Oil rig worker safety has been in the news a lot lately. Nearly every major media outlet and blogger in the entire Nation has directed its attention to arguably the worst environmental disaster in our history. As a result, the headlines and attention have been comprehensive, ranging from BP’s efforts in responding the disaster, to the safety of oil rig workers and those commissioned to help clean up the coastline.

To that end, The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing on Wednesday to discuss worker safety oversight from the oil rig to the shoreline. Pointedly, Chairman George Miller tasked the hearing with determining whether the current regulatory framework is appropriate and effective, specifically referencing the coordination and delegation of oversight between various federal agencies. Before the committee were representatives from the Coast Guard, NIOSH, the DOL, and BOE (formerly MMS).

Major Points From The Hearing:

Whistleblower Protection. Chairman Miller at one point asked whether workers on these rigs had the benefit of whistleblower protection to provide an avenue by which they could report dangerous conditions. While OSHA provides whistleblower protection, it is clear that the agencies responsible for worker safety oversight do not have a process by which such complaints can be processed. What’s even more startling is that OSHA, the agency responsible for enforcing whistleblower statutes, has no jurisdiction where many of these rigs operate. OSHA’s jurisdiction ends 3 miles outside of the coast line, where the US Coast Guard takes over, and what became clear during this hearing is that the US Coast Guard and MMS/BOE do not have legislation in place for whistleblower protection.

“Who’s In Charge?” Ranking Republican John Kline started with a question that seemed to be a topic members were confused with. At one point the Congressman compared the current system of oversight to the lack of coordination in the intelligence community immediately after 9/11. On a related issue, the Committee seemed to gloss over the fact that the Coast Guard and BOE had a memo of understanding between them, distributing inspections over specific items on board rigs. Although the organizations meet quarterly to review their inspections, I can’t help look at this as wholly inefficient. Now, this doesn’t necessarily apply to an accident response framework. Rear Admiral Kevin Cook from the Coast Guard made it clear that the Coast Guard’s Federal On Scene Coordinator was doing a tremendous job coordinating the help from all federal agencies at the accident site. Credit should be given in this regard.

Staggering Deficiencies. Committee members asked in several different ways whether the agencies before them had the necessary resources to perform their oversight functions and the resounding answer was in the negative. David Michaels, representing OSHA, was asked to expand on a comment made during a Senate hearing explained that their resources were barely sufficient to handle their present functions, let alone take on new inspections of offshore drill sites. Doug Slitor explained his agency had a total of 56 inspectors (some with purely administrative and supervisory responsibilities) in the Gulf of Mexico for 3500 site inspections every year.

Safety Systems Management. The Committee made it very clear they consider OSHA to be the experts when it comes to safety oversight, and who would disagree with them? Sure, OSHA has their own problems as Mr. Michaels pointed out, when it comes to worker safety OSHA has the framework in place to broaden their scope if need be. Of particular concern was the current system in place, which at the moment is largely voluntary. Not only voluntary, Chairman Miller also noted the framework was largely due to suggestions from the oil industry itself. It seems clear that many are not pleased with the oversight framework currently in place, and want to see changes made. The phrase “like a duck” kept jumping out as the camera swung over to Mr. Slitor’s responses. Though he remained calm, I imagine his legs were churning furiously underwater.

We don’t yet know what caused the explosion itself, and perhaps we will never truly know. But the fact remains, something went wrong aboard that oil rig leading to the deaths of 11 workers. Hearings are a good start, but when you see problems in communications and standards, it’s time to act. Committee members repeatedly stated the need to ensure an efficient and protective system before the next disaster. I sincerely hope they live up to that.

About The Author: Ravi Bakhru is a third year law student at George Washington University. He currently works as an intern for Workplace Fairness, and has an interest in pursuing employee rights law in the future. To get in touch with Ravi, you can email him at Ravi.Bakhru@gmail.com.

