Bush Nominates Partner in Union-Busting Law Firm and Big Contributor to Head OSHA
Edwin Foulke was nominated last week to become the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Foulke’s main qualifications for the job are that he is a labor lawyer and was chair of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) for five years in the early 1990s.
Foulke’s career as a labor lawyer has been with Jackson-Lewis, a national law firm that prides itself as being "management’s #1 choice for union avoidance training for the past 10 years. . . ."
When Foulke served on OSHRC, which is a quasi-judicial body that hears employer appeals of OSHA citations, he led a successful effort to reduce OSHA’s enforcement capabilities. One of his most controversial decisions reversed years of precedent and seriously weakened OSHA enforcement. Foulke found that OSHA could not assess multiple penalties for violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s "general duty clause" that exposed more than one employee to the same hazard. To justify that decision, Foulke endorsed an opinion that had to discredit the law’s reference "to each of his employees" by characterizing it a merely a "rhetorical nicety. . . ."
Foulke’s resume includes his status as a "Bush Pioneer" in 2004, meaning that he was responsible for raising at least $100,000 for Bush’s campaign. Last year when Foulke ran an unsuccessful campaign to become a Republican National Committeeman, he posted this autobiographical sketch on his website, www.foulke4rnc.com: "I am a life long pro-life, pro-family, social and fiscal conservative Republican. ... As a Reagan Republican, I firmly believe in less government, a strong national defense, lower taxes and personal responsibility and I have the record to prove it. . . ."