FACTS
- The slowdown in inspections could prove dangerous for millions of workers: A Public Integrity analysis shows the vast majority of deaths and catastrophes have occurred at workplaces that weren’t inspected by OSHA.
- Under federal law, the OSHA doesn’t need to visit every workplace — an impossibility given that it has never had more than 1,500 inspectors to cover millions of workplaces.
- A cotton factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, collapsed and killed about 145 workers. That led the state to pass the nation’s first law requiring factory safety inspections. New Jersey, New York and a handful of other states followed.
STATS
- Even though the labor force grew by 16%, the number of workplace safety inspections dipped slightly during the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — before taking a nosedive during the coronavirus pandemic.
- 4 %– 40 inspectors out of 1,000. That’s the percentage decline in OSHA inspectors since Donald Trump took office and instituted a federal hiring freeze.
- In 2019, OSHA’s safety inspectors conducted 962 investigations into fatal or catastrophic workplace incidents — the highest number since the agency began publishing the data in 2011.
- OSHA has conducted more than 6,800 investigations into workplaces that had a fatal or catastrophic incident. The vast majority of them — about 91 % — had not been inspected in the previous 10 years.
- Researchers at Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley found that companies subject to the agency’s random inspections showed a 9.4 % decrease in injury rates compared with uninspected ones.
- Researchers with the RAND Corporation found that OSHA inspections were linked to a sharp decline in reported injuries at medium-size companies. Inspections that led to citations with penalties played a role in reducing injuries by an average of 19 % to 24 % each year for the two years following each inspection.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of 2016 Fatal Occupational Injuries reported there were 5,190 workplace fatalities in 2016, a seven percent increase from 2015.
- The study found that within high-hazard industries in California, inspected workplaces reduced their injury claims by 9.4 % and saved 26 % on workers’ compensation costs in the 4 years following the inspection, compared to a similar set of uninspected workplaces.