Amid the horrific scenes of the BP oil spill, we should not neglect the fact that 11 workers died on the rig when it exploded April 20. Nor should we neglect the daily carnage that workers suffer on the job in America.

It’s been a very bad couple of months for worker safety: Seven dead in Washington following the explosion of the Tesoro refinery.

Six dead in Connecticut in the Kleen Energy power plant explosion.

Twenty-nine dead in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch Mine disaster.

And 11 dead in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig collapse.

But behind the headlines on the latest disaster is a far quieter but equally disturbing story.

In the same week as the Massey mine disaster in West Virginia, local media outlets around the country carried dozens of stories with headlines like “Man Killed in Trench Collapse” or “Fall from Roof Fatal.” The toll of these routine incidents _14 deaths a day from injuries in America — is obscured because most occur one death at a time.

Month after month, workers die, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration slaps the employer on the wrist (a median penalty of only $3,675 per death in 2007).

Like those who died on the BP oil rig or in the Massey mine, the vast majority of deaths on the job are entirely preventable. The problem is not technical but political: Our national system for ensuring health and safety in the workplace is broken.

We know how to prevent trenches from collapsing — by using trench boxes to shore them up. We know how to prevent falls from roofs from becoming fatal — by properly using safety harnesses. We know how to prevent coal mine explosions by minimizing the buildup of coal dust and monitoring methane concentrations.

But employers routinely refuse to use these established precautions, and OSHA does not force them to.

So why aren’t our laws enforced? First, it’s a problem of resources: OSHA’s budget for enforcement is pitiful, a situation that has worsened since deregulation began in the Reagan era. In the late 1970s, OSHA had one inspector per 30,000 covered workers; today it is one per 60,000.

Second, obstacles to any new workplace safety rules, put in place by deregulation ideologues in Congress, have brought OSHA to a standstill. In the last 13 years, OSHA has issued exactly one new health standard establishing the maximum safe exposure level to a chemical, and that under the duress of a court order.

Third, OSHA’s promise that all workers have the right to speak up about unsafe or unhealthy conditions without retaliation is a cruel joke. The agency’s whistleblower protection program is totally ineffective: Non-union workers who file OSHA complaints routinely lose their jobs.

The solutions to this sorry state of affairs are not complex. Congress should boost the budget for OSHA enforcement. Plus, it should protect whistleblowers and require serious penalties for egregious violators.

Under current law, even the worst case of employer neglect can result in no more than a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum six months in jail. That’s got to change.

There is a bill sitting in Congress that would accomplish much of this. But the Protecting America’s Workers Act is stalled in committee while Congress members pound their fists and demand “something be done.” Now is the time for action, before more workers die.

Reprinted with permission by The Progressive, Inc.

About The Author: Tom O’Connor is executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

Time and time again, inspectors found that miners at the Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia were trudging through inches-deep drifts of combustible coal dust. The mining company, Massey Energy, paid the fine, stalled through endless procedural challenges or just ignored the citation all together. The bottom line was that the dust kept piling up…until disaster struck.

In late April, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration unveiled a new program to get tough on the worst offenders, the Severe Violator Enforcement Program (SVEP). Beginning in June, the SVEP will step up enforcement against employers that have shown “indifference” to the safety of their workers through “willful, repeated, or failure-to-abate violations.”

Combustible dust violations will be a high enforcement priority for SVEP, as will amputation hazards, unsafe excavation practices, and silica dust exposure.

Fines for safety violations have been increased only once in the last 40 years. Needless to say, they haven’t kept pace with inflation.

OSHA, which is part of the Department of Labor, plans to increase the costs of non-compliance. Right now, the stiffest possible penalty for a serious violation, i.e., an infraction that could kill or seriously injure someone, is just $7,000. The current maximum penalty for a willfull violation is $70,000. Under the SVEP, the average penalty for a severe infraction will rise from about $1,000 to $3,000-$4,000.

Still a pretty trivial penalty for risking someone’s life or limb, but it’s a step in the right direction.

