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
We must all be aware of one very basic fact: all, absolutely all, chemicals are potentially toxic substances….The key, as I have previously stated, is the quantitative level, the concentration at which any chemical substance is present. Thus anything, I repeat anything, present in an excessive amount is a toxic substance. You cannot legislate against every conceivable chemical substance and therefore, the need for a truly meaningful definition for a toxic substance should be evident.
This bill is the greatest piece of idiocy to come down the pike in quite a while. You know, people wonder why we’ve lost 145,000 jobs from Philadelphia in the last 20 years. If people would spend as much time trying to help develop industry in this city as they have trying to fight it, we’d be a lot better off.
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.
[The right-to-know law would be] harmful to the economy and not very helpful to the air.
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.
