OSHA Reverses Home Worker Advisory

Masloki sent it: an article on prodigy-news that says "Facing a barrage of criticism, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman today withdrew a federal interpretation letter saying that companies' normal workplace safety obligations also apply to employees who do their work at home." That's one OSHA regulatory attempt that certainly didn't last very long; we only got the word about the proposed regulation yesterday.

Comments

This is not good

[jd]

IMHO, this could be an unmitigated disaster. Effectively, businesses have been told "if you put all your employees together, in a dangerous area, we'll bust you from here to the ends of the Earth, but if you just give them some plutonium tablets and let them run home like pretty little sheep, we don't give a damn if you run them like a distributed sweat shop until they die of work-related injuries."

Implications:

• RSI is an occupational disease, caused by work malpractice. Work at home, and nobody gives a shit. Besides you and your family, who have now lost an income earner and have a seriously disabled adult to contend with, with no support from those who inflicted the injury.
• Eye-strain and other eye-related work injuries are easy enough to get with a computer, if it's badly set up, badly maintained, or badly used. But, if a boss shoves the bleeding-heart plebs on the streets and tells them to type, guess what! He doesn't have to pay a cent to get a single one of them trained to use the equiptment safely. Nor does he have to pay for anti-glare screens, or supply decent bulbs for quality lighting.
• If neither the bosses nor insurance companies have to pay for any health care relating to work at home, it suddenly becomes VERY profitable to kick everyone outside, and VERY expensive for those workers who suddenly find that medical costs ain't cheap and they're not covered.

Re:This is not good

[Wellspring]

Effectively, businesses have been told "if you put all your employees together, in a dangerous area, we'll bust you from here to the ends of the Earth, but if you just give them some plutonium tablets and let them run home like pretty little sheep, we don't give a damn if you run them like a distributed sweat shop until they die of work-related injuries."

This is a little alarmist. For one thing, most of the telecommuters I know work for small start-ups which can barely afford to put safety rails on the water cooler as is.

One of the points of working where you live is that you get to make your own environment. OSHA making that decision basically forces companies to either invade your home to shield them from litigation or not allow telecommuting.

If I put live wires hanging inches from my face, that's my choice. If my top bunk isn't wheelchair accessible, ditto. If I am not hanging "labor friendly" posters over my bed, who cares? The idea of working at home is that you aren't in a cubicle, you have control over how you live and work.

You often can't.

[morven2]

The IRS doesn't like it, and won't let you. There are rulings about this all the time.

Basically: if you treat them as if they are an employee, then they ARE an employee.

Some of the indications they look for:

* The 'contractors' actually only work for one company.
* They don't have limited term contracts, or they are constantly, automatically renewed.
* They're subject to the same employee-handbook type rules and restrictions as employees.
* No more flexibility in working hours than an employee

Re:unfortunate

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> ONE DAY after it is first proposed?

Believe it or not, OSHA doesn't use /. to propose regulations. The actual date of the "federal interpetation letter" from OSHA was Nov 15.

A trial balloon goes >>pop!

[DHartung]

This is a problem no matter how you look at it.

With the numbers of home workers now stretching into the millions, there is an urgent need to ensure that these workers are protected from injury. The problem is whose responsibility this is going to be.

With the publication of this new "interpretive letter", OSHA put thousands of companies on notice that they were now going to be responsible for workplace ergonomics/safety issues in home offices over which they have little direct control.

At the same time, millions of telecommuters, salesmen, freelancers, consultants, and others found themselves faced with the possibility that the company they now work with at arm's length will suddenly require an inspection of their home office.

Neither the companies nor the telecommuters, by and large, wanted any part of this. Companies would have been forced to either buy new equipment and expand human resources monitoring, or rescind moves toward telecommuting; workers would have been forced to let the company inspect their home, or return to the office. Very few workers consider RSI a serious problem ... until they get it. A small few might consider this a great opportunity to squeeze some new office furniture out of the company.

In a word, this regulation could have killed the telecommuting golden goose.

The good that has been done is to bring this issue to the forefront. The OSHA people are asking for input on how to implement basic regulatory requirements for the home office. This can have a happy ending; for instance, in a related situation, the IRS at first announced highly restrictive new guidelines for tax deductibility of home offices, then Congress rewrote the law so that the status quo would continue.