This post originally appeared in Working In These Times on May 3, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Lindsay Beyerstein, a former InTheseTimes.com political reporter, is a freelance investigative journalist in New York City. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, Slate.com, AlterNet.org, The New York Press, The Washington Independent, RH Reality Check and other news outlets. Beyerstein writes a daily foreign affairs bulletin for the UN Foundation’s UN Dispatch website and covers healthcare for the Media Consortium. She is the winner of a 2009 Project Censored Award. She blogs at Majikthise.

A little more than a year after taking office, the Obama administration and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis have taken significant steps to repair the damage to workplace safety and health left behind after eight years of the Bush administration.

With Workers Memorial Day (April 28) approaching, this is a good time to look at the progress made since the “the new sheriff” hit town. (Click here for fact sheets, fliers, posters, stickers and other Workers Memorial Day materials.)

As Esther Kaplan writes in the Nation:

During the Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse.

For eight years under the Bush Administration, corporate officials and management representatives headed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Bush’s first MSHA head, David Lauriski, was chief safety officer at Emery Mining’s Wilberg, Utah, mine in 1984 when an explosion killed 27 coal miners. The blast,  says Kaplan, “was later attributed to numerous violations at the mine.”

The owners, it turned out, had been trying for a one-day production record…Seventeen years after the disaster, Lauriski became George W. Bush’s first mine safety chief, a perch from which he halted a dozen new safety regulations initiated under [the] Clinton [administration], advocating instead a more “collaborative” approach with industry.

Today, MSHA is headed up by Joe Main who began work in the mines when he was 19, became a local union safety committeeman, a safety inspector in the Mine Workers (UMWA) Safety and Health Department and eventually is director.

At OSHA, Bush’s last administrator, Edwin Foulke, was former partner at the notorious anti-union law firm Jackson Lewis. He so strongly opposed workplace safety and health laws The New York Times labeled him “an antiregulatory ideologue.”

Contrast Foulke with David Michaels, Obama’s choice as OSHA administrator. Michaels is an occupational safety and health expert, co-founder of the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) and epidemiologist at George Washington University.

Under Bush, OSHA and MSHA emphasized voluntary compliance programs over strong enforcement of workplace safety and health regulations. When they issued penalties, the employers often negotiated down the fines, which were negligible to begin with.

Now, both OSHA and MSHA have stepped up enforcement, assessing large penalties against employers with serious, repeated and willful violations. In October, OSHA levied the largest fine in its history-$87 million against BP Products for failing to correct the safety problems that caused a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured another 170 people at a Texas City oil refinery.

OSHA also is strengthening its enforcement program to focus more on repeated violators and to develop corporate-wide approaches to enforcement.  It’s launched a national investigation in the under reporting of injuries and employer practices that discourage workers from reporting job injuries.

During the eight-year run of the Bush administration, not only did OSHA and MSHA put the brakes on new safety and health rules laws in the pipeline when they took office, neither agency issued any new standard unless forced by the courts or Congress. OSHA is now moving forward with rules on silica, cranes and derricks, hazard communication, combustible dust and other workplace hazards.

The Bush administration presided over the repeal of the nation’s first ergonomics standard and made it so that OSHA’s hands tied to set a new ergonomics rule. But the agency now has proposed changes in the injury recordkeeping rule to reinstate a requirement, repealed by the Bush administration, for employers to identify musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) on the workplace injury log.

At MSHA, new rules to limit exposure to coal dust and silica and to address increases in lung disease among miners are top priorities. Main also told Kaplan that MSHA will identify the top risk factors  that lead to mining deaths and injuries and help educate mining companies on how to eliminate them, but not as a substitute for enforcement.

We’ll provide assistance to the mine operators who do need it, .but never as a replacement to the enforcement tools. There was some confusion about that in recent years. I’m not confused about that.

