The chairwoman of the Labor Liz Ortega assembly (Democrat-San Leandro) recently announced a proposed legislation to increase the criminal prosecution of employers if employees die or are seriously injured at work.
The Bill announces less than three months after the 19-year-old worker Brayan Neftali Otoniel Canu Joj was killed in cleaning an industrial meat grinder in the Tina-Frozen-Lebensmittel facility in Tina in Vernon, California.
The legislation is celebrated by Democrats, the Trade Union bureaucracy and its media allies as a brave step in the direction of “accountability”. In reality it is nothing like that. It is a cynical maneuver that aims to cover up the central role of the democratic party when creating the conditions for the wave of deaths at work and injuries across California.
The announcement of Ortega occurred in the course of a devastating state audit last July that systemic failures within Cal/Osha, the state agency, were allegedly applied with the protection of employees. The results were breathtaking:
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82 percent of the examinations were treated by post and not on site by inspections.
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Over 8,300 employers received an average of 56 percent money cuts, even in cases in which deaths and life -changing injuries were involved.
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Only 1.7 percent of serious cases have ever been transferred to criminal prosecution.
In a notorious case, Alco Scrap Metal, in which three workers have died in just three years, the company paid only $ 18,000 fines – a sum that is so negligible that it hardly registered as a circulatory error in the operating costs.
Ortega, a member of the common legislative Audit Committee, who approved the investigation, insulted the agency official during a hearing: “When do you make the decision to submit criminal transfers?” It threatened the invoice as necessary for the lack of accountability of Cal/Osha, threatened to check the budgets and to drive the legislation to ensure that employers are “held accountable”.
However, this “accountability obligation” campaign is a charade. Ortega and the Democrats hope that the workers believe that some legislative changes and token pursuit measures end the plague of deaths at the workplace. Nothing could be removed from the truth.
The catastrophic state of security at the workplace in California is the result of a conscious program among successive democratic administrations, from Jerry Brown to Gavin Newsom, the reduction of protection and conversion of the supervisory authorities into instruments of company power.
Cal/Oshas Skeleton workforce, outdated interventions, lack of assertiveness and simply inadequate resources are not accidental. The budgets were broken down year after year, while the fines for employers were systematically reduced, so that companies treat free deaths in the workplace as acceptable costs for business activities.
Ortega's proposal does not come from a position of real resistance to this system, but from its role as one of its most important enables. As the first Latina, which acts as the executive secretary of the Alameda Labor Council and as a long-time political director of Afscme Local 3299, Ortega is deeply embedded in the bureaucracy of the Union-a structure that has consistently protected the company profits at the expense of life of workers.
The California Labor Federation and other union authorities who support the Legal Supplement of Ortega are equally involved in the number of fatalities. For decades, the unions have had the security of the workers to maintain their cozy relationships with management and state supervisory authorities.
The case of Ronald Adams Sr., a star worker who was killed at work in Dundee, Michigan, is a notorious example. The United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy had jointly administered security committees with management and Michigans Miosha. Instead of examining independently examined dangerous conditions, the UAW worked together to recharge your business and at the same time suppress the employee's statements and ultimately to ensure business as usual.
This betrayal is not an isolated incident. From auto systems to food processing facilities, the unions act as an executor of the “labor peace”, deliberately block strikes and prevent organized resistance to fatal working conditions.
Ortega's legislative proposal is therefore part of a broader strategy of the Democratic Party and the Unions in order to redirect the increasing trouble among employees into safe, state -controlled channels.
Even if Ortega's invoice passes – and this is anything but safe – it will be nothing more than a toothless gesture. The California Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful corporate songbies in the state, will fight to tooth and nail to water down all sensible reforms and ensure that the end product is interspersed with gaps.
But even in its strongest form, legislation does not enter into the root of the problem. Existing laws already enable criminal persecution of employers due to deaths at the workplace and serious injuries, while they make it practically impossible.
In California, as in most states, the prosecutors have to prove that the behavior of an employer was “intentionally” or “tightened” – that the company deliberately ignored known dangers. Since Cal/Osha rely on mail-in investigations and underfunded enforcement, there is evidence that is rarely available for this standard.
Even in rare cases in which law enforcement takes place, they should protect the company interests. Take the case of 2020 by California Ranch Foods, in which two workers died after exposure to nitrogen gas. The company is guilty – but only two counts of the offense, which led to a fine that made it possible to make the business unchanged.
In some countries, such as Washington, the prosecutors allow companies to impose a second degree, severe fines, probation and security regulations directly with criminal offenses such as homicide. But in practice, CEOs and top executives are almost never in prison. Instead, scapegoats are located at managers or safety officers at the medium level, while corporate profits and businesses remain unaffected.
In New York, where prosecutors have applied aggressive criminal laws against employers, these cases are a handful of exceptions within a system that was generally developed to protect Wall Street from liability.
The California situation is no different. Simply increased criminal transfers, as Ortega suggests, does not lead to a sensible solution. District prosecutors are chronically undermining and there is often a lack of specialist knowledge in security law at the workplace, a reality through design. The same state apparatus that regulates companies has no interest in equipping prosecutors with the instruments in order to question the impunity of the companies.
Increased criminal sanctions are almost certainly exposed to the selectively exposed to which smaller companies and marginalized contractors target, while the largest companies – the Amazons, Teslas and Disney's of California – immune.
The Cal/Osha -Audit has uncovered a system in the terminal crisis. The agency is unable to protect workers because it is used and strongly underfunded to the companies that regulate it. The proposed invoice from Ortega cannot change this.
These toothless fines and performative legislative gestures will not prevent future deaths at the workplace, since this crisis is the inevitable result of an economic system in which the life of employees is increasingly sacrificed for profit.
Employees confront an urgent reality: the organizations and politicians who claim to represent them revealed them. The Democrats defend company interests as ruthlessly as the Republicans, and the Union apparatus acts as a partner of management and the state.
This betrayal requires a decisive reaction. The workers have to face the severity of this crisis and take the matter into their own hands. This means that independent, democratic organizations, which are guided by employees themselves, the committees at every workplace, which are combined by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-And-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
These committees, as in the case of the investigation, which were initiated in the death of Ronald Adams Sr., have to investigate uncertain conditions, uncover corporate crimes and organize collective acts free from the control of the Democratic Party, Republicans and the Union bureaucracy. Defense of life and security requires an international fight against a system that priorizes private profit against human needs.