Last week in Dusseldorf, Germany the world’s largest safety tailgating party was held.
Well, not exactly.
Officially, the event is known as A+A 2009, International Trade Fair for Safety, Security and Health at Work, organized by the German firm Messe Düsseldorf.
But to this American visitor, unaccustomed to the culture of German trade fairs, it seemed like a sprawling party. Part rock concert, part fashion show, part Manhattan boulevard crowd crossing at rush hour. Most men visited A+A wearing suits and ties; most women wore black skirts, black tops, black boots and stockings. Dusseldorf is Germany’s fashion capital, and nearly everyone, everywhere wears black. Very few jeans and windbreakers were seen at A+A.
Beer, only the German variety of course, flowed from most every booth, or so it seemed. And the accommodating bartenders and hostesses would keep refilling your tall, thin beer glass until you threw your hands up and said, “No more.” Many also offered expresso bars. Wines and spirits. Sandwiches.
Fashion shows were held throughout the show days on a carpeted catwalk, with sleek Euro chic models sporting the latest in waterproof yellow, red, and orange hi-viz jackets and trousers. Three rows of seats surrounded the catwalk, occupied by serious men and women dressed in black, legs crossed, arms folded across their chests, as though they were judges. Behind the seats stood attendees, three or four rows deep. Eight to twelve male and female twentysomething models danced, marched, clapped and posed to pounding electronic beats, wearing wool knit caps, rainwear, silver and blue skin-tight body suits, and the bulky outerwear. One break dancing model, doing hand stands and back flips in turnout gear, brought the loudest applause from the audience of several hundred.
Europeans have a more nonchalant attitude toward matters of sex, and throughout the exhibits nude mannequins, some flesh colored, others silver metallic and Terminator-like, wore only fall protection harnesses, long-sleeve synthetic gloves, or a hi-viz jacket top.
Electronic synthesized dance music, and Michael Jackson beats, pumped from the PA systems of many booths, often made conversation difficult. Exhibit space often seemed quadruple the size of what you would see at a U.S. workplace safety and health show. Many had white bar stools and pedestal tables to seat up to 50 visitors. I counted more than 100 sales reps and guests packed into the Sperian booth.
Vendor signs often took on proportions of highway billboards. One featured three young women wearing ripped jeans and tank tops, and two young men in tee-shirts and jeans, straight out of a Gap or Urban Outfitters catalog. What were they selling? Safety shoes.
CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?
For four days, 55,800 visitors — up from 55,200 in 2007 — packed the narrow aisles of nine exhibit halls.
Recession, what recession?
Pump in the loud, thick disco-like music beats, mix in thousands of animated sales conversations in any number of tongues, fuel the exchanges with dark beer or extremely strong German coffee, put all this against a backdrop of vendor signage right out of Times Square, and A+A 2009 had the throbbing, pulsating feel of a long and winding party snaking across acres and acres of exhibit space. A record-setting 1,541 exhibitors came from 62 nations.
Don’t be fooled by the party atmosphere, though. It does nothing to distract vendors from serious negotiations. So what if beer kegs are tapped and the drinking starts by ten a.m.? For all the thousands and thousands of safety and health officers visiting, there is little good old American “tire-kicking” going on, with attendees filling their bags with stress balls, pens, kewpie dolls and magnets.
Of the exhibitors, 538 were German and 238 were Chinese. Germans and Chinese are not big on small talk. Most likely you won’t be handed a business card from one of their sales reps until you’ve been sized up for your buying intentions. Visitors ready to do business are often whisked upstairs to the second floor of many booths, which is often laid out like a restaurant with round or square tables, usually minimalist white, and four seats to a table. Here you find mostly men hunched over or huddled together, empty beer bottles on the tables, engrossed in poker-faced deal-making.
“Generally German trade shows are conducted in a more formal matter than in the United States,” says a Messe Dusseldorf brochure on the country’s business customs and practices. The one downside for U.S. safety and health pros accustomed to business casual: “Khakis and golf shirts are generally too informal for shows in Europe.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The directness of foreign sales reps at a booth can be another culture shock. “Take the direct approach and ask if your booth visitor makes the purchasing decisions,” advises the customs brochure. “In negotiating, Germans tend to start with something close to what they expect to receive in the end. A supplier who asks for much more than they agree to in the end lacks credibility in the eyes of the Germans.”
I got a taste of this visiting the China Pavilion, jam-packed with 10-foot by 10-foot stalls. In one stall, machinery noisily churned out terrycloth gloves. With no machine guarding that I could see. Xinghua Niu, president of Shandong Best Serve Safety Shoe, Ltd., invited me to sit down in his cramped stall. A week earlier he had exhibited at the National Safety Congress and Expo in Orlando, Fla. “U.S. financial crisis hurt very much,” he said through a young woman translator. “Attendance very low.” I asked about the Chinese domestic market for safety goods. It is slowly developing, he explained, as new safety laws come on the books. “People will learn and grow and do better,” he said. He asked if I was a supplier or buyer of safety shoes. I explained I was a magazine editor. Xinghua Niu smiled and replied, “Maybe you introduce me to major. U.S. brands to manufacture for them?”
“I’m no here,” said an Asian munching on sausage and sitting at a table at the booth for the 5th China International Occupational Safety and Health Exhibition. I moved on to the KCL hand protection exhibit featuring two glassed-encased displays of miniature railroad villages, incredibly detailed down to the moving construction cranes, tiny flashing blue welding light, a machine shop, a jet wing assembly operation, a twirling cement truck, and five miniature workers eating lunch at a picnic table, with what looked like the ubiquitous green beer bottles. The only glitch: the machines appeared unguarded and many of the workers were without hard hats and gloves.
A+A 2009, as with all A+A shows (which are held in Dusseldorf every other year), has an unmistakable consumer feel to it. You see it in the names of companies and brands: Rock Star shoes, Mad Dog safety boots and shoes, Job Man, Orbit International, Otter Premium sport footwear, Puma, Dickies, W.L. Gore, Goodyear, Myrtle Beach ball caps, James & Nicholson long and short sleeved dress shirts.
A CONSUMER VIBE
What Germans call “wire and tube” booths largely present consumer designs, signage and entertainment. Halls 3 to 5 and 9 to 10 were reserved for PPE, “corporate fashion” and “safe appliances.” Fire protection, enviro protection, and “measurement and control technology” were pooled in Hall 6. Special exhibits focused on the “Success Factor Office” (something is lost in translation here) and the “Innovation Park Hazardous Substances” (innovative hazardous substances?)
At one booth a bartender mixes vodka and OJ. Another has large photographs of white polar bears wearing insulated black work boots from Sweden. At the corner of one exhibit stands a mannequin wearing a black doo-rag, a double-breasted black-buttoned white top with stiff black and white striped cuffs and upturned collar, and black and white striped pajama bottoms, No shoes, gloves or goggles. One booth has 20 U-shaped black leather chairs for comfortable negotiations. Another is dwarfed by an actual red and black multi-ton trash truck, slightly tilted to one side on a bed of real rocks and gravel, with four-foot diameter tires. The theme? “Power to keep you fit.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you turn a corner and there stands a statuesque blond ponytailed female DJ up on a blue stage-lit carpeted platform with speaker amps, turntables, a Mac laptop and a mixing board. Wearing tight black jeans, the black boots with four-inch heels you see women wearing everywhere in Dusseldorf, a tight gray tank top and head phones draped around her neck, the DJ smiles and sways to disco beats. Next to her stand two technicians working a concert-size mixing board, and next to them, what else, a keg with a tap.
Germany and China were the two leading countries for number of exhibitors. Asia was well-represented with 62 exhibitors from India, 42 from Pakistan, 35 from Taiwan, 25 from South Korea, and 20 from Hong Kong. Eleven of the 37 U.S. exhibitors were grouped under the North American Pavilion banner. The North American hostesses seemed prudish in comparison to their international counterparts, offering coffee and Coca-Cola from a countertop.
OSH GEOPOLITICS
Far from the maddening din of the exhibit halls, at the south end of the Messe Dusseldorf “Kompound,” was the A+A 31st International Congress for Occupational Safety and Health. Here, in a dimly-lit room where attendees sat at long rows of white tables, many wearing headphones listening to translations emanating from a glass-enclosed booth with twelve translators at the back of the room, proceedings took on the air of a United Nations meeting. In fact, the accompanying conference of the International Labour Office (ILO), which is a sub-organization of the UN, had more than 300 delegates from almost 60 countries. The mood was somber and subdued. Several hundred attendees listened on Thursday afternoon to a series of short speeches all emphasizing the significance of the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work.
Crafted in 2008 in Seoul, South Korea at a world conference organized by the ILO, the International Social Security Association, and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the declaration states that promoting high levels of safety and health at work is the responsibility of society as a whole, calls for a national preventive safety and health culture, and emphasizes that continuous improvement of occupational safety and health (OSH) should be promoted by a systems approach to the management of OSH.
Culture. Management systems. Continuous improvement. Sound familiar?
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
The themes of the A+A Congress, attended by 5,000 registrants, could have come straight out of the National Safety Council’s Orlando meeting this year, or the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s 2009 meetings: “Economic Crisis and Safety and Health at Work;” “Safety and Health as Core Elements of Sustainable Corporate Action;” “No Compromise in Times of Crisis;” and “New OSH Culture and Strategies to Claim the Right to a Safe and Healthful Workplace in Times of Global Financial Crisis.”
Birgit Horn, the 36-year-old new project director of A+A 2009, spoke the universal language of safety when asked in an interview for her first impressions of the OSH industry. “The difference between safety and other industries is the emphasis OSH officers put into it,” she said. “People are really touched by the topic.”
Martin-Ulf Koch, manager of the Messe Dusseldorf press department, which oversaw a thriving press room with 300 reporters and journalists, added: “Safety is a mission for these people.”
“It is a very emotional topic I think,” said Ms. Horn. “It makes you really start to look at work differently.” She went on to say workplaces must change to meet the needs of German workers who are “getting older and older” and putting off retirement. “There is a need to keep strength and posture because we will work longer.”
In the states we call that “battling boomeritis.”
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The next new OSHA arrives
Coming out party held in San Antonio
It was a rare treat for safety and health pros. When was the last time the Labor Secretary and the OSHA chief spoke at the same safety and health meeting, from the same stage on the same day?
Every new occupant of the White House, or more specifically the Department of Labor, at some point early on announces their intent to reform, redirect, reinvigorate, recast or “add value” to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Every four or eight years the political pendulum in Washington takes OSHA for a ride to the business-friendly right or organized labor-leaning left, swinging from conciliation and cooperation to revved up enforcement and standards-setting.
After listening to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and acting OSHA boss Jordan Barab speak last Monday, June 29th, at the opening day of the American Society of Safety Engineers’ (ASSE) annual professional development conference, held in San Antonio, it appears OSHA is in for its most pronounced policy swing in decades.
“We’ve got a very activist Secretary of Labor and a very activist head of OSHA,” said a longtime safety professional after the eventful day.
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10 TENETS OF OBAMA’S OSHA
Here are highlights of the new agenda, as laid out by Solis and Barab:
1 — OSHA is back. DOL Secretary Solis and OSHA chief Barab have strong union ties, and are pushing an aggressive OSHA plan that in large part mirrors goals organized labor has promoted for OSHA.
Solis, for instance, spoke of her working class parents in Los Angeles, both union members, “fighting side by side on their shifts to ensure workers came home safe,” and instilling in her the value that you “fight for what is right.”
2 — More than 150 new inspectors will be hired in fiscal year 2010. OSHA’s budget will increase ten percent — with enforcement getting $25.5 million versus less than a $1 million increase for compliance assistance.
3 — Number of annual inspections will increase from 38,000 nationwide to perhaps 44,000, according to some sources. OSHA has not announced any inspection quota or target. Solis puts it simply: “More enforcement, less voluntary protection focus.”
4 — Penalties will be higher for violations. Consider these six-figure-plus enforcement headlines in the five-month span since Inauguration Day in January: more than $1.1 million in penalties against Milk Specialties Co. in Whitehall, Wis.; $500,000 to be paid by Tyson Foods; more than $255,000 in fines against a New Hampshire firearms manufacturer; $217,000 in fines against Delek Refining; more than $141,000 in fines against Hess Corp.; $105,000 in proposed penalties against an Orlando manufacturer; a Petrolia, Pa., chemical company fined more than $121,000; fall hazards at a Torrington, Conn., site lead to more than $118,000 in penalties; $273,000 in fines against a Jamestown, N.Y., employer for lack of asbestos safeguards; $148,000 against Miranda Roofing for fall hazards; and an El Paso, Texas, construction contractor fined $106,200 for alleged workplace safety violations.
5 — New standards will be promulgated for diacetyl flavoring (popcorn lung), combustible dust exposure protection, cranes and derricks, confined space in construction, and rewriting the hazard communication standard in be consistent with new international MSDS laws, commonly called the Global Harmonization System (GHS).
6 — Broad, sweeping new standard proposals will be issued, probably in 2011 or 2012, on ergonomics and basic requirements for maintaining a worksite safety and health program.
7 — OSHA will be more aggressive with standards and policing / enforcement than at any time in the last 20 years, since the late 1980s - early 1990s regime of Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, OSHA chief Jerry Scannell, and OSHA deputy Alan McMillan.
8 — The boom years are over for VPP growth. Unions do not like VPP because they argue OSHA’s audits of candidate companies to gain entry to VPP program are too weak and inconsistent. Barab says there will be no more annual quotas to drive VPP expansion.
9 — Incentive programs, no favorites of the new OSHA leaders, will be scrutinized during inspections. Again, this reflects union thinking. Unions argue incentive programs too often lead to workers not reporting injuries in order to win prizes, and a focus on worker behaviors over plant physical conditions. How OSHA might penalize employers operating incentive contests that inspectors can document as promoting under-reporting is unclear. Employers’ general duty to provide a safe and healthful workplace, the so-called General Duty Clause, may be invoked, as OSHA announced it will do earlier this year to protect workers against influenza exposure, and it has done in the past where a hazard exists but no corresponding standard.
10 — Recordkeeping accuracy and safety in the chemical industry will receive particular scrutiny as the objects of forthcoming OSHA National Emphasis Programs.
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“WE’RE BACK”
“We’re back,” said the diminutive and energetic Solis, smiling as she stood in a concrete back hallway that exits the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, talking with Barab following a brief press conference that came after her ten-minute speech to about 3,300 ASSE members at the meeting’s opening session, held in a cavernous, generic convention ballroom.
“Make no mistake about it,” she told the standing room only crowd which lined the hall’s walls and had attendees sitting on the floor, “the Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business. We are serious, very serious.”
Labor Secretary Solis comes across as the toughest talking DOL head since Elizabeth Dole in the early 1990s took an active interest in OSHA affairs and informed business and the safety profession “the cop is back on the beat.”
And Jordan Barab, a Washington safety and health player for more than 25 years, spoke at the ASSE meeting with an authority not usually associated with someone wearing the “acting” label. He was specific about OSHA’s future plans and did not deflect or defer any questions to the yet-to-be-named permanent OSHA chief.
Both Solis and Barab spoke in tempered, determined and “make no mistake about it “ tones. Barab a bit more witty and quick with a joke, befitting his decades of been there, seen that experience inside the Washington Beltway and years authoring his acerbic blog, “Confined Space.”
In her speech that began at eight in the morning, Solis was clear about the kind of leadership safety and health pros can expect from OSHA and the DOL in the next three-plus years, referencing “OSHA’s renewal of vigorous enforcement,” “intolerable” construction industry fatalities, and again, “We are serious about safety.” After talking about unsafe scaffolding, trenching cave-ins and falls in construction, Solis asserted, “As long as I am Secretary of Labor the department will go after anyone who puts worker lives needlessly at risk.”
She used her speech to announce a Texas construction safety initiative. “Texas has the dubious distinction of having more workers die than any other state,” she said. Beginning in July, OSHA will increase the number of inspectors in Texas and prevent injuries and fatalities at construction sites. Later in the day Barab referred to them as SWAT teams.
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PARALLEL MESSAGES
Both Solis and Barab came to San Antonio to deliver two distinct messages, actually. One intended for the ASSE audience. The second used the ASSE meeting as a platform to fire warning shots at negligent employers, corner cutters, and the non-compliant unwashed operating outside the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center.
Message number one from Solis: “It’s really an honor to be here with so many people so keenly involved in protecting employees,” she said. “You make a meaningful contribution. The work you do is not easy, especially to sell your message in these hard times.”
Message number two: “As I have said since my first day on the job, the U.S. Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business.”
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HEROES AND VILLIANS
Barab continued the parallel messaging in his speech to attendees after lunch on Monday. “We appreciate your work,” he told ASSE members. “We have your back. Your fight is our fight, that’s why we (Solis and Barab) came here today. Fifteen minutes later, he closed his speech saying, “It’s a new day. We’re in this fight together. You’re all heroes in my book.”
Here’s one example how Barab balanced his twin themes: “You look at some of these horrible accidents and wonder how someone isn’t in jail,” he said. “We’re looking at legislation to go after those responsible. Not ASSE members. As far as you are concerned, OSHA standards are the floor. You ultimately bear the burden or reap the benefits of what we do in Washington. Participate in the process, in hearings and comment periods. We need to hear from you.”
On the other hand, Barab several times made reference to “a lot of companies out there” who are cutting corners with safety and health. “Every day someone gets ground up in a piece of machinery or falls,” he said. “I can’t understand how anyone can be killed in a trench. These are obvious hazards and completely unacceptable deaths that need to be prevented.”
The duality of Solis’s and Barab’s talks were lost on at least some ASSE members. It seemed a matter of listeners hearing what they choose to hear.
“I thought Barab’s message was very, very to the left,” said a longtime ASSE member. “Both he and Solis, I thought their message to this audience was horrible. They’re preaching to the choir here. Standards definitely need to be updated. But I don’t want to hear more talk about all this. Let’s see what action happens.”
