A concerned health and safety construction trainer sent me this memo that one of his students from Briggs Engineering in Massachusetts had given him.

The Briggs employee was distressed by the memo and said that he felt that management was putting the financial responsibility for health and safety program compliance on his shoulders.

The trainer sent a copy of the memo to OSHA asking them if this was OK.

Obviously, if a company can merely shift its fiduciary reponsibility for CFR 1926 safety regulations on to its workforce by way of a memo, this trend will catch on like wildfire nationwide. I trust that this isn’t the way you expect a responsible management to behave by threatening or extorting compiance costs out of its workforce to achieve corporate safety program compliance.

If I am wrong on this and this corporate policy is acceptable with OSHA, please let me know so that I can immediately adjust my training curriculum accordingly.

Well apparently, he’s going to have to change his curriculum because an the OSHA rep responsible for dealing with discrimination cases told him that OSHA won’t intervene unless the company actually carries through with the threat.

Hello? Punishing workers is a violation of the, but threatening to punish workers is just fine as long as you don’t actually do it? So if a manager can be so serious in his threats that his employees don’t dare “force” him to carry through, it’s perfectly fine?

As the concerned trainer said:

It’s almost like telling a cop that the guy over there just threatedn to shot me and the cop answering that he won’t even talk to the guy until after he does shoot me.

Yeah, except that these are Bush times.

Officials said the employee in yesterday’s accident was moving between two scaffoldings about 25 feet apart that were attached to a building on Fifth Avenue at West 17th Street. Around 8:45 a.m., the employee, Klever Ramiro Jara, 25, of Brooklyn, unclipped his harness and was walking on a building ledge when he apparently fell.

In response to Jara’s death, the city has formed a task force to improve fall safety for construction workers. But we need more text here in order to test the double blockquotes. The 28-member task force will develop a policy for safety enforcement, worker training and oversight by the middle of next month, said Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster.

In August, New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi announced that following an audit by his office, the New York City Department of Buildings had increased inspections and revamped or instituted new databases to improve its oversight over the issuance and monitoring of permits for cranes, derricks and scaffolds to maintain public safety.

The results of the audit were pretty disturbing:

Auditors made random unannounced site visits in Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens during August and September 2005 to observe cranes and scaffolds and determine if valid permits were in place. Auditors determined that there was no valid permit on record for 43 of 144 pieces of equipment (30 percent), including 41 of 104 scaffolds (39 percent) and 2 of 40 cranes (5 percent).

Department of Buildings inspectors followed up auditors’ findings by visiting the sites where the 43 equipment items without valid permits were located. The inspectors issued Stop Work Orders (SWO) at five of the sites, where seven scaffolds were still operating without permits. Auditors later visited these five sites and found that work continued at three of them, despite the SWO.

In late September and early October 2005, auditors visited 78 sites where scaffolding permits had expired between August 1 and September 12, 2005. At 12 of the 78 sites (15 percent) scaffolding was still present, and work was underway at four of those 12 sites.

It’s not yet clear whether Jara’s employer had a valid permit.

According to the NY Times, things are getting so bad that even employers are getting fed up:

Louis J. Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, which represents about 1,500 construction managers, contractors and subcontractors, said the task force needed to find ways to create and enforce strict universal standards for all builders, and to punish violators.

“Fines are not enough,” he said. “They should be put out of business.”

And then there was this stupid statement from Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

“People that work in this city deserve to have a safe workplace,” he said. “Now, some of the jobs are just inherently dangerous — you’re up there in scaffolding; you know, to say, ‘Well, let’s put it inside,’ you can’t do. But we’ll do everything we can to make them safe.

Shrugging you shoulders and saying a job’s “inherently dangerous” is one step away from sayting “shit happens.” No one’s saying that people shouldn’t work on scaffolds. It can be done safely — it just takes equipment, training and the good management to make sure it gets done.

I mean we almost never even send people to jail for willfully ignoring a safety standard that leads to the death of a worker. This guy gets jail for a bruised shin:

Seeley’s Bay contractor jailed 30 days for health and safety violation

KINGSTON, ON, Oct. 25 /CNW/ - A partner of Peaks & Valleys Contracting, a roofing contractor based in Seeley’s Bay, Ont., was ordered jailed for 30 days today for a violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act that resulted in injuries to a young employee.

On September 14, 2004, a worker fell from a roof about three storeys into a refuse bin on the ground below. The worker suffered a bruised shin bone. Just prior to the incident the worker had been instructed by the defendant to ascend the roof to remove old shingles so they could be replaced. The roof was about eight metres (27 feet) from the top of the eavestrough to the ground. The worker had been on the roof for about 10 minutes before falling. It was the worker’s first day on the job. The incident occurred at a shingling project at row housing on Craig Lane in Kingston. K.B. Home Insulation Ltd., a Kingston-based contractor, was hired by the row housing’s condominium corporation for the shingling project. K.B. Home Insulation Ltd., in turn, hired the defendant to do the work.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found the worker was not wearing a
fall harness when ascending the roof. However, as the worker lay injured in the bin, the defendant put a fall harness on the worker and told the worker to tell Ministry of Labour investigators the worker had been wearing it while on the roof. The worker did as instructed.

Of course the punishment was not just the bruised shin; it was the lie and the fact that the man could have been killed, just like two workers fall to their death every day down here, south of the border, in the United States.

But more important than the guy spending a month in jail is the message this sends out to employers across Canada. You put workers at risk, you lie to inspectors, you go to jail — even if no one dies.

Think about it.