Word: osha
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...years ago, Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to solve this pressing industrial problem. But progress has been slow, if measurable at all. Last year 12,400 workers were killed in industrial accidents, not a very significant improvement over the 13,700 who died in 1971, OSHA's first year; another 2.1 million suffered disabling injuries. The Public Health Service in 1973 estimated that there were 390,000 new cases of occupational disease in the U.S. every year, and as many as 100,000 deaths; it believes that the figures are no better today...
Justifiably, OSHA is widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles in Washington. It draws fire from businessmen, union chiefs, lawyers, Ralph Nader and an assortment of politicians, including President Ford, who attacks OSHA for "unnecessary and unjustified harassment of citizens." The most serious charge is that OSHA has got snarled up in enforcement of petty rules to the neglect of more important matters...
Foot and Ankle. Granted broad powers to protect 50 million workers in 4 million workplaces, OSHA got off to an unwieldy start by immediately promulgating as law almost all safety regulations then on the books at federal agencies and organizations like the National Fire Protection Association. The result: an encyclopedic collection of do's and don'ts, 7 ft. thick if stacked together and packed with dizzying minutiae. Six pages of regulations deal with wooden ladders. Sample: "Knots, if tight and sound and less than one half inch in diameter, are permitted ... provided they are not more frequent...
...OSHA recently has trimmed its rule books a bit, plucking out such anachronisms as a prohibition against ice in factory drinking water (a throwback to a time years ago when ice was cut from polluted rivers). Last week OSHA's director, Assistant Secretary of Labor Morton Corn, said that some of the agency's hoariest regulations soon would be revised and businessmen would get a louder voice in changing them...
...regulations still are paradigms of impenetrable prose that lawyers waste precious time interpreting. In one safety-shoe case, lawyers wrangled over the word extremity; did it mean toes, the entire foot or the foot and ankle? Such procedures consume vast quantities of time and money, even when OSHA has no case at all. One airline was cited for noise violations, only to prove after days of investigation that OSHA'S inspector had read his decibel meter incorrectly...