{"id":4484,"date":"2019-02-11T16:29:02","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T21:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/?p=4484"},"modified":"2019-02-12T21:23:13","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T02:23:13","slug":"moving-on-good-bye-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jordanbarab.com\/confinedspace\/2019\/02\/11\/moving-on-good-bye-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving On. Good Bye Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but I’ve decided to throw off the shackles of retirement and start full time work at the Education and Labor Committee in the House of Representatives tomorrow morning.<\/p>\n

That means that this will be my last regular Confined Space post.\u00a0 As I said in 2007\u00a0when I made a similar move<\/a> to the Ed and Labor Committee, it is with regret and some sorrow to be wrapping things up here yet again. But the opportunity to help\u00a0organize oversight hearings and investigations to ensure that OSHA, MSHA and NIOSH are executing the missions that Congress gave them and work on new legislation that will better protect workers is too much to resist in what we all hope and expect to be the last two years of the Trump administration.\u00a0 Now that we actually have our hands on some of the tools of power for the first time in two years, I’m anxious to stop just writing and tweeting about what’s wrong with this country and this administration, and start doing<\/em> something about it again.<\/p>\n

Confined Space will remain on the internet for reference (as the earlier version<\/a> did), and there may be occasional additions in the form of announcements or commemorations.<\/p>\n

State of the American Workplace<\/h2>\n

Despite the rosy picture some try to paint, the state of working Americans is not good. More than 5,000 workers were killed in the workplace last year –14 every day — and almost 150 each day die from occupational disease — illnesses caused by exposure to asbestos, silica and other hazardous substances. In addition, employers reported that over 3.5 million workers suffered workplace injuries and illnesses in 2017, and those numbers are significantly underestimated.<\/p>\n

To enforce employers’ obligation to provide a safe workplace, we have tiny, underfunded workplace safety agencies that struggle to enforce the law while they are increasingly restricted in what protections the can issue and how those protections can be enforced. In 2018, there were only 1,821 inspectors to inspect the 9 million workplaces under OSHA’s jurisdiction. According to the AFL-CIO’s estimate, federal OSHA has enough inspectors to inspect workplaces only once every 158 years. OSHA now has fewer inspectors than any time in its almost 50 year history, despite the fact that the number of workplaces has more than doubled since 1975. The entire annual OSHA budget is around $550 million dollars while the cost of workplace injury and illness is estimated at $250 billion to $360 billion a year.<\/p>\n