California's tough regs reputation undeserved
Big business loves complaining about California’s famously “tough” regulations. But if they exist mostly on paper and there’s no one around to enforce them, than what the hell is big business whining about?
The state legislature gets the best of both worlds as a result. The majority Dems can show the unions how they’re protecting workers by passing new rules on occupational safety, but their big-business donors are appeased when year after year California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (known widely as Cal/OSHA) is systematically de-funded and top administrative posts remain vacant.
And now it’s worse than it has been in more than a decade, writes Garrett Brown in the rag Industrial Safety & Hygiene News. (Is this really what we spend our weekends reading?) Brown is a long-time investigator for Cal/OSHA. He notes that inspections have dropped statewide by 35 percent since 1992, and actual citations have declined by 44 percent.
In fact, California has one inspector for every 84,000 workers compared with the average among nearly two-dozen other states of one for every 50,000, according to Brown. (Those Commies in Canada have one for every 10,000.) Huge percentages of violations simply go unabated, and while employers are appealing citations they’ve received – which they commonly do and which are severely backlogged statewide – no one can force them to fix the identified hazards in the meantime.
That’s kind of like allowing someone to continue breaking people’s knees with a baseball bat until they’re proven guilty of the first assault.
No one’s appointed a new agency chief for Cal/OSHA in five years meaning “acting chief” Len Welsh has been in political limbo for half a decade. Two chief deputy positions have been empty since 2001. What better way to show your commitment to the bidness climate in California than to simply refuse to staff your state’s workplace-safety office?
Someone might try to explain to the governor that workplace safety keeps insurance costs down, which greatly benefits the state’s bidness climate in the long run. Remember when Schwarzenegger vowed to save California’s fiscal crisis by reforming worker’s comp? Here’s something else you can do, you big stud.
As Brown puts it:
“Cal/OSHA has a national reputation for being a leader of our nation’s workplace safety regulatory agencies. But the lack of political support for the agency’s mission, and a not-coincidental lack of adequate resources, means many of these regulations are simply not being enforced, are not being verified as corrected when cited, and not being defended when appealed. The people who pay for the disconnect between the national reputation and the actual level of regulation and enforcement are, of course, California’s workers. Vulnerable workers – those without union protection and especially those without immigration papers – are especially at risk.
“There is nothing on the state’s political horizon to indicate that Cal/OSHA will get the political support and resources that it needs to do its job. But that job will definitely get larger as the state’s population continues to grow, as multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects approved in 2006 get underway, and as Cal/OSHA looks toward future hazards such as pandemic avian flu or emergency response to terrorist attacks. If the nation’s ‘premier state plan’ fails to meet its mission, or even its legal mandate, then this [is] bad news for workers not only in California but also for workers across the country as California ‘sets the trend’ for workplace safety.”
UPDATE: The governor just appointed Len Welsh full director of the state's occupational safety and health office.
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