Under the law, as it existed at that time, I was entitled to receive $21 per week for total disability until the maximum amount of $2,525 was paid. This amount has been paid to me.

Although I am still totally disabled, I am receiving no compensation. Were it not for the pension agreement and the savings I have, I would be dependent upon social welfare agencies for the support of myself and my wife.

Against the total amount I received, there was deducted the expense of retaining expert witnesses and expert medical testimony, as well as my attorney's fee. The net sum received by me was less than $2,500.

Mr. Retoskey is here, Mr. Chairman.

Senator LEHMAN. I have no questions to ask. The statement is very clear.

Mr. SIFTON. The next witness also has a very brief statement. He is William Troestler, president of UAW Local 553, Racine, Wis.

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM TROESTLER, PRESIDENT, UAW-CIO LOCAL 553, RACINE, WIS.

Mr. TROESTLER. I am one that Mr. Read referred to this morning from the illustrious State of Wisconsin. It seems to me that the illustrious State of Wisconsin, as far as safety goes, is a little bit. backward.

My name is William Troestler. I am president of UAW-CIO Local 553, Racine, Wis. Our members are employed in the Bell City Malleable Iron Works and Racine Steel Casting Co. plant.

After hearing some of the testimony about the job that is said to be done by State labor departments, perhaps the committee will be interested in the following facts about what really happens in our part of Wisconsin under a State labor law that was a pioneering work 30 years ago. One factory inspector is assigned responsibility for inspecting all the industrial plants in Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee Counties.

To give you some of the plants that are there, in Kenosha you have the Nash Kelvinator plant which employs about 6,000. In Milwaukee you have the Seeman Body plant which employs another 6,500. And also the Allis-Chalmers local, the agricultural implement plant. In the city of Racine you have the J. I. Case and the Massey-Harris companies, also agricultural implement plants.

That inspector has enough to do with those plants. It takes, I know, a week to go through the Nash Kelvinator plant alone and do a job in Kenosha.

In the plant named above, the last complete safety inspection made was in February 1949. The inspector found 97 violations of safety orders. These violations were not cleared up until July 1951 and still four items are not cleared up today.

The reason those items are not cleaned up is that the company takes the position that those items are too costly. Yet they are direct violations of the safety code of the State of Wisconsin.

On February 21, 1951, 31 of these violations had not been corrected. That is, of the original 97.

For example: Because there were no wheel guards on the crane rail, a worker lost his fingers. The company had to pay a 15 percent penalty in increased compensation to the injured worker, but this was far less than adequate compensation for the loss of his fingers. This violation had been spotted and management had been ordered to put on the

guards. Because injury resulted from a violation, a penalty was applied.

As a result of collective bargaining efforts on safety in plants, the management has appointed the assistant works manager to make weekly safety inspections. To go into some of those other hazards, they consist of pulling of electrical switches, men working on machines, not locking the switches as has been previously agreed to by the management, leaving tags which say "do not start this machine“ after the machines have been repaired. This has been called continuously to the attention of the works manager and also the president of the company. The violation is still going on today. I just hope that nobody has been killed while I have been in Washington.

Guards are still left off machines and other hazards continue to threaten the lives and safety of workers. Serious dust hazards, particularly, have been allowed to go on since 1949, especially in the steel division of our plant. That is in regard to the terrific dust that comes as a result of melting steel.

Maintenance activities are carried on on conveyers over operating production jobs. This hazardous practice results in castings being dislodged so that they drop on the man working below. One worker who was struck on the head suffered a fractured skull.

Since the State inspector ordered the 97 original violations corrected in February 1949 conditions have so deteriorated that in a subsequent follow-up inspection in January 1952 the State inspector found the company in violation on 75 additional items.

The company has done work on only 10 of these last 75 items up until the time I left for Washington.

Because the company has been mechanizing operations in steel casting departments, this plant has not had a safety follow-up inspection since the original 1949 inspection.

The last complete inspection, in which they found 75 violations, was only of the malleable division and the service departments and various other buildings in the plant.

