COLUMN LEFT : Remembering a Forgotten War--Labor’s : Despite the protections enacted in the early ‘70s, workers still toil in hazardous conditions.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Memories of the war here, as in most towns across the country, are beginning to fade. The yellow ribbons tied around trees along suburban avenues have slipped and look tired next to ebullient magnolia, forsythia and cherry--the bold tints of spring.

On the campus of the University of Rochester last weekend, some students were hard at work drawing chalk lines on the brick wall of the Wilson Commons building, which houses the student union. Four vertical lines on every brick, with a fifth diagonal line running through them. By the end of Saturday, the wall was covered with 53,000 lines. Along one course of bricks, about 10 feet up, were written the words, “Each slash has a face, a mother, a father, someone who misses them.”

The students, part of a group called United Student Activists--high school and college kids from the Rochester area--had an announcement they were passing out, “100,000 . . . and counting,” in which they expressed the hope that the chalked wall would remind people just how bloody and devastating the Gulf War was. Valerie Metzler, who had spent eight hours drawing chalk lines, said she’d found it a rather somber experience.

A couple of miles away, in Highland Park in the southern part of town, a group of union leaders and labor activists were also talking about the dead and wounded, though these were casualties unhonored by yellow ribbons or presidential oratory.

Spring brings with it May Day, the workers’ day. Here in the United States, last Sunday was named by the AFL-CIO as Workers Memorial Day, in honor of the moment 20 years ago when, on April 28, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act. With the act came a new federal agency, OSHA, under the umbrella of the Labor Department, and an expectation among workers that, at last, safety and health standards in workplaces would be vigorously enforced.

As one of the speakers at the rally in Highland Park, I was able to tell the crowd, in this home city of the famously non-union Eastman Kodak Corp., that since the passage of the act--as with the passage of the Environmental Protection Act, another creation of that time--the trend has been downhill from the high hopes of the Nixon years.

This is no irony. Nixon signed OSHA and EPA into law at a moment when public support for federal regulation was high. Soon came the corporate counterattack of the mid-’70s, and under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, such regulation has gotten steadily more lax.

In the 20 years since the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed, about 200,000 American workers have lost their lives on the job. Another 1.4 million have been permanently disabled in workplace accidents, and as many as 2 million have died from diseases incurred from workplace conditions. In the same period, some 20 employers have been prosecuted and just one--a builder in South Dakota--sent to jail, for 45 days.

Throughout the 1980s, the casualty lines in graphs climbed as businesses fought to preserve profit margins by increased productivity--meaning speed-ups and more corners cut on safety standards for workers. Repetitive-motion injuries are now conspicuous in these graphs, both among so-called pink-collar workers in the computer-dominated service sector and line workers, as in the auto factories in Detroit.

Last year, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union tried to bring before Congress new legislation designed to beef up the 1970 safety act by making it easier for workers to refuse hazardous labor and for whistle-blowers to disclose perilous conditions without risk of being fired. Business and the Bush Administration beat back the attempt.

Indeed, business has been launching additional attacks. During the past few years, employers, having already gutted wages, have gone after workers’ medical benefits in contract negotiations, demanding worker co-payments, higher insurance deductibles, decreased coverage or a combination of these.

So there are wars . . . and wars. Some come with yellow ribbons, others don’t. Some get victory rallies; others--like the battle to protect Americans at work--get active sabotage from the flag-waggers in the White House and Congress who claim they care about American lives.