@Soriek comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Soriek 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

OSHA Effectiveness: MMTYWTK

In the thread about unions @vorpal_potato linked an excellent Roots of Progress piece on the history of worker’s compensation law. That got me thinking about the history of workplace safety since then, chiefly the top down reform since no-fault compensation: OSHA.

Did OSHA make workers safer?

Since OSHA was founded in 1970 fatal workplace incidents have decreased by 60% according to the Environmental Law Institute (admittedly somewhat confounded by manufacturing employment decreasing by 65%...).

On the other hand, the Mercatus Center has assembled a graph on workplace fatalities from 1933 to 2010 using data from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The results show that while fatalities certainly dropped after 1970, they had been falling long before and the trendline did not change following the creation of OSHA.

But prior to 1970 fatalities weren’t falling in some kind of regulatory no man’s land. In the entire period on the graph we had continuously evolving workplace safety rules emerging from the Bureau of Labor Standards founded in 1934. The BLS regularly met with organized labor to help establish new safety rules under State Labor Departments and played an important role in the passage of labor legislation like the Walsh–Healey Public Contracts Act or the Fair Labor Standards Act. And all of this doesn’t even capture all the state level workplace safety legislation that happened in the following decades (look up New York).

Without this context, Mercatus leaves you to imagine workplace safety incidents prior to 1970 were dropping entirely due to capitalist technological progress, as opposed to OSHA being another in a series of many steps of gradually increasing safety regulations.

And when you drill down into the details of specific OSHA policies, they often do show results. A few examples:

A 2012 study in Science found that OSHA's random workplace safety inspections caused a "9.4% decline in injury rates" and a "26% reduction in injury cost" for the inspected firms. The study found "no evidence that these improvements came at the expense of employment, sales, credit ratings, or firm survival."

A 2020 study in the American Economic Review found that the decision by the Obama administration to issue press releases that named and shamed facilities that violated OSHA safety and health regulations led other facilities to increase their compliance and to experience fewer workplace injuries. The study estimated that each press release had the same effect on compliance as 210 inspections.

There has especially made progress for those concerns that won’t be reflected in raw safety incidents, such as long term exposure to lead, asbestos, and other toxic chemicals “OSHA standards have virtually eliminated some occupational diseases such as “brown lung” disease in the textile industry, and accidental transmission of HIV and hepatitis in healthcare workers”.

OSHA standards have dramatically changed norms and practices. Just think about how asbestos removal is handled today — with enclosures, full-body personal protective equipment, and more — compared with decades ago. In health care, including dental offices, use of gloves and facemasks or respirators is standard practice, in large measure due to OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard. These practices are now viewed as necessary and appropriate to protect both workers and the public. But when these standards were issued, there was huge employer opposition, with claims that the rules were unnecessary, infeasible, and would put employers out of business and cost jobs.

Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO

What are the economic benefits vs costs of OSHA?

I have no idea why, but I can’t seem to find any present day studies on the compliance costs of OSHA. A number of very out-of-date studies from the 1990s find costs between $10 and $40 billion. Studies on their benefits seem totally clouded by your base assumptions - CATO assumes extremely small benefits because they attribute almost none of the post-1970 drop to OSHA; OSHA itself assumes high benefits because it takes credit for the whole drop. For long term exposure we would also want some way to calculate healthcare costs from ex: respiratory problems. In general I wasn’t able to find a ton useful here but maybe it doesn't matter that much either way; it’s okay if OSHA costs more than it brings in, in terms of dollars and cents, if it plays a large role in reducing human suffering.

Why has OSHA declined in stature?

This piece has a decent quick write up on what works well and not so well about OSHA. Broadly summarized, OSHA has some really well-tailored standards it’s created since the 90s, mixed with a bunch of woefully out-of-date standards from the 60s. The actual inspection trainings are insufficient, and obsolete standards means that sometimes unimportant things are flagged while serious safety hazards are ignored. Why does OSHA use so many out of date standards? It sounds like the same bipartisan dysfunction that’s slowed every agency down since the 70s:

The process for setting standards that protect workers has slowed to a crawl, because Congress, the executive branch, and the courts have weighed it down with added analytic and procedural requirements. The time-consuming hurdles that OSHA must overcome to revise its out-of-date standards means that it has less time to address new hazards that have been recognized since 1970, including the risk of workplace violence to health care and social service workers and musculoskeletal disorders arising from patient handling. It now takes OSHA, on average, more than seven years to complete a new standard. Since 1970, OSHA has issued only 37 major health and 55 major safety standards.

