OSHA Just Reduced the Value of a Worker’s Life – Inside Climate News

The Department of Labor announced “updates to penalty guidelines” to improve worker safety on Monday that it said will support small businesses and eliminate workplace hazards. The announcement follows the release of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s budget for the next fiscal year, which includes a plan for nearly 10,000 fewer workplace hazard inspections amid an 8 percent funding cut and a more than 12 percent reduction in staffing.

The new guidelines reduce penalties for failing to comply with worker health and safety standards at small businesses and those of any size with no history of various serious violations. It also extends the time frame for quickly abating a hazard by redefining “immediately,” which used to mean during the inspection or on the day that it occurred, but now can take up to 15 days. 

These penalty reductions, combined with a drastic cut in the already rare inspections, will surely lead to more worker illnesses, injuries and deaths, experts say.

Penalties from OSHA for endangering workers’ health and lives are already “embarrassingly low” compared to those for other federal violations like harming wildlife, Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for the agency during President Barack Obama’s two terms, wrote on his blog about workplace health and safety. 

“We used to always say that you would get fined more for harassing a burro on federal land than for a serious OSHA violation,” Barab told Inside Climate News.

Penalties have gradually increased over the years, in keeping with inflation. The maximum fine for a serious violation is now $16,550 and about $165,500 for a willful violation.

But most penalties are reduced based on the company’s size, history of compliance, rapid remediation of a hazard and good-faith efforts to correct a problem. 

OSHA has an incentive to reduce penalties to encourage the employer to fix the problem rather than contesting the violation, said Barab. 

If an employer contests the violation, by law they don’t have to fix anything until that challenge is resolved, he said. “And that can be many months or even years after the initial violation.”

Before the new penalty policy changes, small businesses with 10 or fewer employers were eligible for a fine reduction of up to 70 percent, to encourage companies to apply their limited resources to mitigating hazards. The new rule extends that fee reduction to businesses with up to 25 employees, which previously qualified for a 60 percent reduction. 

The new rule also expands the 20 percent fee reduction for a history of compliance to companies that had never been cited because they’d never been inspected.

“We used to always say that you would get fined more for harassing a burro on federal land than for a serious OSHA violation.”

— Jordan Barab, former OSHA deputy assistant secretary of labor

Granting a fee reduction to an employer that could have been running an unsafe workplace for decades just because OSHA never managed to get there for an inspection is a “major change” in OSHA’s policies, Barab said.

OSHA spokesperson Kristen Knebel did not answer questions about how the agency plans to keep workers safe by reducing the number of inspections and relaxing penalties for employers who violate worker health and safety standards.

Dying to Make a Living

Barab, who tracks worker deaths on his blog, told Inside Climate News about a particularly gruesome accident that happened nearly 25 years ago, when the penalties were less than half the current amounts.

On a broiling July afternoon in 2001, a work crew repairing a catwalk at an oil refinery in Delaware released a spark above a large storage tank containing spent sulfuric acid and highly flammable hydrocarbons. The spark ignited vapors from the tank, which burst into flames and collapsed. 

The fire burned for about a half hour and released 100,000 gallons of sulfuric acid into the nearby Delaware River, killing thousands of fish and crabs, according to official estimates at the time.

The explosion also killed Jeffrey Davis, a 50-year-old father of five, and sent eight of his co-workers to the hospital with serious injuries. Davis fell into the sulfuric acid, Barab said. “All they found was his boots.”

The OSHA citation amounted to about $200,000 while EPA issued a $10 million fine for Clean Water Act violations and criminal negligence, citing a long history of problems.

That was more than 20 years ago, but the situation is basically the same today, Barab said. There’s not just a much higher penalty for killing wildlife than for killing a worker, he said, but it’s also higher for lying to a federal OSHA inspector than for killing a worker.

Nearly 5,300 workers died from fatal injuries in 2023—one worker every 99 minutes—according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics. Roughly 20 times that many die of occupational illnesses or diseases related to exposures that occurred years before their deaths, which are difficult to track.

Traumatic injuries sustained at work kill more than 100 workers, on average, every week. The week of July 7 alone, workers died in a fireworks warehouse explosion in Northern California, in a tanker explosion in Texas, on a highway crew in Michigan, while trimming trees in New York, of electrocution in an Alabama manufacturing plant, in vehicle accidents across the country, in shootings on the job in two states and in a cardiac event after responding to several calls while on firefighter duty in Missouri.

The changes made and planned by President Donald Trump’s OSHA will make conditions on the job even more hazardous, experts say. 

OSHA’s ability to protect workers has “greatly diminished” over the years, according to the latest Death on the Job report from the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of U.S. unions.

The agency was starved by budget cuts and hampered by staffing reductions and low penalty rates even before the Trump administration’s additional cuts, AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Rebecca Reindel said at a hearing on OSHA compliance assistance Wednesday. While the agency’s budget and staff have steadily shrunk since 1991, the nation’s overall employment has grown substantially, she said.

Every year the AFL-CIO calculates how long it would take OSHA to inspect each workplace in its jurisdiction one time based on its resources. “Since 1991 that number has gone from once every 84 years to once every 185 years,” Reindel said. 

With the president’s proposed budget and 30 percent inspection reductions, it would be once every 266 years, she said. “The worst on record.”

The administration says the policy changes were made to minimize the burden on small businesses and increase prompt hazard abatement. 

“By lowering penalties on small employers, we are supporting the entrepreneurs that drive our economy and giving them the tools they need to keep our workers safe and healthy on the job while keeping them accountable,” said Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling in a statement announcing the changes.

That’s not how Barab sees it. 

“They’re giving a free pass to employers who have never been inspected before,” Barab said. “And they’re making it much more likely that more employers will never be inspected by significantly cutting the number of inspections that OSHA is expected to conduct next year.”

By changing the criteria for penalty reductions, the Trump administration has removed the already weak deterrent for violating the nation’s worker safety and health laws, said Reindel. “This new policy just creates incentives for employers to take the low road and to not follow the law.”