Why state government matters. Part one . . .

. . . of what is likely to be an extremely long series.

After the disaster that was the 2000 election and its sequels in Florida and at the Supreme Court, some of us still held out hope that things were not going to be quite as bad as we feared. But one of the first signs that things were actually going to be worse came just after Congress convened.

One of the first acts of the all-new, all-Republican Congress (this was in the pre-Jim Jeffords days) was to repeal regulations put in place the previous year by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that would have required employers to take account of ergonomics when setting up their workplaces. We're not talking about wrist pads and seat height here (though those sorts of items would have been covered): we're talking about, for example, not requiring poultry workers to repeatedly reach into awkward positions in near-freezing temperatures to clean up meat for packaging. In other words, the regulations sought to mitigate problems that can permanently disable people and set the stage for even more horrific accidents and injuries.

So the Republican Congress, as expected, took those new protections away from American workers before they even had a chance to enjoy them. Before there could be any accurate accounting of how much the new rules might cost employers, and before there could be any accurate accounting of how much the new rules might save the public - how many fewer lives might be ruined, how many more able-bodied people could stay in their jobs, how much less money communities paid in medical costs and disability programs.

Here in North Carolina, fortunately, we had our own ergonomics rules. But of course in the 2000 elections Democrats lost one seat on the council of state - Cherie Berry, a Republican, had eked out a victory over Democrat Doug Berger after taking 62% of her campaign donations from the very industries she would be regulating - including $10,000 from the House of Raeford, a poultry processor and one of the worst violators of workplace standards in the state. So it should also come as no surprise that within months of taking office, Berry threw out North Carolina's ergonomics standards. And so one election wiped out protections for millions of workers and gave special interests a victory at both the state and national level.

Absent some historic shift in voting patterns, Berry is likely to win reelection this year. But in 2012 reformers hope to include the Commissioner of Labor race in the state's public financing program, which might make Berry more vulnerable. Which is a good thing. Because whatever happens in DC, state labor departments are largely responsible for the enforcement of federal labor standards. And that means 2008 could be a banner year for Democrats nationally without improving the fortunes of North Carolina workers.