Discuss the impact of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

From its inception, the Occupational Safety and Health Organization has been both cussed and discussed, and its effectiveness in improving workplace safety and health has been questioned by the very firms it regulates. Employers complain of excessively detailed and costly regulations that, they believe, ignore workplace realities. However, even critics acknowledge that the agency has made the workplace safer. Since its inception in 1971, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has helped cut workplace fatalities by more than 60 percent and occupational injury and illness rates by 40 percent. At the same time, U.S. employment has increased from 56 million workers at 3.5 million worksites to more than 135 million workers at 8.9 million worksites. On the other hand, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also been accused of overreaching, as when it issued proposed ergonomics standards that would be extremely costly to implement and when it issued a letter applying its rules to home workplaces. Both of those actions were greeted with howls of protest, and both were withdrawn. On the other hand, employers sometimes try to improve their competitiveness at the expense of safety. Management's willingness to correct hazards and to improve such vital environmental conditions as ventilation, noise levels, and machine safety is much greater now than it was before the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Moreover, because of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, we now know far more about such dangerous substances as vinyl chloride, PCBs, asbestos, cotton dust, and a host of other carcinogens. As a result, management has taken at least the initial actions needed to protect workers from them. Finally, any analysis of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's impact must consider the fundamental issue of the causes of workplace accidents. OSHA standards govern potentially unsafe work conditions that employees may be exposed to. There are no standards that govern potentially unsafe employee behaviors. And while employers may be penalized for failure to comply with safety and health standards, employees are subject to no such threat. Research suggests that the enforcement of OSHA standards, directed as it is to environmental accidents and illnesses, can hope at best to affect 25 percent of on-the-job accidents. The remaining 75 percent require behavioral rather than technical modifications.