Leading and Learning Through Safety
Leading and Learning Through Safety
Episode 172 - Abolishing OSHA
The podcast episode discusses a legislative proposal to abolish OSHA, introduced by an Arizona Congressman who argues that workplace safety should be managed by states and private employers rather than the federal government. However, similar efforts in the past have failed, and the speaker believes this attempt is unlikely to gain traction. OSHA plays a crucial role in setting, educating on, and enforcing safety laws, though compliance alone does not guarantee workplace safety. Currently, 22 states operate their own OSHA-approved programs, with varying degrees of success. The discussion highlights that ethical companies view OSHA as a baseline but strive to go beyond compliance by embedding safety into their workplace culture. In contrast, some businesses only implement safety measures due to legal or financial consequences, such as insurance claims and liability costs. The speaker emphasizes that true workplace safety is not just about following laws but fostering a culture where leadership values and prioritizes employee well-being. While the abolition of OSHA is unlikely, the broader challenge remains in ensuring that all organizations, especially those with little regard for safety, are held accountable.
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This week on the podcast, yeah, I'm gonna talk about it. Let's just get rid of OSHA. Let's deregulate it. Let's outlaw it. Let's get rid of it. Yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit about that coming up on this episode of the podcast.
Announcer:You mark, welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety, nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You
Mark French:Music. Welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am your host, and again, thank you for joining me. So happy. You're with me this week as we talk through so many things safety, but also leadership. How do we lead better? And we lead better when our people feel safe and they are safe, we can create that. We have a unique opportunity in our profession to be able to do that. And so this week, I could not ignore the news and all the political posts and all the Facebook posts and so much interesting about this legislation that got introduced that I personally do not think it will go anywhere. And again, personal opinion, but let's jump into that and talk a little bit about it. So an Arizona Congressman introduced a bill to abolish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration his part, the reason he thought this is because of a bloated federal government and believes that safety and health issues are better handled by the states and private employers. It was signed into law in 1970 by President Nixon, etc, etc. It's been around a while, and there's a lot of effect with this. Now, this is not the first time that he has introduced this legislation, and it absolutely never goes anywhere, never has, once probably won't. Now, where the bigger concern is, is that will there be probably some budget cuts for OSHA? Yeah, on a federal level there, that is probably expected. Are there enough inspectors going on to really help curb the key issues? No, it's been underfunded for a while. It needs more. But I also understand so I have a unique perspective, somewhat from being in this world for quite some time, working around businesses, being the side of a safety person in a business, and understanding, really what OSHA does and what it doesn't do. And I'm going to give a lot of personal opinions on this, this podcast, this is going to be a lot of me talking about my experiences and where I think it's good, where I think it's bad. And I'm not sure that any legislation in that is going to be introduced like that is going to make any difference. So first of all, when OSHA was put into effect, there, you could choose states could choose to be part of the federal program, or they could create their own state program. So already there's 22 states running their own plans, covering covering both private and local government workers. So there's already a good percentage of the United States that is already a state funded plan that the state itself is running it now there's been some success stories in some states. There's been some failures, where some oversight went and the Federal had to take it back over because it wasn't doing its job. It was ignoring critical risk factors. From that standpoint, I had the privilege of being able to be part of the Murray State University safety program, one of the oldest, most accredited, not having OSHA around would pay. Negated that educational opportunity for a lot of people to do it. Will safety go away? No. Will the laws be repealed? I really strongly doubt it. Is it silly to do this? Is it political grandstanding of some form? Probably I will. It's all right there, and it's going to be complicated. There's a lot of complicated political things going on right now, from a standpoint of safety, what I have found that the greatest opportunity that OSHA has allowed me one is it does set a standard there. There is a very clear standard of safe and unsafe, even though that doesn't in particularly always prevent injuries. You can be 100% compliant with the OSHA regulations and still have injuries. Yeah, that that is part of it. There's a lot of items out there that can still hurt people that there's not a clear path to guarantee that someone will not get hurt. Most of the OSHA regulations, I've said this before, and I've heard this before, are literally and figuratively written in lots and lots of blood. Before we were able to get a law on the books, it took a lot of people getting seriously hurt or killed before we were able to legislate it. That's why, when we talk about the law as OSHA, we're talking about the minimum, and most of the good companies out there understand that you have to be above and beyond, you have to do more. We comply with the law, and that gives us a baseline of compliance, but we have to look at more. We have to be more. We have to do more to be able to really protect our people. And a lot of the times, there's been two ways that in my past, I have made great influence in safety. Or three, I'll what, unfortunately, I'm thinking about the negative side of some of the situations leadership items that I've been involved in. I guess I'll start there. Let's start with one. The fact that a company wants a safety person and wants to hear the voice of a safety person is usually a strong indicator that they're starting to do things right, or they want to do things right, or they are doing things right in the fact that they find someone who truly understands and cares. Great. That's what it should be. There have been times in my career where, yes, I have had to look at someone in charge, and we've discussed, unfortunately, things that are not so good, and I have to break out the things that I hate having to rely on the most, because it is the bottom to me. It's like your last and final argument in a lot of ways. And it shouldn't have to be you shouldn't have to result to this as a leader in an organization, to result to this type of conversation in any form. And this goes across, really, any industry like we can talk about like any, let's talk IRS, let's talk Department of Labor, let's talk any, any government law or official, there should not be a time in that history as you have a leader that you have to walk up to a next level leader or executive and you say, I have advised you against doing that. Out of my professional opinion. I am now telling you that if you choose to do that. It is only against my professional opinion. It is also legal. According to this standard, you are about to choose to do something illegal. That's not a good you really don't want to be there as a leader. Again, that's where you've really reached into a situation where there's dysfunction, functional organizations do not need to have those style of conversations. It does give at least some semblance to organizations to have those laws to fall back on, even if, let's say, OSHA was abandoned that we just finished it. I still don't the companies that aren't doing the right thing would probably still be more empowered to do the wrong thing without fear of penalty of OSHA. But I don't think that some of the penalties right now are really discouraging some anyway, and that's unfortunate. No one should have to come to work and get hurt because those companies that are choosing to be bad, and this is choice, choosing to not protect their people, the fear of OSHA is minor compared to other opportunities that are out. Out there, and a lot of it is around cost, having to pay the insurance claims, having to pay the liability. That's the other fundamental that we fall back on to safety professionals in a tough situation when we want to get our point across and we talk dollars, let's talk more about that on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast.
