The Gary Puleio Story, Part 3: Dealing With Reality - Matewan - Journal

The Gary Puleio Story, Part 3: Dealing With Reality - Matewan - Journal
The Gary Puleio Story, Part 3: Dealing With Reality
Gary Puleio married somewhat later in life than most of us. I won’t use the old line about him waiting to find the right pearl (even though it’s clearly true) because then one of you is bound to ask how many oysters he shucked along the way, and that’s nobody’s business. All that needs to concern us is that he married Linda, and that they were happy together.
Gary and Linda settled into the life of a middle-class couple. They bought a house in northwest Pennsylvania about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, in the heart of the Rust Belt. It’s an area that has been through some hard times in the last twenty years. The steel mills have all shut down and most of the manufacturing plants that area used to be noted for have shut down, too, either because they were victims of cut-rate foreign competition or because they moved overseas to countries with cheaper labor and less stringent environmental regulations. I asked his sister Donna if he had ever considered moving to a more economically vibrant area.
‘Gary never considered moving,’ she replied. ‘His wife had a white collar job teaching, they owned a home—a mortgage in reality—and Donald had a place in the school system, community and his mother’s church.’ (We’ll get to Donald in a minute.)
Linda is a Special Needs teacher who works with developmentally and physically challenged kids. It’s a demanding profession that calls for a lot of patience, a lot of training, a lot of time, and a lot of skill, and often doesn’t pay all that much because it’s usually on the taxpayers’ dime. But it’s steady work and she loves it. Gary found a job driving a sand truck for a local construction company. It was pretty good money but more important to Gary, it was short-haul driving—no long days or weeks on the road—and he could be home with Linda every night. They were, Donna says, striving for the middle-class lifestyle that is the template for the American family. Like most of us, they didn’t really understand how mythological that status is, but they sacrificed for it just the same.
Gary, like practically every other male in that part of Pennsylvania—and lots of other places—liked to hunt and fish. I’m not going to attempt to explain what males get out of this kind of activity; you have to be one to understand, that’s all. It’s a guy thing. Nor am I going to try to explain Gary’s love for muscle cars (he once owned an IROC-Z, which tells you a lot about how serious he was) except to hint that he drove a dump truck for a living—a huge, ungainly vehicle that handles like a tank and has to be pushed from behind to hit the highway speed limit.
To put your foot down in an IROC and feel the sudden, powerful rumble under the hood and hear it roar to life, and then to shift it into gear and leap ahead in a flash, racing down the road like you’re riding a high-class Thoroughbred with bloodlines that go back to Man-o’-War down the last straightaway at Pimlico or Churchill Downs—that’s a pleasure-jolt that can’t be explained until and unless you experience it, and sometimes not then, but there are men who live for it and even though I’m not one of them, I can understand why they do it.
Gary wasn’t one of them either, despite the fact the his garage housed a vintage 1970 Cyclone Spoiler belonging to his brother, Paul, that they hoped to restore. The cars and the hunting and fishing were just hobbies. Gary didn’t live for them; he lived for his family. In the fullness of time, you see, as often happens, he had one.
The Donald
The middle-class status that Gary and Linda were reaching for was not, in the beginning, an impossible dream. They were DINK’s (Double-Income, No Kids) for the first few years of their marriage; they both had steady jobs that didn’t look insecure; they had a house with a mortgage they could almost afford; and there was even enough extra for Gary to fool around with his cars. In short, they were what most of us would recognize as a normal American couple, living the American dream.
The only thing that was missing was children, so they were no doubt ecstatic when Linda turned up pregnant. Like all couples having their first child, they did all the usual things, made all the usual plans, had all the usual hopes. They ran around for months in a fever of excitement and anticipation, their heads filled with dreams of the perfect future.
Then reality, as it has a way of doing, struck at the dream and struck hard. Their first son, Donald, was born with Apert’s disease.
Apert Syndrome, named for the French doctor who first described it in 1906, is a genetic disorder in which the baby’s skull is prematurely fused. We all know that babies have a ‘soft-spot’ on their heads that we have to be careful of. That’s because the skull is not, as it is in older kids, closed; there are cracks—fissures—that allow the skull to expand until the brain reaches its full growth, at which point the skull-plates finally fuse together. In an infant with Apert, the skull can’t grow, or at least it can’t grow normally, which means that as the brain grows, increasing pressure is put on the cranial cavity to expand—and it can’t. The pressure has to go somewhere, so it goes in the only direction it has: down toward the face.
This is known as craniosynostosis.
Early surgery relieves the pressures by allowing the plates to be detached from one another. During this early surgery some “cranial remodeling” may be done to give the child a more normal appearance. The “retrusion” or hypoplasia of the midface is what could be described as a concave or dished in profile.
As the skull grows, the upper and lower thirds of the face tend to grow at normal rates, but the middle third of the face grows slower, resulting in a more pronounced retrusion over time.
A surgical procedure known as the LeFort III is used to correct this condition. The procedure is usually done after substantial growth is complete (preadolescence) and may be repeated as necessary. The LeFort procedure involves detaching the facial bones from mid eye to upper jaw and spacing this area out with bone grafts so that a proper alignment is made.
I said that Gary was a special kind of hero. So far, you might read the story of his life and ask, ‘For what? He sounds just like a million other guys.’ And you’d be right. Gary stepped into his heroic moment at Donald’s birth and never stepped out again. He didn’t weep or wail or gnash his teeth looking for somebody to blame. He didn’t back off or run away or leave Linda to deal with it even though she was, fortunately or not, the expert. He did what we’d all like to think we’d do in his position, and some of us would. But not all. Maybe not even most. He dug in, determined to do whatever he could to give Donald a chance. Donna again:
Gary was devoted to Donald. Gary saw the harshness and unfairness of life even when one is “normal”. He feared for Donald?s well being and future in light of all his problems. He worried constantly what would become of Donald if some thing happened to him….

