By Jim Bissett
The Dominion Post
‘MORGANTOWN – Previously downsized employees of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health were reinstated Wednesday by the Trump administration – including those at Morgantown’s NIOSH facility on Willowdale Road.
Dr. Yong Qian, a research biologist in Morgantown, said employees here began filtering back to their labs and offices that same day.
Counting the University City and other NIOSH sites in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Spokane, Wash., nearly 900 jobs were initially eliminated in the sweeping move last April.
President Trump championed the cuts, decreeing they were necessary to trim a bloated bureaucracy, but safety advocates feared the worst, saying coal miners in particular, along with others who toil in similarly dangerous jobs, would suffer.
Championing of another kind ensued Wednesday.
“This moment belongs to every single person who refused to stay silent,” Dr. Micah Niemeir-Walsh said after the news broke of the callbacks.
Niemeir-Walsh is a NIOSH industrial hygienist and vice president of Local 3840 of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing workers at the NIOSH facility in Cincinnati.
Calls to union representatives Morgantown AFGE Local 3430, meanwhile, weren’t returned in time for this report.
“Every rally, every media interview, every petition signature, every act of solidarity by our partners in the labor movement led to this victory of saving NIOSH,” Niemeir-Walsh continued.
Several local rallies took place in Morgantown in view of the NIOSH building on Willowdale.
“My gosh, you’re going to miss NIOSH,” read the sign carried by a scientist during one.
J. Davitt McAteer agreed, and was dismayed, he said, as he watched the fallout from the decision to downsize.
McAteer, who was assistant secretary for the Mine Safety and Health Administration when President Bill Clinton occupied the Oval Office, said NIOSH is critical to coal miner safety.
He’s a Fairmont native whose father sailed from Ireland to work in the mines.
NIOSH is a front-line agency in the industry, he said, where every department and every researcher plays a role in keeping miners alive – be it through enhanced designs of respirators to its watchdog role concerning machinery and other particulars underground.
“In mine safety, the lessons are in blood,” McAteer said.
Everett Kelley, AFGE’s national president, said the union would dig in deeper than a coal seam to be there, both for its members and the safety benchmarks they bring to the job site.
“The administration’s attempt to lay off nearly every NIOSH worker was shameful and illegal, considering that much of NIOSH’s work is required by law,” Kelley said.
“We will continue fighting to ensure NIOSH has the resources and support it needs to serve the American public.”
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