Workplace Safety Group Praises Dole for Revitalizing OSHA

An organization that has bitterly criticized the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for lax enforcement in past years said Saturday that it is finally seeing some promising efforts from the agency.

In its third annual Labor Day report, the Chicago-based National Safe Workplace Institute commended Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole for helping OSHA to begin recovering “from the acute political neglect that it experienced in the early 1980s,” when the agency’s budget was severely cut.

OSHA, which is responsible for enforcing federal job safety laws through fines and other sanctions, lost 25% of its budget during the Reagan Administration. The agency has been portrayed by job-safety advocates as an inappropriate victim of Reagan’s oft-proclaimed prejudice against “government interference” in the affairs of business.

Higher Death Rate

The workplace institute’s 49-page report, titled “Unmet Needs,” continued to criticize the federal government and states for weakly and arbitrarily policing hazards in factories and offices.

For example, it reported that the rate of workplace deaths in the nation in 1988--10,700, not counting workers killed in motor vehicle accidents--was four times the rate of France and West Germany and 36 times that of Sweden. The figures are based on the ratio of deaths to workers.

An OSHA spokesman said that he had received an advance copy of the report but had yet to examine it thoroughly and could not comment on its specifics.

Most of the report’s optimism was reserved for Dole, who has served as labor secretary since January and has said often that she wants to make occupational safety and health a high priority.

“So far there are indications that Dole means to keep her word,” the report said.

The report commended recent OSHA rulings including a $2.7-million fine against a New Jersey company for violating numerous federal asbestos standards; a $2-million proposed penalty against Ford Motor Co. for violating an agreement to accurately record injuries; a proposal to strictly regulate entry to confined work space areas, which are blamed for 300 deaths a year, and a proposed fine of $1.1 million against the builder of a Milwaukee tunnel in which three workers died because of alleged employer neglect.

Additional Jobs

The report also praised Dole’s decision to ask Congress for $14.9 million to add 179 OSHA compliance officer jobs. May of these slots were temporarily created in 1987 when the federal government assumed workplace safety jurisdiction in California after Gov. George Deukmejian eliminated enforcement of state work safety laws by cutting the budget. Many state job safety workers were laid off.

Last November California voters passed Proposition 97, an initiative that in effect restored state funding and allowed state job safety workers to resume their jobs in March. Dole then proposed making the extra OSHA slots permanent and reassigning the federal compliance officers who had worked in California to other OSHA regions.

Her proposal, if approved by Congress after the summer recess, would represent a 13% increase in 1,200-member federal OSHA compliance staff, the first increase since 1980, an OSHA spokesman said.

Such actions, the report said, have “given OSHA career personnel a sense of purpose, building the agency’s morale.”

Recent Decision Praised

The report was published before OSHA issued another highly praised decision Thursday requiring 631,000 factories and plants to install locks on machinery so that power is cut off during maintenance and repairs.

The regulation, which had languished in OSHA’s bureaucracy for nearly a decade, is expected to save 120 lives a year.

The new rule, which goes into effect Oct. 31, affects 39 million American workers, most of them in manufacturing and service industries.

The Labor Department estimates it will also prevent 60,000 injuries a year, 28,000 of them serious ones such as loss of limbs or crushed bones.

It will cost the affected establishments $214 million in the next year for necessary equipment and training and $135 million in subsequent years. Those costs will range from $120 for small establishments--such as a small print shop--to $28,000 for large plants with scores of machines, OSHA said.

The workplace safety institute’s executive director, Joseph Kinney, said he was surprised that the regulation was tougher in its final form than when it was proposed.

At first, the government proposed requiring employers to either install locks or place warning tags on the power source to alert workers that machinery was being worked on and was not to be activated.

But the final rule places far greater emphasis on locks, allowing tags only when an employer can prove that equipment cannot be “locked” or that its tag program is as effective as locks.

The standard applies to most machinery used in manufacturing and in service industries such as laundries. OSHA data show that packaging and wrapping equipment, printing presses and conveyors account for a high proportion of accidents caused by failing to cut off power during major maintenance and repairs.

“These guys are 180 degrees from where they were in the Reagan Administration,” Kinney said of OSHA in an interview. “I praise them for it. . . . They have moved on so many fronts.

“The change that’s most significant is that the Reagan Administration biased all its decisions in favor of the employer. . . . What we are seeing is a shift in philosophy and attitude.”

John B. Moran, who retired last year as director of the division of safety research for the federal National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, agreed with Kinney that recent developments make him “very cautiously optimistic” about federal job safety enforcement.

Moran, now an official of a labor training group, said the creation of a separate OSHA office focusing on construction safety early this year was a positive step, but that will make little difference until the agency hires more staff members who are skilled in construction standards.

Critics of OSHA say it still is plagued by a lack of data exchange that prevents one OSHA area from knowing if a local contractor in another region has a bad safety record.

The workplace safety institute’s report also criticized regional OSHA offices for often imposing low fines on construction companies in cases of on-the-job deaths that involve violation of OSHA regulations.

Of 19 area offices surveyed, OSHA’s Dallas office imposed the lowest average fine of $414 in 18 fatalities involving violations. The toughest office was Boston, where fines in 12 fatalities averaged $5,053. Los Angeles was not included in the survey.

The report also repeated past criticism of OSHA for often significantly reducing the size of a penalty after it is first imposed. In many cases penalties are reduced by more than 25%, it said. In the Los Angeles area office, penalties were reduced by an average of only 5.5%, the second-lowest of 20 area offices studied in that category.