First, workplace safety without OSHA would be very unsafe, because OSHA
assures safety and healthful concerns for employees who are some of the
stakeholders of the organization. Furthermore, they provide technical
assistance to employers and employees in their programs that consult them.
Plus, they stimulate management and employee commitment for a safe
environment and improve working conditions by giving routine inspections
(OSHA, 2009).
Second, managers and company owners would be safety conscience to a certain
extend. However, they will be more safety conscience if they knew that there
were penalties, possible jail sentencing for knowingly causing harm to
individuals in the workplace causing major injury or death (OSHA, 2009).
Third, if an OSHA inspector came to the plant or company unannounced I would
feel relieved to know that they are watching over companies. I would welcome
the inspector with open arms.
The reasoning behind all this is a positive view, because companies and
employees need to know that there is regulation for their own protection.
OSHA inspectors can inspect and find a flaw that can be corrected ahead of
time before disaster hits and then it causes more damage to the company.
There were 6.218 fatal injuries out of 17,000 injuries or illnesses for each
day out of 6.2 million workers in 1998 alone. (Personally I recall an old
friend of mine died from asbestos poisoning and he died before he even won
in the lawsuit. In the old days the major plants had a lot of cases of
asbestos poisoning and it’s a slow cancer that hits the lungs and other
parts of the body.) Furthermore, costs exceed $120bil a year, $60.9 bil in
lost wages and productivity, $21.1 in medical costs and $23.7 for rehires,
not to mention the pain and suffering the family goes through (OSHA, 2009).
Still further, some companies think it’s cheaper to ignore fixing a machine
and have a casualty rather than preventing the casualty. There should be
safety training in this case and preventative measures. Since the OSHA Act
casualties have been cut in half. It is better to prevent a disaster than to
have 25 men die from being trapped behind locked doors, company going BK and
owner of Imperial getting 19 years in prison for not having safety features
in place (OSHA, 2009).
Finally, main issues should be to continue to enforce strong penalties, have
more funding for more inspectors, and have better protection for
whistleblowers. There should be an anonymous tip 800 line setup for
whistleblowers to help investigators go after violators and managers need to
have training programs in place for other managers and employees
(stakeholders) and allow NO doctoring of documents. Plus, managers and
company owners should continue to be held liable because they have an
ethical and legal obligation to protect the company and its stakeholders. It
is legally wrong and ethically wrong to have violations and it is the ethical
concept of moral right to life and safety and ethical concept of justice to
give protection to whistle blowers, and the corporation is socially
responsible to take care of the stakeholders or employees (Ethics, 2009).
Marlene
Reference:
http://www.osha.gov/html/comp-desc.html
http://www.scrl.org/index.html
http://www.pao.gov.ab.ca/toolkit/tools/individual-ethics-profile.htm
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