He does return favors,

December 17, 2001 8:42 AM

He does return favors, but how does it affect the workers? Eugene Scalia is President Bush's nominee for Labor Department solicitor. Scalia is one of nine children of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a driving force behind the court ruling that stopped the counting of disputed presidential votes in Florida last year.
posted by semmi (11 comments total)

quid pro quo
posted by jpoulos at 8:53 AM on December 17, 2001

Really now! The liberal conspiracy theorists are getting as wacko as the right wing crazies that thought Bill Clinton was the end of the world.
posted by revbrian at 8:57 AM on December 17, 2001

Clearly, Bush is doing his part to fight the unjust discrimination against the children of the rich and powerful.
posted by srboisvert at 9:12 AM on December 17, 2001

Ergonomic Enemy is what Joshua Green calls Eugene Scalia, in The American Prospect. Why?

"Along with Baruch Fellner, another partner at Gibson, Dunn, he has emerged as the leading architect of the anti-ergonomics movement. Scalia refers to repetitive-stress injuries, which afflict 600,000 American workers annually, as 'junk science,' 'quackery,' and 'strange.' Though ergonomics is a well-documented science, he paints repetitive-stress injury as a 'psychosocial issue'--in effect, calling those who suffer from it fakers. 'The evidence is clear,' Scalia has written, 'that the employees most likely to complain of musculoskeletal discomfort are those who do not like their jobs.'

"He has also advocated exempting unionized workplaces from OSHA inspections, to 'free' workers from the 'cigar-chomping, rough-and-tumble world of labor-management relations.' Scalia is a now familiar type in the Bush administration: a policy assassin who's built a career fighting a specific set of regulations and finds himself appointed to a top position in the very agency he's long opposed."
posted by Carol Anne at 10:22 AM on December 17, 2001

The previous Metafilter discussion on the OSHA standards and Eugene can be found here. Makes for a good refresher on the evil that is the Scalia family.
posted by thewittyname at 11:13 AM on December 17, 2001

The very idea that political appointments might be based on payback and ideology is disgusting; Thanx to the Prospect, I'm seeing things a lot clearer now.
posted by Mack Twain at 11:25 AM on December 17, 2001

Sorry to rain on anyone's parade, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that many, many, many cases of "repetitive stress injuries" are, indeed, caused by nothing more than a desire to avoid doing the job. Quite a few manufacturing concerns pay workers 60-70% while on disability. If you don't think that's an enormous incentive for some people to feign a difficult-to-detect injury, you're naive.

And I'm not sure ad hominem attacks on "the Scalia family" as "evil" are warranted. You might disagree with Antonin's rulings -- I often do -- but evil?
posted by pardonyou? at 11:54 AM on December 17, 2001

Incidentally, the appointment of Eugene Scalia as DOL Solicitor General will require Justice Scalia to recuse himself - i.e. not participate in the case - for any case handled by that office. In other words, look for a lot of 4-4 labor law decisions if Daschle ever lets Gene Scalia get to a confirmation vote.
posted by mikewas at 12:23 PM on December 17, 2001

but I can tell you from first-hand experience that many, many, many cases of "repetitive stress injuries" are, indeed, caused by nothing more than a desire to avoid doing the job.

and i can tell you from first-hand experience that many, many, many cases are actual injuries. that some people are faking is not evidence that all people are faking.
posted by tolkhan at 3:32 PM on December 17, 2001

Sorry to rain on anyone's parade, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that many, many, many cases of "repetitive stress injuries" are, indeed, caused by nothing more than a desire to avoid doing the job.

Lots of people fake whiplash to get the big cha-ching in accident litigation, too, but it doesn't mean whiplash isn't real, or even that the majority of whiplash isn't real. So by extension of Mr. Scalia's view on RSI, maybe we could oppose a requirement for head protection in cars, no? A bit of a straw to grasp there, but I think the point is that just because some people fake an injury doesn't mean that the injury is illegitimate and should not be prevented by manufacturing guidelines nor recognized in disability compensation.
posted by holycola at 9:04 PM on December 17, 2001

The problem isn't the faking of injury, it's the big payout that creates the incentive to fake injury. Get yourselves a social security system that is able to provide food, housing and medical care indefinitely to any injured person--it would be cheaper than giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to people at random--and the problem will go away.

Ash.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:20 AM on December 20, 2001