Randy Rabinowitz, Director, Occupational Safety & Health Law Project

OSHA can regulate only after a complex process of finding “significant risk” and economic “feasibility,” and then is constrained to set standards at “the lowest feasible level.” As a result, some health standards have been costly compared to their effects. The longer process tended to make it less likely that any rulemaking could be begun and completed within the term of any OSHA director.

John Mendeloff, Health and Safety in the Workplace Director, Rand Center

In its 46-year history the agency has issued standards for 30 toxic substances. The standard-setting process has gotten harder and longer, as layers of procedural and analytical requirements have been added and industry and political opposition has intensified. Early on, it took OSHA one to three years to issue new standards for major hazards. The most recent standards — silica and confined space entry in construction — took about 20 years. As a result for most hazards, standards are out of date or non-existent. OSHA can’t address even long-recognized problems, let alone the emerging hazards that put workers in danger.

Also, everyone from Mercatus to the AFL-CIO agrees that OSHA’s present day fines are actually too small to encourage much behavior change from companies, at least relative to things like worker’s comp and lawsuits.

Would More Funding Help?

Mercatus Center and CATO claim (without a source) that Quebec funds its equivalent workplace safety agency four times more per staff and gets similar results. I glanced at a few other countries: in France and Britain they both spend less than us; the UK gets much better results and France gets much worse, so make of that what you will! I just divided budgets by staff whereas the Quebec comparison is supposedly measuring “dollars spent on workplace prevention”, which I don’t know how to check for other agencies, but I could easily believe their numbers are better than ours because we waste a ton on administration or paperwork.

Still, whether we do it by spending our funds more effectively or by raising funds, there does seem to be a strong argument that OSHA needs more staff - the UK has about double our inspectors for a country about a fifth of the size, for instance.

OSHA’s biggest problem and deficiency is that it simply does not have the resources that are needed to meet its responsibilities. OSHA’s current budget is $552 million. As a comparison, the EPA budget is $8.1 billion. Federal OSHA and the state OSHA plans are responsible for overseeing the safety and health of 140 million workers at more than 8 million workplaces. But currently there are fewer than 2,000 OSHA inspectors (about 900 with federal OSHA). Federal OSHA is able to inspect workplaces under its jurisdiction on average only once every 147 years.

tl;dr

Workplace fatalities have fallen by 60% since the passage of OSHA. The rate of workplace fatalities did not fall any faster after OSHA, but it’s hard to disentangle the pre-1970 trendline from the safety regulation and legislation in decades prior, and there’s no reason to assume the trendline would have continued if our standards didn’t continue evolving as well.
OSHA definitely coincided with significant changes in worker pathogen exposure.
OSHA could be improved by:

Simplifying the procedural rules around creating new standards so they take <10 years.
Hiring more inspectors so they’re stretched less thin, and training those inspectors better
Probably increasing OSHA’s ability to levy greater financial fines.

Context

gattsuru Soriek 7mo ago

I'll caution that a lot of the claims among advocates and activists start at misleading for their very best, here. For example:

I'm not entirely sure where this quote's coming from -- it's not present in Mendeloff's better-known "Regulatory Reform and OSHA Policy" nor his current RAND page -- but Mendeloff has spent decades making a variants of it, that OSHA's hands are tied to extremely narrow scopes of allowed regulation. Yet looking at the caselaw makes it obvious this isn't the case: OSHA has explicitly been delegated the power to make any cost-benefit tradeoff, so long as OSHA can provide evidence from a "credible source" of significant risk and can show that the regulations are at all feasible, even if the technology to implement them does not currently exist. You can go back to Hodgson and clearly see the courts unwilling and unable to require OSHA to issue more strenuous standards because someone claimed they were possible.

