Lax Labor Safety Enforcement Costs Workers’ Lives

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/10837

By Doug Cunningham

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) report on how employer safety inspections were handled during the Bush administration reveals a systematic failure to do follow up inspections when employers put workers in serious danger. The OIG report said at 45 worksites where federal safety oversight was lacking, 58 workers were later killed by job hazards. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says there’s no excuse for the federal job health and safety agency OSHA’s failure to properly do follow-up inspections. Fortunately, Sweeney says, we now have a new Secretary of Labor committed to worker’s needs. And that should lead to improvements in OSHA job safety inspections.