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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

It All Depends on Who You Ask

Following last week's hearing by the House Education and Labor Committee on the underreporting of workplace injuries, the committee held a hearing today entitled, Is OSHA Failing to Adequately Enforce Construction Safety Rules?

Not too surprisingly, the answer is different depending on who you ask. If you ask the brother-in-law of a worker killed in a Las Vegas accident, or the Acting Building Commissioner in New York City, or the President of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the answer to the question is pretty similar. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could be doing a lot more to save lives and prevent injuries.

Most of the questions, however, were directed to Edwin Foulke, Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA. In what has become the standard script for administration officials in testimony before congressional oversight committees, Foulke 1) talked about the progress the agency is making, 2) used a couple big numbers without providing a context in which to tell what those numbers mean, and 3) refused to answer questions about what resources the agency needs to do its job better.

No fewer than four times, committee members asked Foulke, in one way or another, if OSHA needed more resources for inspections, training, enforcement, or to get rules written to protect American workers. Foulke did not answer that question even once. His standard response was to talk about the progress OSHA is making in reducing the rates of injuries and accidents.

The irony of repeating that mantra before the committee — a committee that had, the week before, learned about the underreporting of injuries, that had just pointed out to him the soaring rates of increases in injuries among Hispanic construction workers, and that asked him to explain why the rates of fatalities in Canada and several European countries were about half the U.S. average — seemed lost on Foulke.

According to testimony at the hearing by the union representative, four construction workers die each day in the U.S., around 1,200 to 1,500 workers each year. That is 10 times the number of law enforcement officials and 10 times the number of firefighters lost each year. Let's stop asking the administration how it's doing and start documenting the uncomfortable facts about its performance. It may not change agency behavior at this late date, but at least such information can teach us how not to govern.