Hazard or Hardship by Jeffrey Hilgert

Author:Jeffrey Hilgert [Hilgert, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor & Industrial Relations, Political Science
ISBN: 9780801451898
Google: oc4OAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17472091
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Final investigative reports, including cover letters, range from two to thirteen pages, with an average of five or six pages. Regional offices elected to redact different portions of information from each FIR, but generally the documents included a standard format page listing the date the case was opened, the name of the regional investigator, the complainant’s name, the complainant’s representative, the respondent, and the respondent’s representative. This first section also includes a brief statement of the complainant’s allegation, the employer’s defense, and a “coverage” line indicating how the employer falls under OSHA’s jurisdiction. Each also included a redacted list of the witnesses, where there were witnesses. The most extensive section of the document is the “Investigative Findings” narrative. This is followed by the “Analysis” section, a “Closing Conference” section, and a “Recommendation” section.

An in-depth content analysis of the 402 OSHA Section 11(c) refusal cases was conducted for this book. The number of documents that arrived in the mail was less than the total number reported in the overall OSHA case management database. There were 326 cases under OSHA 11(c) analyzed and coded. The complainant information and the list of witnesses were redacted throughout every one of the 326 cases. The only other sections redacted across the regions was the “Analysis” section, which documents the investigator’s thinking, and the “Recommendation” section, which can be deduced by the case closing cover letter despite this redaction. The “Investigative Findings” section is the investigator’s narrative report of the complaint, the statement of the employee complainant, the investigator’s conversations with witnesses, and the investigator’s discussion with the respondent. Through these narrative sections, each case can be reconstructed, giving insight about the social experience of this legal recourse.

Among the information that was either not collected or not available across all investigation reports was union presence, industrial sector, number of employees at the worksite, and complainant occupation. Despite no systematic information on these topics, the following is a rough count of the top ten occupations pieced together from the Atlanta region office, which provided over one-third of the documents examined:

1. Equipment operators, from forklifts to cranes (14.4%)

2. Manufacturing and fabricating employees (13.5%)

3. Commercial drivers, all varieties (13.5%)

4. General laborers (12.5%)

5. Retail services, including food service (9.6%)

6. Other construction workers (8.6%)

7. Mechanics and maintenance workers (8.6%)

8. Cleaners, all varieties (7.7%)

9. Pipefitters and welders (6.7%)

10. Social service and health care employees (4.8%)

This list notably includes service and health occupations although the dominance of the traditionally dangerous occupations on this list may be indicative of the difficulty of pursuing the right to refuse unsafe work under a limited refusal protection model.

The number of work refusals remains extremely low relative to the number of work-related illnesses and injuries nationwide. The number of fatal workplace injuries in the United States (not including fatal workplace illnesses) over the same period (five years) is 28,209 people.33 We can deduce that either the current legal recourse protecting the right to refuse is an ineffective framework for protection, or that recorded workplace fatalities have occurred so

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