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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."
"...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.
"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:
No, more like if you trip and fall down perfectly normal stairs while running down them, it's not really your employer's fault just because the stairs happened to be in their office.
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.
ouch!
Hurt yourself laughing?
The NSA is probably only a few doors from OSHA <_<
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.'"
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.
Or something I know specifically that happened. When I was younger I worked as a line cook at a restaurant. One day a dishwasher was bringing plated to the line and stacked them so high, he couldn't see in front of himself as he walked. He stepped on a dolly used to move glassware to the front of the house and fell over busting most of the plates and almost severing his middle finger on his right hand completely off. It was literally hanging by a thread of flesh.
Needless to say, they were able to re-attache his finger but one of the bosses told another which I over heard that the only reason he wasn't fired and the medical challenged is because he tried to save the plates instead of dropping them to save himself. This is clearly a case of an employee intentionally not being safe which caused a serious accident. It went against the company I worked for because no one fought the claims against it. While I'm not sure I agree with the companies being able to fight accident claims of workers on the job, I'm betting a lot more of them might do so in the future if they are made public and so easily accessible.
it's more likely that shitty employers will punish employees for reporting safety concerns; in a crappy job economy, it's more likely that workers would take more risks than they would prefer because they're so afraid of losing their job and knowing how difficult it is to find another one, especially if you are unemployed.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Is this going to include medical error injuries? That's what really needs to be publicly reported.
Who is John Galt?
This is already misleading. You do not currently need to report injuries that do not result in 3 or more employees being hospitalized to OSHA.
https://www.osha.gov/recordkeeping/index.html
In the past, all you needed to do was keep records within your office of workplace injuries that do not need to be reported and post summaries once a year so employees could see them. The problem is, a guy shows up to work feeling bad and has a heart attack on the production floor. Is that a workplace injury or is that just the guy being ill? The new employee flips out and drives his car through the front of the store after his shift because a customer said he was too incompetent to take his order, and that customer was sitting in front of the window. Is this a work place injury or an illegal act? How about if it wasn't an angry employee at the end of their shift and a person who is having a heart attack or stroke while driving home from the grocery store and veers into the store front?
There is the problem. So many things are either out of the control of the employer or are an acceptable risk. Safety protocol says if you are working over 10 feet in the air, you need either a safety harness to arrest your fall or guardrails. So when your shoe lace comes untied and you fall with the guardrails breaking your arm or the safety harness jerking you hard enough to break a rib, does that count as a workplace injury and if so, how is it distinguished between one due to an unsafe work environment verses an unfortunate accident that might or might not have been worse if the safety features weren't in place?
"Not every injury is the employer's fault" Yeah, so what? Most of them are.
Do you have a source for that? Because it doesn't fit in any way with my anecdotal evidence. I am on the "safety committee" where I work. Not because my job has anything to do with safety or that I'm even management, just that every business unit needs to send a representative and I drew the IT short straw. Anyway, this means that for almost a decade now I have read the reports on every injury in our facility. This is an large factory operation with thousands of employees. I can't recall the last time an incident was our employer's "fault". The vast majority of the time people are injured because they are being stupid or lazy. Generally they refuse to wear their PPE, sometimes they remove guards from machines or just take shortcuts. One person liked to take literal shortcuts across empty pallets until they fell through the slats and twisted their ankle. A couple months ago we had a guy who didn't wear his harness or close the safety railing on a scissor lift and he fell 30 feet to the warehouse floor. Sometimes they don't care about getting hurt a little bit so they can get time off. Pretty much any time someone gets hurt it's their own damn fault. Every now and then it's no one's fault, just serendipity that nothing could have prevented. I have never seen it be a failing of the employer to provide training, safety equipment or creating any other unsafe condition.
The result will be more robots or shipping jobs overseas.
That's a good way to do it, take a specific example.
IANAL but I've talked to lawyers and OSHA inspectors.
First, workplace accidents aren't personal injury cases. They're no-fault. It's like employers make a deal with employees.
When employees are injured on the job, the employer and his mandatory insurance are responsible for paying the medical costs, the lost earnings, and if there's a permanent disability, the cost of the disability in lost earnings for the rest of his life. Fault doesn't enter into it. Even if the employee was stupid and irresponsible, the employer is responsible for covering the costs of his injury.
In return, the employer doesn't have any liability to the employee for personal injury. For example, a lawyer told me about an employment case she handled where a McDonald's employee was burned severely over a large area of his skin by grease spilling on him, the first day on the job. If that were a personal injury case, the employee would have gotten a lot of money. But because it was an employment case, he was only entitled to medical expenses and lost earnings.
