Behind the Lines

Bank Bows Out

AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF FUNDING the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on India's Narmada River, the World Bank has pulled out of the project. On March 31, the World Bank announced that the Indian government requested that the Bank cancel the remainder of its 1985 loan for the dam.

Citizen opposition within India has been organized and vocal throughout the project's execution, with critics claiming that the World Bank did not fulfill its obligation, according to the conditions of the $450 million loan package agreement with India, to investigate the dam's social and environmental problems. The project would have displaced 240,000 villagers, many of whom have vowed to drown in the Narmada River rather than move [See Cracks in the Dam: The World Bank in India," Multinational Monitor, December 1992].

In 1991, an independent review team headed by Bradford Morse, former head of the United Nations Development Project, and former Canadian Supreme Court Judge Thomas Berger found that the Bank had not been meeting environmental and resettlement requirements and warned that the project could not be finished "except as a result of unacceptable means."

According to Al Drattell, senior public information officer at the World Bank, the Indian government will complete construction of the dam, which is currently about 50 percent completed. Drattell says that "under the circumstances, [India] wished to proceed with the project on its own, without the financial assistance under the Bank loan."

Patricia Adams, executive director of PROBE, a Toronto, Ontario-based watchdog organization, says that as far as the Bank's dangerous development schemes are concerned, "Narmada is just the tip of the iceberg. The dam opponents have done the rest of the world a great service by revealing how much damage the World Bank is prepared to wreak and how determined it is to evade responsibility."

Reforming OSHA

IN AN EFFORT TO REDUCE the estimated 10,000 job-related deaths and 1.7 million disabling injuries suffered in the workplace and 390,000 cases of occupational disease each year, Representative William Ford, D-Michigan, introduced the Occupational Safety and Health Reform Act of 1993 on March 10. The act, similar to congressional bills introduced in the past two years is an effort to strengthen the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. If enacted, the legislation would:

Mandate that every business - regardless of size - have a health and safety plan;
Cover the 7.5 million public sector workers currently unprotected by any state OSHA plans;
Require that employers correct imminent dangers identified by OSHA or face $50,000 daily fines - rather than permitting them to wait out a lengthy appeals process;
Set minimum penalties of $1,000 for each serious OSHA violation to help raise revenues for other OSHA programs;
Strengthen criminal penalties for employers whose willful negligence results in the death or serious injury of a worker; and
Require companies to set up joint worker-management safety committees to allow workers an greater input in preventing hazards.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will cost the government $100 million to implement changes called for in the reform bill. Ford proposes to raise $70 million in part by charging businesses for OSHA consultations they now get for free as well as by setting higher fines for health and safety violations.

On April 28, Worker's Memorial Day, U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich is scheduled to testify in the first House hearing on the bill. According to Labor Department spokesperson Jay Rosenblum, Reich and his staff are still reviewing the proposed OSHA reform bills.

Lynn Rhinehart, occupational safety and health specialist at the AFL-CIO, says that the organization and its unions strongly support OSHA reform legislation. "It has been 23 years since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created, and since then it has not been revisited," she says. "It is time to strengthen the law."

Trucking and Free Trade

THE PROPOSED NORTH AMERICAN Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will make air and road transportation in the United States, Mexico and Canada less safe; will likely lead to the domination of the Mexican trucking industry by a few large U.S. carriers; and will increase energy demand and pollution while doing little to steer transportation energy in a more sustainable and environmentally sound direction, according to a March report released by the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The study, Truck Scales and Economics of Scale: Weighing NAFTA and the Politics of Transportation, written by Kristin Dawkins, focuses on the agreement's predicted effects on U.S. domestic transportation carriers and their employees. The report criticizes NAFTA for requiring all U.S. states to honor Mexican commercial drivers' licences, which are not based on the same rigorous training, testing and certification demanded of professional drivers in the United States. While the NAFTA text urges Canada, the United States and Mexico to "endeavor to make compatible" their licensing and other standards for safety, health, environmental and consumer protection, it contains no stipulation for enforcing this recommendation.

"Perhaps the most alarming information I discovered in my research was the way that NAFTA will encourage the consolidation of the transportation industry, leading to ever-larger, more concentrated companies," says Dawkins. "NAFTA's impact on transportation illustrates the way so-called free trade policies are tools for accelerating the concentration of services and wealth in fewer and fewer transnational corporate hands."n

- Julie Gozan