OIRA claims that we need the anti-regulatory hit list in order to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs. OIRA has manufactured an excuse that does not hold up. Manufacturers do not need this extraordinary rejection of the government’s duty to serve the public interest.     OIRA claims that a hit list to serve manufacturers is needed “[i]n light of recent concerns about the health of manufacturing in the U.S” (Final Report at 3). Such concerns are misplaced. According to the Institute for Supply Management, the health of manufacturing is not a cause for concern and in fact has been quite hardy for some time. When OIRA’s draft report was released, the Institute released its Report on Business, finding that the manufacturing sector had registered above 50 on its index—a score that indicates expansion—for 10 consecutive months. Said one financial analyst, “Plain and simple, this report tells us that the manufacturing sector is smoking.”     Evidence since then only reiterates the early evidence of the state of the manufacturing sector. The Institute’s December 2004 report reveals yet more expansion, now for the nineteenth consecutive month, and the Association for Manufacturing Technology and American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association announced that orders for machine tools in November rose 40% over the previous year. This hit list is a Christmas gift to corporate special interests that will not help the crisis in manufacturing jobs.     What OIRA appears to be exploiting is the concern about the health of manufacturing jobs in the United States. The press release accompanying the draft report made that link explicit by including this telling sentence: “The President’s Council of Economic Advisors recently reported that, while manufacturing is beginning to share in the economic recovery, the rebound in manufacturing employment has not been as rapid as in other sectors.”     Ironically, just as OIRA was releasing its final report, the Department of Labor reported that manufacturers added new jobs last year for the first time since 1997, and the Institute for Supply Management released its updated Employment Index, showing growth for the fourteenth consecutive month.     The implication that rolling back or weakening protections of the public health, safety, and environment will necessarily improve the crisis in manufacturing jobs is dubious at best and ignores the two primary reasons for the loss of such jobs: off-shoring and “productivity” gains. In fact, according to Thom Hartmann, the latter may be a symptom of the former:     Productivity is, very simply, the measurement of how many products or services can be produced for how many dollars of labor expended. But offshoring distorts productivity figures in two ways.     First, foreign labor is cheaper but produces nearly identical amounts of product or service. The result is “increased productivity.”     Second, many corporations don't put offshore labor onto their balance sheets as a labor expense. Because they hire offshore companies as subcontractors to do work previously done by their own employees, they get to reduce the number and cost of their employees while having an only slightly increased line-item on their P&L for the subcontractor. The result is that it looks like their remaining employees are getting more done, because the offshore employees are no longer counted in the productivity figures.     Making it easier for manufacturers to pollute everyone’s air or force their employees to work under dangerous conditions does not necessarily mean that manufacturing jobs lost to cheap overseas labor will come back. Unless the White House is willing to reduce the minimum wage to pennies on the dollar or gut the Occupational Safety and Health Act entirely, the giveaways to corporate special interests will not restore valuable manufacturing jobs. Playing fair means protecting the public, not giving special benefits to the manufacturing sector.     Playing fast and loose with the facts is nothing new for OIRA Administrator John Graham, who proved to be a masterful manipulator of the media during his tenure at the industry-funded think tank he founded, the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. So what’s the problem that needs the extraordinary remedy of rolling back protections of the public interest? It’s not the health of the manufacturing sector . . . it can’t be the need to get back manufacturing jobs . . .     . . . it’s a problem of fairness? OIRA turns to a discredited study by the Small Business Administration (lobbyists for business, paid for by the American taxpayer) concluding that manufacturers bear more compliance costs than other industries. This “disproportionate burden” is apparently yet another excuse for the anti-regulatory hit list.     So manufacturers supposedly bear more costs to implement regulatory protections of the public health, safety, and environment than other industries. . . so what? The manufacturing sector takes materials and processes them into new products along with waste from the processing and unused constituents of the original materials. It can be dangerous work for employees and can result in hazardous waste products that are released in the environment to everyone’s detriment. That manufacturers must do more to protect workers and the environment than, say, retailers does not reveal a problem that needs to be fixed but instead may be evidence that safeguards are wisely targeting those who create the harms from which we need protection.     The unfairness that should be a concern to the White House is the problem that manufacturers inflict all manner of burdens on everyone else, and time and again – with the bankrupting of Superfund, the general dereliction of duty in the Department of Labor, the weakening of overtime rights for America’s workers, and the prospect of “tort reform” and now “regulatory reform” – they are allowed to escape responsibility. A compassionate White House would try to make things fair for the people who constitute the government, not the corporations who try to buy it. OIRA is blatantly tapping into anxieties about manufacturing jobs to generate an anti-regulatory hit list that goes far beyond manufacturing.     If this project is intended to address problems with manufacturing jobs, why are so many hit list recommendations beyond the scope of manufacturing altogether? For example, look at the White House’s suggestions for the hit list, in Table 11 of the final report:

• The White House wants EPA to allow the states to grant waivers from safe drinking water standards to economically disadvantaged water systems. Huh? Five will get you ten that President Bush – or OIRA Administrator John Graham – would not dare drink that tap water. Or maybe they would – sometime after they explain how this recommendation benefits the manufacturing sector. (By allowing manufacturers greater ease to pollute the water in rural communities?)
• The White House also wants to make it easier for care facilities to endanger patients who are put in restraints. An important protection for patients is the one-hour rule, which requires facilities that put a patient in restraints to have a doctor check out the patient within one hour. Pretty far from the concerns of manufacturers… perhaps the White House wants to encourage psychiatric facilities to be more like factories….

Meanwhile, the industry nominations for the hit list include even more items that have little or nothing to do with manufacturing jobs:

• Privatizing the development and enforcement of regulations – taking those tasks out of government and entrusting them to private contractors
• Keeping consumer complaints out of the public until substantiated
• Relieving air carrier suppliers of the duty to subject employees to drug and alcohol testing
• Weakening even further the rules governing maximum hours that companies can force their truck drivers to work
• Weakening or eliminating the FCC’s “Do Not Fax” rule
• Allowing employers to count guaranteed family and medical leave against employees when distributing perfect attendance benefits
• Weakening worker rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act by forcing workers with FMLA grievances into arbitration instead of the courts
• Allowing mine companies to avoid improving work conditions by instead rotating miner shifts to reduce workers’ exposure to diesel particulate matter
• Weakening protections against Listeria for makers of ready-to-eat meat products

    After the smoke has cleared and the mirrors are covered over, we see that this hit list is nothing less than an industry free-for-all intended to benefit an industry that has generously supported the Bush-Cheney campaign, and yet another example of the special interest takeover that puts all our safeguards at risk.