The Trump Administration’s new rule returns injury reports back into the darkness of corporate filing cabinets and makes it much more difficult for regulators and safe workplace advocates to collect reliable data.
Friday, April 05, 2019
Trump Repeals OSHA Safety Standards
The Trump Administration’s new rule returns injury reports back into the darkness of corporate filing cabinets and makes it much more difficult for regulators and safe workplace advocates to collect reliable data.
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I wish I could say this is unbelievable, but it is completely believable. It is, however, unbelievably infuriating. Trump and his cronies are lying baldly to his constituents. They must be laughing at the people they conned into electing him, only to slowly and surely remove all protections and entitlements. The last line of this article is brutal, but undoubtedly true, and bears repeating: “OSHA rules are written in blood. Somebody paid for every protection.” That idea just reminds me of all the technicians I know who skirt or even laugh at safety rules. Sure, lawyers are behind many warning stickers, but that doesn’t make the injury any less likely. It is absolutely true that nothing is without risk, but if a danger is obvious and avoidable, it should obviously be avoided. No single show, deadline, or production is ever worth endangering someone. The mindset that is antithetical to that statement is one that values the bottom line above any individual human life. That mindset pushes the pace of work beyond safe levels, seeks to hide accidents to avoid expensive safety upgrades, and treats everyone as disposable.
The headline on this article instantly made me upset. I began to wonder what the governmental necessity or motivation was with removing safety regulations. Yet as I read further and discussed with my friends, we discovered that this change (as shown in this article) is a little misleading. Some funding has been removed from OSHA, but it is not being eliminated in its entirety. Regardless, it is disappointing that not as much thought and care is placed into protecting the workers of our country. This follows the theme of those with money and power avoiding regulations, which reveals the current priorities (or lack thereof). OSHA is an organization mentioned often at crew and is associated with precautions that (not always desirably) have to be followed. Yet now that they are at risk of being taken away, we must reflect on how important these standards are, especially since we will soon enter the workforce.
Hmm, this is unsettling. The article and the website are a little off-putting because they’re fairly up front with their opinions and biases, but I mostly agree with them. It seems kind of ridiculous that this rule was revoked over privacy concerns. If companies are trying to enact some sort of retribution on whistleblowers who report their injuries, they could already do that. If they properly anonymize their paperwork, then it should be very near impossible to identify employees from incident reports. There does not seem to me to be a legitimate reason to take up the rule, and my feeling is that it just reduced worker safety standards in the spirit of deregulation for deregulation’s sake. Reporting incidents seems to me to be common sense. It increases transparency and provides visible and usable data that can help employers, regulators, and activists alike to enact change and make workplaces more safe.
Wow, this is honestly not that surprising to hear about, but it is still really disappointing. I do not really know much more about this specific topic then what this article talks about, but I think it still sounds pretty outrageous. I mean how can working class Americans ignore things like this and continue to support this president? I don’t know, maybe there is more to it than that, but I think it is pretty clear that he does not care about workers and the individual in any conceivable way. He repeatedly shows that his priorities lie with big business and corporations that have money. That is really the only reason to repeal something like that. It benefits dirty employers and really no one else, right? I would want my boss to be reporting job site injuries. I think that is a pretty reasonable thing to get on board with for most people on either side of the aisle.
Like other people have said in the comments above, I’m not even shocked by this and that is a problem. Very disappointing to read this article and realize how much danger this puts workers in. I will never understand how anyone can continue to support the Trump administration when danger is put so close to them. It honestly baffles my mind. I don’t see any reason as to why this rule has been taken away. Who does it benefit? Other than the shitty employers, the amount of shadiness and danger the workers become subjected to is far worse. Again, like everyone else has said, this rule was common sense. It kept the working class safe and companies safe from causing more damage and breaking rules. I will never understand why the Trump administration does the things that they do, and I can only hope and pray that this is term is the last we will ever see of them.
How do people still support Trump consistently preaching that he cares about the American working class, when he does things like shut down the government and pull regulations like this? Is it not obvious that he only fights for his own interests? They lie to their constituents and frame this pro-American, pro-job picture of themselves, but it is all a facade. Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations are put in place to protect all kinds of workers, and to act as a medium of safety which adapts to accommodate new incidents. The closing statement of the article is that “OSHA rules are written in blood. Somebody paid for every protection.” What even is the point of scaling this kind of thing back? All it does is diminish the work of people fighting to protect workers and leave people vulnerable to unsafe working conditions at the hands of people who may or may not care about them.
I want to say I’m surprised and shocked and horrified. But honestly, I’m not. All I can say is yikes. This is a pretty important clause that’s been repealed. I can see how this could cause a ripple effect which could negatively impact the ability of OSHA to have actionable evidence. At the end of the day, the less record keeping, the less likely it is that those violating OSHA laws will suffer consequences. I will say this headline is a little misleading. Or really just overdramatic. It made it seem like every part of the OSHA standards was being revoked. But really, it’s one seemingly small clause. And while the article does argue the real, significant impact of repealing that cause, the headline is essentially clickbait. It’s also a little heavy handed, and maybe biased. Of course, the source is a union based website, so it does make sense that there would be a skew (either intentional or not).
