What is OSHA?

What is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and What is Their Purpose?

What is OSHA? “OSHA” stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. As an agency of the United States federal government, its goal is the safe and healthy working conditions of American workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Act sometimes called the OSH Act, created OSHA in 1970. Its headquarters are in Washington, DC, with about 2,300 employees and an annual budget of around $500 million.

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OSHA Today

OSHA’s goals are to provide and require the following to and from employers and employees in order to create safer working conditions across the country.

Standards
Training
Outreach
Education
Assistance
Compliance
Protection

To meet its goals, OSHA sends compliance officers to work sites all over the country to inspect and report on violations of worker safety laws. Inspections are generally a) scheduled in advance at workplaces in which dangerous activities are taking place or b) surprise inspections due to worker complaints or serious workplace incidents. OSHA also enforces several federal “whistleblower” laws which give employees and other insiders rights when they disclose misconduct in government and private enterprises. OSHA often works with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in enforcement actions against responsible companies and parties.

Some specific jobs and workplaces are exempted from OSHA. This means that they are not subject to OSHA’s regulations. Examples are mines and quarries, airline flight crews, and family farms. These exemptions exist because either the workplaces are regulated by other agencies (like mines and aircraft) or because compliance enforcement would not be efficient (like family farms).

Are you protected by OSHA regulations on your job? Can you make a complaint to OSHA about an injury you suffered while working? Should you? What are your rights? This is a complicated area of the law, one that requires experienced legal representation. Allow Our Law Office to guide you through this unfamiliar and important process.

What About State Laws?

As in other areas of the law, federal laws regarding worker safety allow state laws to offer workers more protection, but not less. OSHA sets a floor that the states can build on but not go beneath.

OSHA Problems

People have been severely criticizing OSHA for decades. It has been argued that the agency simply does not do enough to protect workers with its 2,200 inspectors being responsible for over eight million worksites. Despite a significant budget and staff with powerful regulations on its side, OSHA has only secured a grand total of about a dozen criminal convictions in its more than 40 years of existence.

Furthermore, from 2000-2010, OSHA issued a total of four (4) safety and health standards. This was by far the smallest number issued in any decade of OSHA’s existence. Some have blamed the presidential administration in office during most of that time, which was apparently uninterested in passing or enforcing any meaningful regulations on businesses. During that time, an average of 14 workers a day were killed on worksites in the United States for a total of about 50,000 men and women over that 10-year period.

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To be sure, OSHA has a colossal job and is simply understaffed and under-budgeted to do it. If one of your loved ones is one of the approximately 5,000 people killed on the job each year in this country, help is available to your family.

If you are injured on the job, help is available to your family. Call the veteran legal professionals at Our Law Office today.