HEALTH HORIZONS : THE WORKPLACE : Safety Risks: The Price of Productivity? : Injury rates climb as jobs are redesigned for efficiency. Pressure builds to drastically strengthen the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The byword of business is “productivity.” Do it faster, and do more with less. Assembly lines have been speeded up. Some jobs have been redesigned for efficiency so that workers perform fewer tasks but do them more frequently.
The changes have translated into day-to-day workplace practices that have resulted in higher injury rates and--gradually--public outrage over the fragile health of the American worker.
In jobs ranging from meatpacker to supermarket clerk to directory assistance operator, reports of “repetitive-motion illness” have skyrocketed. In the petrochemical industry, the increased use of cheaper “contract” labor has been blamed for a series of devastating explosions. Stress claims by workers have soared. Businesses’ payments for workers’ compensation insurance have increased similarly.
Pressure is building to drastically strengthen the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal government’s workplace safety agency.
The proposed changes would trickle down to millions of workers:
* You would have the right to refuse to follow a supervisor’s order if you thought it might expose you or your co-workers to injury.
* Your boss would be required to form a worker-management safety and health committee that would have the right to conduct inspections of your factory or office.
* Your company would be required to report any work-related accident requiring hospitalization to OSHA within 24 hours.
* OSHA would be able to fine a company up to $50,000 a day for failing to fix a workplace hazard that poses imminent danger of serious injury.
In most American workplaces, such notions currently are laughable. OSHA inspections of occupational health hazards are rare, up-to-date worker training is scattershot and employee involvement in safety issues is minimal, with the exception of the dwindling number of companies that are unionized.
Congress will consider the proposals this fall and next year in the most wide-ranging debate on workplace safety regulation in two decades.
When it was enacted in 1970, the OSHA act established the first national standards for on-the-job safety. Ever since, the act’s prime sponsor, organized labor, discouraged any congressional amendments--even those strengthening the law--because of fears that business interests and the Republican White House would find enough votes to weaken them.
This summer, however, labor and its Democratic allies decided they had enough support to take the risk.
Business lobbyists say they will strongly oppose many of the proposed changes, which not only would give OSHA far more power to punish errant companies, but also would introduce concepts of worker participation more common to the social democracies of Western Europe.
“This effort . . . would result in a far more adversarial relationship between employers and the government,” said Stephen Yohay, a Washington attorney who specialize in OSHA issues. “It seriously underestimates the value and extent of voluntary compliance.”
OSHA was best known as a whipping boy of the Reagan Administration. As a presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan frequently portrayed OSHA regulations as an example of unnecessary government interference that burdened businessmen and the health of the American economy. As president, Reagan persuaded Congress to severely chop OSHA’s budget. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget slowed the OSHA bureaucracy with policies that added years to the timetable for implementing new regulations.
As a result, OSHA has relatively little clout.
A report issued by the congressional General Accounting Office last year noted that the agency has only 800 inspectors to cover the 3.6 million companies and 55 million workers who fall under its jurisdiction.
Civil and criminal sanctions imposed by OSHA are weak: The average penalty assessed in 1988 for a “serious” violation was $261.
The government’s record-keeping is woefully incomplete: While some private estimates of annual workplace deaths--apart from those involving on-the-job traffic fatalities--are as high as 7,000, the federal government’s official estimate, based on reports from employers, counts only about 3,000 a year.
Even when OSHA identifies a workplace hazard, employers have little incentive to fix it quickly because they can administratively appeal an OSHA citation.
In addition, the GAO report noted, OSHA is overwhelmed by new workplace hazards. Chemical manufacturers alone introduce 1,000 to 3,000 new products every year.
Many OSHA inspectors told GAO investigators that workers were reluctant to report safety hazards because they fear employer reprisals.
The head of OSHA, Gerard F. Scannell, a former safety director for Johnson & Johnson who was appointed during the first months of the Bush Administration, is credited with rejuvenating the agency. Under Scannell, OSHA has imposed a series of million-dollar citations in high-visibility cases.
In late August, for example, Citgo Petroleum Corp. agreed to pay $6 million in OSHA fines to settle federal safety charges resulting from the deaths of six workers last winter in an explosion at the company’s Louisiana oil refinery. It was the largest settlement in OSHA history, and the second multimillion-dollar settlement with a petrochemical company in less than a week. Phillips 66 Co. agreed to pay a $4-million fine and implement corporate-wide changes in safety management to settle citations issued by OSHA in the wake of the 1989 explosion at a Texas chemical plant that killed 23 workers and injured 130.
