By Elizabeth de la Vega, t r u t h o u t

…In the early 1900s, as a former New York City fire chief testified regarding factory conditions after the Triangle fire, there was “nobody responsible for anything.” Now, of course, we have an office – the Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) – that is at least putatively responsible for workplace safety. Specifically, OSHA is legislatively mandated to (1) enact industrial standards for toxic substance exposure and site protection; and (2) conduct inspections to ensure those standards are followed.

Unfortunately, OSHA started becoming anemic during the 1990s, and now it is positively spectral. With fewer employees than it had 30 years ago, yet twice the number of workplaces in its charge, OSHA would need 133 years to inspect every business over which it has jurisdiction.

The far more serious problem with OSHA’s performance, however, is that, under the Bush administration, it has deliberately avoided setting any significant industrial standards. (To be precise, it has set one, regarding the permissible level of workplace exposure to the known carcinogen hexavalent chromium, but only after a court ordered it to do so.)

OSHA’s abdication of its duties is not a matter of incompetence. It is, as Rep. John Barrows (D-Georgia) pointed out in a March 12, 2008, Workforce Protections Subcommittee Hearing of the House, Education and Labor Committee, a purposeful unwillingness to act. Or, to put it more colorfully, as Barrows did: “When you’ve got an agency that don’t know its job or don’t care about its job, or has all kinds of reasons for not doin’ its job, it’s a little bit like goin’ bird huntin’ and havin’ to tote the dog.”

OSHA’s failure to enact mandatory standards has not only been fatal to its mission; it has been fatal to the workers.