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OSHA Wants To Post All Workplace Injury Reports Online
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "AP reports that federal safety regulators are proposing major changes in workplace reporting rules that would require large companies to file injury and illness reports electronically so they can be posted online and made available to the public. 'Public posting of workplace illness and injury information will nudge employers to better identify and eliminate hazards,' says OSHA head David Michaels. OSHA says the change is in line with President Barack Obama's initiative to increase public access to government data. The plan would require companies with more than 250 employees to submit the data electronically on a quarterly basis. That would cover about 38,000 American companies, says Michaels. Under current rules, employers are required to post annual summaries of injury and illness reports in a common area where they can be seen by employees. While the OSHA web site contains raw numbers about incidents at certain workplaces, it doesn't describe what the injury was or how it occurred. OSHA will hold a public meeting on the proposed rule on January 9 in Washington and is accepting public comments for 90 days, until February 6, 2014. Not everyone is enamored of the change. 'Just because you have an injury, it does not mean there was employer fault,' says Marc Freedman, executive director of labor law policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 'Reporting the injury records does not tell the full story of the company.' Some company safety professionals and researchers say they are concerned that the new proposal might unintentionally create an under-reporting problem. Companies may feel pressure to report lower injury numbers if they know they will be made public."
ouch!
"...require companies with more than 250 employees to submit..." Solution: Fire all but 250 of your employees.
If necessary, outsource any remaining work to 1 or more subcontractors, each of which has 250 employees or less.
Until your competition starts hiring moles to get injured on the job at your company and make your safety record look terrible now that it'll all be out in public.
That's the double edged sword of transparency: It can just as easily be used for evil as it can for good. (Opposite issue of all the domestic surveillance that's finally coming to light.)
'Reporting the injury records does not tell the full story of the company.'
Yeah, it may have been too expensive to actually implement safety. Is that what they mean by the "full story"?
"OSHA says the change is in line with President Barack Obama's initiative to increase public access to government data."
Or is it company data that is collected by the government?
Rather, what employer is going to hire someone who has made a claim in the past?
it looks like this:
start reporting your employees as independent contractors. Not only do you get to injur and maim people without any repercussions, but you can hire illegal immigrants and not face any of the state-by-state penalties for doing so. Wal-Mart does this routinely with its cleaning crews.
the fact is OSHA has been a toothless entity for a decade or so anyhow. states like texas and georgia barely have one, and when it enforces violations they typically become 'corrective action taken' events instead of cash out of pocket citations.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Every restaurant should have to post their inspection results on their website and in their window. They should be color-coded. That would be of immensely more public value than this
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This probably would have killed the amount of people apply for jobs at the poorly run and low paying, high turnover rate call center I worked at. Because they had a tuberculosis outbreak! Though they did fix the ventilation before the OSHA inspectors showed up to investigate. But after I left, they had another outbreak. Yeeeesh.
You do realize that names don't have to be given to still make it very easy to identify a person who is named in such a report, right?
Let's say you work at a software development company. Let's say it's a larger company, and relatively well known. At the very least, all of your family knows you work there, your friends know, and you have it on your LinkedIn or Facebook pages.
Now, being a software company, severe injuries are likely quite rare. It may be typical, if not expected, for years to go by between such incidents. Even minor incidents may only happen every five or six years.
But we digress. Back to the example scenario we were discussing earlier. So you're at work, and decide to stand on your desk to adjust a heating vent that's located just above it. While you're up there, you misstep and fall. You end up crushing your penis and testicles upon a dividing wall, then fall on the floor in agony, where you pull down a monitor onto your damaged loins.
Simply put, your genitals have been turned to jelly. The doctors do what they can to save your manhood, but it's a lost cause.
Now, your family knows that you had an injury at work, and your friends know, too. But the details never really got out. That is, until this sort of a report is released. People know that you worked at this given company, and that it had four injuries in the past decade, but only one happened within the past five years. They also know that you were off work recently due to an accident that happened there. It doesn't take much to figure out that you are the one described in the report, given the low number of incidents and the fact that you're the only one who happens to have an injury that overlaps exactly with the one described in the report. Now everyone knows you basically have no penis and scrotum any longer. That's embarrassing!
Contrary to what you're saying, the information could very well identify individuals, even if their names are not used.
While Pradeep claims he fell down the stairs, he would likely be very embarrassed if others found out he actually hurt himself while misusing a Western-style toilet out of ignorance.
If Americans do something like that, they are told how ignorant and provincial they are, maybe even how much they should have been "more multiculturally sensitive" and maybe they require modern "sensitivity training".
I say what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Companies may feel pressure to report lower injury numbers if they know they will be made public.
Yes, that is a strong possibility. That's why there should be criminal penalties levied against the person(s) responsible for reporting these accidents, from the victim's supervisor right up the chain to the CEO and board of directors with increasing penalties. Swing a few guilty CEOs and board members at the end of a rope and the rest will get the message...
'Just because you have an injury, it does not mean there was employer fault,' says Marc Freedman, executive director of labor law policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 'Reporting the injury records does not tell the full story of the company.'
This works both ways. Just because the report is made public, does not mean there was employer fault either. Rather, it allows the company to demonstrate that the injuries it did have were not its fault. Unless they were. "If you have nothing to hide..."
It's strange how Freedman's comments ("does not tell the full story of the company") basically already assumes that all injuries were the employer's fault, even as he claims otherwise. Or is this just another example of the powers that be thinking that they should have exclusive privilege to this information because they alone can process it better than the public can?
Seriously? Do you bang out these witty, racist, scatalogical comments all day in mommy's basement? I know you're hurting inside, because of the penis injury you sustained at work, but you should get out more.