“These people here (at the ASSE meeting) are professionals, they have programs, some are very good, almost all are at minimum compliant. Enforcement, stronger enforcement, doesn’t mean much to them,” said a safety vet with a long string of ribbons hanging from his attendees’ badge listing various honors and ASSE affiliations. (ASSE members interviewed for this article are quoted anonymously due to the longstanding fear that any criticism of OSHA might bring the wrath of regulators down on their employers.)
One attendee thought Barab over-reached with his speech. “He’s only the acting head of OSHA,” he said. “He sure doesn’t talk like he’s ‘acting’. He should wait for his permanent replacement.”
Another thought Barab had toned down his speech from one given in May. “I heard him in Washington and it was a “we’re coming after you” speech. “He had EHS pros scared, especially at the prospects of going to jail for fatalities if Congress passes tougher criminal penalties.”
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FULL SPEED AHEAD
“The Secretary asked me to go full speed ahead on an agenda, “ Barab told his audience.
(The Department of Labor has made Barab a deputy assistant secretary for occupational safety and health, a position he’ll occupy once a permanent chief is confirmed. Sources in San Antonio believed a short list of candidates is being vetted, which includes Barab. Indeed, in her morning press conference, Solis referred to Barab as “a candidate with excellent insights and experience,” while explaining why she named an acting head of OSHA rather than a permanent appointment. “I didn’t want to wait,” she said. Barab in his afternoon speech, predicted a White House nomination for a permanent OSHA chief probably won’t come until September or October.)
Here’s a quick overview of the future agenda of “the new OSHA,” as Barab described the agency:
● “OSHA will not wait any longer to deal with construction fatalities. SWAT teams of inspectors will sweep over Texas in the coming weeks” as part of a new initiative aimed specifically at the Texas construction industry.
● National Emphasis Programs are in the works for enforcement action in the chemical industry and closer review of injury and illness recordkeeping for evidence of under-reporting.
OSHA’s look into the recordkeeping accuracy of a select number of companies will also include reviewing medical records and safety program policies that might affect injury and illness reporting. “I know safety bingo and incentive contests are a very big business, along with the behavioral philosophies that back up many of these programs” said Barab. “But we are going to take a very close look at incentive programs that award prizes for fewest recorded injuries. That make workers reluctant to report.” In general, said Barab, “we believe the focus should be on engineering out the hazards, on physical conditions,” not worker behaviors.
● “Standards-setting is not broken, it’s ailing,” said Barab. He made an exception for updating decades-old permissible exposure limits (PELs). That process “may be broken,” and OSHA “may not be able to do anything within” its existing regulatory framework, he said. New legislation from Congress may be required, he said.
● “We’ve got a long way to go, a lot of catching up to do with standards-setting,” he said. “The days are over of delayed standards-setting, starving OSHA’s budget,” and signing too many superficial industry and association alliances, he said. “It’s a new day. We want strongly protective standards that make sense.“ The lack of standards action in recent years impacts OSHA’s credibility, he said.
● Short-term standards priorities are requirements for combustible dust, “popcorn lung disease,” cranes and derricks, revising the hazcom standard to align MSDS requirements with the UN-backed globally harmonized system (GHS) and confined spaces in construction,” said Barab.
Longer term, ergonomics and a standard for safety and health programs basics are on OSHA’s radar.
● “We must confront the elephant in the room, ergonomics,” said Barab, who coordinated the Clinton administration’s ergonomics standard-setting in the late 1990s. “Ergonomics is a political football with powerful players who don’t want to see it on the field. Well, we’re going to pick up that football” and work with stakeholders to fix what Barab described as an enormous occupational problem. “Too many people are getting hurt” with ergo-related injuries and illnesses, he said.
“We must address (this occupational safety and health problem), our name is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.” First, OSHA must study the legalities of the Congressional law used by the Bush administration in 2001 to repeal the ergo rule, and come to an understanding of how the law interprets the requirement for OSHA to come out with a substantially different version of the standard if it intends to move ahead with standards-setting, round two.
● Barab several times asked the ASSE community for its engagement in standards-setting activity. “Give us your input. Your experience is really a reality check. We didn’t get the engagement we expected from industry when working on the ergonomics standard in the late 1990s. We wanted them to come forward and describe successful ergonomics programs. We need to hear from you. It gets boring hearing from the same five associations at every hearing.”
● As for setting requirements for the basic foundation elements of a safety and health program, Barab said OSHA is heavily engaged now in studying options. Barab believes much support exists for this standard, which he said would be on OSHA’s regulatory radar screen in one or two years.
● A thorough review of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program will be conducted, with an overall de-emphasis on VPP, but no elimination.
● Oversight of state OSHA programs will be strengthened.
● Penalty structures, last updated in 1990, are being examined within the confines of current OSHA legislation. Congressional proposals have already been drafted to raise penalties. “Right now the average penalty for a serious OSHA violation is about $900,” said Barab. “It basically doesn’t add up to a lot. That’s not much of a disincentive.”
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WILL PROS BUY THE NEW OSHA?
Barab ended his speech by returning to his twin messages. “I’m speaking to the choir here.” But he added, “Economic hardship is no excuse for taking short cuts with safety and health. When companies start cutting corners, I know you are unfortunately often the first to go. Your job probably is more important in hard times because workers afraid to lose their jobs won’t raise concerns.”
The coming months will tell whether Solis and Barab: 1) have motivated ASSE members to get more involved in the regulatory process; 2) insulted their professionalism and accomplishments with the talk of a lot of bad actors out there; or 3) sacred them with union-like battle cries about winning “the fight” for safety and health justice that many ASSE members feel they have already fought within their organizations at a number of points in their careers.
Most ASSE members interviewed after Solis’s and Barab’s speeches made it clear they don’t want to be drawn into a fight that is not theirs, a fight between OSHA and risk-taking small contractors and some larger employers who blame workers for accidents and shirk needed safety and health investments.
For one thing, there’s a profound philosophical difference between the majority of ASSE members who believe most employers want to do what is right for worker protection, and the new OSHA’s belief that there are a lot of bad guys out there. And second, most ASSE members have their hands full with an overloaded plate of stressful responsibilities, leaving them ill-equipped to stand by OSHA and fight for what is right, as Solis said.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
It was a rare treat for safety and health pros. When was the last time the Labor Secretary and the OSHA chief spoke at the same safety and health meeting, from the same stage on the same day?
Every new occupant of the White House, or more specifically the Department of Labor, at some point early on announces their intent to reform, redirect, reinvigorate, recast or “add value” to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Every four or eight years the political pendulum in Washington takes OSHA for a ride to the business-friendly right or organized labor-leaning left, swinging from conciliation and cooperation to revved up enforcement and standards-setting.
After listening to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and acting OSHA boss Jordan Barab speak last Monday, June 29th, at the opening day of the American Society of Safety Engineers’ (ASSE) annual professional development conference, held in San Antonio, it appears OSHA is in for its most pronounced policy swing in decades.
“We’ve got a very activist Secretary of Labor and a very activist head of OSHA,” said a longtime safety professional after the eventful day.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
10 TENETS OF OBAMA’S OSHA
Here are highlights of the new agenda, as laid out by Solis and Barab:
1 — OSHA is back. DOL Secretary Solis and OSHA chief Barab have strong union ties, and are pushing an aggressive OSHA plan that in large part mirrors goals organized labor has promoted for OSHA.
Solis, for instance, spoke of her working class parents in Los Angeles, both union members, “fighting side by side on their shifts to ensure workers came home safe,” and instilling in her the value that you “fight for what is right.”
2 — More than 150 new inspectors will be hired in fiscal year 2010. OSHA’s budget will increase ten percent — with enforcement getting $25.5 million versus less than a $1 million increase for compliance assistance.
3 — Number of annual inspections will increase from 38,000 nationwide to perhaps 44,000, according to some sources. OSHA has not announced any inspection quota or target. Solis puts it simply: “More enforcement, less voluntary protection focus.”
4 — Penalties will be higher for violations. Consider these six-figure-plus enforcement headlines in the five-month span since Inauguration Day in January: more than $1.1 million in penalties against Milk Specialties Co. in Whitehall, Wis.; $500,000 to be paid by Tyson Foods; more than $255,000 in fines against a New Hampshire firearms manufacturer; $217,000 in fines against Delek Refining; more than $141,000 in fines against Hess Corp.; $105,000 in proposed penalties against an Orlando manufacturer; a Petrolia, Pa., chemical company fined more than $121,000; fall hazards at a Torrington, Conn., site lead to more than $118,000 in penalties; $273,000 in fines against a Jamestown, N.Y., employer for lack of asbestos safeguards; $148,000 against Miranda Roofing for fall hazards; and an El Paso, Texas, construction contractor fined $106,200 for alleged workplace safety violations.
5 — New standards will be promulgated for diacetyl flavoring (popcorn lung), combustible dust exposure protection, cranes and derricks, confined space in construction, and rewriting the hazard communication standard in be consistent with new international MSDS laws, commonly called the Global Harmonization System (GHS).
6 — Broad, sweeping new standard proposals will be issued, probably in 2011 or 2012, on ergonomics and basic requirements for maintaining a worksite safety and health program.
7 — OSHA will be more aggressive with standards and policing / enforcement than at any time in the last 20 years, since the late 1980s - early 1990s regime of Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, OSHA chief Jerry Scannell, and OSHA deputy Alan McMillan.
8 — The boom years are over for VPP growth. Unions do not like VPP because they argue OSHA’s audits of candidate companies to gain entry to VPP program are too weak and inconsistent. Barab says there will be no more annual quotas to drive VPP expansion.
9 — Incentive programs, no favorites of the new OSHA leaders, will be scrutinized during inspections. Again, this reflects union thinking. Unions argue incentive programs too often lead to workers not reporting injuries in order to win prizes, and a focus on worker behaviors over plant physical conditions. How OSHA might penalize employers operating incentive contests that inspectors can document as promoting under-reporting is unclear. Employers’ general duty to provide a safe and healthful workplace, the so-called General Duty Clause, may be invoked, as OSHA announced it will do earlier this year to protect workers against influenza exposure, and it has done in the past where a hazard exists but no corresponding standard.
10 — Recordkeeping accuracy and safety in the chemical industry will receive particular scrutiny as the objects of forthcoming OSHA National Emphasis Programs.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“WE’RE BACK”
“We’re back,” said the diminutive and energetic Solis, smiling as she stood in a concrete back hallway that exits the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, talking with Barab following a brief press conference that came after her ten-minute speech to about 3,300 ASSE members at the meeting’s opening session, held in a cavernous, generic convention ballroom.
“Make no mistake about it,” she told the standing room only crowd which lined the hall’s walls and had attendees sitting on the floor, “the Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business. We are serious, very serious.”
Labor Secretary Solis comes across as the toughest talking DOL head since Elizabeth Dole in the early 1990s took an active interest in OSHA affairs and informed business and the safety profession “the cop is back on the beat.”
And Jordan Barab, a Washington safety and health player for more than 25 years, spoke at the ASSE meeting with an authority not usually associated with someone wearing the “acting” label. He was specific about OSHA’s future plans and did not deflect or defer any questions to the yet-to-be-named permanent OSHA chief.
Both Solis and Barab spoke in tempered, determined and “make no mistake about it “ tones. Barab a bit more witty and quick with a joke, befitting his decades of been there, seen that experience inside the Washington Beltway and years authoring his acerbic blog, “Confined Space.”
In her speech that began at eight in the morning, Solis was clear about the kind of leadership safety and health pros can expect from OSHA and the DOL in the next three-plus years, referencing “OSHA’s renewal of vigorous enforcement,” “intolerable” construction industry fatalities, and again, “We are serious about safety.” After talking about unsafe scaffolding, trenching cave-ins and falls in construction, Solis asserted, “As long as I am Secretary of Labor the department will go after anyone who puts worker lives needlessly at risk.”
She used her speech to announce a Texas construction safety initiative. “Texas has the dubious distinction of having more workers die than any other state,” she said. Beginning in July, OSHA will increase the number of inspectors in Texas and prevent injuries and fatalities at construction sites. Later in the day Barab referred to them as SWAT teams.
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PARALLEL MESSAGES
Both Solis and Barab came to San Antonio to deliver two distinct messages, actually. One intended for the ASSE audience. The second used the ASSE meeting as a platform to fire warning shots at negligent employers, corner cutters, and the non-compliant unwashed operating outside the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center.
Message number one from Solis: “It’s really an honor to be here with so many people so keenly involved in protecting employees,” she said. “You make a meaningful contribution. The work you do is not easy, especially to sell your message in these hard times.”
Message number two: “As I have said since my first day on the job, the U.S. Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business.”
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HEROES AND VILLIANS
Barab continued the parallel messaging in his speech to attendees after lunch on Monday. “We appreciate your work,” he told ASSE members. “We have your back. Your fight is our fight, that’s why we (Solis and Barab) came here today. Fifteen minutes later, he closed his speech saying, “It’s a new day. We’re in this fight together. You’re all heroes in my book.”
Here’s one example how Barab balanced his twin themes: “You look at some of these horrible accidents and wonder how someone isn’t in jail,” he said. “We’re looking at legislation to go after those responsible. Not ASSE members. As far as you are concerned, OSHA standards are the floor. You ultimately bear the burden or reap the benefits of what we do in Washington. Participate in the process, in hearings and comment periods. We need to hear from you.”
On the other hand, Barab several times made reference to “a lot of companies out there” who are cutting corners with safety and health. “Every day someone gets ground up in a piece of machinery or falls,” he said. “I can’t understand how anyone can be killed in a trench. These are obvious hazards and completely unacceptable deaths that need to be prevented.”
The duality of Solis’s and Barab’s talks were lost on at least some ASSE members. It seemed a matter of listeners hearing what they choose to hear.
“I thought Barab’s message was very, very to the left,” said a longtime ASSE member. “Both he and Solis, I thought their message to this audience was horrible. They’re preaching to the choir here. Standards definitely need to be updated. But I don’t want to hear more talk about all this. Let’s see what action happens.”
“These people here (at the ASSE meeting) are professionals, they have programs, some are very good, almost all are at minimum compliant. Enforcement, stronger enforcement, doesn’t mean much to them,” said a safety vet with a long string of ribbons hanging from his attendees’ badge listing various honors and ASSE affiliations. (ASSE members interviewed for this article are quoted anonymously due to the longstanding fear that any criticism of OSHA might bring the wrath of regulators down on their employers.)
One attendee thought Barab over-reached with his speech. “He’s only the acting head of OSHA,” he said. “He sure doesn’t talk like he’s ‘acting’. He should wait for his permanent replacement.”
Another thought Barab had toned down his speech from one given in May. “I heard him in Washington and it was a “we’re coming after you” speech. “He had EHS pros scared, especially at the prospects of going to jail for fatalities if Congress passes tougher criminal penalties.”
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FULL SPEED AHEAD
“The Secretary asked me to go full speed ahead on an agenda, “ Barab told his audience.
(The Department of Labor has made Barab a deputy assistant secretary for occupational safety and health, a position he’ll occupy once a permanent chief is confirmed. Sources in San Antonio believed a short list of candidates is being vetted, which includes Barab. Indeed, in her morning press conference, Solis referred to Barab as “a candidate with excellent insights and experience,” while explaining why she named an acting head of OSHA rather than a permanent appointment. “I didn’t want to wait,” she said. Barab in his afternoon speech, predicted a White House nomination for a permanent OSHA chief probably won’t come until September or October.)
Here’s a quick overview of the future agenda of “the new OSHA,” as Barab described the agency:
● “OSHA will not wait any longer to deal with construction fatalities. SWAT teams of inspectors will sweep over Texas in the coming weeks” as part of a new initiative aimed specifically at the Texas construction industry.
● National Emphasis Programs are in the works for enforcement action in the chemical industry and closer review of injury and illness recordkeeping for evidence of under-reporting.
OSHA’s look into the recordkeeping accuracy of a select number of companies will also include reviewing medical records and safety program policies that might affect injury and illness reporting. “I know safety bingo and incentive contests are a very big business, along with the behavioral philosophies that back up many of these programs” said Barab. “But we are going to take a very close look at incentive programs that award prizes for fewest recorded injuries. That make workers reluctant to report.” In general, said Barab, “we believe the focus should be on engineering out the hazards, on physical conditions,” not worker behaviors.
● “Standards-setting is not broken, it’s ailing,” said Barab. He made an exception for updating decades-old permissible exposure limits (PELs). That process “may be broken,” and OSHA “may not be able to do anything within” its existing regulatory framework, he said. New legislation from Congress may be required, he said.
● “We’ve got a long way to go, a lot of catching up to do with standards-setting,” he said. “The days are over of delayed standards-setting, starving OSHA’s budget,” and signing too many superficial industry and association alliances, he said. “It’s a new day. We want strongly protective standards that make sense.“ The lack of standards action in recent years impacts OSHA’s credibility, he said.
● Short-term standards priorities are requirements for combustible dust, “popcorn lung disease,” cranes and derricks, revising the hazcom standard to align MSDS requirements with the UN-backed globally harmonized system (GHS) and confined spaces in construction,” said Barab.
Longer term, ergonomics and a standard for safety and health programs basics are on OSHA’s radar.
● “We must confront the elephant in the room, ergonomics,” said Barab, who coordinated the Clinton administration’s ergonomics standard-setting in the late 1990s. “Ergonomics is a political football with powerful players who don’t want to see it on the field. Well, we’re going to pick up that football” and work with stakeholders to fix what Barab described as an enormous occupational problem. “Too many people are getting hurt” with ergo-related injuries and illnesses, he said.
“We must address (this occupational safety and health problem), our name is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.” First, OSHA must study the legalities of the Congressional law used by the Bush administration in 2001 to repeal the ergo rule, and come to an understanding of how the law interprets the requirement for OSHA to come out with a substantially different version of the standard if it intends to move ahead with standards-setting, round two.
● Barab several times asked the ASSE community for its engagement in standards-setting activity. “Give us your input. Your experience is really a reality check. We didn’t get the engagement we expected from industry when working on the ergonomics standard in the late 1990s. We wanted them to come forward and describe successful ergonomics programs. We need to hear from you. It gets boring hearing from the same five associations at every hearing.”
