OSHA Showing New Teeth in Its Watchdog Role : Former Critics Applaud Agency’s Recent Actions, but Many Doubts Remain

In just the past 16 months, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has levied a dozen of the largest fines meted out by the agency in its 16-year history, capped by a proposed $2.6-million sanction against IBP, a Nebraska-based beef processor.

The other targets have included some of the nation’s most prominent corporations--Union Carbide, Chrysler, Caterpillar Tractor, Ford, General Dynamics, John Morrell and Shell.

Most of these companies have been accused of falsifying their records in an attempt to deceive regulators about the number of injuries suffered by employees in their workplaces, apparently in hopes of averting thorough investigations by federal inspectors.

After more than five years of biting attacks by union officials, public health experts and liberal legislators that OSHA had gone soft on business at the behest of President Reagan, critics find themselves applauding some of the recent actions.

But, they still have doubts about how much protection the agency is providing American workers.

Entrenched Problems Seen

“I’m quite surprised to see” the upsurge in enforcement actions, said Frank Mirer, director of health and safety for the United Auto Workers union, who frequently has found fault with the agency.

“I think it’s very beneficial,” he said, adding that it was important to know the nature and extent of workplace injuries in order to develop a strategy to eradicate them.

Similarly, Mike Wright, safety and health director for the United Steelworkers of America, agreed on the need for good records, and said he was pleased to see any signs of life at OSHA.

Nonetheless, both men said they are still troubled about OSHA’s overall performance. And many of the agency’s critics said in interviews that although the recent wave of activity was a positive development, it should not overshadow entrenched problems that plague OSHA.

A fundamental problem is that safety and health in the workplace is not a top national priority, said Tony Mazzocchi, a former vice president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, who played an instrumental role in the creation of OSHA. “There has to be an acceptance of the fact that the lives of 100 million American workers is worth more than $225 million,” he said, referring to the agency’s current budget.

Nicholas Ashford, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said this lack of resources meant it was likely that the nation would continue to have about 14,000 workplace deaths and 2 million serious workplace injuries a year.

Other critics say OSHA has far too few inspectors to do its job properly, remains reluctant to set needed standards for the use of dangerous chemicals and hazardous workplace practices, fails to utilize scientific expertise, does not target companies with perennially bad safety records for follow-up inspections and has shown little interest in trying to get criminal sanctions imposed on executives who endanger their workers’ lives.

Among the skeptics are two former heads of OSHA--Morton Corn, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who led the agency under President Ford, and Carter Administration official Eula Bingham, a professor at the University of Cincinnati.

“Nothing has really changed,” said Corn, who still occasionally gives lectures to new OSHA inspectors at the agency’s training institute in Washington. “We have wonderful young people coming in as compliance officers, but they get very frustrated about what they can do,” he said. “It’s not in writing, but it’s verbalized. They’re supposed to tread softly.”

Bingham expressed similar sentiments. “It’s too little, too late. There is a hue and cry out there in the country--some in the Administration hear it--to do something about such incredible conditions as at IBP. It’s like something out of Upton Sinclair, hard to believe,” she said, referring to “The Jungle,” Sinclair’s 1906 novel about the horrors of working in the meat-packing industry.

‘Paper Work Issues’

On July 21, IBP Inc., the nation’s largest meatpacker and owned by Los Angeles’ Occidental Petroleum Corp., was assessed a $2.6-million penalty by OSHA. The agency charged that the company had failed to report more than 1,000 injuries and illnesses over a two-year period at a huge Nebraska plant that union leaders have charged has one of the highest injury rates of any manufacturing facility in the country. The agency also charged that the company attempted last January to cover up the fact that it intentionally had maintained inaccurate injury logs at its Dakota City, Neb., plant.

“This case is the worst example of under-reporting of injuries and illnesses to workers ever encountered by OSHA in its 16-year history,” said John A. Pendergrass, the assistant secretary of labor who heads OSHA. IBP said it would contest the fine. It dismissed the alleged violations as “paper work issues” and maintained that it has a safe plant.

Some of the agency’s critics, while applauding sanctions against IBP, said OSHA officials should not have been surprised about record-keeping violations. In fact, they asserted, OSHA has invited companies to cheat.

In 1981, not long after President Reagan came into office, OSHA changed its inspection policy. If an OSHA review of an employer’s logs showed that the company’s illness and injury rates were below the average for its industry, then it would be exempt from a full, “wall-to-wall inspection.”

“They (OSHA) dangled too much of a temptation in front of too many firms,” said Corn in a telephone interview. “What we’re seeing now is an effort to salvage that policy,” with the surge of agency actions on record-keeping.

But Pendergrass defended the policy, saying it was necessary given the agency’s limited resources. “If a workplace is safe, if there are not many incidents, not many injuries, we shouldn’t be spending our time there, we should be some place where we can do more good,” he said. “The records are a way of determining where those places are and we’ve been using them for that.”

In a lengthy telephone interview, Pendergrass said the agency had achieved a number of major accomplishments in the year he’s been on the job.

“Anytime new leadership comes into an organization, you’ll see change,” he said. Pendergrass, a longtime health and safety official for 3M Corp., said some of the changes were started by Secretary of Labor William E. Brock, who hired him.

Wave of Fines

Brock launched the wave of record-keeping fines in April, 1986, when he announced that Union Carbide had been fined $1.37 million for 221 health and safety violations at its Institute, W. Va., plant, including requiring employees to “sniff” to determine the presence of phosgene, “an extremely deadly gas.” Ultimately, Union Carbide settled the case for $408,500.

Pendergrass said the highly celebrated series of fines represented only a small fraction of the 65,000 inspections the agency had performed last year. He said he also was particularly pleased with OSHA’s efforts to secure voluntary compliance with safety laws.

The OSHA chief also said the agency would be promulgating a number of long-delayed standards by the end of the year, including those for benzene and formaldehyde, two highly toxic chemicals. Some agency critics expressed doubt that these developments would come to pass, citing repeated past delays.

He also defended the agency against charges that were lodged against it in a draft report of the U.S. Labor Dept.’s Inspector General, which was released last month by the National Safe Workplace Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Chicago.

The report said that efforts to protect workers were undercut by inadequate and untimely inspections, failure to check that discovered hazards had been abated and the unjustified reduction of fines levied on companies that willfully and repeatedly violate OSHA regulations.

Pendergrass said the inspector general’s final report would present a different picture. “It will not say that there is a systemic management problem in OSHA.”

Joseph Kinney, executive director of the Safe Workplace Institute, said dramatic changes are needed in OSHA no matter what the final report says. He said that if the federal government wanted to demonstrate that it was serious about deaths and injuries in the workplace, it would totally transform its position on the use of criminal sanctions as a prod to improve conditions.

Kinney’s organization completed a study in June which revealed that 128,000 people have died since the OSHA act was passed in 1970, but not one person has been convicted and sent to prison as a result of a federal prosecution.

“We think if they’re really serious they would be working on criminal cases,” said Kinney, a former congressional aide. “Everybody knows the deterrent effect of a criminal prosecution is pretty powerful.”

Kinney said he began his research of OSHA enforcement practices 13 months ago, after his younger brother was killed when a scaffold on which he was working collapsed. An OSHA investigation revealed that the scaffolding had been improperly erected and was supported with thin-gauge electrical wire rather than steel cable as required by OSHA rules. The company was fined $800.