The insurance company that insures our company for industrial cases is the Lumbermen's Mutual Casualty Co. Their representatives were in just as little as 2 weeks ago wanting to know the reasons why the terrific increase in the accident rate in the plant. The members of my local union have insisted on a safety program, and I know in the coming negotiations we are making a part of our demands the clean up of all safety violations in the plant. The original 97 violations were not cleaned up until the union took the affirmative through the grievance procedure and through the various means with the president of the company and the works manager to get these safety items cleaned up.

Still you always have the same argument from management that it costs too much money.

I don't know what should be the primary purpose, but since I am here today the primary purpose of my local union first of all is to get rid of the inadequate State labor department safety codes. They have them but they don't enforce them. We must as a union go through the procedure of bargaining to remove them.

The secondary purpose of our local union is to see if we can do something about the political situation in the State so that we can go up to the State of Wisconsin, to the legislature, in the halls at Madison, our capital, and here in Washington, and get some codes that are enforceable. I believe that the bill, S. 2325, has the enforcement procedure that we are looking for, and also S. 2714. We speak in favor of both of them.

Senator LEHMAN. Has your State a State workmen's compensation fund the way we have in New York, or are you covered by private insurance exclusively?

Mr. TROESTLER. I believe we are all covered with private insurance. It is carried with Lumbermen's Mutual Casualty Co.

Senator LEHHMAN. You have no State fund?

Mr. TROESTLER. I couldn't answer that. I don't believe we have. Senator LEHMAN. I want to say I believe our State fund covers at least 50 percent, although it is not mandatory, possibly more than that.

How many inspectors do you have in Wisconsin?

Mr. TROESTLER. I have no idea in regard to that. I might as well add for the record that I don't see how the representatives of West Virginia and also North Carolina appearing here yesterday can say that their States are doing an adequate job with 35 inspectors that they have in the State of West Virginia and only 24 servicing 500 or 600 plants in the State of North Carolina. I don't see how any inspector can do a job on safety when they have that many plants to cover. I know West Virginia is a little smaller than Wisconsin, and they have no more than 35 inspectors in all.

Senator LEHMAN. I think it is in the record. My impression is that they have 30.

Thank you very much.

From all this testimony and from conditions as I know them to exist I can very well understand that in the very small establishments, the expense and the original capital investment of putting in improvements and safety devices may be considerable. So I can see that they might hesitate to put them in as promptly as they should. But in the larger corporations, the larger concerns, the profitable concerns, I just don't understand why they are not willing and eager to put in any safety devices that have been demonstrated to be useful, because in the long run it must be to their own interest to do it. Yet I know they do not. It is just a point of view and a policy that it is hard for me to understand.

Quite aside from everything else, to avoid an accident, as I said this morning, must pay off in dollars and cents.

Mr. ÜTTER. Senator, I would like to point out that actually the safety movement in this country did not begin until workmen's compensation laws were passed and began to pinch the pocketbook nerve. I think if there were uniformly high benefits across the country, more employers would see the benefits of the use of good safe practices and safeguarding machinery.

Senator LEHMAN. Will you proceed, Mr. Utter.

STATEMENT OF LLOYD UTTER, DIRECTOR, INDUSTRIAL HEALTH AND SAFETY DIVISION, UAW-CIO

Mr. UTTER. Mr. Chairman, for the record, I am Lloyd Utter, director, industrial health and safety division of the UAW-CIO.

I want to call your attention to just a few things in the paper which we have prepared. I am not going to try to read this complete paper. I have supplied the committee with copies of two studies that were made by the Bureau of Labor Standards at the direction of the committee on engineering for the President's Conference on Industrial Safety. I think if you will look at the charts in the woodworking machinery and the power press studies, it becomes easily evident that there is much to be done and much to be desired in the way of standards.

Senator LEHMAN. Is this the document you refer to?
Mr. UTTER. Yes.

Senator LEHMAN. It will be filed with the committee.

