The Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed in the U.S. in 1970 in order to provide workers with protections from unsafe workplaces and to reduce the number of fatalities on the job. Before this time, there were few regulations that protected workers and the lack of protections resulted in disasters such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in which 146 people lost their lives when they were unable to escape a locked factory after a fire began. 
Today, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is supposed to enforce the worker safety laws in order to prevent future disasters from occurring and to help ensure that workers have the smallest possible risk of getting hurt on the job. Unfortunately, our Personal injury attorney orange county know that OSHA is understaffed and underfunded and enforcement of safety laws suffers as a result. The lack of effective enforcement of workplace safety laws may have played a direct role in contributing to the 4,693 worker deaths that occurred in 2011.
AFL-CIO Report on The Toll of Neglect
The AFL-CIO recently took a close look at how effective OSHA is at protecting workers. Their findings were published in the 2013 “Death on the Job” report, which has been subtitled “The Toll of Neglect.” The findings of the report were disturbing, as AFL-CIO discovered that:
- An average of 13 workers died each day on U.S. job sites.
- An estimated 50,000 workers died from occupational diseases.
- An estimated 7.6 to 11.4 million job-related illnesses and injuries affect workers each year.
- The losses from on-the-job injuries and illnesses is anywhere from $250 to $300 billion each year.
- OSHA has 837 federal inspectors to inspect more than 8 million worksites it has jurisdiction over. With the number of available inspectors, worksites could be inspected around once every 131 years.
- OSHA has little ability to levy effective fines and impose effective penalties. Only 84 criminal prosecutions have occurred since 1970 and criminal charges are limited to situations where a worker commits an intentional willful violation that caused a workplace death. Fines are small, with a median fine of only $5,715 after a workplace death and an average fine for a violation set at just $2,156.
