OSHA under siege.

• Author: Anderson, Sarah
• Position: Occupational Safety and Health Administration

North Carolina Congressman Cass Ballenger has been leading a crusade against what he calls "the Gestapo" over at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Ballenger claims his proposal to disarm OSHA of its enforcement power and turn it into a friendly consulting service for business has been a big hit outside the Beltway.

"If you leave Washington, D.C., this bill is one of the most popular things there is out in the country. I have not talked to anybody back home that doesn't think it's a great idea," Ballenger boasted to the National Journal

Back home in Ballenger's district, Mary Williams isn't surprised about that. "Ballenger hasn't heard anything bad because the only people he's probably talking to are his buddies over at the country club. He's not talking to people like me." Ballenger and Williams have both spent most of their lives in the western hills of North Carolina. But aside from an Appalachian twang, they have little in common. Ballenger inherited his family's business in Hickory and still holds at least a $1 million stake in the plastic-packaging firm. Not surprisingly, he views fellow business owners as benevolent leaders of America. While acknowledging that workplace-safety problems exist, he stresses that this is not because businesses don't want to protect their workers. The problem, he says, is that most are too afraid to ask OSHA for help.

Mary Williams (who agreed to tell her story only under a pseudonym) has a different perspective. For more than ten years, she worked the production line at a chicken-processing plant in Morganton, twenty miles from Hickory, in Ballenger's district. She doesn't recall a whole lot of benevolence towards workers or anxiety about OSHA among her bosses. She does remember the day they discharged her. Gutting, deboning, and chopping millions of chickens at dizzying speeds had left her body too crippled by carpal-tunnel syndrome to be of any use to her employer, Case Farms, Inc. She was earning less than $7 per hour.

Williams says if Ballenger did ask her opinion of his OSHA reform bill, she would have only one thing to say to him: "Why don't he come down here and try to do this work for a while? I could talk myself blue in the face, but he wouldn't understand until he saw it for himself." Ballenger and his allies in the anti-OSHA crusade would do well to take her up on the invitation. A few days on the line at Case Farms might help them understand why most workers wish that OSHA would inspire more fear, not less.

In OSHA's twenty-five-year history, the agency has hardly built up what one would call a formidable army of safety enforcers. In Ballenger's home state, the so-called OSHA Gestapo has so few inspectors that it would take them fifty-five years to inspect every workplace once. Fines for serious violations (in which someone could be or has been injured or killed) average only $1,024, according to the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Project, a nonprofit organization.

While the regulatory burden is already light, Ballenger's new bill would make compliance with job-safety laws almost completely voluntary. Workers would have to be killed, seriously injured, or exposed to continuous danger before OSHA could enforce the law. In response to the bill, groups like the Occupational Safety and Health Project that have spent years trashing OSHA for being too soft on businesses are now rallying to the agency's defense. Weak enforcement is better than no enforcement. And that is the choice...