I tend to try and test ideas against facts as much as I can. Which is well and good until new facts come up that undermine the original assumptions…
Back in March, writing about the boneheaded coverage of the mine disasters early in the year, I cited a study done of the contractor building the new Bay Bridge here in California, suggesting that a new cooperative, rather than adversatial approach to safety monitoring and accident prevention might be paying off.
A newspaper article today suggests that the numbers may have been fudged.
The contractor building the Bay Bridge’s $1 billion replacement segment concealed worker injuries behind a sophisticated curtain of bonuses, pliant medical workers and a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy of handling workers’ compensation claims and safety conditions, a review of state records shows.
Workers for KFM, A Joint Venture, were routinely fired when their injuries were too severe to hide, according to official interviews with workers, foremen and safety officers, as well as a state Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) review of injury logs and medical records.
That’s completely scummy if true.
I’ll see if I can dig a bit more and see where this leaves the notion that working cooperatively with regulators lowered the rate below the norms – even if not extraordinarily below the norms. But there’s no way this doesn’t challenge the point I raised in my post (while leaving the main point, which was that the journalists covering mining were looking at fines rather than deaths).
And I’ll stand by my final point from March:
…there’s a good post-millenium Democratic issue – how do we take the regulations that got us from the polluted, deadly 50’s to today and make them smarter? How do we make them effective, not at fining or delaying or harassing industry, but at meeting the goals we set when we established the regulations in the first place?
Let’s track deaths and injuries and pollution instead of violations. And let’s fight for policies that lower them – rather than those that track revenue from violations.
They don’t appear to have been concealing injuries from OSHA because they were worried about OSHA per se. They were worried about insurance, which seems to tell us as much about the state of the insurance industry as anything.
A few thoughts:
1. They wouldn’t have gotten away with this without the complicity of the workers. How is an army of inspectors going to find out if a worker is injured if the worker doesn’t want them to know.
2. Its not clear from the article, but I bet the workers eventually turned on the company, making this a stupid crime.
3. A $5,790 fine? That’s crazy. Relying on self-reporting makes sense only if you punish the Hell out of lies.
Cooperating might work in a homogenous, communal situation like Japan or the Amish, but in an individualistic, transactional setting, adversarial is best. And the adversaries should have a real stake in the matter, not some meaningless government regulation that is imposed by legislative fiat.
Tracking deaths and injuries and pollution instead of violations makes sense because they’re better metrics, not because they’re a nicer form of conflict resolution.