Login


Notice: Passwords are now case-sensitive

Remember Me
Register a new account
Forgot your password?

An Ounce of Prevention

Friday, May 7, 2010 | 1

By Julius Young
Boxer & Gerson

My momma taught me that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Surely that's true for California.

Occupational health and safety enforcement has been in free fall in California. In November 2009, Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration stats revealed that California issued the lowest rate of serious OSHA citations in the country. In California 19% of citations were issued as serious. The national average was around 43%.

California isn't that much safer. Injuries that could have been prevented on the front end by better safety standards and adequate enforcement turn into problems dumped into the workers' compensation system.

It's always amazed me that some industries resist safety regulations, yet complain about workers' compensation costs. We've recently seen the results of that approach in the West Virginia mine explosion and the Gulf of Mexico oil rig debacle.

A bill to address Cal-OSHA safety enforcement, AB 2774, will be heard in the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee on May 5 at 1:30 in Sacramento at the State Capitol Room 447.

Currently the California OSH Appeals Board has taken a narrow approach to defining "serious physical harm", equating it with "serious injury." As a result of the restrictive definition, fewer violations have been issued as "serious".

AB 2774 would bring the Cal-OSHA program in line with Federal OSHA and the Federal OSHA Field Manual.

Under AB 2774, "serious physical harm" would be defined as:

  • Any injury or illness, specific or cumulative, occurring in the place or in connection with any employment, which is the consequence of a condition, practice, means, method, operation, or process that meets any of the following:
    • (A) Requires inpatient hospitalization for a period in excess of 24 hours for other than medical observation.
    • (B) Causes an employee to suffer the loss of any member of the body
    • (C) Causes an employee to suffer any serious degree of permanent disfigurement.
    • (D) Could reasonably lead to impairment of a part of the body by substantially reducing its efficiency on of off the job for more than 24 hours
The proposed bill would also make it clear that a single condition, practice, means, method, operation or process can be classified as "resulting in serious physical harm".

Health and safety advocates have argued that the legislation is needed because there is no other means to defined "serious physical harm", given the current position of the Cal-OSHA Appeals Board.

All of this comes at a time when the Feds are examining the Cal-OSHA program. In January 2010 the Federal OSHA program informed Ca-OSHA and the Cal-OSHA Appeals Board that it is conducting a study of enforcement under the state program.

The bill's sponsors are Assembly members Sandre Swanson, Warren Furutani, Bill Monning and Mariko Yamada. Here is a link to a pdf of the current bill text: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bil ... sm_v97.pdf

Also worth checking out is "Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA" by the Center for Progressive Reform. The policy paper summarizes many of OSHA's failures and outlines suggestions for strengthening worker health and safety enforcement: http://www.progressivereform.org/articles/OSHA_1003.pdf

Julius Young is a claimants' attorney for the Boxer Gerson law firm in Oakland, Calif. This column was reprinted with his permission from his blog, http://www.workerscompzone.com

Comments

This comment is private.

Related Articles