Hoping work might soon be a little less dangerous
By
Phil Mattera for the Dirt
Diggers Digest
Given
the sweeping scope of the proposal, it is not possible for pollsters to ask
about every component. I suspect there would also be high numbers for a portion
of the plan that has received little attention. That is the provision that
would strengthen the capacity of federal departments responsible for enforcing
workplace protections.
Biden is proposing that $10 billion be spent to beef up agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Wage and Hour Division.
The plan states: “President Biden is calling on Congress to provide the federal government with the tools it needs to ensure employers are providing workers with good jobs – including jobs with fair and equal pay, safe and healthy workplaces, and workplaces free from racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination and harassment.”
It
makes sense to push for improvements in job quality at the same time the
country is striving to bring the quantity of jobs back to the levels seen
before the arrival of Covid-19. Workplace abuses predated the pandemic, in some
ways got worse during the past year—especially with regard to job safety in
industries such as meatpacking—and will be with us long after the health crisis
abates.
Congress
has perennially failed to fund these agencies adequately, leaving them with
insufficient numbers of inspectors and investigators. For example, the most
recent edition of the AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report notes that the number of
workplace safety inspectors declined steadily during the Trump years both at
the federal and state levels. These staffing shortages create a form of de
factor deregulation as many workplace abuses go undetected and unprosecuted.
Biden’s
plan also briefly addresses another problem with workplace enforcement:
artificially low penalty structures, especially at OSHA. The Administration
calls for increasing these penalties but does not provide specifics.
The
penalty situation at OSHA is not as bad as it used to be. Changes made during
the Obama Administration, including 2015 legislation that extended inflation
adjustments to workplace safety fines, helped raise penalty rates. The maximum
for a serious violation is now $13,653 and the maximum for a willful or
repeated violation is $136,532.
These
maximum amounts do not tell the full story. As Death on the Job points
out, the average penalty for a serious violation in fiscal
year 2019 was only $3,717. The average for willful violations was $59,373 and
for repeat violations it was $14,109. Even in cases involving fatalities, the
median penalty was just $9,282.
The
cumulative effect of low OSHA penalties can be seen in the data in Violation
Tracker, which only includes fines of $5,000 or more. OSHA accounts
for 37 percent of the cases in the database but less than 1 percent of the
total penalty dollars. Numbers such as these cause too many employers to
conclude that their bottom line is best served by skimping on workplace safety
and paying the meager fines that may or may not be imposed by OSHA.
The
Biden infrastructure plan could begin to change that.