A new Government Accountability Office report made public today recommends that the U.S. Department of Labor improve the way it counts injuries and illnesses among the nation’s workers.

Among other things, the GAO investigators reported that a third of occupational health professionals they surveyed said they had been pressured by employers to provide insufficient treatment to workers in order to hide or downplay injuries or illnesses.  The GAO also reported that two-thirds of those health professionals observed worker fear for reporting injuries, and more than half said they were pressured to downplay an injury so it would have have to be reported on official logs.

The report is available here, with a summary here and highlights here.

In short, GAO investigators found that efforts by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to confirm injury and illness reports filed by employers and workers are not adequate. Some of the reasons:

– OSHA overlooks information from workers about injuries and illnesses because it does not routinely interview them as part of its records audits.

– OSHA also does not review the accuracy of injury and illness records for worksites in eight high hazard industries because it has not updated the industry codes used to identify these industries since 2002.

In addition, the report found:

According to stakeholders interviewed and the occupational health practitioners GAO surveyed, many factors affect the accuracy of employers’ injury and illness data, including disincentives that may discourage workers from reporting work-related injuries and illnesses to their employers and disincentives that may discourage employers from recording them. For example, workers may not report a work-related injury or illness because they fear job loss or other disciplinary action, or fear jeopardizing rewards based on having low injury and illness rates. In addition, employers may not record injuries or illnesses because they are afraid of increasing their workers’ compensation costs or jeopardizing their chances of winning contract bids for new work. Disincentives for reporting and recording injuries and illnesses can result in pressure on occupational health practitioners from employers or workers to provide insufficient medical treatment that avoids the need to record the injury or illness. From its survey of U.S. health practitioners, GAO found that over a third of them had been subjected to such pressure.

The report was requested from GAO by U.S. Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Patty Murray (D-WA), and U.S. Reps. George Miller (D-CA) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).

In a prepared statement, Harkin said:

The widespread underreporting so clearly documented in this report is undermining the health and safety of American workers.  If we don’t know the full extent of the workplace hazards workers face, we cannot fully address these risks. We need to take steps to require employers to provide a full account of on-the-job injuries and to protect workers so they can report workplace incidents without fear of retaliation.

Miller added:

We cannot allow the lack of accurate information to permit hazardous working conditions to go unaddressed, putting workers’ health and lives at risk. The GAO report underscores the need for OSHA to have all the tools they need to eliminate incentives that result in underreporting injuries.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union issued the following statement on the GAO report:

Thousands of workers in America deal with workplace injuries everyday. This epidemic of suffering is damaging to the workers, their colleagues, their workplaces, and their families and the communities in which they live. American companies, especially those in the food processing industries, must stop contributing to this problem by pressuring and intimidating workers to keep silent about these problems.

We must stop this epidemic – and it can’t be done without clear and accurate reporting of the injuries as they occur. Unfortunately, this GAO report makes clear current OSHA policies are centered on crunching numbers rather than getting the facts from workers. In fact, OSHA inspectors are not required to interview a single worker when auditing injury reports.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Worker safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.