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Your health and safety matters

Date Posted: February 18 2005

OSHA is union blind.

Because union companies, as opposed to non-union, often have larger projects and worksites that remain active over long periods of time, some union contractors suspect their sites are inspected more often by OSHA than their non-union competitors.

The data does not support that suspicion, reports the Laborers Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA).

OSHA conducted 22,362 inspections of construction worksites in 2004. About a third were the result of fatalities or complaints. Two-thirds (64%) were "programmed," meaning they were randomly-generated from the total list of employers.

Union sites were inspected 4,051 times - 18 percent of the total. Data is unavailable on the percentage of construction companies that employ union labor, but 19.6 percent of construction workers are union members.

"Larger companies probably are more commonly union than smaller ones," said Noel C. Borck, Management Co-Chairman of the LHSFNA and Executive Vice President of the NEA - the Association of Union Constructors. "So the percentage of union companies is probably somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. Judging by that, union sites do not appear to be inspected more often than non-union sites."

The most common OSHA inspection was for fall protection (4,870 inspections), and these produced the second most citations (5,552). The most common citation was for scaffolding (8,658).

Citations for excavations and requirements for protective systems resulted in the highest average cost ($2,748) per citation. Fall protection/steel erection ($2,585) and cranes and derricks ($2,128) citations had the next highest average cost.

Driving is dangerous.
What's the most common cause of workplace fatalities?

You may be surprised to learn that it is highway crashes. About one in four workers killed on-the-job in 2003 (the most recent year for which data is available) - 1,350 workers - died in a highway incident.

This is just the number of workers killed while driving a vehicle at work. It does not include 120 workers killed each year while working in roadway work zones.

The plague of health care costs.
In the latest summation of health spending in the U.S., a study in the January/February journal Health Affairs indicates that, in 2003, for the first time ever, more than 15 percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GNP) went to health care.

That is 20 percent more than the next highest industrial nations, Switzerland and Germany.

The 2003 increase in health spending was only 7.7 percent, after a 9.3 percent increase in 2002. Still, health spending in 2003 averaged $5,670 per person, up $353 from 2002. Hospital care accounted for about a third of all expenditures.
The 2003 percent increase was greater than the growth in the U.S. economy as a whole. That means health spending rose faster than federal revenues and crowded spending on other priorities.

(Information for this article was provided by the Laborers Health and Safety Fund of North America)