● As for setting requirements for the basic foundation elements of a safety and health program, Barab said OSHA is heavily engaged now in studying options. Barab believes much support exists for this standard, which he said would be on OSHA’s regulatory radar screen in one or two years.
● A thorough review of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program will be conducted, with an overall de-emphasis on VPP, but no elimination.
● Oversight of state OSHA programs will be strengthened.
● Penalty structures, last updated in 1990, are being examined within the confines of current OSHA legislation. Congressional proposals have already been drafted to raise penalties. “Right now the average penalty for a serious OSHA violation is about $900,” said Barab. “It basically doesn’t add up to a lot. That’s not much of a disincentive.”
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WILL PROS BUY THE NEW OSHA?
Barab ended his speech by returning to his twin messages. “I’m speaking to the choir here.” But he added, “Economic hardship is no excuse for taking short cuts with safety and health. When companies start cutting corners, I know you are unfortunately often the first to go. Your job probably is more important in hard times because workers afraid to lose their jobs won’t raise concerns.”
The coming months will tell whether Solis and Barab: 1) have motivated ASSE members to get more involved in the regulatory process; 2) insulted their professionalism and accomplishments with the talk of a lot of bad actors out there; or 3) sacred them with union-like battle cries about winning “the fight” for safety and health justice that many ASSE members feel they have already fought within their organizations at a number of points in their careers.
Most ASSE members interviewed after Solis’s and Barab’s speeches made it clear they don’t want to be drawn into a fight that is not theirs, a fight between OSHA and risk-taking small contractors and some larger employers who blame workers for accidents and shirk needed safety and health investments.
For one thing, there’s a profound philosophical difference between the majority of ASSE members who believe most employers want to do what is right for worker protection, and the new OSHA’s belief that there are a lot of bad guys out there. And second, most ASSE members have their hands full with an overloaded plate of stressful responsibilities, leaving them ill-equipped to stand by OSHA and fight for what is right, as Solis said.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The limitations of “safety”
It’s time to expand the profession’s vocabulary
Do you believe the United States is in the midst of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character,” to use the words of pollster John Zogby?
Or are our attitudes and behaviors simply adjusting to this recession, and we’ll revert to our old “orientation,” however you want to interpret that, once this storm passes?
Zogby argues, based on zillions of polls and interviews he has conducted during the past decade, that we are on our way to becoming a society that is “less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
To be sure, changes of all sorts are occurring around us at what seems dizzying speed.
The Big Three U.S. automakers, it’s been said, must fundamentally change how they operate to survive. The banking system is obviously ripe for systemic change. Our foreign policies with numerous countries, particularly in the Middle East and Far East, are under review and subject to new strategies. The same goes for the country’s position on climate change. Our energy consumption must become greener, less oily, according to the White House. The nation’s highways, bridges, tunnels, our concrete and asphalt infrastructure, is in for massive rebuilding. Healthcare coverage, patient safety, pharmaceutical marketing, education, labor laws, the Internet grid, the unemployment safety net are all subject to near-term Washington intervention. Creative destruction is wreaking havoc in mass communications, with newspapers disappearing, network news watched by a dwindling audience, and web sites and Internet feeds increasingly becoming primary news sources.
What about the profession of occupational safety and health?
Current status
Sure, the profession has taken its share of blows in this recession. What job, other than coal miners and debt collectors, hasn’t? Pros with outstanding resumes are out of work. Consultants are scrambling to hold onto clients.
A compliance officer in California emailed me: “In the private sector, most of the big employers have outsourced a lot of the (EHS) work, so there are not many people to lay off anymore. What takes the hit is funding for outside consultants to come in and do ‘preventive maintenance’ type of work. So my impression is that a lot of the PM type monitoring, hazard evaluation, extra training when not legally required, is going to go by the wayside. Emergency situations will be dealt with, but the old list of routine activities is in for a significant reduction.”
Return to old ways?
Sooner (hopefully) or later the country will pull out of this recession. But do you seriously believe “things” — everything from loan policies to energy consumption to news consumption to foreign relations to how companies manage safety and health programs — will all return to their previous “orientation,” to use pollster Zoby’s term?
Cynics, who are never in short supply, will assert yes, old habits run deep. But when talking about the occupational safety and health profession’s future, I say the timing couldn’t be better for a “fundamental reorientation.” In fact, I’ll up the ante and say it is overdue and essential. Not regarding the profession’s character, which will always be grounded in a unique mix of science, passion, empathy, and initiative. What must change is how professionals communicate to the world at large — to management, employees, the media, politicians, the public — all who, let’s be honest, give workplace safety and health little thought unless a crane topples over in Manhattan or a refinery blows in Texas.
Workplace safety and health is too narrowly defined by accidents, incidents, losses, call them what you will, they are negatives. Plus, the word “safety” does not inspire or motivate commitment. “Health” is more readily embraced by society. “Safety” reminds us of school safety patrols, seat belts, NASCAR SAFER Barriers or public safety — policing, firefighting, inspecting restaurants.
The profession, for long-term sustainability’s sake, needs to communicate that it is about more than inspecting, patrolling, policing, putting out fires, and reacting. These characterizations are old school and restraining. I agree with Carl Metzgar, CSP, a longtime safety and loss control consultant in Winston-Salem, N.C., who recently wrote a letter to me (yes, not an email) in which he commented, “Boy, do I hate that misused, misunderstood, meaningless word.”
Carl was referring to the word “safety.”
Good riddance
Let’s get rid of it. No, we can’t do that. It’s in the title of our magazine, of every other similar magazine, just about all the major professional societies, and maybe a hundred thousand business cards.
But we can begin to expand the profession’s vocabulary and self-definition. I offer up the term “risk” as a substitute for “safety” in many instances.
In a paper on reinventing OSHA, Gary Rosenblum, CIH, writes, “The game must be changed, and risk management should be used to do this. Risk management is many things, but focusing on reducing uncertainty and increasing desired outcomes by scientific anticipation and effective flexibility is a big part of it.
“Today businesses are in dire straits and looking to cut costs drastically. It is inevitable that without dramatic change, business will stop investing in safety and health, with the hopes that perhaps the downside won’t be that bad. This is bad risk management. Risk management means protecting assets against loss from an uncertain world by reducing risks wherever they may be.”
Put aside the evidence that financial risk management went out the window in the past ten years. “Risk” resonates and grabs the attention of managers, reporters, consumers, and yes, students considering a career in occupational safety and health.
Its applications are expansive. Think of its association to “enterprise,” “exposure,” “value,” “ethics,” “vulnerability,” “uncertainty,” “liability,” “assets,” “assessments,” “severity,” “outcomes,” “perceptions,” “behavior,” “decision analysis,” “scenario planning,” “investments,” “communication,” “protection,” “security” and “management.”
We’re overdue to bring about an expanded reorientation of how people think about workplace safety, how the profession defines itself, and how it’s understood by those outside the field.
Do you believe the United States is in the midst of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character,” to use the words of pollster John Zogby?
Or are our attitudes and behaviors simply adjusting to this recession, and we’ll revert to our old “orientation,” however you want to interpret that, once this storm passes?
Zogby argues, based on zillions of polls and interviews he has conducted during the past decade, that we are on our way to becoming a society that is “less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
To be sure, changes of all sorts are occurring around us at what seems dizzying speed.
The Big Three U.S. automakers, it’s been said, must fundamentally change how they operate to survive. The banking system is obviously ripe for systemic change. Our foreign policies with numerous countries, particularly in the Middle East and Far East, are under review and subject to new strategies. The same goes for the country’s position on climate change. Our energy consumption must become greener, less oily, according to the White House. The nation’s highways, bridges, tunnels, our concrete and asphalt infrastructure, is in for massive rebuilding. Healthcare coverage, patient safety, pharmaceutical marketing, education, labor laws, the Internet grid, the unemployment safety net are all subject to near-term Washington intervention. Creative destruction is wreaking havoc in mass communications, with newspapers disappearing, network news watched by a dwindling audience, and web sites and Internet feeds increasingly becoming primary news sources.
What about the profession of occupational safety and health?
Current status
Sure, the profession has taken its share of blows in this recession. What job, other than coal miners and debt collectors, hasn’t? Pros with outstanding resumes are out of work. Consultants are scrambling to hold onto clients.
A compliance officer in California emailed me: “In the private sector, most of the big employers have outsourced a lot of the (EHS) work, so there are not many people to lay off anymore. What takes the hit is funding for outside consultants to come in and do ‘preventive maintenance’ type of work. So my impression is that a lot of the PM type monitoring, hazard evaluation, extra training when not legally required, is going to go by the wayside. Emergency situations will be dealt with, but the old list of routine activities is in for a significant reduction.”
Return to old ways?
Sooner (hopefully) or later the country will pull out of this recession. But do you seriously believe “things” — everything from loan policies to energy consumption to news consumption to foreign relations to how companies manage safety and health programs — will all return to their previous “orientation,” to use pollster Zoby’s term?
Cynics, who are never in short supply, will assert yes, old habits run deep. But when talking about the occupational safety and health profession’s future, I say the timing couldn’t be better for a “fundamental reorientation.” In fact, I’ll up the ante and say it is overdue and essential. Not regarding the profession’s character, which will always be grounded in a unique mix of science, passion, empathy, and initiative. What must change is how professionals communicate to the world at large — to management, employees, the media, politicians, the public — all who, let’s be honest, give workplace safety and health little thought unless a crane topples over in Manhattan or a refinery blows in Texas.
Workplace safety and health is too narrowly defined by accidents, incidents, losses, call them what you will, they are negatives. Plus, the word “safety” does not inspire or motivate commitment. “Health” is more readily embraced by society. “Safety” reminds us of school safety patrols, seat belts, NASCAR SAFER Barriers or public safety — policing, firefighting, inspecting restaurants.
The profession, for long-term sustainability’s sake, needs to communicate that it is about more than inspecting, patrolling, policing, putting out fires, and reacting. These characterizations are old school and restraining. I agree with Carl Metzgar, CSP, a longtime safety and loss control consultant in Winston-Salem, N.C., who recently wrote a letter to me (yes, not an email) in which he commented, “Boy, do I hate that misused, misunderstood, meaningless word.”
Carl was referring to the word “safety.”
Good riddance
Let’s get rid of it. No, we can’t do that. It’s in the title of our magazine, of every other similar magazine, just about all the major professional societies, and maybe a hundred thousand business cards.
But we can begin to expand the profession’s vocabulary and self-definition. I offer up the term “risk” as a substitute for “safety” in many instances.
In a paper on reinventing OSHA, Gary Rosenblum, CIH, writes, “The game must be changed, and risk management should be used to do this. Risk management is many things, but focusing on reducing uncertainty and increasing desired outcomes by scientific anticipation and effective flexibility is a big part of it.
“Today businesses are in dire straits and looking to cut costs drastically. It is inevitable that without dramatic change, business will stop investing in safety and health, with the hopes that perhaps the downside won’t be that bad. This is bad risk management. Risk management means protecting assets against loss from an uncertain world by reducing risks wherever they may be.”
Put aside the evidence that financial risk management went out the window in the past ten years. “Risk” resonates and grabs the attention of managers, reporters, consumers, and yes, students considering a career in occupational safety and health.
Its applications are expansive. Think of its association to “enterprise,” “exposure,” “value,” “ethics,” “vulnerability,” “uncertainty,” “liability,” “assets,” “assessments,” “severity,” “outcomes,” “perceptions,” “behavior,” “decision analysis,” “scenario planning,” “investments,” “communication,” “protection,” “security” and “management.”
We’re overdue to bring about an expanded reorientation of how people think about workplace safety, how the profession defines itself, and how it’s understood by those outside the field.
Could it be? OSHA senile at 38?
Regulatory bodies, like people, have distinct life cycles
…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth, they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D, “The Great Crash, 1929,” published originally in 1955
Could it be the venerable good doctor, a titan of economics, possessed the prescience to be describing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 16 years before it began operation in 1971? And more importantly, could he have been explaining why so many occupational safety and health professionals today are disengaged from OSHA?
The profession’s disconnect from OSHA is palpable, almost raw with frustration. “Leave me the hell alone and let me do what I know how to do,” emailed a pro with almost four decades in the field. He laments the agency’s “misleading and often confusing direction” in recent years, and the lack of any significant regulatory agenda items “or public outcries to fix what may not be broken.”
“OSHA is almost 39 years old now” writes Tom Lawrence, whose safety and health career pre-dates the birth of the agency, in an email to us. “Politics in abundance and budgets in scarcity. Potential for significant change? Not likely.”
It’s time to cut the ties that have bound professionals to Washington for almost 40 years, argues Lawrence, and press ahead with innovation and resourceful not in abundance inside the beltway.
Who’s in charge here?
Or as American Industrial Hygiene Association Director of Government Affairs Aaron Trippler recently wrote in his newsletter: “Many of those who live and work here, including yours truly, also shake our head when we see Congress and the agencies attempt to do the work of governing.” Trippler went on to describe the consultant hired by OSHA who worked for 27 months, ending in mid-2008. His fee: $572,946 billed for labor and $108,434 in compensation for his commuting costs. “This was more pay than that of the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, the Secretary of Labor, the Vice President of the U.S., or any member of Congress. Who in the heck is in charge?” asks Trippler.
That confusion, in terms of OSHA’s management, is the one issue regarding the agency labor and business camps both can agree on. But that’s as far as any consensus goes. Borrowing from Galbraith’s depiction of a federal regulator, labor will argue the agency has devolved into an arm of the industry it regulates. Numerous businesses look at OSHA’s actions or inaction and see bureaucratic senility.
An agency evolves
OSHA’s life cycle can be traced in a way that parallels Galbraith’s evolutionary stages. First, in its youthful heyday of the 1970s, the agency was vigorous and aggressive with inspections and standards-setting. After a bureaucratic start-up phase, committed health and safety experts led OSHA — Dr. Mort Corn (1975-1977) and Dr. Eula Bingham (1976 – 1980). Dr. Bingham, the most fervent regulator and activist agency head ever, was evangelical in her endeavors to protect workers. Meanwhile, a growing number of employers, employer associations, and Republican politicians found OSHA’s actions increasingly “intolerant.”
Surprisingly, the agency did not “mellow” during the 1980s Reagan years and the term of President George H.W. Bush (1988-1992). “I remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s when we saw a flurry of new standards — hazard communication, respiratory protection, lockout-tagout, process safety management — and thought that OSHA had a decent handle on driving safety improvements at the national level,” writes Jeff LaBelle, a safety and risk assessment manager, in an email to us. “Since then we’ve seen much too little and much too late.”
Ironically, the mellowing and winding-down occurred during a Democratic regime, the two terms of President Clinton (1992-2000). It was the vision of Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore that a more mature OSHA would reinvent itself as a customer-focused, problem-solving partner with industry. In this context, OSHA’s much ballyhooed ergonomics standard, rushed out the door mere days after Gore lost the 2000 election, could be considered a mid-life crisis binge.
The “much too little and much too late” phase of OSHA’s evolution, which critics peg from 1992 until the present, could be interpreted, using Galbraith’s life cycle of a regulator, as the disorientation and cognitive failures that accompany aging. But although OSHA chiefs Joe Dear, Charles Jeffress and John Henshaw during that time were attacked on many counts, senility never came up; all were in their prime when at the agency. Critics contend that as OSHA has aged, it has become more than ever an arm of the industry it regulates. Ergo, the never-ending announcements of industry alliances in recent years. And, to be sure, a fantastically rich web site with deep resources and “tools” to help businesses.
Life on the beach?
So what have we here in 2009?
Will OSHA continue to slumber in what Galbraith would ascribe as its sunset years? Overworked and under-staffed safety and health professionals in industry are not of a mind to wake the agency and confront possibly a slew of new standards. That’s not going to happen anyway, not with an army of attorneys at the disposal of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for OSHA to continue to drift listlessly in its old (by Galbraith’s definition) age. Big business is global, with its workers at risk around the world and up and down supply chains, but OSHA is not an energetic global regulatory thought-leader. It must be.
And small business, which still dominates the domestic workplace landscape, cannot continue to put workers at risk, increasingly non-English speaking employees, through ignorance, lack of resources, or knowing non-compliance.
In this economy, retirees return to work and workers put off retirement. Old age ain’t what it used to be. Yes, there’s much talk of the graying of OSHA, of the coming wave of retirements. Still, hundreds if not thousands of careerists at OSHA aren’t ready to cash it in. They need strong, vibrant leadership. And here in 2009, when OSHA needs direction and vision, the safety and health profession can’t be caught “decoupling” and leaving the agency to close its eyes and stretch out on a beach chair somewhere.
Dave Johnson, Editor
…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth, they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D, “The Great Crash, 1929,” published originally in 1955
Could it be the venerable good doctor, a titan of economics, possessed the prescience to be describing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 16 years before it began operation in 1971? And more importantly, could he have been explaining why so many occupational safety and health professionals today are disengaged from OSHA?
The profession’s disconnect from OSHA is palpable, almost raw with frustration. “Leave me the hell alone and let me do what I know how to do,” emailed a pro with almost four decades in the field. He laments the agency’s “misleading and often confusing direction” in recent years, and the lack of any significant regulatory agenda items “or public outcries to fix what may not be broken.”
“OSHA is almost 39 years old now” writes Tom Lawrence, whose safety and health career pre-dates the birth of the agency, in an email to us. “Politics in abundance and budgets in scarcity. Potential for significant change? Not likely.”
It’s time to cut the ties that have bound professionals to Washington for almost 40 years, argues Lawrence, and press ahead with innovation and resourceful not in abundance inside the beltway.
Who’s in charge here?
Or as American Industrial Hygiene Association Director of Government Affairs Aaron Trippler recently wrote in his newsletter: “Many of those who live and work here, including yours truly, also shake our head when we see Congress and the agencies attempt to do the work of governing.” Trippler went on to describe the consultant hired by OSHA who worked for 27 months, ending in mid-2008. His fee: $572,946 billed for labor and $108,434 in compensation for his commuting costs. “This was more pay than that of the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, the Secretary of Labor, the Vice President of the U.S., or any member of Congress. Who in the heck is in charge?” asks Trippler.
