Until recently, the burden of safety was put on the worker, with urgings to be careful. Most experts now say that, in a dangerous occupation, even the most cautious operator runs too high a risk. Many bosses ignore safety problems because they see the costs of workers’ protection cutting into profits.
In Los Angeles, former District Attorney Ira Reiner gave bosses of unsafe operations a new motivation to make their places safe: he arranged for their prosecution and trial; some even were sent to prison. Twenty-four hours a day, 7 days a week, Mr. Reiner had a lawyer and an investigator standing by, ready to respond to the report of a death on the job.
“When a worker is killed, fellow workers are appalled and upset and will speak candidly to investigators immediately after the accident,” Mr. Reiner explained. “But if you wait a few days, things change. The employer talks to the other workers, who see their jobs at stake.
“By then, an entirely different attitude has set in. If there is a deliberate violation of the law, the highest company official who had guilty knowledge will be personally charged. We are now getting phone calls from lawyers at corporations, asking our advice on how to set up safety programs.”
In July 1987, California Governor George Deukmejian killed the state’s office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (CAL-OSHA). He turned inspection and regulation over to the Federal OSHA. Last November, voters restored the state’s jurisdiction to inspect private-sector workplaces.
John Lynch, who once headed Ira Reiner’s occupational crimes unit says, “I have seen a dramatic increase in fatalities since the feds took over.” The federal agency rarely refers cases for prosecution. Instead, the agency relies on “mega-fines,” penalties that can total more than $1 million.
John Pendergrass, of OSHA, says that his is a civil, not a criminal agency. “We want the employer to make the workplace safe in a timely manner,” he says. So OSHA imposes the heavy fines, which can increase as time elapses, to motivate employers to act promptly.
Joseph Kinney of the National Safe Workplace Institute says that OSHA often ends up cutting its fines by 50 percent or more, taking the bite out of them. Mr. Pendergrass says OSHA’s approach obviously works because the on-the-job death rate is dropping. This, counters Mr. Kinney, is a mirage due in part to a shift in employment – from risky manufacturing, mining, and farming jobs to jobs in the far less hazardous service industries, including retail trades, repairs, and offices.
Moreover, Mr. Kinney says, in the last 8 years, owing mainly to OSHA’s weak approach to job safety, the decline in the death rate has slowed from 2.2 percent annually to only 0.7 percent. If the reduction had continued at the old 2.2 percent rate, Mr. Kinney says, nearly 4,000 fewer deaths would have occurred in the last 4 years. Pendergrass calls this “statistical manipulation.”
The records show that OSHA issued 1,238 citations for “willful” violations (the gravest of its offense categories) in 1980 but only 523 in 1981, the first year of the Reagan Administration. Last year’s total was 1,159. In addition, OSHA cut its inspectors from 1,350 in 1980 to 1,150 in 1981.
Mr. Pendergrass says OSHA is doing better with fewer inspectors and fewer citations. But the experts we talked with say they doubt this. They also criticize him for not setting priorities to go after dangerous industries, and they say he has not established safety standards in a timely way. It takes 2 to 6 years for a regulation to get on the books. And hundreds of industrial chemicals are so new that no rules have been formulated yet to regulate their use or storage.
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GENERAL HEALTH
