Interest group decries OSHA's reinvention

A public interest group is charging that the Clinton administration's reinvention of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has left Americans less safe in the workplace.

Public Citizen, a liberal public interest group based in Washington, has released a new study finding OSHA is hurting worker safety by reducing the number of hard-nosed inspections it conducts.

"Every year the Clinton administration has been in office, inspections have been lower than in any year during any prior administration" since OSHA was created in 1971, Public Citizen said in its report. "It is time to admit that this policy has been a failure that has left workers unprotected in their workplaces."

The number of inspections OSHA completes has steadily declined since 1975, but saw its most drastic decline from 1994 to 1995, when inspections dropped by 35 percent as the Clinton administration implemented its reinvention program. The number of OSHA inspections per year has risen since then, but is still 22 percent lower than when Clinton took office.

The number of citations OSHA issued for serious violations of federal workplace safety laws dropped 51 percent from 1994 to 1995. OSHA fines also fell from $116 million in 1994 to $61 million in 1995. In both cases, the numbers have risen since 1995 but are still below pre-Clinton administration levels.

OSHA chief Charles N. Jeffress, in a written statement, said the agency is targeting inspections at work sites with high injury rates, while focusing time and money on education and compliance assistance for other sites.

"America's workplaces have never been safer," Jeffress said. "The economy is booming, yet job-related injury, illness and fatality rates are all down significantly. The measure of OSHA's success is not told through inspection numbers or flawed research. The real measure is in making the workplace more safe and healthful."

Public Citizen conceded that workplace illness and injuries are on the decline. The fatal occupational injury rate in 1998 was 4.5 per 100,000 workers, compared to 5.3 per 100,000 in 1992. The rate of non-fatal injuries and illnesses among U.S. workers has declined from 8.9 per 100 full-time workers in 1992 to 7.1 per 100 full-time workers in 1997.

But Peter Lurie, a medical researcher and author of the Public Citizen report, said workplace injuries and illness have been on the decline for a long time, so the Clinton administration's reinvention team shouldn't take credit for the decrease. Lurie said the workplace itself has changed over the years, with people moving into new jobs that pose different dangers than the ones to which American workers were traditionally exposed.

"The Clinton administration has claimed to be focusing its inspections more appropriately. But what they've actually done is just decrease inspections," Lurie said.

Jeffress said inspections have been replaced with consultation visits. Over the past five years, OSHA has sent its experts on 127,000 such visits, helping employers identify and correct almost 1 million workplace hazards, Jeffress said.

Public Citizen also questioned the reliability of OSHA's statistics, noting that workplace injury and illness rates are self-reported by employers. It's also difficult to track chronic workplace health hazards that surface years after workers have been exposed to them, Public Citizen said.

The public interest group is not the first organization to attack the OSHA reinvention effort. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents employers, has successfully challenged OSHA's Cooperative Compliance Program in federal court. The program would have reduced a workplace's chances for an OSHA inspection in return for a promise to adhere to rigorous safety standards. But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the Chamber of Commerce in April, ruling that OSHA did not involve stakeholders in developing the program.