Gary and The Donald

In practice what this meant was that Gary spent many hours becoming and then being an integral part of Donald’s treatment plan. Donald has, as a direct result of the Apert’s, a number of related physical and mental ailments—what Donna, a doctor, refers to as ‘multiple handicaps and developmental delays’—so Gary made trip after trip the 90 miles to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for things like ‘infant stimulation’ sessions (a form of physical and/or mental therapy intended to keep an infant’s brain and musculature from atrophying)—almost 3 hours round-trip added to his normally long hours on the road in his rig. He took care of Donald when he wasn’t working and took him along whenever he went somewhere.
Maybe he got tired, irritated, testy sometimes. Probably he did. But he never quit, never let up much less gave up. Neither did Linda. Together they took on this blow that life had sent them, and together they fought to make Donald’s life as normal and happy as any other kid’s. And seven years later, when Gary Jr arrived, a normal baby after a normal birth, it looked like they were going to make it.
A couple of corporations had other ideas.
Next: Multiple Murderers
Part 1 Part 2
Posted on Oct 11, 2004 at 02:29AM by Mick in Labor Issues | 5 Comments
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Reader Comments (5)
You should provide links at the end to the other parts of Gary's story so newcomers can read them all in a row. Did you do that and I missed it?

This is excellent idea and you're doing a brilliant job of it.
October 11, 2004 | eRobin
Thanks. I've never done this kind of writing before and it's been a struggle trying to put the disparate pieces of a life together so they make sense to people who never knew Gary--like me. I can only hope I'm doing him justice.

No, I haven't done the links thing. I didn't think of it. The first two parts are linked on the Recent Dispatches list. I was going to--am going to--put them all on a single page along with the documentaion from OSHA when the series is finished, but your idea is a good one. I'll do it today.
October 11, 2004 | Mick
You are to be commended for your empathetic presentation of my brother's life and the circumstances that resulted in his death. While one can be outraged at the neglect of corporations in situations like this, the indifference of those very agencies designed to protect workers ( and paid for by our tax dollars) is even harder to accept. The Center for American Progress has an excellent article (pdf file): A Record of Rollbacks http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=82002">http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=82002

This article exposes the true nature of those individuals who are supposed to be protecting us.

Examples:

1.Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor, has led the Bush administration's efforts to block ergonomic protections and slash overtime pay.
2. John Henshaw,assistant Labor Secretary for Occupational Health and Safety, has declined to issue a single significant health or safety standard. Henshaw previously worked for Monsanto, which over the past 20 years has compiled a lengthy list of worker neglect.
3. Eugene Scalia, former Labor Dept Solicitor, was a leader in the ANTI-ergonomics movement. Previously he specialized in representing MANAGEMENT in labor disputes and downplayed the importance of worker safety.
4. David Lauriski, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, spent 30 years in the coal mining industry and argued that coal dust standards should be loosened.

Over these past 3 years since Gary was killed, I realize how insidious corporate cronyism is and how far the right wing agenda has advanced in undermining worker's safety. Retrospectively, it seems naive to even have expected anything other than the ridiculous "conclusion" that was reached at the end of the "investigation" of my brother's death.
Thank you again for your efforts.

