Published earlier today on Triple Pundit.
Scrap metal recycling is a US$50 billion business that as of 2013 employs over 150,000 people in the United States. While the slump in volatile metal prices caused revenues to plateau in 2013 after a prosperous few years, scrap metal recycling will long be profitable — especially when considering the fact 95 percent of cars eventually end up at a recycling facility. For this industry’s workers, however, with these jobs come risks.
A recent example is the death of a worker at an Illinois scrap metal recycling facility earlier this year. The company has now been fined US$470,000 by the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Organization (OSHA) for eight different violations, ranging from the lack of employee protection from hazards to even a complete failure to post signs pointing out dangerous equipment. Furthermore, the dearth of safety features at a metal shredder is what led to the employee’s arm to be trapped in a conveyor belt, which led to his death. What is most disturbing, however, is that OSHA had never inspected the facility, as noted in an interview on Think Progress.
But while this case makes it easy to highlight this one company and OSHA’s shortcomings, the reality is that the scrap metal sector is one of the more dangerous settings for American workers — and little is done to enforce safety protections for workers.
A big part of the problem is that while Congress tasks various government agencies with enforcing federal laws and regulations, these agencies rarely receive the funding necessary to hire the people needed to review, inspect, audit and, in the end, file claims over violations. We saw this over a decade ago with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which did not have the staff to review public companies’ filings while the likes of Enron, Adelphia and MCI Worldcom collapsed from shady accounting practices. We have long seen an overwhelmed FDA struggle to inspect foods manufactured here and imported into the U.S., which has led to an onslaught of recalls from baby formula to peanut butter.
But OSHA’s directives for workplace safety, including the monitoring of recycling plants, compared to what it can do logistically, are absurdly impossible to enforce. Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly friendly to anything smacking of government regulation, points out that OSHA inspectors are only able to visit each workplace in the U.S. once every 99 years. The ratio varies by states: Texas businesses can count on an OSHA visit every 126 years while the state of Washington has knocked that rate down to once in 44 years. Granted, even if you take out the small mom-and-pop shops, the small offices, mall kiosks and the like, the odds remain that safety rules can be ignored or overlooked with little consequences — until a serious accident or death occurs. A business is far more likely to blindsided with a frivolous, and fiscally destructive, Americans with Disability-related lawsuit than a visit from an OSHA inspector. And while human nature dictates why we resent someone perceived as an outsider from showing up on our turf . . . an occasional OSHA inspection is far less harmful than what happened in Illinois or at a fertilizer plant in Texas earlier this year.
Unfortunately OSHA’s budget continues to suffer cuts while its burden grows. The agency has fewer inspectors than it did in 1981, when the U.S. had half the workplaces compared to today. It would be easy to say self-inspection and self-governing are the solution; but we still need a third party to enforce workers’ safety, and their lives—especially since the recycling industry has more hazards than we would like to believe.
Image credit: Wikipedia (IFCAR)
Leon Kaye has lived in Abu Dhabi for the past year and is currently spending some time in Uruguay. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter. Other thoughts of his are on his site, greengopost.com.
The post No OSHA Inspection Ever for Scrap Metal Plant, Scene of Fatal Accident appeared first on greengopost.com.