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Mark French:welcome back to the second half. So we're talking about the potential legislation that went in to abolish the OSHA Act, which I don't think will gain much traction, but the use of OSHA, it's really three factors. They create laws, they educate on laws, and they enforce. A lot of times when good companies really approach people safety, they're looking at beyond those basic things anyway. They're looking at, how do you be better? Where it really affects is those companies who don't care. It gives at least some threat. It's kind of like the perpetual speeder. The threat of being caught sometimes will slow you down a little in certain areas. Same thing with OSHA, those who are not doing a good job in safety play the game where they think if there's an opportunity to get caught, they won't get caught, and they're still going to do bad things and put people at risk. Fundamentally, we're talking about this really subsection of organizations that are poor and don't care. And infuriate me, because how can you not care about people, but historically, that certainly is well documented through history of just not caring about people. So that's a whole I think that's more philosophical than it's going to be technical safety, and so we'll move past that, because I could go into that way too long, way too long. But we were talking about cash, and how the fear of losing money is also the other motivator, not just the law, but when you have those injuries, having to pay your insurance claims, having to pay all the things that come with it and potential liability that could come with it, when you're talking dollars to an organization that also creates change. And again, that's that's a lagging indicator and a lagging metric, to be able to talk to people about it doesn't really if you're there, you're either at a starting point of where you're really starting to educate leadership and educate people on what safety is providing, or if it's the constant conversation, your your organization is not really thriving, it's not looking at the next advancement in human motivation and leadership kind of stuck, not necessarily proactive, but not At least you're thinking about at least you're caring something, one is always greater than zero. Now, would we love to be 100 and in the scaling case, yeah, maybe. But one is still greater than zero. If we're doing something, we're doing something, and that's better than nothing, always. So if we're talking about it, even if it's Hey, you can't do that because it's illegal or it's going to cost you a lot of money if someone gets hurt. At least it's a discussion. At least it's a beginning point for talking about safety. So let's look at the other organizations that really have embraced and understand and are focusing on the good parts of leadership in creating safety for people. Is OSHA A prime motivator for those organizations, not really. It's usually something inherent to core or culture. It's something that is fundamental. It's something about value. It's something about human life. It's something about caring about people. It's more than just a law that says don't hurt people. It's an understanding that you can't be known as an organization that hurts people and creates problems. There's so much about that, but if you fund. Mentally see that, then the case for safety remains. Is it good to have a law that that at least begins the conversation, to have the case for safety? Yeah, some organizations need that starting point, and this is a starting point for that. And again, that's why I don't see it, given the history of how much it took to actually get the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the evolution through the years of it, in the way that laws are promulgated now, and some of the work in the fact that 22 are running their own individual state plans already, I don't think the risk is high. I think there could be more done. I think there should be more done. But I'm also in the profession, and I see the value, and I've I know people who are out there doing it every day, and feel that they are doing some some really good work out there, and they see some really terrible things, and they do some really good work. Where I look at it is those organizations that need OSHA are usually not getting caught anyway, because they're there's so many, there's they know. They know it. Again, I go back to my speeding example. If you if you know where the speed traps are going to be, you know where to avoid them. And that's all what we see, unfortunately, until things are terrible, terrible, where other organizations that have values, that understand motivation of people, that understand leadership is so important and very prominent, where safety is inherent, and we're not even looking at the baseline. We're looking at where do we? Where are we? Where will we be better? How do we continue to protect because again, OSHA compliance does not guarantee safety. There's still hazards out there that may not be covered. There's still situations out there that may not inherently be legislated, that we look for, that we work on, that we can look for, the analysis to find how to protect our people better. It's all the time, it's and it's not just the hazards, it's how we interact with our workplace. Because risk does not go away. You can lower the risk. You can eliminate technically, if people are still there's a lot of argument there. Let me use the generalization that if someone is interacting with the process, risk is there. It can be really, really low and it can be within a just really tolerance level of of low. Risk doesn't mean that it couldn't happen, doesn't mean that some protection could not work, and something could happen. Hopefully it's minimized to the best of our ability. That's what we're gonna minimize it. I think we're having the biggest gap, and the biggest trouble in what we do is because we have such a wide gap. If you were to look at the bell curve, this is long and wide for the US. We have those that are in the middle just doing the thing. We have those that are excelling. We have those that don't care at all. And there's a varying degrees of all of it. So the span of good to bad to great was huge, and it's hard to manage all of that. I have a final thought that kind of leaves it hanging out there, but that's really where it comes is, how do you try your best to gather as much as you can toward the middle? And you play the odds and you work your best to create lower risk. Thanks for joining me on this episode. I appreciate you joining me through this randomness of talking about OSHA, and until next time we chat, stay safe.
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