The only serious restriction on OSHA regulations are that they can not be impossible to implement nor can they set thresholds on what is possible rather than what is dangerous. And it's that last bit that's driven OSHA's plodding pace post-1980. Not that OSHA must regulate to the hilt, but that its employees and administrators want to -- and because so much voluntary and other-regulatory standards already cover other exposures, are only relevant when -- regulate to the hilt, and that's the place where it's hardest to prove anything. In the benzene case, OSHA had been trying to drop the maximum allowed exposure limit by and order of magnitude with zero studies showing significant health risks in between those levels but instead a rather unclear understanding of what safety factors mean.

Mendeloff repeatedly points to the far-greater count of exposure limit changes from the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, who to be fair are very much in favor of setting thresholds very quickly to extremely low values! But that doesn't tell us terribly much about what the correct exposure limits are, or even good policy.

It's... probably worth pointing out that a little over a dozen states have separately-funded OSHA-approved State Plans doing their enforcement.

Soriek gattsuru 7mo ago

Thanks for your reply, sorry for the delay, I've been pretty wrapped up

I'm not entirely sure where this quote's coming from -- it's not present in Mendeloff's better-known "Regulatory Reform and OSHA Policy" nor his current RAND page

All the quotes are from that Environmental Law Institute piece, I didn't want to keep citing it because I honestly hadn't realized we didn't have character limits anymore.

Thanks for the added legal context on where OSHA's restrictions really are/aren't. IANAL but my one quibble is that the ruling that they don't have to do cost/benefit analysis is from 1981, and since then we had Clinton's EO in 1993 that I think does require them to do that. At least, it's a thing they're clearly spending time doing, whether or not it guides their regulatory decisions the way it should.

More importantly, does any of this refute the broader argument about all the added layers of procedural and analytic requirements that all three of the people interviewed cited? This seems like a separate measure from where their authority actually ends that would add a time burden rather than a legal burden. Even the feasibility studies, whether or not their actual threshold is reasonable, presumably signify months of mandated paperwork. From OSHA's quick overview on the website:

Once OSHA has developed plans to propose, amend or revoke a standard, it publishes these intentions in the Federal Register as a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking," or often as an earlier "Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking." Prior to publication of proposed and final major rules OSHA consults with OMB under procedures established by Executive Order. OSHA consults with small business on proposed rules which significantly affect them through a panel with participation by the Small Business Administration and OMB, as required by theSmall Business Regulatory Enforcement and Fairness Act (SBREFA.)

An "Advance Notice" is used, when necessary, to solicit information that can be used in drafting a proposal. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking will include the terms of the new rule and provide a specific time (at least 30 days from the date of publication, usually 60 days or more) for the public to respond.

Interested parties who submit written arguments and pertinent evidence may request a public hearing on the proposal when none has been announced in the notice. When such a hearing is requested, OSHA will schedule one, and will publish, in advance, the time and place for it in the Federal Register.

After the close of the comment period and public hearing, if one is held, OSHA must publish in the Federal Register the full, final text of any standard amended or adopted and the date it becomes effective, along with an explanation of the standard and the reasons for implementing it. OSHA may also publish a determination that no standard or amendment needs to be issued.

It certainly sounds pretty time consuming. In 2012 the GAO also wrote a report that seems to find the same thing titled "Multiple Challenges Lengthen OSHA’s Standard Setting". The exerpt below is probably unnecessarily long but just to give a flavor of all the mud they have to wade through:

Experts and agency officials indicated that the increased number of procedural requirements affects standard-setting time frames because of the complex requirements for OSHA to demonstrate the need for standards. Experts and agency officials named a variety of statutes and executive orders that have imposed an increasing number of procedural requirements on OSHA since 1980.

The process for developing and issuing standards is complex and directed by multiple procedural requirements. According to Labor staff, agency consideration of a new standard can be the result of information OSHA receives from stakeholder petitions; occupational safety and health entities, such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board; OSHA’s enforcement efforts; or staff research (see fig. 3). To publicly signal OSHA’s intent to pursue development of a new safety or health standard, OSHA typically publishes a Request for Information or an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the topic in the Federal Register. In this report, we refer to these events as “initiation.” OSHA also signals the beginning of standard-setting efforts by placing the issue on its regulatory agenda.