Both safety agencies suffered drastic cuts in budget and personnel (especially in inspection and personnel) under the Bush administration. The Obama administration has restored those cuts and its FY 2011 budget includes some modest increases.

Employers’ rights appeared paramount in the Bush OSHA and MSHA. Today both agencies have established programs focusing on workers’ rights, including whistleblower and anti-discrimination protections and better worker access to fatality and injury.

The Obama administration also is backing congressional efforts to improve workplace safety and health laws, including the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067 and S. 1580), which toughens penalties, expands OSHA coverage to public-sector workers, strengthens anti-discrimination protections and expands workers’ rights.

It’s likely the same corporate and Republican forces that blocked improvements in workplace safety and health will fight this legislation and each and every new safety initiative.

So this Workers Memorial Day, along with honoring workers killed and injured on the job and demanding good, safe jobs with decent wages, health and retirement security and a voice on the job, workers will continue the fight for strong new safety and health protections.

*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on March 18, 2009. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. I came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.

Organized labor and its allies are rightly alarmed over the high incidence of on-the-job accidents that have killed or maimed many thousands of workers. But they haven’t forgotten – nor should we forget – the on-the-job violence that also afflicts many thousands.

Consider this: Every year, almost two million American men and women are the victims of violent crime at their workplaces. That often forces the victims to stay off work for a week or more and costs their employers more than $60 billion a year in lost productivity.

These crimes are the tenth leading cause of all workplace injuries. They range from murder to verbal or written abuse and threatening behavior and harassment, including bullying by employers and supervisors.

Women have been particularly victimized. At least 30,000 a year are raped or otherwise sexually assaulted while on the job. The actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since it’s estimated that only about one-fourth of such crimes are reported to the police.

Estimates are that more than 900,000 of all on-the-job crimes go unreported yearly, including a large percentage of what’s thought to be some 13,000 cases annually that involve boyfriends or husbands attacking women at their workplaces.

The Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents many of the victimized workers, cites that as an example of the job violence problem that is often distorted by media coverage that “would lead us to believe that most workplace violence involves worker against worker situations.”

The union says that has focused many employers “on identifying troubled employees or disgruntled workers who might turn into violent predators at a moment’s notice. But in fact, 62 percent of all violence at worksites is caused by outsiders.”

As you might expect, those most vulnerable to the violence are workers who exchange money with the public, deliver passengers, goods or services, work alone or in small groups during late night or early morning hours in high-crime areas or wherever they have extensive contact with the public.

That includes police, security guards, water meter readers and other utility workers, telephone and cable TV installers, letter carriers, taxi drivers, flight attendants, probation officers and teachers. Convenience store clerks and other retail workers account for fully one-fifth of the victims.

The American Federation of Teachers is so concerned that it has provided each of its 1.4 million members a $100,000 life insurance policy payable if the teacher dies as the result of workplace violence.

The major violence victims also include health care and social service workers such as visiting nurses, and employees of nursing homes, psychiatric facilities and prisons. They suffer two-thirds of all physical assaults. Many of the victims regularly deal with volatile, abusive and dangerous clients, often alone because of the understaffing that’s become all too common.

It could get even worse, at least for some workers. The RWDSU warns that today’s troubled economic times create additional threats. The danger is especially great for retail workers whose stores are likely to face increased incidents of theft, some involving gun-wielding robbers.

The RWDSU and other unions have been pushing for recognition of workplace violence as an occupational as well as criminal justice issue. That would put it under the purview of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and state job safety agencies.

The federal and state agencies could then issue enforceable regulations designed to lessen the on-the-job dangers of violence, as they do for other hazardous working conditions. A few states do that already, but only for a very limited number of industries.

OSHA has issued guidelines for workers in late-night retail jobs, cab drivers and some health care workers, but the guidelines are strictly voluntary. Although the unions’ top priority is for legally binding regulations, they also are pressing employers to meanwhile voluntarily implement violence-prevention programs.