That confusion, in terms of OSHA’s management, is the one issue regarding the agency labor and business camps both can agree on. But that’s as far as any consensus goes. Borrowing from Galbraith’s depiction of a federal regulator, labor will argue the agency has devolved into an arm of the industry it regulates. Numerous businesses look at OSHA’s actions or inaction and see bureaucratic senility.
An agency evolves
OSHA’s life cycle can be traced in a way that parallels Galbraith’s evolutionary stages. First, in its youthful heyday of the 1970s, the agency was vigorous and aggressive with inspections and standards-setting. After a bureaucratic start-up phase, committed health and safety experts led OSHA — Dr. Mort Corn (1975-1977) and Dr. Eula Bingham (1976 – 1980). Dr. Bingham, the most fervent regulator and activist agency head ever, was evangelical in her endeavors to protect workers. Meanwhile, a growing number of employers, employer associations, and Republican politicians found OSHA’s actions increasingly “intolerant.”
Surprisingly, the agency did not “mellow” during the 1980s Reagan years and the term of President George H.W. Bush (1988-1992). “I remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s when we saw a flurry of new standards — hazard communication, respiratory protection, lockout-tagout, process safety management — and thought that OSHA had a decent handle on driving safety improvements at the national level,” writes Jeff LaBelle, a safety and risk assessment manager, in an email to us. “Since then we’ve seen much too little and much too late.”
Ironically, the mellowing and winding-down occurred during a Democratic regime, the two terms of President Clinton (1992-2000). It was the vision of Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore that a more mature OSHA would reinvent itself as a customer-focused, problem-solving partner with industry. In this context, OSHA’s much ballyhooed ergonomics standard, rushed out the door mere days after Gore lost the 2000 election, could be considered a mid-life crisis binge.
The “much too little and much too late” phase of OSHA’s evolution, which critics peg from 1992 until the present, could be interpreted, using Galbraith’s life cycle of a regulator, as the disorientation and cognitive failures that accompany aging. But although OSHA chiefs Joe Dear, Charles Jeffress and John Henshaw during that time were attacked on many counts, senility never came up; all were in their prime when at the agency. Critics contend that as OSHA has aged, it has become more than ever an arm of the industry it regulates. Ergo, the never-ending announcements of industry alliances in recent years. And, to be sure, a fantastically rich web site with deep resources and “tools” to help businesses.
Life on the beach?
So what have we here in 2009?
Will OSHA continue to slumber in what Galbraith would ascribe as its sunset years? Overworked and under-staffed safety and health professionals in industry are not of a mind to wake the agency and confront possibly a slew of new standards. That’s not going to happen anyway, not with an army of attorneys at the disposal of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for OSHA to continue to drift listlessly in its old (by Galbraith’s definition) age. Big business is global, with its workers at risk around the world and up and down supply chains, but OSHA is not an energetic global regulatory thought-leader. It must be.
And small business, which still dominates the domestic workplace landscape, cannot continue to put workers at risk, increasingly non-English speaking employees, through ignorance, lack of resources, or knowing non-compliance.
In this economy, retirees return to work and workers put off retirement. Old age ain’t what it used to be. Yes, there’s much talk of the graying of OSHA, of the coming wave of retirements. Still, hundreds if not thousands of careerists at OSHA aren’t ready to cash it in. They need strong, vibrant leadership. And here in 2009, when OSHA needs direction and vision, the safety and health profession can’t be caught “decoupling” and leaving the agency to close its eyes and stretch out on a beach chair somewhere.
Dave Johnson, Editor
A cheap shot
OSHA lobs spitball at Battleship Wal-Mart
Last month, OSHA’s area office for Long Island, New York, cited Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., $7,000 for inadequate crowd control following the November 28, 2008 death of a temporary Wal-Mart employee. The man was knocked to the ground and trampled by a frenzied mob of some 2,000 bargain-hunters in a pre-dawn, Black Friday holiday sales stampede at Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream, N.Y. store, about 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy-tree) 34, had only been on the job a week as a so-called “seasonal worker” and died of asphyxiation. $7,000 is the maximum penalty OSHA can cite for a single serious violation, which was what the tragedy was judged to be. $374.5 billion was the sales total racked up by Wal-Mart for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2008. Inspectors used Section 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the so-called general duty clause, to cite Wal-Mart the maximum $7,000 fine for a serious violation of the clause.
There’s something pathetic here, though perfectly legal, about a $374.5 billion business being fined $7,000 for an employee’s gruesome death on the job.
A belated gold standard
In all-too-typical reactive fashion, Wal-Mart, as part of a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office to avoid prosecution, has gone out and hired the finest crowd security consultants in the country. They’ve worked NFL Super Bowls and Olympic games. Now they’ll devise “protocols set up to be the gold standard for crowd management” in the retail industry, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
A $10,000 fine is the max the D.A. could have sought.
Wal-Mart will implement the new plan at its 92 New York stores as part of the deal with the D.A.’s office. The deal also calls for Wal-Mart to set up a $400,000 victims’ compensation and remuneration fund (11 others, including a pregnant women, were injured in the crush), contribute $1.2 million for Nassau County’s Youth Board, donate $300,000 to the United Way of Long Island, and hire 50 high school students every year to work in its five stores in the county. Call it knee-jerk corporate social responsibility.
Here’s hoping the high schoolers receive the training in security and crowd control Mr. Damour never got.
Monetizing life
This story isn’t about Wal-Mart, OSHA, or the Nassau Country DA. It’s about the impossible and demeaning task of putting a price tag on human life. Here there can be no “gold standard.”
The mathematics of loss doesn’t add up. In 25 major aviation accidents between 1970 and 1984, the average compensation for victims who went to trial was $1 million, according to a Rand Corporation analysis. Average comp for cases settled out of court was $415,000. The wife of a currency trader killed in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers was eligible for $138,000. The widow of a security guard killed in Tower 1 will get $444,010.
For some, money doesn’t matter. There were about a dozen families so clinically depressed about 9/11 they never filed a claim to the compensation fund. Those families would have received on average $2 million each tax-free.
OSHA’s $7,000 fine of course is not intended to compensate for a life lost. But it’s ridiculous to read OSHA’s press release stating a $374.5 billion company has been hit with a $7,000 penalty for the death of one of its employees trampled on the job like a human doormat. Like it or not, the $7,000 is interpreted as the price tag for this fatality. It’s grotesque.
It’s all legit
EPA recently fined an apartment complex owner and property management firm more than $300,000 for failing to disclose information about lead paint to tenants. Failure to simply disclose info about lead paint is 40 times worse of a transgression than having an employee stampeded to death? OSHA recently fined a Texas piping manufacturer $146,500 — more than 20 times the Wal-Mart fine — for 29 serious violations, though no one was injured or killed.
These discrepancies are legitimized by laws that on the books. They also cheapen respect for life and dignity.
Stronger medicine
In Congress, there is a proposal to increase the OSHA serious/fatality violation penalty maximum to $12,000, allowing up to $50,000 for a fatality.
$7,000, $12,000, $50,000 — no matter how many zeroes you affix to the penalty, it won’t modify corporate behavior or change corporate culture. As someone once told me, only greed (see financial meltdown) or fear (of a brand meltdown) will do that.
OK, so how about mandatory referral to the Justice Department and jail time with no parole for managers found guilty of willfully or seriously neglecting their duty to protect employees when the outcome is an on-the-job fatality?
How about a memorial, a small white cross with a marker perhaps, to Jdimytai Damour set up inside the electronic doors of Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream store. Shoppers entering might stop to consider, “What the hell happened here?” Or maybe their curious kids will ask. I’d like to hear the explanation.
And OSHA needs get with the 21st century service-driven “new” economy. The symbolism of the Wal-Mart penalty is unnecessary. Issue retail industry safety and health guidelines. Put more of a priority on evaluating work environments where public behavior can be hazardous, such as retailing, health care (patients and visitors), and highway construction work zones.
Don’t lob spitballs at battleships and in doing so belittle lives lost. Do something of consequence. What’s $7,000 to a $374.5 billion multinational? A dwarf kicking grains of sand at a giant. Stop degrading victims, victims’ families and OSHA’s credibility. Rewrite the legal technicalities that lawmakers, attorneys and companies hide behind. Stop making it so easy for all of us to quickly turn the page and forget another life lost unnecessarily.
Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
Last month, OSHA’s area office for Long Island, New York, cited Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., $7,000 for inadequate crowd control following the November 28, 2008 death of a temporary Wal-Mart employee. The man was knocked to the ground and trampled by a frenzied mob of some 2,000 bargain-hunters in a pre-dawn, Black Friday holiday sales stampede at Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream, N.Y. store, about 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy-tree) 34, had only been on the job a week as a so-called “seasonal worker” and died of asphyxiation. $7,000 is the maximum penalty OSHA can cite for a single serious violation, which was what the tragedy was judged to be. $374.5 billion was the sales total racked up by Wal-Mart for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2008. Inspectors used Section 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the so-called general duty clause, to cite Wal-Mart the maximum $7,000 fine for a serious violation of the clause.
There’s something pathetic here, though perfectly legal, about a $374.5 billion business being fined $7,000 for an employee’s gruesome death on the job.
A belated gold standard
In all-too-typical reactive fashion, Wal-Mart, as part of a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office to avoid prosecution, has gone out and hired the finest crowd security consultants in the country. They’ve worked NFL Super Bowls and Olympic games. Now they’ll devise “protocols set up to be the gold standard for crowd management” in the retail industry, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
A $10,000 fine is the max the D.A. could have sought.
Wal-Mart will implement the new plan at its 92 New York stores as part of the deal with the D.A.’s office. The deal also calls for Wal-Mart to set up a $400,000 victims’ compensation and remuneration fund (11 others, including a pregnant women, were injured in the crush), contribute $1.2 million for Nassau County’s Youth Board, donate $300,000 to the United Way of Long Island, and hire 50 high school students every year to work in its five stores in the county. Call it knee-jerk corporate social responsibility.
Here’s hoping the high schoolers receive the training in security and crowd control Mr. Damour never got.
Monetizing life
This story isn’t about Wal-Mart, OSHA, or the Nassau Country DA. It’s about the impossible and demeaning task of putting a price tag on human life. Here there can be no “gold standard.”
The mathematics of loss doesn’t add up. In 25 major aviation accidents between 1970 and 1984, the average compensation for victims who went to trial was $1 million, according to a Rand Corporation analysis. Average comp for cases settled out of court was $415,000. The wife of a currency trader killed in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers was eligible for $138,000. The widow of a security guard killed in Tower 1 will get $444,010.
For some, money doesn’t matter. There were about a dozen families so clinically depressed about 9/11 they never filed a claim to the compensation fund. Those families would have received on average $2 million each tax-free.
OSHA’s $7,000 fine of course is not intended to compensate for a life lost. But it’s ridiculous to read OSHA’s press release stating a $374.5 billion company has been hit with a $7,000 penalty for the death of one of its employees trampled on the job like a human doormat. Like it or not, the $7,000 is interpreted as the price tag for this fatality. It’s grotesque.
It’s all legit
EPA recently fined an apartment complex owner and property management firm more than $300,000 for failing to disclose information about lead paint to tenants. Failure to simply disclose info about lead paint is 40 times worse of a transgression than having an employee stampeded to death? OSHA recently fined a Texas piping manufacturer $146,500 — more than 20 times the Wal-Mart fine — for 29 serious violations, though no one was injured or killed.
These discrepancies are legitimized by laws that on the books. They also cheapen respect for life and dignity.
Stronger medicine
In Congress, there is a proposal to increase the OSHA serious/fatality violation penalty maximum to $12,000, allowing up to $50,000 for a fatality.
$7,000, $12,000, $50,000 — no matter how many zeroes you affix to the penalty, it won’t modify corporate behavior or change corporate culture. As someone once told me, only greed (see financial meltdown) or fear (of a brand meltdown) will do that.
OK, so how about mandatory referral to the Justice Department and jail time with no parole for managers found guilty of willfully or seriously neglecting their duty to protect employees when the outcome is an on-the-job fatality?
How about a memorial, a small white cross with a marker perhaps, to Jdimytai Damour set up inside the electronic doors of Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream store. Shoppers entering might stop to consider, “What the hell happened here?” Or maybe their curious kids will ask. I’d like to hear the explanation.
And OSHA needs get with the 21st century service-driven “new” economy. The symbolism of the Wal-Mart penalty is unnecessary. Issue retail industry safety and health guidelines. Put more of a priority on evaluating work environments where public behavior can be hazardous, such as retailing, health care (patients and visitors), and highway construction work zones.
Don’t lob spitballs at battleships and in doing so belittle lives lost. Do something of consequence. What’s $7,000 to a $374.5 billion multinational? A dwarf kicking grains of sand at a giant. Stop degrading victims, victims’ families and OSHA’s credibility. Rewrite the legal technicalities that lawmakers, attorneys and companies hide behind. Stop making it so easy for all of us to quickly turn the page and forget another life lost unnecessarily.
Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
“Most of the parents were desperate…”
It’s time to truly engage victims and their kin
I’m reading the new book, “Columbine,” (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009) and I can’t get Ron Hayes out of my head. Ron, from Fairhope, Alabama near Mobile, has been raising hell as a worker safety and victims’ rights activist since 1993, when his 19-year-old son Pat was killed on the job. Pat was "walking down the corn" — scraping the inside walls of a grain bin in Florida. As Pat knocked down the corn, 60 tons of it collapsed in a rush, suffocating him to death.
In “Columbine,” author Dave Cullen describes how the families of the 12 dead students, one dead teacher, and the 24 injured were misled and mistreated by public officials. Ron knows that pain.
Panicked parents of Columbine students frantically tried to learn the fate of their kids in the hours immediately after the shooting spree. “No word, for hours on end,” writes Cullen. Day stretched into night. The wife of the murdered teacher couldn’t sleep, still not knowing if her husband was dead or alive. She curled up with a pair of his socks.
The father of one murdered boy had his son’s death confirmed the next morning, flipping through a Denver newspaper. He stopped when he saw a half-page aerial photo of his son’s body stretched out on a sidewalk, next to a large pool of blood.
Fog of catastrophe
Chaos and confusion are partially to blame for the stonewalling and lack of cooperation that often confronts survivors and families of victims after a fatality — especially a large-scale catastrophe. At Columbine High, law enforcement officials had no clue how many perpetrators there might have been. A conspiracy was suspected due to scale of the attack. School officials needed a day to confirm how many of Columbine’s 2,000 students were safe, where they were, how many had been sent to hospitals.
“I knew Cassie was in there (the high school) somewhere,” said her father. “It was terrible to know she was on the other side of the fence and there was nothing we could do.”
“Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died,” writes Cullen.
The official Jefferson County (Jeffco) Sheriff Department’s report had been promised in the summer of 1999, but as the first anniversary (April 20, 2000) approached county officials said the report still had six to eight weeks to go.
“Investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information,” writes Cullen. Finally, two families filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately. They asked for videos made by the two killers, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. The father of one of the families who filed wanted to compare the raw data with the written report. “They lie as a practice,” he said.
“Treated like dirt”
That’s what Ron Hayes discovered, too. “There was no help or justice for Pat. OSHA treated us like we were dirt,” Hayes told a Senate Labor Committee hearing in April, 2008. “Losing a loved one on the job is very difficult to deal with but when the very agency that is supposed to protect them, fails in correcting, investigating and prosecuting the company that killed your loved one, it is even harder to bare.”
A district judge in Colorado approved the request of the two Columbine families. Days later, the judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. What emerged was about seven hundred pages of who, what, where, when and how information. “The logistics were useful, but hardly what people had been waiting for,” writes Cullen. The essential question of why had been ducked.
Victims and their families are often kept in the dark, and the truth suppressed, out of fear of lawsuits. Columbine was no exception. The sheriff’s report described a complaint that had been filed 13 months before the shooting by a family whose son was the subject of death threats from one of the killers. Ten pages of annihilation rants from the same murderer’s web site had been obtained. The report spent one paragraph summarizing these warnings and two defending police actions, or inaction.
“The department claimed it had been unable to access one of the killer’s web site, despite the fact that officials had printed pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found,” writes Cullen.
“Just heartbroken”
After an OSHA investigation into Pat’s death, agency investigators determined that his employer, Showell Farms, was guilty of six willful safety violations and recommended that the company pay more than $500,000 in fines. But OSHA's area director later reduced the fine to $42,000, citing a lack of clarity about whether OSHA's standards applied.
Ron Hayes and his family learned of the reduced fines and citations from a local news broadcast — despite repeated requests to OSHA for information. "When I saw it on TV that day," he recalled in article in Mother Jones magazine, "I was just heartbroken."
At last year’s Senate hearing Hayes testified, “These cases fall by the wayside and no one seems to care, except for the family.”
Misery at the church
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., discovered this firsthand when he and three other senators visited with the families of 12 coal miners killed in the January 2, 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. These families had been pained beyond the pale by a horrible communication breakdown. Gathered at the Sago Baptist Church, they first received word through widespread press announcements that 12 survivors were found and only one had died. Families ran outside, celebrating a “miracle.” Hours later completely contradictary and correct reports arrived. Only one miner survived while the other 12 had perished.
Kennedy said he was troubled to hear the families had not yet been involved in the accident investigation. He urged state and federal investigators to take time to talk to the relatives, who he said are extremely knowledgeable about the industry.
Congress jumps in
Earlier this year the “Protecting America’s Workers Act” was introduced in the U.S. House a Representatives. Among the bill’s provisions: a series of legal rights to allow “workers and their families to hold dangerous employers accountable,” according the language of the legislation.
These rights include:
● Workers and employee representatives have the right to contest OSHA’s failure to issue citations, classification of its citations, and proposed penalties.
● Injured workers, their families and families of workers who died in work-related incidents have the right to meet with investigators, receive copies of citations, and to have an opportunity to make a statement before any settlement negotiations.