The process for developing OSHA standards varies, but the typical process involves multiple steps. After OSHA initiates a standard-setting effort, staff typically schedule meetings with stakeholders—employer groups, worker groups, and other interested parties—to solicit feedback and discuss issues related to the potential standard, including its potential cost to employers.

Concurrently with these meetings, OSHA staff and contractors perform technological and economic feasibility analyses using data gathered by visiting worksites in industries that will be affected by the potential standard. These analyses are necessary because the Supreme Court has held that the OSH Act requires that standards be both technologically and economically feasible. In addition, courts have held that OSHA must evaluate economic and technological feasibility on an industry-by-industry basis, which requires that the agency research all applications of the hazard being regulated, as well as the expected cost for mitigating exposure to that hazard, in every industry. For the technological feasibility analysis, staff identify the controls required by the standard and determine if each of them is technologically feasible for employers to implement. Agency officials told us this is an enormous undertaking because, for example, sometimes there are no sources of information on the applications of various chemicals or technologies. According to OSHA officials, this also requires visits to multiple worksites, and because these visits are generally conducted on a voluntary basis rather than under OSHA’s inspection authority, OSHA staff or its contractors can only visit worksites where the employer allows the visit.

Collaboration with NIOSH has, at times, helped facilitate these site visits. For example, OSHA officials told us that their staff worked closely with NIOSH staff in developing the technological feasibility analyses or risk assessments for standards on butadiene, methylene chloride, hexavalent chromium, silica, and diacetyl. When OSHA performs the economic feasibility analysis, it concludes that a standard is economically feasible if the affected industry or industries will maintain long-term profitability and competitiveness.29 To do this, staff and contractors, by analyzing information they collect when visiting worksites, must assess the extent to which employers in the affected industries can afford to implement the required controls. In addition to the site visits, OSHA staff sometimes conducts industry-wide surveys to determine baseline practices and collect other relevant information needed for the technological and economic feasibility analyses. According to OSHA officials, the process of developing a survey and having it approved by OMB takes a minimum of 1 year.

In addition to the feasibility analyses, OSHA staff generally must also conduct economic analyses. First, OSHA must assess the costs and benefits of significant standards as required by Executive Order 12866.31 Second, under the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996, if OSHA determines that a potential standard would have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities, such as businesses, it is one of three federal agencies that must initiate a panel process that seeks and considers input from representatives of the affected small businesses. The small business panel process takes several months of work that many other federal regulatory agencies do not have to complete in order to issue regulations. Agency officials told us they want to consult with small businesses, but that the provisions laid out in the requirement make it too formal a process and are duplicative of the public hearings they hold after publishing the proposed rule. Finally, according to OMB guidelines, if a potential standard is projected to have an economic impact of more than $500 million, OSHA must initiate a peer review of the underlying scientific analyses.33

After completing the above steps, OSHA submits the preamble and text of the potential standard to OMB for review. OSHA then publishes a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register to alert the public that OSHA intends to issue a new final standard and to invite interested parties to comment on the proposed standard. Although OSHA is only required under the OSH Act hold public hearings upon request, as a general practice, officials told us that OSHA holds such hearings and has issued regulations governing its hearing procedures. GAO has reported that, while regulatory agencies are generally subject to a number of rulemaking requirements, many rules do not trigger certain requirements.

Notably, an administrative law judge presides over the hearings, and stakeholders have the opportunity to submit evidence to support their views on specific provisions of the proposed standards. The administrative law judge may also permit cross-examination by stakeholders or OSHA attorneys to bolster or challenge testimony presented during the hearing. Finally, stakeholders can submit data and other written documents subsequent to the hearing that OSHA must consider when crafting the final standard.

Yadda yadda.

Very good point tbh.

Ugh, and of course he doesn't actually have citations for his claims there. Thanks for at least pointing the direction out.

IANAL but my one quibble is that the ruling that they don't have to do cost/benefit analysis is from 1981, and since then we had Clinton's EO in 1993 that I think does require them to do that.

EO 12866 isn't externally enforceable, and to the extent it 'requires' agencies to evaluate costs, that ends up being just that :

Each agency shall assess both the costs and the benefits of the intended regulation and, recognizing that some costs and benefits are difficult to quantify, propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that the benefits of the intended regulation justify its costs.

