OSHA recordkeeping masks workplace health threats

The U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the supposed guardian of worker safety and health, has been falling down on the job. Even as workplace exposures to toxic substances have risen steadily in recent decades, the agency’s monitoring of these exposures has dropped off dramatically—by a factor of three between 1988 and 2007.

The agency, like the industries it oversees, is more concerned with appearances than with safeguarding the health of millions of workers jeopardized by unsafe industry practices. And so it accepts without question industry reports that paint a rosy picture of workplace health – even for notoriously dangerous industries such as steel plants and poultry factories.

Few are as aware of the discrepancy between reporting and reality as Robert Whitmore, the agency’s top expert and foremost critic on workplace injury and illness records, who was forced out of his job after becoming increasingly vocal about his agency’s lax enforcement of industry recordkeeping requirements. For nearly 25 years, Robert Whitmore was the top OSHA official overseeing OSHA recordkeeping requirements before he was put on paid administrative leave for more than two years, and then finally terminated this summer. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed legal pleadings on Whitmore’s behalf, seeking restoration of his employment, as well as other damages.

In his congressional testimony last year, Whitmore stated that agency claims of safer and healthier workplaces could no longer be supported: 

“I contend that the current OSHA Injury and Illness information is inaccurate, due in part to wide scale underreporting by employers and OSHA’s willingness to accept these falsified numbers. There are many reasons why OSHA would accept these numbers, but one important institutional factor has dramatically affected the Agency since 1992, regardless of the political party in power: steady annual declines in the number of workplace injuries and illnesses make it appear that OSHA is fulfilling its mission.”

OSHA management placed him on paid administrative leave back in July 2007 and left him there until the Washington Post ran a story about his extraordinary bureaucratic exile on February 19, 2009. Shortly after that piece ran, OSHA moved to fire Whitmore for “disruptive, intimidating and inappropriate behavior” citing incidents that had occurred more than two years earlier—this despite numerous awards Whitmore had won during his 37-year Labor Department career. PEER seeks to have Whitmore restored to his previous position through proceedings in front of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, the tribunal which hears whistleblower complaints.

“Bob Whitmore is the victim of management malpractice of the highest order,” stated PEER Counsel Christine Erickson who filed the “stay” motion to temporarily return Whitmore to his job. “The only thing Bob Whitmore is guilty of is unwillingness to tolerate official incompetence and malfeasance.”

Ironically, the Obama administration is now moving to adopt some of the reforms that Whitmore had long urged. On September 30, 2009, OSHA initiated an “Illness and Injury Recordkeeping National Emphasis Program” that beefs up enforcement of industry reporting rules. It is designed to “test OSHA’s ability to effectively target establishments to identify under-recording of occupational injuries and illnesses”.

“By all rights, Bob Whitmore should be allowed to end his career implementing the measures he fought to bring about,” Erickson added. “If the Obama administration expects to meaningfully change OSHA, it is going to need the help of inside reformers like Bob Whitmore.”