These complaints are really nonsense.
"Not every injury is the employer's fault" Yeah, so what? Most of them are. And if everyone is posting the numbers, statistics say that no employer fault injuries will be comparable. So what really is the complaint here?
"Companies may feel pressure to report lower injury numbers..." If employers are suppressing injury reports, I'll bet a good sum of money they doing this regardless of any public reporting. And, news flash, this is fraud. Don't design your information disclosure programs around fraudulent actors. That's terrible strategy.
"'Reporting the injury records does not tell the full story of the company." Really. So the phrase 'Injury Records' doesn't tip off the reader to that fact? Are they concerned that their Marketing and Legal departments haven't had a full chance to scrub any semblance of actionable data out of those Injury Reports?
Is this going to include medical error injuries? That's what really needs to be publicly reported.
Who is John Galt?
The result will be more robots or shipping jobs overseas.
I've done reporting work at a state health department. In general, information was suppressed if it was to small of a population (incident population or rate population). In general, a population under 50 is considered too small to report publicly without exposing protected health information (PHI). With accident records, you population is employees. Suppressing site information may help, but it also reduces the effectiveness. It's also likely that most small businesses would never have a large enough population. Most likely, the results would need to be aggregated over a long period of time. I don't think this works under the law as it currently stands.
The company I work for started this year sending out company wide emails with the accident report whenever there's an OSHA recordable anywhere in the company, one of them went something like this:
During a training class where there was some activity where employees were given a raw egg and had to perform some task without breaking the egg (ok I forgot the specifics, it was one of those stupid things they make you do at stupid team-building classes): one employee threw his egg at another employee's back. The employee who was hit with the egg then attacked the first employee, resulting in an OSHA recordable injury to the first employee.
Just hop over to /b/ on 4chan.
Have gnu, will travel.
Like I've told every one of my employers - the number one cause of workplace deaths - "Pissed Off Past Employees"
It seems strange that this kind of data isn't already publicly available. Putting it on a website is certainly more efficient... wait, HealthCare.gov.. well, maybe it'll be more efficient, it's a different department. But what bothers me is the illness portion of it, are they talking flu or incidents of cancer? If it's the latter then they need to first publish the information about the TSA employees in Boston and possible radiation exposure due to nudeo scanners. Of course the TSA says "uh huh" and says there's no correlation. Having the raw data of TSA employees and incidents of cancers or other diseases in comparison to the general population
would help in either affirming or putting to rest that what these folks are doing is not harming their health or the health of the traveling public. I would also carry it into the various branches of the Military as well and not just look towards the private sector as being the worst offenders when in fact some of our weapon systems have been know to kill our own members of the military. So, if they're going to do it, do it across the board and don't just single out private industry..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
What about a robot hand grasping a man's penis?
Many on the job injuries happen by human carelessness not because there was any kind of safety violation by the companies who are going to have their data made public by OSHA. Probably, the only winners here will be the insurance companies who may not have what data the government is planning to release, but rest assured, they will be watching this like hawks. Its not as if it isn't already expensive enough running a small business, especially these days. Nothing ever happens like this that isn't part of some larger agenda.
The real problem with these, though, is that it creates a perverse discincentive to grown and hire more people. Friend owns medium sized medical practice, Had 41 employees, fired one and one moved out of town. Those jobs are now empty because they're too expensive to fill. Growth plan? Fuck it. Lot they own next to the existing building? Empty and for sale. There's the hidden costs that politicians don't care about because they don't cost votes.
If necessary, outsource any remaining work to 1 or more subcontractors, each of which has 250 employees or less.
That potential loophole is ridiculously easy to seal with some careful phrasing of the rules. You simply have to look at beneficial ownership and make companies have to report injuries from subcontractors. No, the proper way to deal with this is through getting the rules written in a sane manner in the first place. If information like this is made public then it needs to be done so in a manner that explains the context.
The notion of reporting workplace injuries is a good idea (in principle anyway) but there are a LOT of nuances to the issue. Many workplace injuries have nothing to do with the actual performance of work at the job. Sometimes people just trip and hurt themselves in ways they could just as easily have done in their living room and which the company could not possible prevent. Should that be something the company is held responsible for? There are a LOT of people who falsely claim to have received workplace injuries in order to get workers compensation payments. Should the company be penalized by public reporting of these false claims? What about when it is unclear whether the "injury" was real or not?
It's a complicated issue and a simply reporting requirement is both a significant administrative burden and a potential source of misleading information about the safety of a given workplace.
start reporting your employees as independent contractors.
Doesn't get you a thing. Businesses are responsible for people working on their behalf whether or not they receive a W2.
the fact is OSHA has been a toothless entity for a decade or so anyhow.
Toothless? Hardly. They might be underfunded but they can easily shut a business down on a whim. They can even lie about "findings" and fine you as a result. If OSHA visits your facility you are almost certain to be fined for something. It's virtually impossible to be perfectly compliant with every rule. In my state they even send out offers to "inspect" your place to make suggestions with the offer that if they find something they'll go easier on you. It's basically a shakedown.
Just another boneheaded move by an unconstitutional part of our government. This move will not only hurt employers but also employees as well. oh, you were injured on the job? What if it was your fault and the same thing happens here at my/this shop? Sorry but I can't hire you even if you have the proper credentials, the risk of injury would be too high and so would our insurance. This could harm businesses as they may not be able to get employees and customers with even one injury that was the fault of the employee. The more power the government is granted to take care of us from cradle to grave the more power the government gets for not only spying on us but to also eliminate any and all privacy and may also give the government powers to discriminate against certain groups of people . This is why a government that violates its own constitution cannot be trusted.
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