This is interesting, but it's a very far cry from Mendeloff's insistence that only the "lowest feasible level" is allowed, and indeed at its time it was supposed to be about reducing the often-steep overregulation that other agencies had invoked. (It also sets a fairly speedy timeline that agencies are supposed to meet, and if you want to have a laugh some day compare it to their actual movement rate.)

More importantly, does any of this refute the broader argument about all the added layers of procedural and analytic requirements that all three of the people interviewed cited? This seems like a separate measure from where their authority actually ends that would add a time burden rather than a legal burden.

My objection is less that Mendeloff claims that there is some increased time burden from review, and more that he claims that there's a process that only allows a very narrow band of regulation such that this time burden must be exceedingly long, outside the scope of a single OSHA director's run, and (implicitly) that it requires such resources and focus that OSHA can not do these things in parallel. And that's not really the case, in no small part because that first step falters.

((And his own piece makes clear that he's really just after harsher limits than can be demonstrated in evidence: "What changes might help? For health standards, change the law to allow lower exposure limits based on lesser evidence when the reduction is moderate." Which is just open season for OSHA to make up numbers.))

Mendeloff, in other works, often points to benzene regulations, and that's not unreasonable given that OSHA spent nearly twenty years on it. But if you look at the timeline, the overwhelming majority of this was not the regulatory overhead side, nor the OSHA-specific work of coordinating with industry to determine feasibility, but trying to gather data to support their new and stringent standard being so low. Almost all of the long lead time occurs because OSHA wants to set standards at the bleeding edge where data was not yet present.

And that might not even be wrong as a policy decision, since at least ideally clear risks would be handled by industry practices or by other regulations. But it drastically changes both the calculus of what revisions would be necessary, and what Mendeloff is asking for.

I certainly believe you that Mendeloff is exagerrating his claims, his line about the lowest feasible level just seemed minor to me compared to his + the other interviewed subjects' main argument about ever-increasing procedural requirements.

Definitely interested in the idea that the procedural requirements are less of a time burden than the data digging required by overambitious regulatory targets - though can those really be separated? It seems like a ton of the procedural load is specifically around data collection and review.

Where do you access the timeline / breakdown of how the time was used for the Benzene process? I couldn't seem to find it in the EHP writeup.

gattsuru Soriek 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

At least for the data collection side, my argument's that they're doing a lot of stuff that's very time-consuming and difficult specifically so they can promote very low targets and limited thresholds of economic feasibility, and they don't have to do that and still be useful as a regulatory agency. It's still a time burden to prove, even for low standards of certainty, obvious signals and straightforward risks, but it's a lot easier to go "Professor, Fire Hot" than it is to isolate a one-in-a-million risk that only a thousand people got exposed to.

I'm afraid the best approach is to look through the procedural history for court cases and the sources used to promote the final rules: Industrial Union Department v. American Petroleum Institute makes clear that OSHA had requested a study in "spring of 1976", received a preliminary result in April, 1977. While they had diddled the figures to make them match what OSHA wanted (by incorrectly assuming that the historic leukemia deaths were from <25 ppm exposures, when at least some of the exposures were probably much higher), the data was strong for exposures around 100 ppm. OSHA just didn't want to push that or even a reasonable safety factor from that because it had begun accepting a zero-threshold model for most carcinogenic materials, and because there wasn't much space below the (then-voluntary) 10 ppm threshold already present.

Getting numbers that precise with any accuracy required a lot of work and a lot of time, simply because the signal was so tiny. OSHA maintained (and afaik, has not been stopped by courts) from treating one-in-a-million risks as 'significant' for regulatory purposes, but you can look at the analysis and watch the studies walk toward the eventual threshold OSHA wanted. That wasn't really done until the mid-1980s, though, arguably the earliest with Crump 1984 but OSHA looked to depend more on Rinsky 1987.

By contrast, again pointing to IFU v API, OSHA asked a consultant to evaluate and estimate the costs of a 1 ppm threshold in October 1976, and that consultant finished the entire economic impact study by May 1977.

