Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 8, 1995 TAG: 9509080063
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
When labor negotiations heat up, federal safety inspectors often see a surge of complaints from workers.
But well over half of complaints from union shops turn up no serious safety hazards, and more than one-third of the time inspectors find no violations at all, Occupational Safety and Health Administration records show.
When complaints come from non-union shops, a smaller percentage turn up with no violations - just over one-quarter, an Associated Press computerized analysis of six years of OSHA records found.
Critics say the system is being abused.
``I thought all along there were corporate campaigns launched to use not only OSHA, but to use EPA and other parts of the government, just to harass management,'' said Rep. Cass Ballenger, R-N.C., an OSHA critic who is pushing legislation to radically alter the agency.
Union officials dispute that notion.
``Management always accuses labor of that,'' said Arthur Coia, president of the 365,000-member Laborers International Union of North America. ``I don't think it's a major problem.''
What is clear to OSHA officials is that inspectors frequently see their time consumed by worker complaints, leaving little leeway for surprise inspections at hazardous work-sites.
Complaint inspections that turned up no safety violations used up more than 100,000 OSHA man-hours in 1994 alone, the AP analysis found.
``It's possible for an organization to structure a complaint in such a way as to legally obligate OSHA to do an on-site inspection even if there are other workplaces that may have more serious hazards to be addressed,'' said Joseph Dear, OSHA's chief.
But Dear is reluctant to curtail workers' right to complain. ``Who better to tell you about a serious workplace hazard than the worker who may be confronting it?'' he said.
Nonetheless, OSHA recently began experimenting with allowing inspectors to resolve complaints by phone and fax, rather than launching on-site inspections.
By law, the agency must investigate all complaints.
Nationally, 31 percent of the 162,703 OSHA inspections conducted between Jan. 1, 1989, and May 5 of this year found no violations, while 56 percent found no serious safety hazards.
For complaints at unionized companies, the percentages were 36 percent with no violations and 59 percent with no serious hazards, compared to 27 percent and 54 percent respectively at non-unionized companies.
Examples abound in the agency's records of companies that have repeated inspections prompted by worker complaints this decade.
Proponents of the complaint process say it works, even when it is tied to labor strife. United Parcel Service sites were inspected 572 times as a result of complaints since 1989.
There were more than 100 complaints in each of 1993 and 1994, when the union and UPS were locked in a protracted dispute over plans to increase the maximum weight of packages.
Half the UPS complaints uncovered safety violations, and half of those were serious.
``There's no question that we believe many of the worker complaints are union-motivated and not always based in fact,'' said Ken Sternad, a spokesman at UPS.
But Teamsters spokesman Craig Merrilees said UPS has a ``dismal and dangerous record'' with some 1,300 OSHA citations this decade and thousands of its workers injured each year.
Merrilees said UPS needs more regulation and ``not nitpicking over whether employees are calling OSHA too often.''
by CNB