The Problem with OSHA Operations

November 21, 2013

November 21, 22013
The Problem with OSHA Operations
Since the beginning, OSHA has been a resource for employees everywhere, ensuring them that someone out there is looking out for their safety in the workplace. However, through the years OSHA has lost control with the consistency that had made them so successful in the beginning. Flaws in OSHA’s system have begun to show up through the years and the affects have proven costly to the organization and firms alike. The organization originally dealt with and continues to deal with safety issues among companies across the United States. Today, OSHA has lost the respect of firms across the board. This has changed the way that many employers view OSHA. They now look at OSHA as an organization that would be willing to punish them at the drop of a hat or at least impose their will over the firm at every opportunity.
PPE Requirements OSHA’s first flaws shows its face when we start the conversation about PPE’s. PPE is an acronym for personal protection equipment. Equipment that falls into this category would be safety glasses, welding gloves, respirators, or even special types of footwear. The problem that OSHA is facing when it comes to PPE requirements is that the requirements for certain jobs are not being updated frequently enough. When the safety requirement for a job are originally drawn up by OSHA that is usually how they stay for the lifetime of that job (OSHA Compliance Issues). Even as new, more advanced equipment enters the market, firms are required to follow the plans that OSHA had originally drawn up for them when the job was first created. Fixing this problem could be easier said than done at this point. In essence it would be simple; just update the existing safety requirement for existing jobs for any given firm. There are three reasons that would pose a problem to this way of thinking. First off, due to OSHA’s neglect of PPE requirement updates from the beginning, simply starting now and revising all job PPE requirements would be overly taxing on the people who will be administering each change. Secondly, there are new PPE’s entering the market regularly. This would make it hard to keep the requirements up to date with the safest most effective equipment for the job (Effective PPE Program). Lastly, today jobs are changing regularly and with the changing jobs the PPE requirements for the jobs will also be changing. Therefore keeping up with all of these PPE requirement changes would be a exhausting on OSHA administrators and the firms which OSHA effect.
Monitoring of the Nature and Hazards on Site Another flaw that OSHA exhibits is that during the monitoring of individual firms, inspectors fail to stay consistent and fail to find many dangerous hazards a firm may be trying to hide or the firm might not be aware of (Savit and Gould 2012). Things like air quality, machinery hazards, and dermal contaminates are most commonly overlooked and evaluated inconsistently between firms (Stanley 2013). This could be due to the fact that there are many different inspectors conducting the inspections. Each inspector seems to think that certain aspects of safety are more important than another. This is the main reason how and why things get overlooked. Along with these inspections comes the occasional upgrade or downgrade in PPE requirements. Although once the safety plans are drawn up they are seldom modified, this would is where we will see those modifications occur. To fix this problem, OSHA inspectors should be put though a mandatory and uniform training course before they are allowed to conduct any inspections. Not only should inspectors be required to take this training course upon joining the inspector team, but they should be required to attend a follow up training session every couple of years to learn about the new inspection practices and to refresh their existing