More Proof That Bush Didn't Give A Rat's Ass About The American Worker

The dreadful Bush legacy continues to unfold.

A special government program to improve worker safety in hazardous industries rarely fulfilled its promise, according to a Labor Department audit. Over the past six years, dozens of deaths occurred at companies that should have been subjected to much tighter federal safety enforcement.

The report was the first detailed appraisal of a highly touted Bush administration initiative that called for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to devote attention and resources to improving safety at companies with a troubled history of job-related fatalities. The study found that officials failed to gather needed data, conducted uneven inspections and enforcement, and sometimes failed to discern repeat fatalities because (if you can believe this) records misspelled the companies' names or failed to notice when two subsidiaries with the same owner were involved.

Last year, the administration also changed the program's rules, sharply reducing the number of companies eligible for special attention. Proper enforcement might have "deterred and abated workplace hazards at the worksites of 45 employers where 58 subsequent fatalities occurred," Assistant Inspector General Elliot P. Lewis wrote in the report.