Philadelphia Worker and Community Right-to-Know Act
The Philadelphia Worker and Community Right-to-Know Act requires employers that use any of 450 chemical substances to file Material Safety Data Sheets with various local government agencies. (An additional list of 99 chemicals will trigger the filing requirement if they are emitted from the workplace.) Material Safety Data Sheets must be made available to the public, upon request, through the governmental agencies where they are filed. Containers of these chemicals must be clearly labeled. (This was the first municipal right-to-know law.)
Cry Wolf Quotes
The bill produces no protection for legitimate industry trade secrets, the disclosure of which would not be necessary to protect health or the environment.
So that a bill like the Right to Know Bill is not in itself definitive; it would not drive all of these businesses away. It will bear more harshly on some than others, and may expedite their rate of closing or leaving or – and very often it’s not even a question of driving a company away, they just don’t expand here. They go and expand somewhere else.
Adding another layer of government regulations onto these federal programs which provide substantially similar protection to employees and the public as those proposed in the bill is wasteful, inflationary and unnecessary.
I can assure you from my experience, it’s going to cost us jobs.
Backgrounders & Briefs
Dying To Know: A Historical Analysis of the Right-To-Know Movement
This survey provides a sweeping analysis of the right-to-know movement in America.