Currently, only about one-fourth of them have such programs or any guidelines at all. The RWDSU’s Health and Safety Department is offering to help the other employers develop programs.

We have federal and state standards, laws and regulations designed to protect working Americans from many of the serious on-the-job hazards they face daily. Yet we have generally failed to lay down firm guidelines for protecting workers from the workplace violence that’s one of the most dangerous hazards of all.

*This post originally appeared in Truth Out on February 11, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the author.

About the Author: Dick Meister is a former labor correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle and has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a newspaper, radio, television and online reporter, editor and commentator.

The American workplace has changed dramatically over the last two decades, and so have the inherent hazards for workers. New, bigger, more powerful equipment has come online. New chemicals and other toxic substances have come into routine use. New production and construction methods have been introduced.

Created in 1971, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, is charged with protecting workers in the workplace, empowered to adopt regulations on a range of worker-safety topics, and to enforce those regulations to the point of pursuing criminal violations of the law. In its early years, OSHA aggressively attacked the myriad safety problems in American workplaces, to great effect – fewer injuries and fewer deaths. But the war on regulation launched during the Reagan years began a steady decline in OSHA’s ambition and effectiveness, and progress preventing workplace injuries has stopped.

Today, OSHA casts an exceedingly small shadow on the American workplace. It has been starved of the resources it needs to keep up with regulatory challenges and burdened with analytical requirements by adverse court decisions and congressional action. The result is that new safety standards can take a decade or more to implement, and enforcement of existing standards is sporadic at best.

This week, the Center for Progressive Reform released “Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA,” by CPR Member Scholars Thomas McGarity, Rena Steinzor, and Sidney Shapiro, along with me. The white paper explores the reasons for OSHA’s systemic failures, and offers a series of recommendations for regulatory reform of OSHA – administrative actions the agency could implement in the absence of congressional action. They include:

• End the practice of regularly discounting penalties before they’re even proposed.
• Publish all negotiated settlement proposals for public comment.
• Conduct a rigorous analysis of what resources would be required to make the OSHA inspection program a credible threat for employers chronically out of compliance, restoring the efficacy of deterrence-based enforcement throughout the agency.
• Improve training to promote criminal referrals and work with state and local prosecutors to prompt criminal indictments in certain cases.
• Use the “general duty clause” to protect workers exposed to chemicals that lack OSHA-derived Permissible Exposure Levels. The “general duty clause” requires that employers have a general duty to protect workers from known hazards likely to cause death or serious harm.
• Seek additional resources to increase rulemaking staff.
• Reexamine the heavy risk analysis requirements OSHA imposes on itself in the wake of a Supreme Court decision several years ago.
• Avoid negotiated rulemaking, a process where stakeholders in a prospective rule meet to negotiate a standard with guidance from OSHA. The objective is to avoid litigation, but the approach simply hasn’t worked.
• Improve transparency with respect to the White House Office of Management and Budget’s interaction with the agency.

These kinds of actions would be a good start toward helping set OSHA on the path toward protecting American workers from harm on the job.

*This post originally appeared in CPR Blog on February 9, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.

About the Author: Matthew Shudtz, J.D., is a Policy Analyst working with CPR’s Clean Science and Corporate Accountability issue groups. He joined CPR in 2006 after graduating law school with a certificate in environmental law. As a staff attorney in the Environmental Law Clinic, he worked on litigation with the Environmental Integrity Project that led to a consent decree in which the Mirant Corporation agreed to comply with newer, more stringent opacity and particulate matter standards for its Chalk Point generating station, one of the largest power plants in Maryland. Mr. Shudtz’s prior experience in the public interest field also includes work for the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he was a legal intern. While at NRDC, he provided research and drafting support in FIFRA and CAA litigation, and CWA regulatory affairs. He also worked as a legal/legislative intern at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation during the 2005 Session of the Maryland General Assembly. He received his J.D. from the University of Maryland and a B.S. from Columbia University.

This is an AP story written by SAM HANANEL. I am reposting to UnionReview.com with the hope of spreading the news.

