Occupational Safety Act (OSHA): A Case Study

Before the introduction of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1970 worker safety was not necessarily on the forefront of everyone employers mind. The safety movement in general had gotten an early start, somewhere between 1907 and 1912, where nearly every state that was industrialized had some form of safety laws in place after the public had grown too enraged over the accident levels that had reached high peaks around 1907. The problem, however, was that many of these laws were unlike most other labor legislation, making them ineffective due in large part to the lack of constitutionality (Herman and Somers, 1953). In 1970 the Act was passed and it immediately became law to care for worker safety in the workplace. All of the …show more content…
This is primarily because even though the basis of OSHA was founded on worker safety, it is through employer standards that the employees learn. With the Act, employers are not only required to give employees a safe place to work free from hazards, they are required to tell employees of all of their protections and obligations under the act (Hodgson, 1971). This is being done, but not in the manner of reading the rulebook per se, more in the way of re-wording the Act into an easy-to-deliver package that people will relate to and buy in to. Employers are also required to keep records of workplace injuries and employee exposure risks and hazards, as well as tell the employees if they are at risk of exposure to anything outside the limits set forth within the Act (Hodgson, …show more content…
In today’s world, however, where big business and politics reign supreme, the basic safety rights of workers are being threatened. In California, the state issued budget by the government for OSHA workers, and ultimately OSHA enforcement, has been put on a ‘starvation diet,’ thus being forcefully taken away from the employees as a safety countermeasure in the age of consumerism and profit-making (Brown, 2015). It is no surprise to hear this, since creating a safe working environment costs employers money and profit, so employers banding together to repel OSHA at a state level is not surprising. This also leads to another point of concern, which is the somewhat lack of concern by employees to understand their basic rights under OSHA as they grow complacent. As previously mentioned, employers are feeding the safety rhetoric to their employees and most are doing a great job, but this does not necessarily mean they are upholding the law as high as the OSHA law requires. It brings to light a situation which is almost undeniably happening, a situation where employers are in some ways ‘neglecting’ to give employees access to the knowledge of their basic safety