Adding Inequality to Injury
Workplace fatalities and injuries cause untold suffering for families. 12 people lose their lives every day on worksites across the US along with 3 million people who are seriously injured on an annual basis. OSHA recently launched a report document that highlights this issue entitled, ‘Adding Inequality to Injury: The Costs of Failing to Protect Workers on the Job.’ In it they look at the unfair burden of the cost of these accidents which fall primarily on the victim themselves/private insurance (63%) and on state apparatus (16%). The report also highlights that just 21% of the burden is being shouldered by the employer.
Employer responsibility
In their advocacy and supervisory role OSHA are well placed to survey the landscape of employer behavior and labor market trends as they affect worker safety. What they raise as a key concern for 2015 is the responsibility of employers to their workers. There are a significant number of workers today who are classed as independent contractors but fulfill all the criteria of ‘wage employees’. This classification favors the employer in that it negates their responsibility to those workers in terms of safety training provision. It also favors employers who wish to deny compensatory packages to these workers in the event of an accident. This lack of responsibility, sadly, often extends to provision of safe working conditions.
The most effective solution to the problem of contractor safety is, obviously, to prevent workplace fatalities and injuries from occurring. This would spare workers and their families from needless hardship and suffering. It would also bring the US more in line with the norms of workplace safety particularly in Western Europe. By way of example, the UK suffers workplace fatalities at a rate of 25% as that of the US in key industries such as construction.
Move to more contingent workforce
The trend within labor markets is now towards multiple employers at any individual work site. Imagine a factory which has its standard ‘wage’ employees but also has a selection of temporary agency employees as well as independent contractors all contributing to the work effort. Given this type of situation there needs to be excellent communication between all the various employers to ensure workers are aware of safety protocols and hazards. This is where worker safety can easily ‘fall between two stools’ and accidents become more prevalent. In response to this OSHA will now often cite an employer for endangering the employees of another employer working in the same workplace.
Workplace accidents must be seen first and foremost as avoidable. This is what is required by the law, and it would spare workers and their families from needless hardship and suffering as well as from the loss of income and benefits associated with these conditions. A reduction in workplace accidents would also have an enormous impact on healthcare costs with the National Safety Council in the US estimating the bill for work injuries to be circa $5 billion in 2012.
How to avoid accidents in your workplace
The past 44 years, since the introduction of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (1970), has seen a consistent improvement in fatalities and injury rates at work. However, the rate of 3.4 per 100,000 still results in 12 deaths per day.
Having a system of training for all employees, contractors and temps at a work site is an essential first step. Advances in software technologies now ensure that workers can be safely initiated into the workplace before they turn up for work on the first day. In the past it has been difficult to achieve one centralized system for employee testing and test reporting. Not anymore. Safety training software can now manage employees’ safety training and company initiations in a coherent way. Not only this but it also provides employers with a robust compliance platform when it comes to their obligations to oversight bodies like OSHA.
There should be no excuses for employers when it comes to protecting the people they are responsible for. As the OSHA report states, “statistics are people with the tears washed off them”, which should give some idea of the urgency of this issue in a fast changing labor market.
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