Soon after she became the nation’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis warned corporate America there was “a new sheriff in town.”

Less than a year into her tenure, that figurative badge of authority is unmistakable. Her aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules.

The changes are a departure from the policies of Solis’ predecessor, Elaine Chao. They follow through on President Barack Obama’s campaign promise to boost funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, increase enforcement and safeguard workers in dangerous industries.

Solis made a splash in October when OSHA slapped the largest fine in its history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery.

Garnering less attention, she just finished hiring 250 new investigators to protect workers from being cheated out of wage and overtime pay. She also started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate. And she is proposing new standards to protect workers from industrial dust explosions — an effort the Bush administration had long resisted.

Some business groups say they prefer a more cooperative approach between government and businesses — what the Bush administration called “compliance assistance.”

“Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the ‘gotcha’ or aggressive enforcement first approach,” said Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business’ small business legal center.

Other business leaders point out that the rate of workplace deaths and injuries actually fell to record lows in the previous administration, while the agency also helped employees collect a record amount of back pay for overtime and minimum wage violations. Chao has claimed that success was the result of cooperating with businesses to help them understand the myriad regulations.

Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, said his members “want to build upon that progress and recognize what’s working.”

But a November report from the Government Accountability Office suggested there is widespread underreporting of workplace safety issues. Investigators cited evidence that some employers pressure workers not to report illnesses and injuries and urged OSHA to be more aggressive in verifying business records.

Labor Department spokesman Jaime Zapata said the idea of helping businesses understand the rules remains an important part of the agency’s strategy, along with stepped-up enforcement. Solis plans to hire 100 new OSHA inspectors next year.

“Compliance assistance was not a creation of the last administration,” Zapata said.

The changes have drawn praise from organized labor leaders who spent millions to help get Obama elected. Solis, a former California congresswoman and daughter of immigrant parents who were both union members, is a favorite of labor unions and a longtime advocate for workers’ rights.

“We will not rest until the law is followed by every employer, and each worker is treated and compensated fairly,” Solis said last month as she described a new national public awareness campaign to make sure workers know their rights on the job.

The massive fine against BP certainly caught the public’s attention, but other businesses are also paying a steep price for violating safety rules.

Two months into the new fiscal year, OSHA has already cited six companies for “egregious” violations that carry the highest penalties. There were only four such egregious cases in all of the previous year.

Solis said her agency this year will tackle 90 new rules and regulations next year. One change would give workers more information about how their pay is computed. Another would make employers disclose whether they sought advice from anti-union labor consultants.

*This post originally appeared in The Union Review on January 2, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.

About the Author: Richard Negri is the founder of UnionReview.com and is the Online Manager for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

We’re accustomed to reading statistics from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration about workplace injuries. Every year, for instance, there are 4 million work-related injuries.

But ever wonder where OSHA gets those numbers?

According to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Labor and OSHA may not be doing enough to make sure these numbers reflect reality. For one thing, inspectors don’t always talk to the workers they’re supposed to be protecting.

OSHA gets its information about workplace accidents and injuries from employers. Employers have incentives to downplay injuries on their job sites. A high injury rate makes a company look bad. Reporting too many injuries could open the door to a lawsuit or an investigation. (See below for a new video from Brave New Foundation on the fatal effects of lax enforcement of OSHA regulations.)

Most people are honest, but realistically, there will always be a certain number of bad actors who game the system and slackers who only make a half-assed effort. The bias is toward underreporting: cheaters could be artificially driving down injury statistics or the whole country.

To help keep employers honest, OSHA audits about 250 of the 130,000 high-hazard worksites that it monitors. The auditors check to make sure that the auditee’s reports to the government square with the companies’ internal records. But those audits won’t catch employers who don’t record injuries in the first place. Maybe workers aren’t telling their bosses about incidents because they’re afraid of being penalized. Or maybe they are telling management and management isn’t writing it down.

