Workplace inspections Short on surprises

An AP investigation found that three-quarters of U.S. workplaces where serious accidents occurred had never been inspected by OSHA during the 1990s, with the agency spending more time on union complaints than conducting preventive surprise inspections. The study of 778,000 OSHA inspections revealed systemic gaps in oversight, particularly affecting small, non-union businesses.

Three-quarters of U.S. work sites where serious accidents occurred in 1994 and early 1995 had never been inspected during this decade by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Together these accidents killed more than 1,800 workers and injured thousands more. This fall, AP studied the records of 778,000 inspections conducted by OSHA between January 1989 and May 1995 and examined the most serious accidents in 1994 through April 1995.

The resulting story, "OSHA Fails to Check Three Fourths of Places Where Workers Die," was released Sept. 5 and 6. Some of what AP found included: OSHA inspectors were not doing a large number of surprise inspections. These unannounced "program inspections" are supposed to convince businesses to follow safety regulations because OSHA staff could, in theory, show up at any time and slap fines and citations on companies that don't follow the rules.

OSHA staff often spent its time chasing down union complaints, many of which resulted in no serious violations. Nationally, 54 percent of OSHA inspections were surprise inspections during the period studied by AP. However, several states, "inundated with complaints that must be inspected first, lag far behind the national average," AP reported. Of the 6,411 workplaces AP concentrated on, 75 percent had not been visited by OSHA in the previous five years.

Seventy-six percent of those were non-union companies and more than half were small shops with fewer than 50 employees.