● Any worker or their representative can object to a modification or withdrawal of a citation, and this entitles them to a hearing before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
You can argue whether these rights go too far, and Congress will. But it’s time, past time, to stop callous treatment of victims and their families and bring them in from the dark. They need to be engaged, not ignored.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
I’m reading the new book, “Columbine,” (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009) and I can’t get Ron Hayes out of my head. Ron, from Fairhope, Alabama near Mobile, has been raising hell as a worker safety and victims’ rights activist since 1993, when his 19-year-old son Pat was killed on the job. Pat was "walking down the corn" — scraping the inside walls of a grain bin in Florida. As Pat knocked down the corn, 60 tons of it collapsed in a rush, suffocating him to death.
In “Columbine,” author Dave Cullen describes how the families of the 12 dead students, one dead teacher, and the 24 injured were misled and mistreated by public officials. Ron knows that pain.
Panicked parents of Columbine students frantically tried to learn the fate of their kids in the hours immediately after the shooting spree. “No word, for hours on end,” writes Cullen. Day stretched into night. The wife of the murdered teacher couldn’t sleep, still not knowing if her husband was dead or alive. She curled up with a pair of his socks.
The father of one murdered boy had his son’s death confirmed the next morning, flipping through a Denver newspaper. He stopped when he saw a half-page aerial photo of his son’s body stretched out on a sidewalk, next to a large pool of blood.
Fog of catastrophe
Chaos and confusion are partially to blame for the stonewalling and lack of cooperation that often confronts survivors and families of victims after a fatality — especially a large-scale catastrophe. At Columbine High, law enforcement officials had no clue how many perpetrators there might have been. A conspiracy was suspected due to scale of the attack. School officials needed a day to confirm how many of Columbine’s 2,000 students were safe, where they were, how many had been sent to hospitals.
“I knew Cassie was in there (the high school) somewhere,” said her father. “It was terrible to know she was on the other side of the fence and there was nothing we could do.”
“Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died,” writes Cullen.
The official Jefferson County (Jeffco) Sheriff Department’s report had been promised in the summer of 1999, but as the first anniversary (April 20, 2000) approached county officials said the report still had six to eight weeks to go.
“Investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information,” writes Cullen. Finally, two families filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately. They asked for videos made by the two killers, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. The father of one of the families who filed wanted to compare the raw data with the written report. “They lie as a practice,” he said.
“Treated like dirt”
That’s what Ron Hayes discovered, too. “There was no help or justice for Pat. OSHA treated us like we were dirt,” Hayes told a Senate Labor Committee hearing in April, 2008. “Losing a loved one on the job is very difficult to deal with but when the very agency that is supposed to protect them, fails in correcting, investigating and prosecuting the company that killed your loved one, it is even harder to bare.”
A district judge in Colorado approved the request of the two Columbine families. Days later, the judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. What emerged was about seven hundred pages of who, what, where, when and how information. “The logistics were useful, but hardly what people had been waiting for,” writes Cullen. The essential question of why had been ducked.
Victims and their families are often kept in the dark, and the truth suppressed, out of fear of lawsuits. Columbine was no exception. The sheriff’s report described a complaint that had been filed 13 months before the shooting by a family whose son was the subject of death threats from one of the killers. Ten pages of annihilation rants from the same murderer’s web site had been obtained. The report spent one paragraph summarizing these warnings and two defending police actions, or inaction.
“The department claimed it had been unable to access one of the killer’s web site, despite the fact that officials had printed pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found,” writes Cullen.
“Just heartbroken”
After an OSHA investigation into Pat’s death, agency investigators determined that his employer, Showell Farms, was guilty of six willful safety violations and recommended that the company pay more than $500,000 in fines. But OSHA's area director later reduced the fine to $42,000, citing a lack of clarity about whether OSHA's standards applied.
Ron Hayes and his family learned of the reduced fines and citations from a local news broadcast — despite repeated requests to OSHA for information. "When I saw it on TV that day," he recalled in article in Mother Jones magazine, "I was just heartbroken."
At last year’s Senate hearing Hayes testified, “These cases fall by the wayside and no one seems to care, except for the family.”
Misery at the church
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., discovered this firsthand when he and three other senators visited with the families of 12 coal miners killed in the January 2, 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. These families had been pained beyond the pale by a horrible communication breakdown. Gathered at the Sago Baptist Church, they first received word through widespread press announcements that 12 survivors were found and only one had died. Families ran outside, celebrating a “miracle.” Hours later completely contradictary and correct reports arrived. Only one miner survived while the other 12 had perished.
Kennedy said he was troubled to hear the families had not yet been involved in the accident investigation. He urged state and federal investigators to take time to talk to the relatives, who he said are extremely knowledgeable about the industry.
Congress jumps in
Earlier this year the “Protecting America’s Workers Act” was introduced in the U.S. House a Representatives. Among the bill’s provisions: a series of legal rights to allow “workers and their families to hold dangerous employers accountable,” according the language of the legislation.
These rights include:
● Workers and employee representatives have the right to contest OSHA’s failure to issue citations, classification of its citations, and proposed penalties.
● Injured workers, their families and families of workers who died in work-related incidents have the right to meet with investigators, receive copies of citations, and to have an opportunity to make a statement before any settlement negotiations.
● Any worker or their representative can object to a modification or withdrawal of a citation, and this entitles them to a hearing before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
You can argue whether these rights go too far, and Congress will. But it’s time, past time, to stop callous treatment of victims and their families and bring them in from the dark. They need to be engaged, not ignored.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
Recession blues?
Research doesn’t show injuries increasing
In April we received this email, edited here for brevity:
Mr. Johnson,
I am a police officer in Edmonton, Alberta. I have been researching the effects of low morale usually associated with job stress/job dissatisfaction on officer safety performance. Have you noted a relationship between employee morale (job satisfaction) and employee performance with respect to safety?
Olena Fedorovich
Dear Olena,
Excellent question. With the economy in the tank, you would think employee morale is taking a bath. I emailed your question to 112 occupational safety and health experts; and searched the internet to review published research.
I learned there is no easy answer for you. Safety and health experts disagree vehemently on whether low morale leads to an increase in injuries.
From consultant Bob Veazie: “Yes, LOW MORALE ABSOLUTELY MEANS MORE INJURIES.” (The emphatic capitalization is his.)
“The short answer is yes, the potential for errors and injuries is greatly increased by low morale,” said Michael Topf, president of Topf Initiatives.
We also received these responses:
“I’ve seen less than sterling EHS performance during times of a robust economy, when morale was seemingly high, and commendable EHS performance during times of stress,” reported Chris Laszcz-Davis, principal of The Environmental Quality Organization.
“I looked at this question during my research for my Ph.D. One of the surprising things I found was that plants with a more positive attitude had workers who were willing to take more chances in their general behavior toward safety,” recalled Henry Lick, former director of industrial hygiene for Ford Motor Company.
Are you sufficiently confused, Olena?
The problem is a paucity of empirical evidence connecting morale, job satisfaction and job distress to safety outcomes. The expert responses I received often carried qualifiers: “I believe,” “I would think,” “It’s tough to determine,” “I suspect.” Dee Woodhull, a consultant with ORC Worldwide, said it best: “This (low morale, high distress equals more injuries) seems to be one of those myths in the safety profession we assume is true.”
Stick to the facts
Mired in opinion and mythology, Olena, let’s stick to the facts:
● Levels of distress among employees have been rising long before the current recession. Time magazine ran a cover story on June 6, 1983: “Stress: The Epidemic of the 80s.” Dan Petersen, in an interview with ISHN published July 18, 2003, said: “In the last 10 to 15 years I have never seen the number of pissed off and angry people working in companies.”
● Occupational injury rates have plummeted during this timeframe. By 2007, the incidence rate for private industry had dropped to 40 percent of its 1972 value, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
● “The rate of growth of the workplace incidence and illness rate drops about 2.5 percentage points during the 20 months leading up to the (recession) trough, before bottoming out in sync with economic activity,” writes Frank A. Schmid, director and senior economist for the National Council on Compensation Insurance, Inc. (NCCI), in a paper, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” published March 28, 2009.
“Of particular interest is the Great Depression,” writes Schmid. “The recession-related drop in (injury) frequency growth during the Great Depression was the most extensive of all recessions.”
One myth of the Great Depression was punctured by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1954 book, “The Great Crash: 1929.” Galbraith wrote that the image of speculators hurling themselves from Wall Street windows in a suicide wave following the stock market crash is “part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none. The suicide statistics for New Yorkers show only a slight deviation from those of the country as a whole.”
● A Gallup Poll from August, 2008 reported 90 percent of U.S. workers were either completely satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. Only nine percent were dissatisfied with their work to any degree.
So here is the situation: 1) the U.S. economy is as bad as it’s been in 50 years; 2) distress levels have been increasing for decades; 3) during that time injury rates have dropped significantly; 4) historical statistics show no correlation between recessions, depressions and increased injuries (author Schmid calls this “the dog that did not bark”); 5) job satisfaction has not been affected by years of increasing wear and tear of distress and Petersen’s “pissed off and angry” workforce.
Why doesn’t the dog bark?
What gives, you’re probably wondering, Olena. Here are potential reasons for the decline in injuries despite hard times and increasing distress:
● Workplace injury rate under-reporting. According to a 2008 House Committee on Education and Labor hearing report, under-reporting estimates range from 33 to 69 percent. Among the reasons cited: OSHA logs are maintained by employers, who might have an incentive to under-report to avoid inspection, or win safety performance contests.
● Fear of job insecurity. As a result, safety complaints and reports of minor types of injuries that can be covered up can decline. “Fear of job loss causes many in the workforce to travel under the proverbial radar to not be noticed,” said James Leemann of the Leemann Group LLC.
● Fear drives risk aversion. “What causes risk aversion?” asked A&K Ross Associates in a paper presented at the 2005 International Rail Safety Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. “Basically fear. Fear of blame, fear of job loss or promotion, fear of media scrutiny when things go wrong, fear of prosecution.” The result, according to the authors: “An overly cautious approach to safety.”
All caution was tossed out the window in the consumer spending spree and extreme risk-taking of financial institutions in the years leading up to the recession. But now, bewildered by a recession with no end in sight, risk aversion has reach new heights, according to a September, 2008 Merrill Lynch Survey of Fund Managers. Investors have taken a “flight to safety” with the most risk-averse mindset yet recorded, according to the survey.
● Survival first. “Most folks I know today are grateful to have a job and anxious to work safely and effectively,” said Laszcz-Davis.
“I do not think a ‘morale meltdown’ precipitates an increase in at-risk behaviors or more injuries,” said Leemann. “It results in just the opposite behavior. Most people are in such a survival mode the last thing they want to do is lose their job.”
● Humans could be naturally risk-averse. Behavioral economists have discovered “losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good, driving our risk-taking,” writes Michael Shermer in “Irrational Economic Man,” published January 11, 2009 in City Journal magazine. “So deep and powerful an economic emotion is this aversion that it may be an evolved trait,” he writes.
● The innate pursuit of esteem. This pursuit “makes people loss averse,” write Tyler Cowen and Amihai Green in a paper published February 13, 2003, “Esteem and Risk Aversion.” “When esteem enters the picture, individuals are more likely to be strongly risk-averse,” the authors write.
● Low moods. Symptoms of low mood — fatigue, loss of motivation and interest, pessimism, and the behavioral inability to feel rewarded by previously pleasurable activities — function to reduce risk-taking, according to Daniel Nettle in an article published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
As the mood state deteriorates, the riskiness of behavior will decline until it becomes highly risk-averse. Low moods sap individuals of the energy, enthusiasm and optimism needed to believe risks will pay off.
To sum it up, Olena, plenty of evidence exists that low moods, low self-esteem, risk aversion, and fear of job loss — recession blues — all contribute to reduced risk-taking and lower injury rates. Historical injury statistics tied to business cycles bears this out.
Distress and injuries: a shaky connection
There’s one more point we should make, Olena. In your email, you connect low morale, job distress and job dissatisfaction, as though they are one and the same. Research tells a different story:
● “An individual’s actual level of morale has no influence on their level of distress, and vice versa,” write Peter Cotton and Peter M. Hart in “Occupational Wellbeing and Performance: A Review of Organizational Health and Research,” published in the July, 2003 Australian Psychologist. “The factors influencing levels of morale are not the same as those determining levels of distress.”
To simplify the authors’ model, morale and job satisfaction are more a function of one’s cognitive states, a matter of making mental judgments, evaluations and perceptions about work. Distress — or its opposite: energizing, motivating stress — emanates more from our emotional side, states of anxiousness, anger, guilt, sadness, energy, enthusiasm and pride.
● “Stress researchers have failed to link indicators of occupational stress to relevant organizational outcomes,” which would include injuries, state Cotton and Hart.
This “failure to link” is also referenced in the 2006 book, “Human Safety and Risk Management,” by A Ian Glendon, Sharon Clarke and Eugene F McKenna. The relationship between job distress, job dissatisfaction and injury is moderated by several factors, according to the authors: safety knowledge, safety motivation, safety culture, social support from co-workers, relationships with supervision, management concern and support, and personality type.
“There is limited evidence to support a relationship between job distress and work-related injuries such as vehicle crashes, “ according to the authors.
● The “selling of distress.” In our review of relevant research, we discovered most claims of a connection between job distress and costly injuries were made by organizations or associations with a vested interested in promoting the prevalence and cost of job distress — stress reduction coaches and consultants, stress institutes, etc. Most of the research relates distress to the costs of increased absenteeism, presenteeism (mentally checking out while still on the job), high turnover, substance abuse and stress-related workers’ comp claims (typically cases of subjective mental anguish or back injuries, not more objective injuries such as body blows, falls, crashes or amputations).
We don’t want to diminish the damage caused by job distress. It’s real, and it’s costly. But the impact is on one’s overall well-being, especially mental and physical health, more than traumatic injury causation, according to research.
NIOSH makes this point in its booklet, “Stress…at Work,” (NIOSH Publication 99-101) stating: “Job stress poses a threat to the health of workers, and in turn, the health of organizations. Evidence is rapidly accumulating to suggest that stress plays an important role in several types of chronic health problems — especially cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and psychological disorders.”
Important findings
So Olena, we’ll leave you with three discoveries we made in the course of our research:
1 — Injury rates follow business cycle behavior, but counter-intuitively. According to the NCCI report, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” in recessions job creation plummets while job destruction soars. Job destruction (layoffs) decreases the growth rate of workplace injury and illness rates. Why? The most inexperienced workers are laid-off first, and the longest-tenured workers survive. Approximately 30 percent of all reported injuries in manufacturing are associated with workers who have been with their current employer for less than one year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coming out of a recession, when hiring increases (job creation), injury rates will rise as more inexperienced workers land jobs. This includes workers who switch jobs, come out of unemployment, or rejoin the workforce.
2 — Focusing on the morale, job satisfaction, and distress of employees can lead to a “blame the worker” mindset. This misses the very significant influences that organizational culture, co-worker support, and supervisory and management leadership have on morale and distress.
“Substantial improvements in the levels of occupational wellbeing will only be achieved by focusing on improving leadership and managerial practices and other aspects of organizational climate,” write Cotton and Hart. “Organizational climate is the strongest determinant of individual morale. Organizational development programs that improve the quality of leadership practices and organizational climate are likely to have a greater impact on reducing workers’ compensation premiums that traditional occupational health and safety risk management approaches.”
3 — “Personality is the strongest determinant of individual distress, write Cotton and Hart. Perhaps you should survey, study and discuss the emotions, moods and levels of self-esteem that run through your workforce. Look for “withdrawal behaviors” that negative emotions trigger: absenteeism, turnover, submitting stress-related comp claims, lack of participation, decreasing volunteerism, and isolation and alienation (leading in extreme cases to potential violent outbursts). Keep in mind that after personality, morale and organizational culture are the two biggest influences on withdrawal behaviors.
So if officers in your Officer Safety Unit are not wearing body armor or carrying radios when they should, don’t be too quick to pin it on the recession, poor job satisfaction, or distress. Step back and look at your organization and the level of communication, social support, training and education, concern and empathy on the part of supervisors and managers.
Regards,
Dave Johnson, Editor
In April we received this email, edited here for brevity:
Mr. Johnson,
I am a police officer in Edmonton, Alberta. I have been researching the effects of low morale usually associated with job stress/job dissatisfaction on officer safety performance. Have you noted a relationship between employee morale (job satisfaction) and employee performance with respect to safety?
Olena Fedorovich
Dear Olena,
Excellent question. With the economy in the tank, you would think employee morale is taking a bath. I emailed your question to 112 occupational safety and health experts; and searched the internet to review published research.
I learned there is no easy answer for you. Safety and health experts disagree vehemently on whether low morale leads to an increase in injuries.
From consultant Bob Veazie: “Yes, LOW MORALE ABSOLUTELY MEANS MORE INJURIES.” (The emphatic capitalization is his.)
“The short answer is yes, the potential for errors and injuries is greatly increased by low morale,” said Michael Topf, president of Topf Initiatives.
We also received these responses:
“I’ve seen less than sterling EHS performance during times of a robust economy, when morale was seemingly high, and commendable EHS performance during times of stress,” reported Chris Laszcz-Davis, principal of The Environmental Quality Organization.
“I looked at this question during my research for my Ph.D. One of the surprising things I found was that plants with a more positive attitude had workers who were willing to take more chances in their general behavior toward safety,” recalled Henry Lick, former director of industrial hygiene for Ford Motor Company.
Are you sufficiently confused, Olena?
The problem is a paucity of empirical evidence connecting morale, job satisfaction and job distress to safety outcomes. The expert responses I received often carried qualifiers: “I believe,” “I would think,” “It’s tough to determine,” “I suspect.” Dee Woodhull, a consultant with ORC Worldwide, said it best: “This (low morale, high distress equals more injuries) seems to be one of those myths in the safety profession we assume is true.”
Stick to the facts
Mired in opinion and mythology, Olena, let’s stick to the facts:
● Levels of distress among employees have been rising long before the current recession. Time magazine ran a cover story on June 6, 1983: “Stress: The Epidemic of the 80s.” Dan Petersen, in an interview with ISHN published July 18, 2003, said: “In the last 10 to 15 years I have never seen the number of pissed off and angry people working in companies.”