GAO found that OSHA doesn’t routinely interview workers. This is partly because there is a two-year lag between the audit period and the time the inspectors show up. By that point, workers may not remember, or they may no longer be working at the same job.

The report recommends that OSHA routinely interview workers about safety and minimize the lag between the time an incident is reported and the time OSHA inspectors show up.

The recommendations section doesn’t specifically address what OSHA should do to make random audits more effective. All the advice is geared toward investigating incidents that have been reported. You’d think that they’d be at least as worried about employers that haven’t reported injuries.

And here’s “16 Deaths Per Day,” the new five-minute video from Brave New Foundation about the weak laws protecting U.S. workers from on-the-job injuries—and death:

*This article originally appeared in Working in These Times on November 17, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.

**For more information on workplace health and safety issues visit our Workplace Fairness resource page.

About the Author: Lindsay Beyerstein, a former InTheseTimes.com political reporter, is a freelance investigative journalist in New York City. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, Slate.com, AlterNet.org, The New York Press, The Washington Independent, RH Reality Check and other news outlets. Beyerstein writes a daily foreign affairs bulletin for the UN Foundation’s UN Dispatch website and covers healthcare for the Media Consortium. She is the winner of a 2009 Project Censored Award. She blogs at Majikthise.

The Government Accountability Office has recently released a report showing that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Voluntary Protection Program is ineffective. OSHA’s VPP, established in 1982 and expanded to over twice the number of job sites during the Bush administration, allows businesses to avoid routine OSHA inspections by, among other things, demonstrating below average injury and illness rates, and having a good health and safety program. This allows businesses that participate to voluntarily monitor employee health and safety, without much government oversight. This “hands-off” approach by OSHA was seen by many as giving too much leeway to employers, and insufficient to protect the health and safety of the workers. United States Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) even declared it a “recipe for disaster.”

Unsurprisingly, the GAO report concluded that not all participants in the VPP were maintaining the minimum safety levels required by the program, yet there was not an adequate system set up within the VPP to ensure that only qualified participants were allowed to remain in the program. First, there was no policy that requires documentation of OSHA’s follow-up actions in response to jobsite injuries or fatalities and second, there are no internal controls within the VPP that monitor jobsite injuries and fatalities to ensure that they stay below a minimum required for the program.

According to OSHA’s VPP manual, regional offices are required to review the safety and health systems of a jobsite following a serious injury or fatality. These reviews are supposed to help to protect the workers by determining if changes are needed to prevent that type of accident from happening again, or by removing the jobsite from the VPP. The problem is there is no requirement that these reviews be documented within the VPP files. Documentation would allow OSHA to maintain a check on the regional offices and ensure that appropriate actions were being taken; however, in their study, the GAO found no documentation of actions taken by VPP staff in regard to a number of jobsite fatalities. GAO’s further inquiry determined that while a small number of these sites voluntarily removed themselves from the VPP, a much larger number remained VPP participants, including a site which had three fatalities in five years and a site which received ten violations relating to a fatality, including seven serious violations. A small number of these sites never even received a complete investigation after an onsite fatality. These discoveries left the GAO to conclude that several sites, including sites that were part of the VPP’s Star program (the highest level of safety standards and least frequency of OSHA reviews), did not “successfully protect employees from fatality, injury, and illness” and yet remained in the program.

