https://www.vox.com/2020/8/18/21366388/osha-worker-safety-trump
By Joe Yerardi and Alexia Fernández Campbell Aug 18, 2020, 5:05am EDT
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Knowles’s accident was one of 3,203 that led to a death or “catastrophe” — defined by the US Department of Labor as hospitalizations of three or more workers — and triggered an investigation by safety inspectors at the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the first three and a half years of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to the agency’s enforcement data.
In 2019, OSHA’s safety inspectors conducted 962 investigations into fatal or catastrophic workplace incidents — the highest number since the agency began publishing the data in 2011.
As these incidents mount, however, the Trump administration has scaled back OSHA inspections, which research has shown to lower injury rates. The agency conducted slightly fewer safety inspections during the first three years of Trump’s presidency than during a comparable period at the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, even though the labor force grew by 16 percent, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of the agency’s inspection data.
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Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, OSHA has been cutting back even more, conducting only 5,127 inspections since March 13, when Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency. That’s a drop of about two-thirds compared to the same period last year.
The slowdown in inspections could prove dangerous for millions of workers: A Public Integrity analysis shows the vast majority of deaths and catastrophes have occurred at workplaces that weren’t inspected by OSHA.
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The department also has been slow to hire and replace inspectors at OSHA; their number fell from 952 in 2016 to 862 in January, the lowest number of inspectors in the agency’s history, according to the National Employment Law Project.
Staffing has since gone down to 761 inspectors, according to the Labor Department.
Debbie Berkowitz, who served as an OSHA policy adviser under Obama, said the administration is “starving” the agency of the staff it needs to keep workers safe.
“This will have lasting consequences,” said Berkowitz, now NELP’s director of safety and health. “It’s undermining the effectiveness of the agency.”
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But Congress hasn’t cut OSHA’s enforcement budget; instead, it has given the agency slightly more funding than the administration has asked for. It earmarked $576.8 million for fiscal year 2020 — $19.3 million more than requested.
Former OSHA officials say the decrease in inspectors has more to do with the federal hiring freeze imposed during Trump’s first year in the office. Dozens of inspectors left their jobs in the months following his inauguration, and the Labor Department has been slow to replace them.
OSHA “has done a poor job filling the vacancies,” said Rebecca Reindel, safety and health director for the AFL-CIO labor federation.
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Research shows that OSHA inspections have a significant impact on safety. In 2012, for example, researchers at Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley found that companies subject to the agency’s random inspections showed a 9.4 percent decrease in injury rates compared with uninspected ones. They also found no evidence of any added cost to inspected companies from complying with regulations.
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