December 22, 2003
NY Times Article On Jobsite Deaths I always thought that OSHA was a joke. This article just confirms my suspicions.
Over a span of two decades, from 1982 to 2002, OSHA investigated 1,242 of these horror stories — instances in which the agency itself concluded that workers had died because of their employer's "willful" safety violations. Yet in 93 percent of those cases, OSHA declined to seek prosecution, an eight-month examination of workplace deaths by The New York Times has found.
What is more, having avoided prosecution once, at least 70 employers willfully violated safety laws again, resulting in scores of additional deaths. Even these repeat violators were rarely prosecuted.
OSHA's reluctance to seek prosecution, The Times found, persisted even when employers had been cited before for the very same safety violation. It persisted even when the violations caused multiple deaths, or when the victims were teenagers. And it persisted even where reviews by administrative judges found abundant proof of willful wrongdoing.
Behind that reluctance, current and former OSHA officials say, is a bureaucracy that works at every level to thwart criminal referrals. They described a bureaucracy that fails to reward, and sometimes penalizes, those who push too hard for prosecution, where aggressive enforcement is suffocated by endless layers of review, where victims' families are frozen out but companies adeptly work the rules in their favor.
"A simple lack of guts and political will," said John T. Phillips, a former regional OSHA administrator in Kansas City and Boston. "You try to reason why something is criminal, and it never flies."
Excellent post Sullivan!
It scares me how huge bureaucratic systems can turn against those who were supposed to be served by it so easily, and often do.
Let me say now that my only exprerience with OSHA rules really pissed me off. I wanted a lamp in my cube since I was reading really small print gov't regulations and I'd gone through the "over 40" vision change which means that lack of good light gives you headaches. Our facilities folks came in with a light meter and told me that I couldn't have extra light since OSHA said I had enough.
I only bring this up because employers seem to hate OSHA regulations so much, and yet, they rely on their rules to enforce whatever standards they've set up, without regard for specific circumstances.
But, I never thought that negligent causing deaths of workers could be a misdemeanor. Or, that OSHA would not even prosecute those cases which were egregious. Assuming this story is accurate, this is so shameful. And shocking.
This a great series. Much as it pains me to say it (the Times gets way more than their fair share of awards), it deserves a Pulitzer. Oh, and great post too!
Path's story is somewhat disturbing. Were the facilities people troubled by the extra cost on their electric bill for the lamp? What if Path brought in a lamp? Would they have stopped him because it was exeeding the OSHA standard?
No, they never discussed cost. The facilities managers had spent a lot of time and money designing the interior of our new headquarters and they pretty much wanted the cubicles to have no personal decoration, so that their handiwork would stand out. Also, they seemed to take requests like mine as personal criticism. The people were there to serve the workplace, not vice versa, from their point of view.
Some months later, the company lawyers, who were having the same problem reading the fine print as I was, went over facilities' heads and got lamps. I rode in on their coat tails.
Their high-tech design also included overhead lights that were controlled by motion sensors. The sensors were directed at the passageways between cube rows. If you were working late or weekends, the overhead lights would go out every half hour or so, so you'd have to go out of your cube and flail your arms about till the lights in your area turned back on. Spooky times!
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