Bill McMorris of the Washington Free Beacon documents the Obama administration’s latest effort to appease unions and trial lawyers.
American businesses are up in arms about a new labor rule that will allow the federal government to publish sensitive safety data on a public database, potentially fueling union organizing and frivolous lawsuits.
The Occupational Safety and Healthy Administration issued a rule on Wednesday that will require companies to turn over all records of injuries that happen on the job. Companies have long been required to keep records of work-related incidents and make the data available to OSHA in the event of a complaint or investigation.
The new rule will force employers to preemptively turn over those records each year. The agency says those company and industry-wide statistics will then be published on a public website, though it pledged to protect workers’ personal information. The new rule is expected to cost employers $15 million per year. …
… Business groups criticized the rule, saying it would do little to improve worker safety. Publicizing injury numbers without context can give the public a false sense of the danger inherent in certain professional fields, according to the Association of Builders and Contractors.
“OSHA created a rule that does nothing to achieve its stated goal of reducing workplace injuries and illnesses and ignored the concerns from industry that this rulemaking will have unintended negative consequences,” Greg Sizemore, the group’s vice president, said in a release. “In departing from its current ’no fault’ recordkeeping system, OSHA has empowered itself to disseminate records and data to the public that fails to show the complete narrative of a company’s safety record or its efforts to promote a safe work environment.”
The Coalition for Workplace Safety, an umbrella group composed of several trade groups from the construction, retail, and textile industries, among others, said that the way the “fatally-flawed” rule was written “will only result in more regulatory burden.”