So not paying his medical expenses isn't an option. It doesn't matter whether he was at fault or stupid. If he was injured on the job, the employer has to pay for it. In exchange, the employee can't sue them for personal injury.
The other issue is that when you have an injury, everybody is responsible. The employee is responsible for being stupid, but the employer is responsible for not maintaining a safe workplace, which includes training and supervising their employees. But employees don't have to pay the costs of the consequences of their unsafe actions. Employers do.
No, more like if you trip and fall down perfectly normal stairs while running down them, it's not really your employer's fault just because the stairs happened to be in their office.
No, under OSHA regulations, and under any safe workplace policies (including policies imposed by the insurance companies), the employer has an obligation to provide a safe workplace.
That includes training and supervision.
The employer has an obligation to make sure employees aren't running down stairs. Employers can fire employees who unsafely run down stairs.
But if the employer lets an employee run down stairs on his employer's time, and the employee falls and hurts himself, the employer is responsible for that injury.
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 rest of what you said is also true, but doesn't need specifically addressed. The lawsuits I am speaking of is not a general liability type of suit, it is where a company acted illegally in ignoring safety or some other regulation which resulted in the employee's injury or death. An example might be a construction worker was ordered to go on top of a pitched roof in the middle of winter with ice and snow on it without the proper safety equipment or else face termination- which resulted in his or her injury or death.
Most work place accidents are no fault and worker's comp is supposed to cover medical costs and compensate for some lost wages. But when the employer acts in an intentional or egregious conduct, you sometimes have the ability to go outside the worker's comp system. This has generally always been the case but varies from state to state insomuch as what the bar is for intentional or egregious conduct. The state may have the bar so high that it is almost impossible to be a practical remedy but those states generally fine excessively and hold employer's criminally liable for violations.
Here are a few resources that show a little more details on the potential for lawsuits. Note, these are not simple accidents, they all involve the employer doing something intentionally unsafe without regard to safety or established protocols.
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/workplace-injury-lawsuit-sue-30334.html
http://www.coleschotz.com/?t=40&an=14486&format=xml&p=5198
http://www.laffeybuccikent.com/can-an-employee-sue-an-employer-for-a-work-accident-in-pennsylvania/
And here is a couple about employers going to jail
http://www.thehortongroup.com/Insurance_Library/Tell_A_Tale__Go_to_Jail
http://safety.blr.com/workplace-safety-news/safety-administration/workplace-accidents/CalOSHA-Referral-Leads-to-Fines-Jail-Time-for-Cont/
http://www.fpcwlaw.com/blog/2013/09/workplace-fatalities-lead-to-jail-time-for-executive.shtml
Just hop over to /b/ on 4chan.
Have gnu, will travel.
Thanks, I didn't know about those.
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"
So, in the three seconds between when the employee started running and when they started falling down the stairs, it's the employer's obligation to make sure they're not running?
The only way to make sure that that doesn't happen is to have RFID tags monitoring the speed of people and a PA system that automatically announces "Employee #314159 - stop running".
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.
No, it's the employers responsibility to hire and train employees. That includes safety awareness and procedures.
If employees are unsafe, that is a reflection on the company. If there are safety incidents, that is a reflection that the company does not value safety.
That's odd, because every one of the incidents you listed (they are not accidents) was the employers fault. They may have also been the employees fault.
Here's the deal, if you have lazy employees, those who don't wear PPE, take shortcuts, etc., then what is the employer doing about it? If the answer is "nothing" or the equivalent, then the employer does not value safety. I've worked at places where those things will result in termination or significant discipline and where they won't. Guess which places care about safety?
Finally, if your workers are taking shortcuts, then that implies that your assumptions about workflow are wrong. You are making people work too fast. Or your PPE sucks. In any case, once again, the employer is at fault. The employee is making a rational choice: lack of performance will get me fired, safety violations won't.
But it really doesn't, at least in the bigger picture. If you, as a business owner, don't move into a new area, assuming that area has a reasonable chance of being profitable, somebody else will. And then you have two companies of 249 employees because your company didn't grow. At some point, the economies of scale resulting from combining into a smaller number of companies with more people far outweigh any disincentive that might appear to exist right at or near the limit, at which point you make the leap to being way above that 250 person limit, and those regulations can't create a disincentive.
In the end, it all balances out.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Our shop has a (significantly, actually) lower than industry average safety record, so I know where our company stands on safety. That;s not the point. You cannot control employees like robots. They will choose to do the wrong thing for their own reasons totally unrelated to the job requirements. All PPE sucks, for one thing. You try to require the PPE that sucks the least, but it still sucks more than not wearing it. Despite the fact that it would be a warning, I'll bet I could walk the floor right now and find someone not wearing hearing protection, of all things. No matter how much you tell them, young, healthy people don't care about safety.