The GAO has suggested that if OSHA is going to continue with this “hands-off” approach they should, at the very minimum, establish better internal controls, which will help regional offices to ensure that only job sites that truly have exceptional health and safety procedures and records to remain participants of the VPP. The GAO found that the vast majority of jobsite reviews performed by regional OSHA offices were performed without access to past medical records of workers at that site, which is information that should have been obtained from the national office before the review. This information is required for the jobsite reviews to provide the national office with accurate jobsite injury and illness rates. The GAO also found that the OSHA’s national office took no effort to review the actions of the regional offices to ensure that only jobsites that met the minimum health and safety levels remained as participants in the VPP. As a result, the GAO found that 12 percent of jobsites had injury and illness rates that were higher than the national average for their respective industries, including a jobsite that had an injury and illness rate that was 4 times higher than the industry average. It does not take much to realize that a jobsite with an injury and illness rate 4 times higher than the industry average should not be able to forgo routine inspections by OSHA, and having jobsites such as these seems to defeat the whole purpose of the VPP. Needless to say, this “hands-off” approach has some serious shortcomings, and maybe trusting companies to maintain safe work environments is not such a good idea if the program does not have a procedure for dealing with jobsites that do not actually keep workers safe.

The final major flaw that the GAO discovered when compiling their report was that OSHA has set no performance goals for the VPP nor found ways to measure its actual effectiveness. OSHA has acknowledged they do need to set up performance goals in accordance with the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, but have claimed as evidence of the program’s effectiveness that VPP participants’ safety rate are consistently lower than the national averages. However, the GAO investigation discovered that there were discrepancies between the injury and illness rates shown in OSHA’s annual reports and the actual rates shown by the jobsites. Additionally, the GAO investigation found some workers who claimed that “the injury and illness rates requirements of the VPP are used as a tool by management to pressure workers not to report injuries and illness.” This means that OSHA’s claims about the effectiveness are not backed by any real data, and further goes to show the serious shortcomings of the VPP.

While OSHA has stated that they have accepted the GAO’s recommendations, maybe the solution is to not try and patch together this broken and faulty program. Maybe it is just not possible to trust the health and safety of America’s workforce with the employers who are encouraged to cut corners on safety procedures to save money. It seems a “hands-off” approach to worker health and safety simply may not be a viable option.

David Combiths: David Combiths is a Legal Intern with Workplace Fairness, where he writes and edits legal content relating to employee health, safety, injury and illness issues. He is currently a second year student at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC.

The H1N1 (swine flu) virus is now the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. The World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday declared the virus a Phase-6 pandemic, its highest level of warning.

The declaration means the virus has circled the globe and poses a threat to spread more rapidly among populations. So far, there have been 27,737 cases of swine flu and 141 deaths in 74 countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says there have been 13,000 cases of the flu and at least 27 deaths.

WHO classifies the reported cases as mild to moderate. But two other factors are causes for concern. About half of those who have died from the H1N1 virus were young and healthy people not normally susceptible to flu. Second, the virus continues to spread in the warm summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, a time when flu viruses normally disappear.

When the virus was found to have spread to the United States earlier this year, the CDC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommended that employers follow recently issued guidelines for protecting workers from pandemic flu, and CDC issued new interim guidelines to protect health care workers from the H1N1 infection

But studies showed that numerous states and health care facilities were not following the guidelines. Last month, the AFL-CIO and several unions urged OSHA to protect health care workers and other front-line employees by issuing a hazard alert and/or compliance directive that makes clear that exposure to the H1N1 virus poses a recognized hazard to workers and requires protective measures.  OSHA is currently evaluating the unions’ request.

In April, a report by the AFL-CIO and several unions revealed that health care workers are at risk because many of the nation’s health care facilities are not prepared to deal with a pandemic.

Don’t forget to check out the AFL-CIO’s pandemic flu site, which includes vital resources for health care workers, firefighters, educators and more. Recently added to the site are five updated fact sheets:

• Basic Facts About Pandemic Flu and the H1N1 (Swine) Flu
• Protecting Workers During Pandemic Flu
• Protecting Health Care Workers During Pandemic Flu
• Respirators: One Way to Protect Workers Against Pandemic Flu
• What the Union Can Do: Preparing the Workplace for Pandemic Flu

About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL-CIO in 1989 and has written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. He carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. He’s also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold blood plasma, and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen him at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. He was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still has the shirts, lost the hair.

This article originally appeared in the AFL-CIO Now Blog on June 12, 2009. Re-printed with permission by the author.