Donna Puleio Spadaro, MD
October 12, 2004 | Donna Puleio Spadaro, MD
Here's a timely article...

washingtonpost.com
OSHA Withdraws More Rules Than It Makes, Reviews Find

By Cindy Skrzycki

Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page E01


It's no secret that the Bush administration prefers voluntary, collaborative efforts on the part of companies to improve their safety records. Since the administration took over in 2001, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has forged hundreds of agreements with companies and business associations to improve their safety records while rulemaking has been sharply curtailed.

According to OSHA Assistant Secretary John Henshaw, the approach has resulted in safer workplaces with fewer fatalities, injuries and illnesses -- what he calls the triple bottom line. "I've seen what works and doesn't work on the shop floor," said Henshaw, reflecting his own career as a safety and health professional at chemical companies, Monsanto Co. and Astaris LLC, before he came to the safety agency.

But labor unions and some watchdog groups would rather OSHA play its more traditional role, issuing regulations.

"We have a preference for an actual regulation that is enforceable and fair across the board," said J. Robert Shull, senior regulatory policy analyst at OMB Watch, a nonprofit group funded mostly by foundations that has three union officials among its 15 directors.

Adds Peg Seminario, director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO: Setting and enforcing standards is part of their mission. "So why aren't they?"

Since fall 2000, the agency has not been regulating in the traditional sense, OMB Watch found in a series of reviews. Twenty-four rules that were in some stage of development on OSHA's agenda were withdrawn by the administration. Nine rules were completed, but none were major and several were related to recordkeeping.

In examining the agency's December 2003 and June 2004 regulatory agendas, which track the progress of its rules, OMB Watch found that that since last December, OSHA has revised a rule on commercial diving operations, reexamined one on mechanical power presses and changed how musculoskeletal disorders are reported. It completed one rule, to protect shipyard workers from fire hazards, and yesterday proposed new standards to protect workers from hexavalent chromium, a chemical used in chrome plating. That was under a court order.

"It's a meager output. It's the black hole of government," Shull said. "OSHA cleared the decks of its agenda. Just swept it clean." His group maintains that gutting the agency's regulatory agenda is a sop to business, which won a big victory when the Bush administration cancelled a final rule to protect workers from ergonomic injuries.

Early in the Bush administration, Henshaw said he didn't put much stock in the regulatory agenda, calling it a wish list that contained proposals that had been incubating for years with no result. He said he preferred a "to-do" list -- which OMB Watch now calls a "do-nothing" list.

That list has 24 items, including whether employers have to pay for protective equipment for their workers.

Said Henshaw, who inherited the protective equipment proposal from the Clinton administration: "We're reviewing the comments now and we're committed to taking the next step. But I don't want to say exactly what the next step is."

His emphasis, he said, has been on cooperative efforts with business and stepped-up enforcement of "bad actors" who are responsible for most safety problems.

The agency has formed 231 long-term alliances with trade associations and companies since 2002 that emphasize outreach, education, and sharing "best practices." OSHA under Henshaw has forged 214 active strategic partnerships that set safety goals involving 4,762 employers, and there are 1,153 voluntary protection program sites, where companies with exemplary safety records forego routine inspections.

Critics of the agency are leery of these arrangements, where union participation is minimal. And they don't entirely trust the numbers OSHA uses to support its claim that injures and illnesses are decreasing. Unions don't consider the reports dependable, she said, because they are furnished by employers.

Seminario points out that there have been two major changes in the way employers collect injury and illness data since 2002, making comparisons to earlier years difficult. For example, the incidence of musculoskeletal injuries on the job -- injuries from repetitive work and poorly designed workplaces -- is no longer reported separately.

Data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on days missed from work for illness show that over the past few years, the percentage of days taken off due to injuries and illnesses related to ergonomic issues has remained constant -- about 34 percent -- though the overall number of injuries and illnesses has decreased.

The business community said it wasn't that focused on the proposed rules OSHA axed but wanted to prevent new regulations. And groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been unhappy that the safety regulators issued citations for ergonomic violations under a broad enforcement authority. Since Congress killed the ergo rule two years ago, OSHA has opened cases against seven companies for ergonomic-related violations.

Randel Johnson, vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits for the chamber, called the trend troubling. "The agency has aggressively pursued ergonomics citations . . . demanding abatement measures that sound much like the repealed regulation and micromanaging targeted employers with a laundry list of requirements. Despite what the unions may allege, our life with OSHA has been no rose garden."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company


October 12, 2004 | Donna Puleio Spadaro, MD
Great job, Mick. You've added flesh and bones to what some still see as statistics.

For more information about the politics behind rollbacks in workplace safety (as well as the environment, food,drugs, etc., etc.) there's a great series in Newsday entitled "Erasing the Rules," some of which I've summarized here