CertainlyWorse Dedicated Pessimist Soriek 7mo ago

I once had a brief foray as an OSHA consultant in a Western government department. By the time I got there it was thinly concealed sinecure. The workload was laughable and the majority of the job was evaluating complaints from employees that were angling towards some sort of compensation graft. Actual safety in an office environment did not require the large team we had. I didn't last too long before the lack of meaning in the job led me back to the private sector.

I remember in one case, a 'partially blind' person's ~~emotional support~~ guide dog was causing a genuinely severe allergic reaction in a nearby seated work colleague (whereby 'nearby' I mean on the opposite side of the floor). All the other consultants basically ran and hid from the job because the blind person had a history of 'requesting' ~~danegeld~~ support items to make them more comfortable at work. I was flabbergasted at their workstation on an open floor plan which was fully surrounded by 6ft high partitions to ~~give them their own private office~~ protect them from sunlight due to their light sensitivity. After a brief investigation I figured out it was the dog bed in their pod that someone had authorised that had not been cleaned for years. Getting it regularly cleaned along with a HEPA air conditioner sorted it out, but the cost of maintaining the kayfabe disgusted me.

Soriek CertainlyWorse 7mo ago

You have any opinions on what could make it work better? Interesting to hear there were more staff than necessary rather than too few

It was mainly the entrenched 'not for profit' drive behind the organisational culture that led to inefficiency. There were no incentives to cut costs (staff) and in the process make the remaining staff more efficient.

Normally every few years a new party will get in power and appoint a taskforce to cut costs in the public sector, but as an outside force it would never be able to maintain a reasonable level of efficiency. With inefficient staff, more would be required to undertake the workload so staff bloat would increase again over time.

There would probably need to be a taskforce for efficiency embedded directly within the department(s). This would include management/organisational consultants (or more cheaply, an FTE role with those skills).

Government culture can complicate these issues in other ways. The public sector is left leaning in their politics and is unionised. Due to self-regulation it is very difficult to fire government employees for laziness and incompetence. It can require multiple admonishments and a performance management process that can last years. The process of firing an employee is so draining on middle management that they arrange for transfers to other departments to make it someone else's problem. Or wait for a wave of redundancies to effectively bribe people to leave.

The refusal to weaken employment regulations around firing people makes the public service collect some of the laziest people I have ever come across. I remember one 55year old man that had spent a career at just above the entry level rank for unskilled workers. He told me stories about how he would skip work to attend environmental protests. He regularly turned up late and left early. His work turnover was less than half of the average (and the average was not that high). He had managed to coast through his career and despite his workmates despising him for his laziness, he had never been fired. This man was a union representative which I saw him exploit multiple times in the short period I knew him.

It gets worse. Government deliberately aims to hire minorities. This includes people with a disability. A small fraction of people with a disability are for want of a better word, grifters. On top of the risk of hiring some of these people, they are created through filing a false workers compensation claim for a workplace injury, PTSD or the like. The OSHA consultants strongly suspected that grifters would tell their friends about techniques to file claims and get long periods of time off work or better yet a total and permanent disability determination for money indefinitely.

But I digress and you asked for solutions. Besides the efficiency taskforce I would look at weakening regulations around the grounds for firing staff. Also for the OSHA team, assign soft KPI's for caseload clearance with rewards for completion and performance management for those that fall way below expectation. I say soft KPI's because management discretion would be required as you would prefer to reward and not punish consultants for taking difficult (and time consuming) cases.

I've really only scratched the surface about government culture. Changing it is like trying to clean an oven with only warm water and a wash cloth.

Thanks for the thought out response, I'll definitely reflect on this information.

MaiqTheTrue Zensunni Wanderer CertainlyWorse 7mo ago

This is one reason that I’m generally against ADA for most things. I don’t mind wheelchair ramps and the like, but the problem is more or less that there’s almost no limit either to the things that can be considered “disabilities” nor the requests (which have basically the force of law behind them) even at great cost to the rest of the company and the other people who work there. If I have a mental illness, I get essentially extra time off to deal with the anxiety or depression or whatever. The rest of the workforce not only doesn’t get the xtra time off, but has to then take up the slack I leave behind. And because a lot of mental illness has few physical tells it becomes an easy thing to fake. I go to the doctor and get a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or ADHD with little actual screening against cheating, go tell HR my ~~demands~~ accommodations and get extra benefits to myself.