Mr. UTTER. Much has been said about the States being able to take care of this problem at the State level and that it is a State responsibility. I think you can see from this chart that we do not have any uniformity of standards, and in very few places do we have standards at all. The ASA standards are generally acceptable to labor and they certainly should be acceptable to industry, having been developed by industry.

Mr. MEIKLEJOHN. You are referring to the American Standards Association?

Mr. UTTER. Yes, American Standards Association.

Senator LEHMAN. What is the American Standards Association? Mr. UTTER. It is an organization of industries that develop standards governing the quality of production and engineering standards of production, and they also study the control of unsafe conditions and the safeguarding of machinery and develop the American safety standards.

I might just comment that Senate bill 2325 actually would tend to bring about this uniformity because it is contemplated that the bill would make for the acceptance of such standards as ASA standards as the national standard. In these studies that the Bureau of Labor Standards did it was found that 27 States had no standards at all covering power press, 21 had no standards for the safeguarding of woodworking machinery. These two are the more simple of the machines and the most commonly used machines in industry. It just follows that if there are no standards controlling this machinery, certainly there will be no standards for the safeguarding of other machinery within the States.

Perhaps it would be helpful to the committee to check with these charts and see if these people who have come here representing State labor commissions and State departments of labor come here with clean hands.

Senate bill 2325 would not take any of the rights away from the States. It would only undertake the responsibilities that States have neglected to take. It would only move in to inspect in a State where the State was not enforcing the minimum safety standards. I think all of this concern about the Federal Department of Labor interfering with State rights all boils down to this does the State want to have decent standards or does it not? If they do, they certainly can

get them if we pass Senate bill 2325, and if they want to enforce them, that is their job, and in that way they have no interference from the Federal level. Also, the matter of cost has been brought up here, and it was suggested that Senate bill 2714 would be more economical, that it would cost something like $6 million to finance that bill. I suggest that if we get uniform standards across the country, we would save many times that amount, and I don't think you can put a price tag on safety; on which bill is going to cost the least. I think, obviously, uniform standards will save the taxpayers of this country many times $6 million.

I cannot accept some of the conclusions at which Mr. William L. Connolly, Director of the Bureau of Labor Standards, arrived. I agree with some of his figures but I cannot accept or agree with his conclusions. He stated that after 40 years we still are not able to accomplish the job that we know can be done in industrial safety, because 211⁄2 million of the smaller employers cannot afford to have safety departments or safety engineers on their payrolls.

It seems to me that rather than being an argument for leaving it with the States, it certainly is an argument for Federal standards. At least this method would let them know what methods could be used to control these industrial injuries and in that way they also can receive the advice and help of the technicians from the different labor departments including the Federal department. So I think actually Mr. Connolly made a very good point for the passage of Federal standards.

Also I would like to comment briefly on some of the statements made by Forrest H. Shuford, the commissioner of labor from North Carolina. He feels that Senate bill 2325 would interfere with States' rights and suggests that they would like to do things more after the pattern that was set by the Public Contracts Act. I suggest that the very same pattern can be followed here. If any of the States desire to adopt what is agreed is the minimum standard and wish to enforce it, the same pattern can be followed under this bill as is practiced under the Public Contracts Act. The State labor departments can enforce the standards of safety and get Federal moneys to supplement the staffs of their departments.

Some of the safety engineers in this country, I feel, are doing the movement a great disservice also by belittling the problem of industrial injuries. We hear time and again that you are safer at work than you are off the job. I think that we should take time to examine those figures. There are some 32,000 workers who were killed in off-the-job accidents, while there are around 17,000 who were killed in on-the-job accidents. Actually the worker is only on the job about 25 percent of the time, about 41 hours out of 168 hours a week. So actually, rather than 32,000 fatalities, he could still be as safe off the job if there were 50,000 fatalities to workers off the job.

In the figure about injuries there is a much greater disparity. There are roughly 2 million injured on the job, some 2 million and a half injured off the job. These figures apply only to workers and if we follow the same reasoning here we could have 6 million injuries off the job and still be as safe as you would be on the job.

Senator LEHMAN. Well, they do have to sleep some time.
Mr. UTTER. Yes.