● Occupational injury rates have plummeted during this timeframe. By 2007, the incidence rate for private industry had dropped to 40 percent of its 1972 value, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
● “The rate of growth of the workplace incidence and illness rate drops about 2.5 percentage points during the 20 months leading up to the (recession) trough, before bottoming out in sync with economic activity,” writes Frank A. Schmid, director and senior economist for the National Council on Compensation Insurance, Inc. (NCCI), in a paper, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” published March 28, 2009.
“Of particular interest is the Great Depression,” writes Schmid. “The recession-related drop in (injury) frequency growth during the Great Depression was the most extensive of all recessions.”
One myth of the Great Depression was punctured by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1954 book, “The Great Crash: 1929.” Galbraith wrote that the image of speculators hurling themselves from Wall Street windows in a suicide wave following the stock market crash is “part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none. The suicide statistics for New Yorkers show only a slight deviation from those of the country as a whole.”
● A Gallup Poll from August, 2008 reported 90 percent of U.S. workers were either completely satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. Only nine percent were dissatisfied with their work to any degree.
So here is the situation: 1) the U.S. economy is as bad as it’s been in 50 years; 2) distress levels have been increasing for decades; 3) during that time injury rates have dropped significantly; 4) historical statistics show no correlation between recessions, depressions and increased injuries (author Schmid calls this “the dog that did not bark”); 5) job satisfaction has not been affected by years of increasing wear and tear of distress and Petersen’s “pissed off and angry” workforce.
Why doesn’t the dog bark?
What gives, you’re probably wondering, Olena. Here are potential reasons for the decline in injuries despite hard times and increasing distress:
● Workplace injury rate under-reporting. According to a 2008 House Committee on Education and Labor hearing report, under-reporting estimates range from 33 to 69 percent. Among the reasons cited: OSHA logs are maintained by employers, who might have an incentive to under-report to avoid inspection, or win safety performance contests.
● Fear of job insecurity. As a result, safety complaints and reports of minor types of injuries that can be covered up can decline. “Fear of job loss causes many in the workforce to travel under the proverbial radar to not be noticed,” said James Leemann of the Leemann Group LLC.
● Fear drives risk aversion. “What causes risk aversion?” asked A&K Ross Associates in a paper presented at the 2005 International Rail Safety Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. “Basically fear. Fear of blame, fear of job loss or promotion, fear of media scrutiny when things go wrong, fear of prosecution.” The result, according to the authors: “An overly cautious approach to safety.”
All caution was tossed out the window in the consumer spending spree and extreme risk-taking of financial institutions in the years leading up to the recession. But now, bewildered by a recession with no end in sight, risk aversion has reach new heights, according to a September, 2008 Merrill Lynch Survey of Fund Managers. Investors have taken a “flight to safety” with the most risk-averse mindset yet recorded, according to the survey.
● Survival first. “Most folks I know today are grateful to have a job and anxious to work safely and effectively,” said Laszcz-Davis.
“I do not think a ‘morale meltdown’ precipitates an increase in at-risk behaviors or more injuries,” said Leemann. “It results in just the opposite behavior. Most people are in such a survival mode the last thing they want to do is lose their job.”
● Humans could be naturally risk-averse. Behavioral economists have discovered “losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good, driving our risk-taking,” writes Michael Shermer in “Irrational Economic Man,” published January 11, 2009 in City Journal magazine. “So deep and powerful an economic emotion is this aversion that it may be an evolved trait,” he writes.
● The innate pursuit of esteem. This pursuit “makes people loss averse,” write Tyler Cowen and Amihai Green in a paper published February 13, 2003, “Esteem and Risk Aversion.” “When esteem enters the picture, individuals are more likely to be strongly risk-averse,” the authors write.
● Low moods. Symptoms of low mood — fatigue, loss of motivation and interest, pessimism, and the behavioral inability to feel rewarded by previously pleasurable activities — function to reduce risk-taking, according to Daniel Nettle in an article published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
As the mood state deteriorates, the riskiness of behavior will decline until it becomes highly risk-averse. Low moods sap individuals of the energy, enthusiasm and optimism needed to believe risks will pay off.
To sum it up, Olena, plenty of evidence exists that low moods, low self-esteem, risk aversion, and fear of job loss — recession blues — all contribute to reduced risk-taking and lower injury rates. Historical injury statistics tied to business cycles bears this out.
Distress and injuries: a shaky connection
There’s one more point we should make, Olena. In your email, you connect low morale, job distress and job dissatisfaction, as though they are one and the same. Research tells a different story:
● “An individual’s actual level of morale has no influence on their level of distress, and vice versa,” write Peter Cotton and Peter M. Hart in “Occupational Wellbeing and Performance: A Review of Organizational Health and Research,” published in the July, 2003 Australian Psychologist. “The factors influencing levels of morale are not the same as those determining levels of distress.”
To simplify the authors’ model, morale and job satisfaction are more a function of one’s cognitive states, a matter of making mental judgments, evaluations and perceptions about work. Distress — or its opposite: energizing, motivating stress — emanates more from our emotional side, states of anxiousness, anger, guilt, sadness, energy, enthusiasm and pride.
● “Stress researchers have failed to link indicators of occupational stress to relevant organizational outcomes,” which would include injuries, state Cotton and Hart.
This “failure to link” is also referenced in the 2006 book, “Human Safety and Risk Management,” by A Ian Glendon, Sharon Clarke and Eugene F McKenna. The relationship between job distress, job dissatisfaction and injury is moderated by several factors, according to the authors: safety knowledge, safety motivation, safety culture, social support from co-workers, relationships with supervision, management concern and support, and personality type.
“There is limited evidence to support a relationship between job distress and work-related injuries such as vehicle crashes, “ according to the authors.
● The “selling of distress.” In our review of relevant research, we discovered most claims of a connection between job distress and costly injuries were made by organizations or associations with a vested interested in promoting the prevalence and cost of job distress — stress reduction coaches and consultants, stress institutes, etc. Most of the research relates distress to the costs of increased absenteeism, presenteeism (mentally checking out while still on the job), high turnover, substance abuse and stress-related workers’ comp claims (typically cases of subjective mental anguish or back injuries, not more objective injuries such as body blows, falls, crashes or amputations).
We don’t want to diminish the damage caused by job distress. It’s real, and it’s costly. But the impact is on one’s overall well-being, especially mental and physical health, more than traumatic injury causation, according to research.
NIOSH makes this point in its booklet, “Stress…at Work,” (NIOSH Publication 99-101) stating: “Job stress poses a threat to the health of workers, and in turn, the health of organizations. Evidence is rapidly accumulating to suggest that stress plays an important role in several types of chronic health problems — especially cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and psychological disorders.”
Important findings
So Olena, we’ll leave you with three discoveries we made in the course of our research:
1 — Injury rates follow business cycle behavior, but counter-intuitively. According to the NCCI report, “Workplace Injuries and Job Flows,” in recessions job creation plummets while job destruction soars. Job destruction (layoffs) decreases the growth rate of workplace injury and illness rates. Why? The most inexperienced workers are laid-off first, and the longest-tenured workers survive. Approximately 30 percent of all reported injuries in manufacturing are associated with workers who have been with their current employer for less than one year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coming out of a recession, when hiring increases (job creation), injury rates will rise as more inexperienced workers land jobs. This includes workers who switch jobs, come out of unemployment, or rejoin the workforce.
2 — Focusing on the morale, job satisfaction, and distress of employees can lead to a “blame the worker” mindset. This misses the very significant influences that organizational culture, co-worker support, and supervisory and management leadership have on morale and distress.
“Substantial improvements in the levels of occupational wellbeing will only be achieved by focusing on improving leadership and managerial practices and other aspects of organizational climate,” write Cotton and Hart. “Organizational climate is the strongest determinant of individual morale. Organizational development programs that improve the quality of leadership practices and organizational climate are likely to have a greater impact on reducing workers’ compensation premiums that traditional occupational health and safety risk management approaches.”
3 — “Personality is the strongest determinant of individual distress, write Cotton and Hart. Perhaps you should survey, study and discuss the emotions, moods and levels of self-esteem that run through your workforce. Look for “withdrawal behaviors” that negative emotions trigger: absenteeism, turnover, submitting stress-related comp claims, lack of participation, decreasing volunteerism, and isolation and alienation (leading in extreme cases to potential violent outbursts). Keep in mind that after personality, morale and organizational culture are the two biggest influences on withdrawal behaviors.
So if officers in your Officer Safety Unit are not wearing body armor or carrying radios when they should, don’t be too quick to pin it on the recession, poor job satisfaction, or distress. Step back and look at your organization and the level of communication, social support, training and education, concern and empathy on the part of supervisors and managers.
Regards,
Dave Johnson, Editor
Friday, May 1, 2009
Congress urged to hand OSHA new ammo to motivate employer compliance
Celeste Monforton, an assistant research professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services, and chair of the Occupational Health & Safety Section of the American Public Health Association, offered a number of thoughts and ideas, shared by many OSHA activists, for introducing new incentives for safe workplaces, the title of a Senate hearing held April 28.
Monforton’s ideas could be a harbinger of OSHA reform legislative proposals we’ll see in the next one or two years. And with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the odds of these kinds of proposals being enacted into law are greater than they have been for decades.
Monforton stated in her testimony: “Davitt McAteer, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, notes that employers (and individuals) generally fall into three categories. One group is the top performers: companies that strive for operational excellence. They don’t worry about OSHA inspections; they already have worker injury and illness prevention programs that are grounded in employee involvement and continuous improvement and, frankly, put OSHA’s bare-minimum regulations to shame.
“At the other end of the spectrum are the bad actors. These individuals intentionally disregard the law or are indifferent to it – they act as though the rule of law doesn’t apply to them. Unfortunately, there are employers who fall into this category. These are employers who violate the law, without care or concern for the individuals or communities potentially affected by their decisions. They flout rules designed to protect our air, water and other natural resources, defy minimum wage and overtime rules and collective bargaining rights, and ignore workplace health and safety standards. Employers in this category deserve to get the book thrown at them – not just the book, the whole book shelf.
“Our occupational health and safety (OHS) regulatory system must provide harsh penalties for employers who fall into this category. The system should require the equivalent of ‘points on their permanent record.’ Employers who flagrantly, willfully or repeatedly violate laws designed to protect workers from injuries and illnesses should see their finances and reputations suffer.
“Our system should take advantage of the times when such employers are caught, and capitalize on these grievous situations for their value as a deterrent for companies nationwide. It may not deter other bad actors, but it will catch the attention of those who might be tempted to cut a few corners when under pressure.
“The majority of employers and the majority of people in general are neither stellar performers nor bad actors. We respect laws’ aims and purposes, and we comply with them – most of the time. At times, however, competing forces color our judgment, and we break a rule because we think the likelihood of causing harm is low, as is the risk of getting caught.
“Many employers and their managers know that workplace OHS standards are based on lessons learned and have a public health and safety purpose. But, from time to time, when certain competing forces weigh on them, they make a calculation. They weigh the risk of suffering harm or causing harm to another and the likelihood of getting caught breaking the law. The deterrent effect of OSHA’s penalty system could be amplified to outweigh the influence of competing forces.
“An employer has the right to contest four aspects of the citation: (1) the classification of the violation (e.g., serious, willful); (2) the OSHA rule, standard or statutory clause affixed to the violation; (3) the abatement date; and/or (4) the proposed penalty. Instead of formally contesting one of these aspects, an employer may request to meet with the director of the local OSHA office for an informal conference before the 15-day period to file a notice of contest expires.
“The majority of employers who receive OSHA citations participate in informal conferences, and the majority of OSHA inspection cases are resolved this way. OSHA’s area directors have the authority to reclassify violations (e.g., downgrade from willful to serious, serious to other-than serious); withdraw or modify a citation, an item on a citation, or a penalty; and negotiate the proposed penalty. If both parties agree to the negotiated terms, the employer must then abate the hazard in the agreed upon time period; if no agreement is reached, the employer will likely choose to formally contest it through the OSHRC system and can refrain from correcting the safety problem in the meantime.
“OSHA’s area directors offer penalty reductions and reclassifications of citations (e.g., from serious to other-than-serious) in order to compel prompt correction of the hazard. From a local OSHA manager’s perspective, s/he would rather get the dangerous situation rectified so that workers at the site are protected from potential harm, rather than risk a chance that the employer will contest the citation and penalty.
“OSHA’s inspectors and local managers are truly in a difficult position because the citations and penalties are linked to hazard abatement. Compare the situation of OSHA inspectors and supervisors to that of their colleagues at the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
“Under the Mine Act, when a federal mine inspector identifies a violation of an MSHA standard or regulation, mining companies are required to begin fixing the problem immediately.
“Employers in the mining industry have the right to challenge citations and penalties before the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission (MSHRC), but an employer’s decision to litigate an inspector’s finding and/or the proposed penalty does not give him permission to let workplace hazards persist. OSHA needs comparable authority.
“The principle of prevention must be enshrined in our workplace OHS regulatory system. This means providing OSHA the authority to compel immediate abatement of hazards that are known to contribute to serious injury, illness or death. We can’t make advances in preventing harm to workers when our system forces local OSHA staff to bargain with employers for worker protections that they are already required to implement. The informal settlement process should not only expedite abatement of the hazard, but also give OSHA leverage to require employers to implement measures that go above and beyond what is required by OSHA.
“I envision a transformed OSHA penalty system that would offer a more significant deterrent effect and would provide incentives for employers to enhance their OHS systems beyond the bare-minimum OSHA requirements.
“For example, modest reductions in the penalty amount could be reserved exclusively as a negotiation tool to compel abatement of other-than-serious violations. (As noted above, immediate abatement should be required for a class of hazards known to contribute to serious injury, illness or death.) In order for an employer to secure a reclassification of a violation (e.g., from serious to other-than-serious), the firm would be required to implement a meaningful worker injury and illness prevention measure at their worksite (e.g., a worker-involved hazard identification and correction program). Likewise, if an employer sought a reclassification of a willful violation to a serious violation, the firm would be required to implement a comprehensive health and safety management system, or would be required to implement a meaningful and verifiable intervention at all of the firm’s locations.
“The pragmatist in me recognizes that making such changes to the current penalty system is likely to increase the number of citations and penalties that are contested. That’s true. In fact, MSHA staff tell me that since the agency’s penalties were increased substantially in April 2007, the contest rate has quadrupled.
“In order to temper employers’ race to the courtroom (which would be a windfall for attorneys who specialize in employer OHS defense), OSHA could capitalize on the reputation costs to firms of OHS violations, by making accessible to the public in a searchable format data on employers’ specific violations, informal settlement demands, contest history, etc. Potential employees, communities, competitors and the press should have access to employer-specific data, to make an assessment for themselves about a firm.
“Isn’t it time that we, as a nation, proclaim that certain hazardous conditions in workplaces are not tolerated? Just as drunk drivers now receive hefty legal penalties and scorn from their peers, employers should pay dearly for allowing workers inside an unshored trench, permitting unguarded floor openings, tolerating inoperable safety devices and sending workers into confined spaces without proper training and equipment.
”Congress should direct OSHA to publish a list of specific hazardous conditions or work practices that will be deemed automatic willful violations. Citations issued under this provision would not be eligible for reclassification and would remain on the company’s enforcement history record for a minimum of ten years. This congressional mandate would include a requirement for OSHA to update the “automatic willful” list biennially.
“It’s time to capitalize on the prevention potential of OSHA citations. For example, if a serious hazard or violation of a workplace standard is identified in an employer’s workplace, that company should be expected to look for this same hazard in all of its other operations, once it has been put on notice that the hazard exists. With 21st-century communication tools at their fingertips, businesses are well equipped to correct hazards and strengthen prevention programs across all of their sites.
“Congress should mandate when a serious hazard has been identified by OSHA
at one facility, the firm should be required to conduct an audit to determine whether the same hazard exists at other facilities. If comparable hazards or violations are found at another site, citations for those violations should be classified using the new category of “reckless disregard.”
“Congress should give OSHA the authority to compel abatement of hazards regardless of an employer’s decision to contest a citation and/or penalty. Moreover, reclassification of citations (e.g., from serious to other-than-serious) should be reserved for circumstances in which the employer agrees to implement an intervention that goes above and beyond mere compliance with an OSHA standard.
“OSHA should capitalize on the reputation costs to employers who violate OHS standards by making workers, competitor businesses and the public much more aware of companies’ OSHA enforcement history. This would entail offering a web-based system with data on employers’ specific violations, informal settlement demands, contest history, etc.
“Congress should direct OSHA to publish a list of specific hazardous conditions or work practices that will be deemed automatic willful violations and that will not be eligible for “Section 17” designations or other reclassification by OSHA.
“Congress should reset the current statutory minimums and maximums for OSHA civil
penalties and mandate that OSHA index them regularly to account for inflation.
“OSHA’s penalty calculation should include a specific factor that assesses the economic
benefits reaped by an employer for violating health and safety regulations, which will level the economic playing field for firms that invest in progressive, effective OHS labor-management systems.
“Congress should impose an obligation on large firms to address hazards on a company-wide basis, once they have been identified by OSHA at one of the firm’s facilities.
“A new category of violation, “reckless disregard,” should be created for employers who fail to use an OSHA citation as notice of a hazardous condition to be corrected elsewhere.
pending cases. This could be a simple electronic spreadsheet with data fields such as case
number, employer, worksite location, date of OSHA citation, status of litigation, date of final decision and the URL for the final decision text. Making this information available increases the likelihood that frequent and severe offenders will suffer deserved reputational damage.
Monforton’s ideas could be a harbinger of OSHA reform legislative proposals we’ll see in the next one or two years. And with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the odds of these kinds of proposals being enacted into law are greater than they have been for decades.