The two settlements--in which both companies pledged to improve worker training--came weeks after Scannell’s boss, Labor Secretary Lynn Martin, wrote the chief executive officers of every Fortune 500 corporation urging them to conduct health and safety audits of their work forces just as they conduct financial audits.
Worker safety advocates are cheered by the Labor Department’s attitude. But they complain that OSHA is moving too slowly and lacks the legislative authority to be effective.
For example, when OSHA last year decided to address the mounting problem of repetitive-motion illness, it embarked upon a “rule-making” process so slow that it could be five years before a specific regulation requiring employers to protect their workers takes effect.
With reported cases of repetitive-motion illness having increased sevenfold between 1981 and 1989--and now accounting for half of all job-related illnesses--a greater sense of urgency is needed, critics say.
“We are moving so slowly while people are being ground up and incapacitated,” said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), who has held several hearings of a House subcommittee in recent years to pressure OSHA officials on what he considers insensitivity to workers.
In July, a coalition of 31 labor unions petitioned OSHA to issue an emergency six-month standard on repetitive-motion illness, in which employers would be required to follow specific ergonomic practices, such as inspecting tools, desks and other furniture to make sure equipment was adjusted to fit individual workers.
The day after the unions filed their petition, Democrats in Congress introduced the OSHA reform bill.
The legislation would require OSHA to respond to petitions for health and safety standards far more quickly than it does now. It would expand OSHA’s jurisdiction to federal government workers. (For example, OSHA has no power to cite the Postal Service, even though that agency has one of the nation’s most glaring repetitive-motion illness problems.)
The legislation would allow OSHA to seek criminal prosecution of employers who are suspected of “willful” violations leading to serious injuries; currently, criminal prosecution is restricted to cases of workplace death and is rarely sought by OSHA. Scannell has warned that expanding criminal penalties would weaken voluntary cooperation by businesses.
The bill also would force employers to pay fines and correct hazards of “imminent danger” immediately, rather allowing them to wait until they have exercised their right to appeal an OSHA citation.
To illustrate their frustration, OSHA critics frequently cite the death of James Lindon, a Boston Edison worker who was killed in a toxic gas explosion in a manhole in 1989.
Ten months before the incident, Lindon’s employer had been cited for five willful violations of OSHA standards after a similar explosion injured eight people.
“Had the employer been required to revise its procedures after that first incident, the explosion that killed James Lindon would probably not have occurred,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a sponsor of the OSHA reform bill. “But the current law does not require employers to correct even the most serious violations if they contest the citation. So OSHA could do nothing to ensure that workers were being protected while the citation is appealed.”
The final and potentially most important change the OSHA legislation would make would require all employers to establish a formal safety and health program, and require all companies with 11 or more workers to form health and safety committees made up of an equal number of employee and management representatives.
Business lobbyists vehemently oppose this idea, saying it interferes with what is traditionally a management prerogative.
The management-worker committees would be authorized to review employer safety programs, conduct inspections and make recommendations to the employer.
Mandatory employee involvement in company safety exists in only two states, Washington and Oregon. California earlier this year enacted legislation requiring all companies to create formal safety programs; the law suggests--but does not require--that management-employee safety committees be established.
The 1990 GAO study of OSHA noted that such employee involvement is virtually nonexistent apart from unionized companies. While OSHA’s field operations manual says the agency’s inspectors should ensure worker representatives an opportunity to participate in OSHA inspections, workers accompanied OSHA inspectors at only 4% of the nonunion work sites the agency inspected.
Backers of the reform bill say they want to shift the focus of the agency from inspections and the threat of civil fines to one in which workers and managers are encouraged to take an active role in identifying potential hazards before injuries and illnesses occur.
“Because OSHA cannot solve (workplace safety and health) problems by itself, the bill gives employers and workers a larger role,” said Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), another sponsor of the bill.
Pressure for a stronger OSHA increased in September, when 25 workers died in a fire at Imperial Food Products, a North Carolina poultry processing plant. Most of the deaths were attributed to smoke inhalation; many of the exit doors were locked. In its 11 years of operation, the plant had never been inspected by a federal or state workplace safety official.
“If just one OSHA inspector--state or federal--had made Imperial Food Products unlock just one door, this tragedy might not have happened,” said another sponsor of the OSHA legislation, Rep. William D. Ford (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
To Ford, whose father was killed in an industrial fire in 1946, incidents like the one in North Carolina epitomize a legacy of inattention to occupational safety. “By being sloppy.” he said, “we are allowing ourselves to cripple the economy.”
