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.

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.

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Some want to regulate what you eat, some want to regulate what you say, and some want to regulate how you type your TPS reports.

Those around long enough to remember the 1990’s will grumble to recall the battle over ergonomics regulations sought by Big Labor and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. OSHA has already taken an important step in the march to regulating ergonomics by announcing its plan to require employers to keep records of ill-defined “musculo-skeletal disorders.” It announced today that the deadline for filing comments is March 30.

What’s a musculo-skeletal disorder? It isn’t defined well (and can and will include injuries not from work), so the eventual outcome is a flood of new “injuries” all kept in one big umbrella category. Remember: injuries are already recorded; now the government would have an additional statistic to urge regulatory action. Want the gist of the problem: at Maverick Strategies, we put this together:

Want to file a comment with OSHA? There’s still time (go here). But, you’d better be in the right position when typing…

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