Monforton stated in her testimony: “Davitt McAteer, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, notes that employers (and individuals) generally fall into three categories. One group is the top performers: companies that strive for operational excellence. They don’t worry about OSHA inspections; they already have worker injury and illness prevention programs that are grounded in employee involvement and continuous improvement and, frankly, put OSHA’s bare-minimum regulations to shame.
“At the other end of the spectrum are the bad actors. These individuals intentionally disregard the law or are indifferent to it – they act as though the rule of law doesn’t apply to them. Unfortunately, there are employers who fall into this category. These are employers who violate the law, without care or concern for the individuals or communities potentially affected by their decisions. They flout rules designed to protect our air, water and other natural resources, defy minimum wage and overtime rules and collective bargaining rights, and ignore workplace health and safety standards. Employers in this category deserve to get the book thrown at them – not just the book, the whole book shelf.
“Our occupational health and safety (OHS) regulatory system must provide harsh penalties for employers who fall into this category. The system should require the equivalent of ‘points on their permanent record.’ Employers who flagrantly, willfully or repeatedly violate laws designed to protect workers from injuries and illnesses should see their finances and reputations suffer.
“Our system should take advantage of the times when such employers are caught, and capitalize on these grievous situations for their value as a deterrent for companies nationwide. It may not deter other bad actors, but it will catch the attention of those who might be tempted to cut a few corners when under pressure.
“The majority of employers and the majority of people in general are neither stellar performers nor bad actors. We respect laws’ aims and purposes, and we comply with them – most of the time. At times, however, competing forces color our judgment, and we break a rule because we think the likelihood of causing harm is low, as is the risk of getting caught.
“Many employers and their managers know that workplace OHS standards are based on lessons learned and have a public health and safety purpose. But, from time to time, when certain competing forces weigh on them, they make a calculation. They weigh the risk of suffering harm or causing harm to another and the likelihood of getting caught breaking the law. The deterrent effect of OSHA’s penalty system could be amplified to outweigh the influence of competing forces.
“An employer has the right to contest four aspects of the citation: (1) the classification of the violation (e.g., serious, willful); (2) the OSHA rule, standard or statutory clause affixed to the violation; (3) the abatement date; and/or (4) the proposed penalty. Instead of formally contesting one of these aspects, an employer may request to meet with the director of the local OSHA office for an informal conference before the 15-day period to file a notice of contest expires.
“The majority of employers who receive OSHA citations participate in informal conferences, and the majority of OSHA inspection cases are resolved this way. OSHA’s area directors have the authority to reclassify violations (e.g., downgrade from willful to serious, serious to other-than serious); withdraw or modify a citation, an item on a citation, or a penalty; and negotiate the proposed penalty. If both parties agree to the negotiated terms, the employer must then abate the hazard in the agreed upon time period; if no agreement is reached, the employer will likely choose to formally contest it through the OSHRC system and can refrain from correcting the safety problem in the meantime.
“OSHA’s area directors offer penalty reductions and reclassifications of citations (e.g., from serious to other-than-serious) in order to compel prompt correction of the hazard. From a local OSHA manager’s perspective, s/he would rather get the dangerous situation rectified so that workers at the site are protected from potential harm, rather than risk a chance that the employer will contest the citation and penalty.
“OSHA’s inspectors and local managers are truly in a difficult position because the citations and penalties are linked to hazard abatement. Compare the situation of OSHA inspectors and supervisors to that of their colleagues at the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
“Under the Mine Act, when a federal mine inspector identifies a violation of an MSHA standard or regulation, mining companies are required to begin fixing the problem immediately.
“Employers in the mining industry have the right to challenge citations and penalties before the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission (MSHRC), but an employer’s decision to litigate an inspector’s finding and/or the proposed penalty does not give him permission to let workplace hazards persist. OSHA needs comparable authority.
“The principle of prevention must be enshrined in our workplace OHS regulatory system. This means providing OSHA the authority to compel immediate abatement of hazards that are known to contribute to serious injury, illness or death. We can’t make advances in preventing harm to workers when our system forces local OSHA staff to bargain with employers for worker protections that they are already required to implement. The informal settlement process should not only expedite abatement of the hazard, but also give OSHA leverage to require employers to implement measures that go above and beyond what is required by OSHA.
“I envision a transformed OSHA penalty system that would offer a more significant deterrent effect and would provide incentives for employers to enhance their OHS systems beyond the bare-minimum OSHA requirements.
“For example, modest reductions in the penalty amount could be reserved exclusively as a negotiation tool to compel abatement of other-than-serious violations. (As noted above, immediate abatement should be required for a class of hazards known to contribute to serious injury, illness or death.) In order for an employer to secure a reclassification of a violation (e.g., from serious to other-than-serious), the firm would be required to implement a meaningful worker injury and illness prevention measure at their worksite (e.g., a worker-involved hazard identification and correction program). Likewise, if an employer sought a reclassification of a willful violation to a serious violation, the firm would be required to implement a comprehensive health and safety management system, or would be required to implement a meaningful and verifiable intervention at all of the firm’s locations.
“The pragmatist in me recognizes that making such changes to the current penalty system is likely to increase the number of citations and penalties that are contested. That’s true. In fact, MSHA staff tell me that since the agency’s penalties were increased substantially in April 2007, the contest rate has quadrupled.
“In order to temper employers’ race to the courtroom (which would be a windfall for attorneys who specialize in employer OHS defense), OSHA could capitalize on the reputation costs to firms of OHS violations, by making accessible to the public in a searchable format data on employers’ specific violations, informal settlement demands, contest history, etc. Potential employees, communities, competitors and the press should have access to employer-specific data, to make an assessment for themselves about a firm.
“Isn’t it time that we, as a nation, proclaim that certain hazardous conditions in workplaces are not tolerated? Just as drunk drivers now receive hefty legal penalties and scorn from their peers, employers should pay dearly for allowing workers inside an unshored trench, permitting unguarded floor openings, tolerating inoperable safety devices and sending workers into confined spaces without proper training and equipment.
”Congress should direct OSHA to publish a list of specific hazardous conditions or work practices that will be deemed automatic willful violations. Citations issued under this provision would not be eligible for reclassification and would remain on the company’s enforcement history record for a minimum of ten years. This congressional mandate would include a requirement for OSHA to update the “automatic willful” list biennially.
“It’s time to capitalize on the prevention potential of OSHA citations. For example, if a serious hazard or violation of a workplace standard is identified in an employer’s workplace, that company should be expected to look for this same hazard in all of its other operations, once it has been put on notice that the hazard exists. With 21st-century communication tools at their fingertips, businesses are well equipped to correct hazards and strengthen prevention programs across all of their sites.
“Congress should mandate when a serious hazard has been identified by OSHA
at one facility, the firm should be required to conduct an audit to determine whether the same hazard exists at other facilities. If comparable hazards or violations are found at another site, citations for those violations should be classified using the new category of “reckless disregard.”
“Congress should give OSHA the authority to compel abatement of hazards regardless of an employer’s decision to contest a citation and/or penalty. Moreover, reclassification of citations (e.g., from serious to other-than-serious) should be reserved for circumstances in which the employer agrees to implement an intervention that goes above and beyond mere compliance with an OSHA standard.
“OSHA should capitalize on the reputation costs to employers who violate OHS standards by making workers, competitor businesses and the public much more aware of companies’ OSHA enforcement history. This would entail offering a web-based system with data on employers’ specific violations, informal settlement demands, contest history, etc.
“Congress should direct OSHA to publish a list of specific hazardous conditions or work practices that will be deemed automatic willful violations and that will not be eligible for “Section 17” designations or other reclassification by OSHA.
“Congress should reset the current statutory minimums and maximums for OSHA civil
penalties and mandate that OSHA index them regularly to account for inflation.
“OSHA’s penalty calculation should include a specific factor that assesses the economic
benefits reaped by an employer for violating health and safety regulations, which will level the economic playing field for firms that invest in progressive, effective OHS labor-management systems.
“Congress should impose an obligation on large firms to address hazards on a company-wide basis, once they have been identified by OSHA at one of the firm’s facilities.
“A new category of violation, “reckless disregard,” should be created for employers who fail to use an OSHA citation as notice of a hazardous condition to be corrected elsewhere.
pending cases. This could be a simple electronic spreadsheet with data fields such as case
number, employer, worksite location, date of OSHA citation, status of litigation, date of final decision and the URL for the final decision text. Making this information available increases the likelihood that frequent and severe offenders will suffer deserved reputational damage.
AFL-CIO details 12-point plan to beef up OSHA enforcement
At a House hearing on April 28, AFL-CIO Director of Safety and Health Peg Seminario outlined a 12-plan to put real “teeth” into OSHA enforcement, as she described. With an administration and Labor Secretary sympathetic to union concerns and grievances, you can be sure Seminario’s views are echoing in the Department of Labor. Acting OSHA chief Jordan Barab’s former boss on Capitol Hill, Rep.George Miller (D-CA), sponsored the April 28 hearing and introduced legislation the previous week to beef up OSHA enforcement. Barab has been quoted in internal OSHA emails as vowing to recharge OSHA enforcement and reinvigorate the agency.
Here are Seminario’s 12 recommendations, taken word for word from her prepared testimony:
1) OSHA can and should take action under the existing law to make enforcement more effective and to enhance penalties for violations that put workers in serious danger and cause death and injury.
2) The entire OSHA penalty policy and formulas should be reviewed and revamped. The agency should use its the full statutory authority to impose meaningful penalties for serious, willful and repeat violations of the law, particularly in cases involving worker deaths.
3) OSHA should cease the practice of issuing “unclassified” violations in all enforcement cases. The Enhanced Enforcement Program (EEP) should be overhauled to actually provide for enhanced enforcement, stiffer penalties and follow-up for employers who persistently violate the law.
4) Federal OSHA should conduct an in-depth review of the enforcement and penalty policies and practices in the state plan states to determine whether they are “as effective as” the federal OSHA enforcement program, as required by law, and take action where plans are found to be deficient.
5) OSHA should greatly expand the access to and disclosure of information on employer’s enforcement records. The list of employers on OSHA’s EEP list should be posted on the web, along with reports about the employers’ violations and progress towards addressing hazards. The OSHA inspection database should be not only searchable by establishment, but also by industry, geographic area, standards violated and types of violations and linked to the data bases on exposure measurements and injury rates reported under the OSHA data initiative.
6) The Congress must also act to address the serious deficiencies in the OSH Act itself. The OSHA civil penalties should be increased – significantly. The enhanced penalties for mine safety adopted by Congress in the MINER Act in 2006 - $60,000 for serious violations and $220,000 for flagrant violations - provide a good guide.
7) There should also be a floor for penalties in fatality cases, to take into account the harm that has been done.
8) These increased penalties should be automatically adjusted for inflation, as is the case with other federal laws, so their impact is not diluted with the passage of time.
9) OSHA’s authority to issue violations and assess penalties for each instance of a violation should be made clear and unambiguous. The greater the number of workers put at risk or in danger or who have been injured or killed due to workplace violations, the greater the penalty should be.
10) Consideration should be given to adopting special provisions to address safety and health practices at the corporate level. Presently, the enforcement structure of the OSH Act is focused primarily at the establishment level, which is inadequate to change the practice and culture at the corporate level. Requirements for corporate officials to address identified violations and hazards on a corporate-wide basis would greatly enhance the Act’s effectiveness, and result in improved workplace conditions and greater protection for workers.
11) The criminal enforcement provisions of the Act must also be strengthened and expanded. At a minimum, criminal violations should be made a felony carrying a significant prison term and monetary fines, and expanded to cover cases where violations cause serious injury to workers. The law should make clear that responsible corporate officials are subject to prosecution in appropriate cases. As a matter of fundamental fairness and sound public policy, the criminal provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act should be strengthened so that violations of workplace safety laws carry at least the same potential consequences under our criminal justice system as violations of federal environmental statutes.
12) For these legislative improvements to be effectively implemented, OSHA and the Department of Labor must be given additional resources to enforce the law. The Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067), introduced last week by Rep. Miller and Rep.Woolsey with the support of others incorporates many of these needed measures.
Here are Seminario’s 12 recommendations, taken word for word from her prepared testimony:
1) OSHA can and should take action under the existing law to make enforcement more effective and to enhance penalties for violations that put workers in serious danger and cause death and injury.
2) The entire OSHA penalty policy and formulas should be reviewed and revamped. The agency should use its the full statutory authority to impose meaningful penalties for serious, willful and repeat violations of the law, particularly in cases involving worker deaths.
3) OSHA should cease the practice of issuing “unclassified” violations in all enforcement cases. The Enhanced Enforcement Program (EEP) should be overhauled to actually provide for enhanced enforcement, stiffer penalties and follow-up for employers who persistently violate the law.
4) Federal OSHA should conduct an in-depth review of the enforcement and penalty policies and practices in the state plan states to determine whether they are “as effective as” the federal OSHA enforcement program, as required by law, and take action where plans are found to be deficient.
5) OSHA should greatly expand the access to and disclosure of information on employer’s enforcement records. The list of employers on OSHA’s EEP list should be posted on the web, along with reports about the employers’ violations and progress towards addressing hazards. The OSHA inspection database should be not only searchable by establishment, but also by industry, geographic area, standards violated and types of violations and linked to the data bases on exposure measurements and injury rates reported under the OSHA data initiative.
6) The Congress must also act to address the serious deficiencies in the OSH Act itself. The OSHA civil penalties should be increased – significantly. The enhanced penalties for mine safety adopted by Congress in the MINER Act in 2006 - $60,000 for serious violations and $220,000 for flagrant violations - provide a good guide.
7) There should also be a floor for penalties in fatality cases, to take into account the harm that has been done.
8) These increased penalties should be automatically adjusted for inflation, as is the case with other federal laws, so their impact is not diluted with the passage of time.
9) OSHA’s authority to issue violations and assess penalties for each instance of a violation should be made clear and unambiguous. The greater the number of workers put at risk or in danger or who have been injured or killed due to workplace violations, the greater the penalty should be.
10) Consideration should be given to adopting special provisions to address safety and health practices at the corporate level. Presently, the enforcement structure of the OSH Act is focused primarily at the establishment level, which is inadequate to change the practice and culture at the corporate level. Requirements for corporate officials to address identified violations and hazards on a corporate-wide basis would greatly enhance the Act’s effectiveness, and result in improved workplace conditions and greater protection for workers.
11) The criminal enforcement provisions of the Act must also be strengthened and expanded. At a minimum, criminal violations should be made a felony carrying a significant prison term and monetary fines, and expanded to cover cases where violations cause serious injury to workers. The law should make clear that responsible corporate officials are subject to prosecution in appropriate cases. As a matter of fundamental fairness and sound public policy, the criminal provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act should be strengthened so that violations of workplace safety laws carry at least the same potential consequences under our criminal justice system as violations of federal environmental statutes.
12) For these legislative improvements to be effectively implemented, OSHA and the Department of Labor must be given additional resources to enforce the law. The Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067), introduced last week by Rep. Miller and Rep.Woolsey with the support of others incorporates many of these needed measures.
Heads up: Under-reporting of job injuries to grab the spotlight in 2009
With a friendly administration in the White House and Democrats in control of Congress, unions are pushing hard for changes in how the federal government researches and reports annual injury and illnesses.
States the AFL-CIO in its recently published annual state of job safety and health report: “While government statistics show that occupational injury and illness are declining, numerous studies have shown that government counts of occupational injury and illness are underestimated by as much as 69 percent. A study published in the April 2006 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that examined injury and illness reporting in Michigan has made similar findings. The study compared injuries and illnesses reported in five different data bases – the BLS Annual Survey, the OSHA Annual Survey, the Michigan Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, the Michigan Occupational Disease reports and the OSHA Integrated Management Information System.
“It found that during the years 1999, 2000 and 2001, the BLS Annual Survey, which is based upon employers’ OSHA logs, captured approximately 33 percent of injuries and 31 percent of illnesses, reported in the various data bases in the state of Michigan. A similar study published in 2008 comparing the injuries reported to state workers’ compensation systems with those reported to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Annual Survey in six states for the years 1998-2001 found similar results.
“The study, which examined reporting in Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin found that the BLS survey captured 50 to 75 percent of the injuries and illnesses that occurred, missing half to a quarter of the injuries and illnesses that occurred in these states. As with the Michigan study, more injuries and illnesses were reported to the state workers’ compensation systems than to the BLS survey.
“The BLS data underestimates the extent of workplace injuries and illnesses in the United States for a variety of reasons. First, the data exclude many categories of workers (self-employed individuals; farms with fewer than 11 employees; employers regulated by other federal safety and health laws; federal, state and local government agencies; and private household workers). This results in the exclusion of more than one in five workers from the BLS Annual Survey. In addition to the built-in exclusions, which BLS is candid about, there also is underreporting for other reasons. There are a number of factors —mostly economic—that help explain underreporting:
“1) Workers’ compensation systems create incentives for employers to underreport by increasing costs for companies that show an increase in injuries.
”2) Firms seeking government contracts may fear being denied a contract if their injury rate is too high.
“3) OSHA’s reliance on injury rates in targeting inspections and measuring performance creates a clear incentive for employers not to record injuries.
“There also are many reasons why workers may not report an injury or illness to their employer:
"1) Economic incentives can influence workers. Employer-implemented programs that offer financial rewards for individuals or departments for going a certain number of days without an injury may discourage workers from reporting. A recent report by the California State Auditor documented one such case where the use of economic incentives on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge project was identified as a likely cause of significant underreporting of injuries.
“2) Employees do not want to be labeled as accident-prone.
”3) Employers implement programs that discipline or even terminate workers when they report an injury, discouraging workers from reporting.
“4) Workers may be reluctant to apply for workers’ compensation; many others do not knowhow to use the workers’ compensation system.
“5) Foreign-born workers, whether in the country legally or not, face additional barriers to reporting. They may not know how or to whom to report the injury. They may fear being fired or harassed or being reported to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services.
The union report continues: “Under the Bush administration, officials at OSHA largely ignored the issue of underreporting, continuing to rely on employer reports of workplace injuries as evidence that policies were working, despite overwhelming evidence that this information is unreliable. Moreover, there were no efforts or initiatives to enhance enforcement on OSHA injury and illness recordkeeping requirements.