CertainlyWorse Dedicated Pessimist MaiqTheTrue 7mo ago

I touch on this in in my other comment.

I have a friend who is a paraplegic. He tells me that the genuinely disabled despise these sorts of grifters as they drain resources and weaken the acceptance for making allowances for people with disabilities such as through the ADA.

ulyssessword Soriek 7mo ago

I knew that Mercatus Center graph looked familiar: Does Reality Drive Straight Lines On Graphs, Or Do Straight Lines On Graphs Drive Reality?

TL;DR: OSHA may be one of the steps which contributes to lowered workplace fatalities, much like laser photolithography may be one of the steps which enables smaller and smaller transistors in microchips.

Soriek ulyssessword 7mo ago

Yeah! That's exactly the point I was trying to get across, however mangled.

Quantumfreakonomics Soriek 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

Its interesting to read through the OSHA fatality reports. Almost every fatality is either someone falling to their death (usually while working construction), or getting run over. There's also the occasional freak accident. Is there any reasonable standard that would have protected this guy from the literal bomb someone had put in the scrap metal bin?

freemcflurry Quantumfreakonomics 7mo ago

They wrote that in a really weird way:

He sustained a concussion and puncture wounds from the shrapnel. He also sustained burns and he was killed.

Reading through a random selection I think all of the falls and electrocutions were preventable by wearing a harness and lockout tagout respectively. When you do dangerous stuff at your job all day it stops feeling dangerous and you do careless stuff like not tying off and falling out of a cherry picker. In my experience the problem usually isn't the procedures, it's that you do training when you get hired and then maaybe once a year after that but if it's not drilled into people on a regular basis then the procedures won't get followed. Nobody likes to be the hall monitor bugging people to wear their safety glasses.

I was surprised by how many murders there were. I would never want to work at a gas station in a bad area after reading that.

netstack Texas is freedom land freemcflurry 7mo ago

9/11/13

TJ Lyle & Company, GA

Worker cutting a water pipe with a chain saw died after the saw kicked back and cut his neck, severing arteries.

It’s incredible that, in a country of 330 million souls, these documents are only 70 pages long.

Soriek netstack 7mo ago

Anecdotally, I did non-union, non-OSHA monitored construction work with basically no safety standards, and my boss still drilled in me like crazy to stand skewed when cutting & always make sure one end was free hanging to guard against that kind of kickback. Seems like an awful way to die.

cjet79 Soriek 7mo ago

The effects of regulation are usually discreet, not continuous. The pre 1970 decline in fatalities is also discreet. This suggests regulation was not the cause.

There are also known mechanisms for the continuous improvements in worker safety in the market. These market safety improvements will be tied with the general price of labor.

I'd expect regulations to have noticeable and discreet effects within an industry. But it is unlikely to show up on the overall graph of workplace fatalities.

Soriek cjet79 7mo ago

I'd expect new technology or self-initiated safety practices introduced from companies to have the same kind of discrete impact though. That's part of why I appreciate leaving the trendline (which can contain a lot we don't know) and looking more at their specific policies, where you do see discrete jumps in ex: bloodborne pathogen exposure.

hydroacetylene Soriek 7mo ago

On the other hand, I have a strong prior that US agencies are going to do less, be less efficient, and generally have a much worse paperwork:results ratio compared to other countries. Giving them more money can’t fix that no matter what it’s earmarked for- OSHA safety inspectors will compensate for the added staffing and increased fines by focusing on doing the least productive parts of their jobs and possibly working fewer hours.

Soriek hydroacetylene 7mo ago

I imagine this is true, but less out of a love of paperwork on the part of OSHA and more because that's what our legislators mandate. In my experience bureaucrats hate bureaucracy more than anyone else. If you read the employee survey reports some of them release on how to improve the agency, there will always be people complaining that they can't do any real work because they have too many procedures to follow and compliance activities to report, too many levels of authority decisions need to move through, the OIG is always breathing right down their neck, etc.

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

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