The outcome here is possibly/likely going to result in individual responsibility for these safety/ergonomic issues, while signing off on a legal form that absolves the employer of responsibility. Hopefully, in the process, there will also be an education campaign to ensure that these spun-off workers have some sense of how the decisions they're making will affect their future health.
----

It's too late...

[foxtrot]

OSHA won't recommend rules for telecommuters' home offices. This is good!

Unfortunately, the cat's already out of the bag. "What a neat idea", you can almost hear people thinking. "I can now get my employer to buy me a new ergonomic chair for the home office and a keyboard tray and an ergo keyboard and..." And some of these many people work for a company that laughs at the request. And one of those people will develop some form of RSI while telecommuting from home in their non-ergonomic environment.

And that bastard's gonna sue.

Soon, his company will be paying out a huge settlement, some of which will be absorbed probably by insurance, being medically related. And the insurance companies will notice. And they'll declare higher rates for companies that allow telecommuting.

I don't think it will completely kill telecommuting, but once the problem enters the realms of the beancounters, nothing is safe...

unfortunate

[MillMan]

I was really disappointed to hear this. ONE DAY after it is first proposed? Wether or not you agree with some of the specifics (the staircase example seems a bit much), something HAS to be done when 20 Million people work this way, and yes, it needs to be regulated. If we didn't have an organization like OSHA we'd be back to the 1800's where it wasn't uncommon for people to die in factories on a regular basis.

I wonder where all the pressure came from. Citizens? Or the business lobby? Given the fact that the two politicians that were quoted were Republicans, it must have been mostly from the business side. If you doubt corporate power, getting this blown away in one day should make you think otherwise.

Also:

Republican leaders had already pledged to scrutinize OSHA after Congress returns from its holiday break because of regulations the agency
proposed in November that would require employers to minimize everyday physical - or "ergonomic" - stresses of certain jobs.

What the hell is wrong with this? This is referring to proposed regulations at the company's site, not even at home. Corporations can't even tolerate these minimal expenses (when they might actually save money due to less employee time lost)? When corporate profits are at or near all time highs, why do we allow them to get away with this? Does anyone else find this to be really unfortunate?

I gave them a better idea

[Travoltus]

Since I sent them a handwritten letter I'll try to recreate some of my points here:

1) Telecommuting is a giant ergonomic plus in and of itself. The workers will automatically adjust their home environment to their liking for when they are working (and even when they're not).

2) This being true, the benefit gained by forcing employers to take on the same obligations towards telecommuting workers as they have for onsite employees, will be strongly offset by a cutback in telecommuting programs. This will have a small but negative impact on the environment, as former telecommuters go back to their full morning/nite automobile commute schedule.

3) Who is to say the telecommuter won't do something to the furniture (say, SELL it)? This opens the door for the necessity of increased monitoring and accounting of their behavior at home, which is already certain to rise to alarming levels just to keep track of their work habits. A company trying to manage a telecommuter's ergonomic safety in the home, looks to be like trying to gently set down a can of charcoal lighter fluid on burning coals. Not a good idea. (And the people who try it won't get to keep their souls. heh.)

4) For the sake of ergonomic improvements and the environment, I would suggest two revisions:
A) Publish information about ergonomic issues at home, for telecommuters. Give employers a small financial incentive to disseminate this information. Let the telecommuters make their own well informed ergonomic decisions at home.
B) Provide more incentives to companies to push more of their tasks that have telecommuting potential, into telecommuting programs. Companies that do this should be assessed tax credits that will be ledgered against environmental funds (in other words take the tax credit loss out on the eco budget because it is, after all, cutting down on pollution from automobile commutes).


I wrote this last night and threw it in the mailbox this morning. And lo and behold the situation is already resolved. Grrrrrrrrrr. Oh well!

Reaon for decision.

[Matt2000]

Its not a coincidence that this retraction comes just hours after a large number of work at home Slashdot readers started filing for damages due to Linux "research" involving the latest Playboy issue.

I don't think anyone really can know the lasting trauma of a poorly placed papercut till it happens to a sensitive area.

Hotnutz.com