“In 2008 and 2009, the problems of underreporting of workplace injuries and illnesses were the subject of Congressional attention and action. In June 2008, the House Education and Labor Committee held an oversight hearing to explore the extent, causes and impact of injury underreporting. The Senate Labor Appropriations Subcommittee reviewed the issue during the hearing on the FY 2009 Department of Labor appropriations bill. The committee then acted to provide funding for a number of initiatives on underreporting. The final FY 2009 omnibus funding bill provided $1 million for an enhanced OSHA recordkeeping enforcement program;$1 million for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to further study problems of injury underreporting; and $250,000 for NIOSH research on underreporting.
“At the request of Senators Edward Kennedy and Patty Murray of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and Representatives George Miller and Lynn Woolsey of the House Education and Labor Committee, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is conducting an in-depth study on underreporting and employer injury recordkeeping practices. The GAO report on the results of the study is expected to be published in the fall 2009. Hopefully these initiatives will provide additional information on the extent and sources of injury and illness underreporting and lead to changes in policies and practices to address problems of injury underreporting,” concludes the report.
States the AFL-CIO in its recently published annual state of job safety and health report: “While government statistics show that occupational injury and illness are declining, numerous studies have shown that government counts of occupational injury and illness are underestimated by as much as 69 percent. A study published in the April 2006 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that examined injury and illness reporting in Michigan has made similar findings. The study compared injuries and illnesses reported in five different data bases – the BLS Annual Survey, the OSHA Annual Survey, the Michigan Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, the Michigan Occupational Disease reports and the OSHA Integrated Management Information System.
“It found that during the years 1999, 2000 and 2001, the BLS Annual Survey, which is based upon employers’ OSHA logs, captured approximately 33 percent of injuries and 31 percent of illnesses, reported in the various data bases in the state of Michigan. A similar study published in 2008 comparing the injuries reported to state workers’ compensation systems with those reported to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Annual Survey in six states for the years 1998-2001 found similar results.
“The study, which examined reporting in Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin found that the BLS survey captured 50 to 75 percent of the injuries and illnesses that occurred, missing half to a quarter of the injuries and illnesses that occurred in these states. As with the Michigan study, more injuries and illnesses were reported to the state workers’ compensation systems than to the BLS survey.
“The BLS data underestimates the extent of workplace injuries and illnesses in the United States for a variety of reasons. First, the data exclude many categories of workers (self-employed individuals; farms with fewer than 11 employees; employers regulated by other federal safety and health laws; federal, state and local government agencies; and private household workers). This results in the exclusion of more than one in five workers from the BLS Annual Survey. In addition to the built-in exclusions, which BLS is candid about, there also is underreporting for other reasons. There are a number of factors —mostly economic—that help explain underreporting:
“1) Workers’ compensation systems create incentives for employers to underreport by increasing costs for companies that show an increase in injuries.
”2) Firms seeking government contracts may fear being denied a contract if their injury rate is too high.
“3) OSHA’s reliance on injury rates in targeting inspections and measuring performance creates a clear incentive for employers not to record injuries.
“There also are many reasons why workers may not report an injury or illness to their employer:
"1) Economic incentives can influence workers. Employer-implemented programs that offer financial rewards for individuals or departments for going a certain number of days without an injury may discourage workers from reporting. A recent report by the California State Auditor documented one such case where the use of economic incentives on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge project was identified as a likely cause of significant underreporting of injuries.
“2) Employees do not want to be labeled as accident-prone.
”3) Employers implement programs that discipline or even terminate workers when they report an injury, discouraging workers from reporting.
“4) Workers may be reluctant to apply for workers’ compensation; many others do not knowhow to use the workers’ compensation system.
“5) Foreign-born workers, whether in the country legally or not, face additional barriers to reporting. They may not know how or to whom to report the injury. They may fear being fired or harassed or being reported to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services.
The union report continues: “Under the Bush administration, officials at OSHA largely ignored the issue of underreporting, continuing to rely on employer reports of workplace injuries as evidence that policies were working, despite overwhelming evidence that this information is unreliable. Moreover, there were no efforts or initiatives to enhance enforcement on OSHA injury and illness recordkeeping requirements.
“In 2008 and 2009, the problems of underreporting of workplace injuries and illnesses were the subject of Congressional attention and action. In June 2008, the House Education and Labor Committee held an oversight hearing to explore the extent, causes and impact of injury underreporting. The Senate Labor Appropriations Subcommittee reviewed the issue during the hearing on the FY 2009 Department of Labor appropriations bill. The committee then acted to provide funding for a number of initiatives on underreporting. The final FY 2009 omnibus funding bill provided $1 million for an enhanced OSHA recordkeeping enforcement program;$1 million for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to further study problems of injury underreporting; and $250,000 for NIOSH research on underreporting.
“At the request of Senators Edward Kennedy and Patty Murray of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and Representatives George Miller and Lynn Woolsey of the House Education and Labor Committee, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is conducting an in-depth study on underreporting and employer injury recordkeeping practices. The GAO report on the results of the study is expected to be published in the fall 2009. Hopefully these initiatives will provide additional information on the extent and sources of injury and illness underreporting and lead to changes in policies and practices to address problems of injury underreporting,” concludes the report.
AFL-CIO report rips Bush administration’s OSHA management
In its annual report on the state of job safety and health protections and performance, timed to be released on Workers’ Memorial Day, April 28, the AFL-CIO this year savaged the Bush administration’s handling of OSHA affairs.
“For eight years, the Bush administration failed to take action to address major safety and health problems,” according to the report. “Many OSHA and MSHA rules were withdrawn or blocked. The rules that were issued were largely in response to court challenges, congressional mandates or tragedies. New and emerging hazards were not actively addressed. Voluntary efforts were favored over strong enforcement.
“OSHA’s enforcement has remained relatively weak. The dollar amounts of both federal and state OSHA penalties are woefully inadequate, even in cases of workplace fatalities. The OSHAct’s criminal penalty provisions are also very weak and rarely utilized. OSHA funding and staffing has not kept pace with the growth in the nation’s workforce. As a result, OSHA’s ability to provide oversight has diminished with the average frequency of federal OSHA inspections now more than once every 137 years for covered workplaces.
"Congressional oversight and legislative action on job safety and health have increased
significantly with the election of Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, and are expected to remain strong with the prospects for enactment of legislative improvements now greatly enhanced.”
“When it comes to job safety enforcement and coverage, it is clear that OSHA lacks sufficient resources to protect workers adequately. A combination of too few OSHA inspectors and low penalties makes the threat of an OSHA inspection hollow for too many employers. More than8.8 million workers still are without OSHA coverage.
"OSHA’s resources remain inadequate to meet the challenge of ensuring safe working conditionsfor America’s workers. In FY 2008, there were at most 2,043 federal and state OSHA inspectors responsible for enforcing the law at approximately eight million workplaces. In FY 2008, the799 federal OSHA inspectors conducted 38,652 inspections (727 fewer than in FY 2007), and the 1,244 inspectors in state OSHA agencies combined conducted 57,720 inspections (245 more than in FY 2007).
“At the peak of federal OSHA staffing in 1980, there were 2,951 total staff and 1,469 federal OSHA inspectors (including supervisors). The ratio of OSHA inspectors per one million workers was 14.9. By 2007, there were only 948 inspectors officers, or 6.4 inspectors per million workers, the lowest level in the history of the agency.”
“For eight years, the Bush administration failed to take action to address major safety and health problems,” according to the report. “Many OSHA and MSHA rules were withdrawn or blocked. The rules that were issued were largely in response to court challenges, congressional mandates or tragedies. New and emerging hazards were not actively addressed. Voluntary efforts were favored over strong enforcement.
“OSHA’s enforcement has remained relatively weak. The dollar amounts of both federal and state OSHA penalties are woefully inadequate, even in cases of workplace fatalities. The OSHAct’s criminal penalty provisions are also very weak and rarely utilized. OSHA funding and staffing has not kept pace with the growth in the nation’s workforce. As a result, OSHA’s ability to provide oversight has diminished with the average frequency of federal OSHA inspections now more than once every 137 years for covered workplaces.
"Congressional oversight and legislative action on job safety and health have increased
significantly with the election of Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, and are expected to remain strong with the prospects for enactment of legislative improvements now greatly enhanced.”
“When it comes to job safety enforcement and coverage, it is clear that OSHA lacks sufficient resources to protect workers adequately. A combination of too few OSHA inspectors and low penalties makes the threat of an OSHA inspection hollow for too many employers. More than8.8 million workers still are without OSHA coverage.
"OSHA’s resources remain inadequate to meet the challenge of ensuring safe working conditionsfor America’s workers. In FY 2008, there were at most 2,043 federal and state OSHA inspectors responsible for enforcing the law at approximately eight million workplaces. In FY 2008, the799 federal OSHA inspectors conducted 38,652 inspections (727 fewer than in FY 2007), and the 1,244 inspectors in state OSHA agencies combined conducted 57,720 inspections (245 more than in FY 2007).
“At the peak of federal OSHA staffing in 1980, there were 2,951 total staff and 1,469 federal OSHA inspectors (including supervisors). The ratio of OSHA inspectors per one million workers was 14.9. By 2007, there were only 948 inspectors officers, or 6.4 inspectors per million workers, the lowest level in the history of the agency.”
“Perfect Storm” for OSHA reform gathers force in Washington
Brace yourself. The Occupational Safety and Health Act stands a better chance now of being seriously amended than at any time since it was first written in 1970. How so? The move by Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to the Democratic Party combined with what seems to be the probable court-confirmed victory of Al Franken to take his seat on the Democratic side of the Senate would give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, plus a majority in the House and of course a Democrat in the White House.
Make no mistake, Congress has larger national priorities than raising OSHA civil penalties and indexing penalties to inflation; setting mandatory minimum penalties for violations involving job fatalities; allowing felony prosecutions against employers who commit willful violation resulting in death or serious injury, and extending those penalties to corporate officers; bringing public sector, railroad and airline employees, and Energy Department contractors under OSHA compliance; and giving accident victims and their families greater participation in enforcement proceedings and the right to contest enforcement decisions — all provisions of the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067) introduced last week in the House, and the soon-to-be reintroduced mirror image version of the bill in the Senate.
Reform bills such as these have been introduced repeatedly in the past decades to no avail, but now a “perfect storm” of forces pushing for expanded and increased OSHA powers is brewing in Washington. For the first time since the OSH Act was written, you have an activist Democratic president, a strongly pro-union Secretary of Labor, an acting OSHA chief who for years was a union safety and health official, and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Plus, there is the pent-up demand for fundamental changes to the OSH Act that has been building for decades across a broad spectrum of unions, public health groups, grassroots job safety and health coalitions, academics, researchers, some highly visible safety and health professionals from private industry, and some of the professional societies.
You very well might not see Congressional Democrats push an OSHA reform bill to the House and Senate floors for full votes in 2009, and signed into law by President Obama. Not with the economy in crisis; energy, healthcare, education and immigration legislation big-ticket items; and numerous foreign policy issues. But it could happen in 2010 or 2011, before the politics of the next presidential election rule out controversial actions in 2012 (and anything OSHA touches is controversial).
Here is how Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) explained the forces coming together to suggest the real possibility of OSHA reform, in his opening remarks before a hearing held earlier this week by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee that Kennedy chairs:
“Twenty years ago, workplace safety advocates and families of employees killed on the
job launched Workers Memorial Day — a day of remembrance and advocacy. Since the first observance of Workers Memorial Day, however, almost 125,000 men and women have been killed on the job, an average of almost 6,000 a year. Clearly, we must do much more to protect hard-working Americans.
“In President Obama and Vice President Biden we have leaders who are committed to
worker safety. When he was on the HELP Committee, then-Senator Obama built a record of making workplace safety and health a priority. As President, he is continuing that commitment. He and Secretary Solis have stated they intend to make protecting workers on the job a top priority at the Department of Labor.
“As the Executive Branch does its part, so too must we do ours. Enacting of the
Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970 was a major step in guaranteeing the basic right of workers to be safe on the job. Since the law was signed, however, we have not substantially amended it to improve worker protections.
“We have, however, learned much in the 40 years since OSHA was enacted and it is long
past time to use this knowledge to make significant reforms. We know that many workers are left out of the Act’s protections, and expanded coverage is essential. We know that whistleblowers are indispensable in bringing safety problems to light, but they won’t come forward unless they have strong protections. A HELP Committee report last year showed that even when employers’ violations of the Act result in workers killed on the job, the employers often walk away with just a slap on the wrist. Clearly, civil and criminal penalties should be increased.
“…the OSHA process fails victims and their families. (They) have an important contribution to make after a workplace accident, but the law gives them no right to participate in OSHA procedures. All too often, the first contact by families with OSHA comes after a case is closed. By then, the citations have been written and the penalties have been assessed, frequently, the family is not sure about what actually happened to their loved one or to the employer who was responsible.
“That’s not right. Victims and their families deserve better. No one cares more about a
workplace fatality than the family of the worker who died. Yet, of all the parties involved, they are the only ones who don’t have a seat at the table.
“It’s also not good policy. Victims and their families often have valuable information
about what happened and why. They may know that workers had complained about unsafe conditions, or that certain supervisors or managers were cutting corners. When victims, families, and their representatives are left out of the process, this critical information is lost. Including victims and their families and representatives is good for them, and it also may also save the lives of other workers.
“These inadequacies in the law need to be corrected, and only Congress can do it. That’s
why we’ve introduced the Protecting America’s Workers Act in the past, and I plan to introduce it again. The principal reform in the bill will give workers and their families and representatives a seat at the table. It also includes sensible reforms to ensure that victims and their families have a right to talk to OSHA before a citation issues, to obtain copies of important documents, to be informed about their rights, and to have an opportunity to have their voices heard before OSHA accepts a settlement that lets an employer off the hook for violations.”
Make no mistake, Congress has larger national priorities than raising OSHA civil penalties and indexing penalties to inflation; setting mandatory minimum penalties for violations involving job fatalities; allowing felony prosecutions against employers who commit willful violation resulting in death or serious injury, and extending those penalties to corporate officers; bringing public sector, railroad and airline employees, and Energy Department contractors under OSHA compliance; and giving accident victims and their families greater participation in enforcement proceedings and the right to contest enforcement decisions — all provisions of the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067) introduced last week in the House, and the soon-to-be reintroduced mirror image version of the bill in the Senate.
Reform bills such as these have been introduced repeatedly in the past decades to no avail, but now a “perfect storm” of forces pushing for expanded and increased OSHA powers is brewing in Washington. For the first time since the OSH Act was written, you have an activist Democratic president, a strongly pro-union Secretary of Labor, an acting OSHA chief who for years was a union safety and health official, and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Plus, there is the pent-up demand for fundamental changes to the OSH Act that has been building for decades across a broad spectrum of unions, public health groups, grassroots job safety and health coalitions, academics, researchers, some highly visible safety and health professionals from private industry, and some of the professional societies.
You very well might not see Congressional Democrats push an OSHA reform bill to the House and Senate floors for full votes in 2009, and signed into law by President Obama. Not with the economy in crisis; energy, healthcare, education and immigration legislation big-ticket items; and numerous foreign policy issues. But it could happen in 2010 or 2011, before the politics of the next presidential election rule out controversial actions in 2012 (and anything OSHA touches is controversial).
Here is how Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) explained the forces coming together to suggest the real possibility of OSHA reform, in his opening remarks before a hearing held earlier this week by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee that Kennedy chairs:
“Twenty years ago, workplace safety advocates and families of employees killed on the
job launched Workers Memorial Day — a day of remembrance and advocacy. Since the first observance of Workers Memorial Day, however, almost 125,000 men and women have been killed on the job, an average of almost 6,000 a year. Clearly, we must do much more to protect hard-working Americans.
“In President Obama and Vice President Biden we have leaders who are committed to
worker safety. When he was on the HELP Committee, then-Senator Obama built a record of making workplace safety and health a priority. As President, he is continuing that commitment. He and Secretary Solis have stated they intend to make protecting workers on the job a top priority at the Department of Labor.
“As the Executive Branch does its part, so too must we do ours. Enacting of the
Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970 was a major step in guaranteeing the basic right of workers to be safe on the job. Since the law was signed, however, we have not substantially amended it to improve worker protections.
“We have, however, learned much in the 40 years since OSHA was enacted and it is long
past time to use this knowledge to make significant reforms. We know that many workers are left out of the Act’s protections, and expanded coverage is essential. We know that whistleblowers are indispensable in bringing safety problems to light, but they won’t come forward unless they have strong protections. A HELP Committee report last year showed that even when employers’ violations of the Act result in workers killed on the job, the employers often walk away with just a slap on the wrist. Clearly, civil and criminal penalties should be increased.
“…the OSHA process fails victims and their families. (They) have an important contribution to make after a workplace accident, but the law gives them no right to participate in OSHA procedures. All too often, the first contact by families with OSHA comes after a case is closed. By then, the citations have been written and the penalties have been assessed, frequently, the family is not sure about what actually happened to their loved one or to the employer who was responsible.
“That’s not right. Victims and their families deserve better. No one cares more about a
workplace fatality than the family of the worker who died. Yet, of all the parties involved, they are the only ones who don’t have a seat at the table.
“It’s also not good policy. Victims and their families often have valuable information
about what happened and why. They may know that workers had complained about unsafe conditions, or that certain supervisors or managers were cutting corners. When victims, families, and their representatives are left out of the process, this critical information is lost. Including victims and their families and representatives is good for them, and it also may also save the lives of other workers.
“These inadequacies in the law need to be corrected, and only Congress can do it. That’s
why we’ve introduced the Protecting America’s Workers Act in the past, and I plan to introduce it again. The principal reform in the bill will give workers and their families and representatives a seat at the table. It also includes sensible reforms to ensure that victims and their families have a right to talk to OSHA before a citation issues, to obtain copies of important documents, to be informed about their rights, and to have an opportunity to have their voices heard before OSHA accepts a settlement that lets an employer off the hook for violations.”
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