Rise in Construction Accidents Prompts Review of Federal Agency, OSHA

May 13, 2008

  • May 13, 2008 at 11:14 am
    lastbat says:
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    Increasing fines and penalties is all well and good. Here’s a couple more things:

    Give OSHA a bigger budget. One reason enforcement is so weak is you might have 30 inspectors to cover hundreds of thousands of workplaces in a state. Some employers go their entire corporate lives without ever seeing an OSHA inspector. If you want more workplaces inspected you need more inspectors.

    Change to performance-based standards. Currently most OSHA standards are rule-based and don’t focus on employee safety. If the employer has to worry about following the statute they aren’t worrying as much about employee safety. Make the standards performance-based and employers will have more tools available to protect employees.

    Step up promotion of the VPP program. The more worksites certfied VPP the fewer you need to inspect because they already have top-notch programs.

    But the real key is moving the focus from conforming to rule-based standards to conforming to performance-based standards.

  • May 13, 2008 at 3:55 am
    R says:
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    Increasing the fines and penalities will do little to improve worker safety. More inspecions and performance based standards will help some.

    Criminal penalities, sending the top man in the company to jail for manslaughter will get the attention of company management. When it has been done at a local level, it has gotten the attention of every other contractor in that area.

    As for the Honorable Senators and Congressman, where were they for the last many years, more than 8, watching the real dollars to OSHA/MSHA/NIOSH get cut? Stop playing election year politics with the lives of workers and step up to the plate with Congreesman Enzi. He has been trying for 10 plus years to change the way OSHA/MSHA/NIOSH work.

  • May 14, 2008 at 8:10 am
    lastbat says:
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    I’ve adopted Webster’s definition of common sense for my program – “[t]he vague, uninformed opinion . . .” and I don’t want anybody’s common sense anywhere near my safety program. I want management fully involved, I want employees fully involved and I want them to address safety as integral to whatever they are doing at the time. If employees aren’t following safe work habits they need to be gotten rid of. If management is encouraging unsafe work habits they need to be gotten rid of.

    If the system doesn’t allow safety to be ignored it won’t be ignored. Making it either physically or systematically impossible to ignore safety is the best way to ensure workers go home with everything attached.

    And if the only way to motivate management to get involved is to threaten jail time – that should be a tool in the box.

  • May 14, 2008 at 5:01 am
    Johnny says:
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    Yeah, like a subcommittee will do anything to change what’s happening out there. Sorry lastbat and R but I really don’t think your ideas will work well but they are interesting suggestions except for the jail time for company management, that’s a SUTPID idea. A lot of injury accidents really do occur due to the complete lack of common sense by the injured party. I have seen and investigated enough constrcution site accidents to confidently state that the majority of them were preventable if the injured party used common sense, asked questions to supervision and actually slowed down to do their job instead of running on the project. Don’t even get me started on how many injuries are the result of horseplay on the project…

  • June 23, 2008 at 11:00 am
    c says:
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    Although employers preach safety and train personnel regularly, injuries still occur due to employee neglect to work safely. When trained properly employees know how to work safely and should be held accountable when injured and found to be at fault. It has always been the employer who suffers the consequences when someone is hurt. I think it should be the employee that should also be penalized for the neglect on their part when the employer is doing it’s part to promote safety both in engineering and work practice measures. This would be a wakeup call to employees to work safely. The employee must be clearly at fault for this idea to work.



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