The Occupational Health and Safety Administration performed slightly more work site inspections in President Trump’s first year in office than it did under President Barack Obama’s final year, but they were less thorough, in a rollback of the previous administration’s efforts.
The federal safety agency performed 32,396 inspections in fiscal 2017, which ended Sept. 30, 2017, a modest increase over the previous year’s figure of 31,948. However, the inspections were shorter and less intense overall, with OSHA inspectors opening more cases but spending less time on them.
“This administration is firmly committed to the safety of American workers. For the first time in five years, OSHA inspections increased year over year in 2017. Additionally, the Department of Labor has provided blanket authority for OSHA to hire additional inspectors,” a Labor Department representative who requested anonymity told the Washington Examiner.
The National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit worker advocacy group, reported Tuesday that the agency’s overall activity nevertheless had declined, pointing to an OSHA metric that weighted the cases based on the amount of hours they took, a system dubbed “enforcement units.” Under that system, the amount of enforcement units fell from 42,900 during Obama’s last year to 41,829 in Trump’s first, a decline of about 2 percent.
“The actual total number of inspections dropped way down in FY 2016, but the weighted value was much higher (because) this new system gives more weight to more in-depth inspections. OSHA under the new administration is reducing enforcement activity as measured by the new weighted system,” said the group’s spokeswoman, Debbie Berkowitz.
The weighted counting system was adopted by the Labor Department in 2016 under former Secretary Tom Perez, and meant that certain cases counted for more than others if they took longer to perform. At the time, the department argued that just counting total cases “may have discouraged some offices from committing the necessary resources to fully complete more time-consuming, complex investigations.” The new metric was meant to spur them to be more thorough.
The number of cases OSHA opened that year, 31,948, was down sharply from the previous year’s count of 35,820, a figure that was already down from previous years. The figures for Trump’s first year indicates that investigators are no longer being encouraged to conduct fewer, but more resource-intense, investigations and instead are being prodded to close cases faster.
“This decline in enforcement activity continued at an accelerated pace in the first five months of FY 2018. Comparing OSHA enforcement activity in just the first five months of FY 2018 with enforcement activity from the first five months of FY 2017, the data shows that enforcement units are already down by 1,163 from FY 2017,” NELP reported.
