Office Managers.

• Author: Olson, Walter

OSHA's retreat from its bid to regulate home workplaces sets a subversive precedent.

In late January the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced, as The New York Times put it, a "clarification" meant to dispel "confusion" about its policies. Contrary to earlier reports, the agency had decided that federal law did not require the homes of the nation's 20 million telecommuting employees to be free of such hazards as inadequate lighting, dangling power cords, ergonomically incorrect seating, rickety stairs, and drafty or stuffy ventilation conditions.

Accordingly, OSHA would not expect the nation's employers to carry out periodic inspections of their workers' home offices, or obtain from them checklists certifying that the employees' dens and basements were safe. Nor would employees who placed the occasional work-related phone call or sent the occasional e-mail message from home on evenings and weekends, or brought a spreadsheet home to work on while tending a sick child, be expected to map out emergency evacuation plans for their homes, keep OSHA-approved fire extinguishers and first aid kits on hand, or mount posters in their hallways to remind themselves of their right to a safe workplace.

Readers could be excused if their heads spun at the idea that all this could count as a mere "clarification" by the agency. A better description would be "abject, tail-between-its-legs retreat." Only two weeks earlier, a front-page story in The Washington Post had publicized an agency directive decreeing that businesses were indeed responsible for making sure that their employees' home work sites were free of federal safety violations. But by the time OSHA Director Charles Jeffress got done clarifying agency policy, you might have thought it was the nation's employers who'd been threatening to wrap home offices in red tape, and OSHA that had been waging a gallant fight against such a prospect. The "bottom line" for his agency, Jeffress said, had "always been" the same: "OSHA will respect the privacy of the home and expects that employers will as well."

What had actually taken place, of course, was a crash exercise in that time-honored Washington art, getting a story off the front pages. It more or less worked: News coverage practically ceased once the agency disclaimed an intent to regulate. But the agency's home office directive was no mere frolic by low-level staffers. It sprang from deep philosophic roots in the federal labor law we live under, and the premises of that law, inherited from the New Deal, unfortunately have not changed. Which means there's no principled reason for OSHA to stay out of this area in the future.

For most of this century, fights over "industrial homework" mostly arose from the activities...