Tom Andel

OSHA mounts a defense
June 25, 2008

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) hasn’t been getting favorable media coverage lately—at least from the Wall Street Journal. An article appeared last week stating that many workplace injuries go uncounted. It cited a professor of medicine at Michigan State who noted that reported injuries have declined over the years while fatalities have not. Other sources say employees are encouraged not to report injuries.

An OSHA spokesperson told WSJ she disagrees that OSHA depends on employers to supply injury information, saying OSHA conducts 250 record-keeping audits of employers each year, and 90% of these accurately recorded injuries and illnesses.

Edwin G. Foulke, Jr., assistant secretary of OSHA, spoke before the Committee on Education and Labor in the U.S. House of Representatives this week and mounted an even stronger defense.

“Since 2001, as part of its strong enforcement program, OSHA proposed more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in penalties for safety and health violations and made 64 criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, which represents more than 30 percent of all criminal referrals in the history of OSHA and more than any previous Administration,” he said. “In Fiscal Year (FY) 2008, of the almost 57,000 violations issued so far, 80 percent have been categorized as serious, willful, repeat or failure-to-abate, the highest percentage ever recorded by the agency. We are also effectively targeting our inspections.”

He said 78 percent of the construction worksites OSHA inspected had violations, but because OSHA is so effective, injuries, illnesses and fatalities are at the lowest levels in the nation’s history.

I have sources at worksites too. One of mine, Consultant Geoffrey Sisko, senior vice president at Gross & Associates, told me that while he hasn’t been around projects with serious injuries, he believes operators sometimes work hard at putting themselves at risk.  One incident he told me about involved an operator on an order picker.  These operators must wear restraints. Some think tethering themselves is more trouble than it’s worth. This particular operator, knowing his supervisors looked up occasionally to check, would put his tether hook in his back pocket so it looked like it was attached.

OSHA won’t find out about this guy until he becomes a statistic. But first he has to become his company’s statistic. Is OSHA more likely to find out about him if he winds up in the fatality column?

What’s your experience with OSHA?

Posted by Tom Andel on June 25, 2008 | Comments (1)