Worker's Lives are Worth Less than a Burro's on Federal Land

Take a look at part of a speech that Dr. David Michaels, the administrator of OSHA, gave at the annual conference of the American Society of Safety Engineers.

"Recently a worker died while cleaning a container,” Dr. Michaels said. “I believe the employer was slapped with a $175,000 fine. But what gets me is that the same company was fined $10 million dollars for the same incident for causing pollution and negatively hurting the fish and crabs. So how do we tell the family of this worker who died that fish and crabs are worth more than his life?”

And if an employer is really bad, he continued, and “willfully ignores workplace safety rules and regs and prevention efforts and one of their employees dies on the job” that employer gets six months in jail.

By contrast, he noted, “if you harass a burro on federal land you can get a year in jail. Does that make sense?”

Now don't get me wrong, I am against animal cruelty but it's unbelievable that worker's lives are now "valued" lower than a crab's or a burro's. There are companies out there that deliberately ignore worker safety. I've said it before and I'll say it again- company OSHA citations have to be increased. Despite inflation, OSHA citations have only increased ONCE in 40 years. Fines are so minuscule that companies would rather pay OSHA fines than actually implement a safety program and equipment.

Let's take a look at other agency fines and compare it to OSHA fines.
-Department of Agriculture is authorized to impose a fine of up to $130,000 on milk processors for willful violations of the Fluid Milk Promotion Act, which include refusal to pay fees and assessments to help advertise and research fluid milk products.
-The Federal Communications Commission can fine a TV or radio station up to $325,000 for indecent content.
-The Environmental Protection Agency can impose a penalty of $270,000 for violations of the Clean Air Act and a penalty of $1 million for attempting to tamper with a public water system.

The maximum civil penalty OSHA may impose when a hard-working man or woman is killed on the job — even when the death is caused by a willful violation of an OSHA requirement — is $70,000.

Worker deaths should be treated the same as any other felony. Some argue that management should have to face jail time for worker deaths that resulted from a serious violation. An OSHA violation is serious if death or serious physical harm can result from a hazard an employer knew or should have known exists.

Another flaw of the system is that criminal penalties are only considered misdemeanors. Misdemeanor cases tend to receive less attention than felony cases. Prosecutors often regard these cases as a poor use of scarce time and resources (osha.gov). "Since passage of the OSH Act in 1970 fewer than 100 cases have been prosecuted while more than 300,000 workers have died from on-the-job injuries (osha.gov)."

It's critical for the OSH act to be revised and updated to modern times. Hundreds, if not thousands, of workers risk their lives everyday working in unsafe environments just so they can feed their families and pay their bills. Media coverage on this subject tends to increase when a major tragic accident such as the Horizon oil leak occurs when 11 men lost their lives. As time passes the media attention decreases until the subject is rarely brought up or forgotten altogether. This subject needs to be in the media light constantly until changes are made and workers can go home safely at the end of each workday.

Sources:
osha.gov