while on the job. National Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for New York show that both the number and rate of assaults and violent acts on state employees (including stabbing, biting, hitting, beating and other types of assaults) has increased in each of the three years from 1999 to 2001.
The number of assaults on state employees has risen from 1,396 in 1999 to 1,710 in 2001. The rate of assaults and injuries per ten thousand state employees rose to 83.5 in 2001, a 26% increase over the 1999 rate. Almost one fourth (23.7%) of the assaults in 2001 resulted in a loss of 31 or more days of work.
New York State Department of Civil Service Workers Compensation data indicate that 12% of all claims are classified in the category of “patient/inmate assaults,” which does not include additional assaults in the category of “struck by an article or individual.”
Factoring in direct and indirect costs, the State’s annual total costs for state employment related to workplace violence are estimated to be $42.5 million for those cases that involve six or more days of lost work time. This estimate does not include work-related injuries that are not reported or where costs are covered under regular health insurance benefits.
Workplace Safety Initiatives
PEF has approached workplace safety on a number of fronts. We have worked with members of the Legislature to promote passage of Safe Staffing, Safe Workplace, and Intensive Case Manager Safety bills.
In the agency L/M forums, PEF has worked diligently to expand H&S training, reporting and preventive programs.
While there have been some successes, particularly at the Department of Corrections Services at the Office of Alcohol and Substances Abuse Services, OASAS.
Our efforts have not been without their frustrations. In previous years, some workplace safety bills passed in the Assembly but were never acted upon by the Senate or supported by either democratic or republican governors.
As of last week, none of the eight bills PEF supported had passed either house. Attempts at collaborative efforts with agencies have hit roadblocks. The Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities recently refused to participate in a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health to conduct an intervention study on violence prevention in New York State social service agencies.
In 1999, despite the support of local management and all of the unions at Finger Lakes DDSO, a proposed pilot project on violence prevention was blocked.
Even at their best, the results of these union initiatives are incremental and piecemeal, with no guarantee of permanence. This is exemplified by our experiences in OMH, where despite agency cooperation on a statewide violence prevention policy and program, implementation has been uneven. Bare bones staffing levels have reduced the ability of facilities to free up staff for planning, and local management is often unresponsive.
Although the project has had many positive outcomes, sadly, OMH has declined to continue this work, even though the University of Maryland offered to apply for a three-year continuation grant.
These examples demonstrate why we need an enforceable standard. While we will always prefer to work through cooperative labor/management programs to address health and safety, having an enforceable standard provides a positive incentive for the parties to get the job done.
Individual agency initiatives are valuable and can foster a productive labor/management relationship, but they do not and can not take the place of a comprehensive standard on workplace safety with broad application and strict accountability.
In the instances where we cannot obtain management commitment to safety, we need the ability to file a specific PESH complaint.
Our Recommendations Are Simple and Direct:
New York needs a uniform standard for workplace safety and security that will apply across the board to all public agencies where employees are at risk. This standard should require policies, procedures and practices for preventing, reporting, and responding to violence in the workplace.
It should, at a minimum, include four components: (1) The elements of risk assessment, (2) A written safety plan, (3) Employee training and education, and (4) The identification and implementation of hazard prevention and control methods.
Such a standard is particularly necessary in light of the increased security risks that we face since the tragedy of September 11.
Not surprisingly, when it comes to public safety not related to the workplace, the state has responded swiftly. The case of Kendra Webdale is illustrative of this point. She was pushed in front of a subway by Andrew Goldstein, a former psychiatric inpatient, and killed. This community safety story received national headlines.
Within months the Legislature passed and the Governor signed Kendra's Law, appropriating over $21 million dollars, requiring increased security to prevent potentially violent mental health patients from escaping state facilities, and creating an entire new structure that authorizes judges to issue orders requiring people to take their medicine, regularly undergo psychiatric treatment, or both. Failure to comply could result in commitment for up to 72 hours.
In contrast, when Judi Scanlon was murdered in 1998, there were no national headlines, no leadership indignation, no hearings, no legislation passed. There was not even press coverage in Albany or New York City papers of a state employee brutally murdered on the job in Buffalo.
Although the Assembly has passed proposed legislation for Judi's Law that would require minimum safety measures for all mental health workers who conduct home visits, it has not received the broad bipartisan support of Kendra's Law. What is the difference?
The only distinction is that Judi was killed while doing her job. Judi was a victim of a workplace homicide. Her death was a workplace safety deficit, rather than community one. The political will was there for Kendra's Law and we need the same kind of will to address workplace violence.
You have both an opportunity and a responsibility to act now to rectify this imbalance. I ask you to recommend to the Commissioner of Labor that a workplace safety standard be developed and implemented.
Zero tolerance is the only acceptable approach to workplace fatalities and assaults. PEF will continue to fight unrelentingly for the safety of our members. We hope that fight will be made easier by your recommendation to the Commissioner of Labor to develop and implement a comprehensive workplace safety standard.
Thank you for your time and consideration.