Hit The Road, Jordan: OSHA’s New Head Brings Thuggishness to the Labor Department

by Charles C. Johnson

Many of my friends are currently unemployed or underemployed. They graduated from Claremont McKenna, one of the finest colleges in America, but have found it tough to get jobs.

But one alum from our college, Jordan Barab, CMC ‘75, is making it tougher still in his capacity as acting head of the Office Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Great Depression Unemployment Line

But with Barab, we have the opportunity to not only examine the implication of his appointment but also surmise what he will do and what he has already one in office by carefully considering his and OSHA’s history.

During the past eight years, Barab spent his time excoriating the Bush administration’s laissez faire labor policies from his blog, Confined Space. Left unexamined, of course, is whether those same labor policies account for us having one of the lowest unemployment levels in U.S. history during the Bush years.

Among other things, Barab argued that the Bush administration was refusing to enforce OSHA regulations and statutes that allegedly would have helped workplace safety. He published scary (and utterly unfounded) statistics pushed by organized labor:

More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices.

Assuming that the figure is accurate, which it is probably not, there are many questions that just this paragraph leaves unanswered such as whether this figure is high or low relative to all time standards, and whether or not OSHA regulations have any effect, positive or negative, in decreasing workplace accidents. In fact, as the U.S. moves from an agricultural to industrial to knowledge based economy, the number of deaths have been declining every single year.

fatality

Like the minimum wage laws that lead to unemployment for lower level workers, the outcome of all these OSHA regulations is to drive up the cost of hiring workers, a policy which gives more power to the union members that have already been hired or to workers with seniority. If companies are mandated to spend millions to improve the workplace environment, they’ll be less likely to hire the workforce they need.

People often price their lives very differently and are willing to work dangerous, humiliating jobs in exchange for a certain level of pay. Shouldn’t they be allowed to make choices about what they deem precious and valuable? (Just ask illegal immigrants or anyone who has ever worked a job from Craigslist.)

Barab is critical of the “president’s cronies” in his final blog post – a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, given that Barab worked for one of the more radical unions in the country, the AFL-CIO.  He decries the Bush Administration and the Republican congress’s efforts to repeal a costly, hastily imposed Clinton-era regulation on ergonomics that would have forced employers to cover the cost of employees’ carpal tunnel syndrome. (Just how do you tell if the secretary got her stiff hand from working on the job or surfing the internet at home?) The costs were estimated by some to be as high as $100 billion and earned the dishonor of being what U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO, Tom J. Donahue, called, “the most costly, burdensome, and far-reaching government regulation in U.S. history.” Even unions estimated that the cost of compliance would be in excess of $8 billion.

Don’t expect Barab to be persuaded that OSHA is a waste of money and beholden to the unions he formerly worked for. Barab, in the days since he became acting OSHA head, has promised that “OSHA is back.”

Back from where? And just what kind of OSHA can we expect from Barab? Here it is instructive to look at his record, but before we do that, it’s worth pointing out his Facebook (publicly accessible from here) where he lists himself as a fan of the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act” (card check) and George Orwell. (I guess that I read 1984 as a warning and that he read it as an instruction manual.) Even the left-leaning, former presidential candidate, George McGovern has come out against card check, an effort to eliminate the secret ballot from America’s workplaces.

Either Barab hasn’t looked into the actual track record of OSHA — or worse, he just doesn’t care. Had he, he would see OSHA’s record of utter and abysmal failure which he should have recognized when he served as special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA until 2001.

After spending two years on a request from an employer about complying with OSHA from a home office — now that’s speedy regulation! — OSHA finally responded and told the employer community that OSHA standards applied to those working at home as well as those working at the office. Public outcry forced them to reconsider, but that was after employers wasted an estimated $1000 dollars per home getting them up to OSHA standards and after it took OSHA two years to respond. All of this stopped more flexible work arrangements by forcing employers and employees to bear the cost of a stupid regulation. Many of those who were adversely affected were women, who wanted to stay at home with their kids and still have a career from their home office.

Not egregious enough for you? Let’s look at what happened in 2000, when Barab was also working for OSHA. Many college students will go on to work in the for-profit sector and like me, have aspirations of working on your own start up. At first, many of your employees will be paid hourly wages if they work on a new firm, that is, of course, until you all make serious bank when the company goes public, thanks to your diligence and hard work. But thanks to OSHA’s unclear and silly regulations in 2000 which mandated that stock options be included in overtime pay, many firms just turned around and refused to award stock options to their hourly employees. It was simply too complex and not worth the legal hassle. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to argue that some of the early programmers who were denied those stock options might not have been too incentivized to work their hardest on the new firms that had hired them. In the freelance economy of Silicon Valley, this couldn’t have been good for start ups looking for people to move through their ranks.

Of course, OSHA, being a government entity, doesn’t regulate one of the most unsafe workplace environments in the entire federal government, the totally wasteful U.S. Postal service, which according to Reason Magazine, “accounted for 29 percent of all federal agency workers’ compensation claims in fiscal 1994. In the same year, it paid out over $521 million in workers’ comp, death benefits, and medical expenses.” Putting it simply, we’re not only paying for the 750,000 employees of the Postal service’s generous government benefits and subsidizing the whole government-run business, we’re ignoring the very real human costs that it puts on the workers out there who would undoubtedly be safer in competitive firms that had to compete on safety, wages, etc. for the best workers.

Now to be fair, Mr. Barab wasn’t around in 1994, but that policy is still in effect. Will he change it? I doubt it. To his credit, Barab was critical of the lavish display of attention when the shuttle Columbia exploded, decrying the double standard between the attention spent on astronauts and dead industrial workers who often get ignored by the mainstream media. He missed the lesson from this, of course. Space exploration is simply too dangerous to be left up to governments, and so, apparently is delivering the U.S. mail.

Of course, another government group that doesn’t get appropriate OSHA scrutiny is the U.S. Congress. The Hill recently reported that more than 70 percent of congressional offices violate OSHA standards. (What a shame that Congress didn’t get shut down for noncompliance, huh?)

Jordan Barab believes that penalties for OSHA aren’t high enough, as Safety News reported.

Right now, the average fine for a serious violation is between $900 and $1,000. Barab says that’s not enough of a disincentive to force companies to address safety hazards.

It would be up to Congress to change OSHA’s penalty structure, and there is a bill introduced to do just that.

Ultimately, Barab says he’d like OSHA fines to be comparable to those EPA is able to issue for environmental violations.

He’d also like Congress to make it easier for OSHA to bring criminal penalties for egregious violations.

By forcing companies to pay more and more money to solve a problem that has been declining every year, OSHA harms the very U.S. workers it is supposed to help. The effects of not being able to receive a job due to regulation are difficult to measure, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real. So you’ll forgive me if I wish Barab were just like all those other CMC alums right now – out on the market looking for a job.


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Posted Mar 14th 2010 at 12:21 pm in Big Labor, Congress, Federal Spending | 106 Comments