This attack on OSHA is another blow to the working and middle class from the Trump administration. Our president turns around and bites his voting base in the ass again and again, and this is a trend that I do not see ending anytime soon. OSHA is a necessary and important organization to ensure that workers and laborers are kept safe, and that corporations do not cut safety corners in order to increase their profit margins. Not only this, but OSHA is harmful to literally no one, and only serves to help the American people. How and why Trump would choose to harm OSHA goes completely over my head, and makes even less sense than most of his presidency, in my mind. OSHA is very relevant to our lives and our careers, and this repeal is especially bad for us, as theatre is not the most financially lucrative business to begin with.
It’s so sad to that I, along with pretty much everyone else in the comments, isn’t even shocked by something like this because so many awful things keep happening over and over again. We’re getting so numb to the fact that our president doesn’t care about keeping workers safe. While the article reads as pretty biased, the last line, “OSHA rules are written in blood. Somebody paid for every protection.” really sticks with you. It make you remember that the guidelines are made because they’re trying to prevent more people from being injured or killed. There is no reason to pull back standards for keeping someone’s physical wellbeing in tact. Trump hasn’t completely done away with OSHA like the headline of the article suggests, I would not be too surprised if it will lead to that point. We can only hope that we’ll be able to keep protecting our workers in the future.
Just another hopeful headline in the government's aim to turn us back to the dark ages. As much as OSHA regulations can be slightly annoying sometimes, it’s good to recognise they are there for a reason, to keep people safe. This also brings up another issue of looking at injury trends to see where the common ailments are. I appreciate that CMU takes it one step further with near miss reports to see where an injury is likely to happen in the future. I wonder if there is someone in charge of compiling this data into a report on the school level to see where our greatest weaknesses lie. I also wonder what other governing bodies could pick up the slack where the federal government fails. Is there a state level version of OSHA? If there is can they reimplement a similar policy? I also wonder why trump would think this was a good idea. What personal business interest does this help, cause one thing I know for sure is that this is not for the benefit of the american working people.
I definitely agree with all of my peers who comments above: I am not even shocked but still incredibly disappointed. I am not quite sure why this administration feels the need to keep taking away rules that make everyone’s’ life better, safer, and just more efficient in general. I am not surprised that they did this, but I pose the same question as Bri: who does it benefit? What was the point of this? It’s obvious that Trump and his administration have no empathy towards the working and middle class, as they keep pulling stunts like this that increasingly make their lives’ worse. By removing this clause, they are literally just making life more unsafe for the workers and giving bad employers the ability to continue being bad. I literally do not understand Trump or his actions and I am so excited for the idea of a new administration in the upcoming years because someone needs to come in and put all of these things back to where they were before.
Much like everyone else on this thread, I am disappointed, but not surprised. However, after reading this article, I found the title to be a little misleading. Trump has not repealed OSHA, like a lot of other things, he has just made it more difficult for people to effectively do their jobs. This decision has a significant impact on many industries, theatre just being one of them. The live entertainment industry has so many dangerous areas of work and employees need to know that they are protected in the event that they get hurt on the job. Most recently, a stagehand at Coachella died during load in and it is organizations like OSHA that will help figure out what went wrong so that it does not happen again. Like Bri, I will never understand how someone can support an administration that is blatantly putting workers in danger in their day to day lives.
I agree with the general consensus of the comments that it’s sad how we aren’t even shocked by what would have been a major scandal under any other president. The last line about OSHA rules being written in blood really stuck with me- it’s an issue inherent to capitalism that profit be valued over the lives and safety of workers. While we spend a lot of our time griping about OSHA rules that seem unnecessary or annoying, we should remember that they are put in place for a reason. The point of these guidelines is to protect workers, not so much against their working environment, but from the demands of the company they work for. Trump is setting a very dangerous precedent by beginning to remove those protections, and for literally no benefit to anyone other than those who stand to profit from less safe working conditions. That should be so surprise to anyone, though- his entire economic strategy revolves around “make it better for the rich people”.
I can’t believe that this was allowed to happen. Cutting corners in terms of safety is non-negotiable. There’s no way that injury reports are violating privacy laws. I have so many issues with “privacy” being a reason why safety is put on the backburner. From personal experience, I know that keeping others safe should have priority over privacy. There are so many ways to prevent something bad from happening by simply learning from mistakes and past examples. Think of a kid who’s told not to touch a hot stove. They’ll never truly know the pain that a hot stove can dish out until they touch it. Sure, they’ll know not to, but they won’t understand the consequences. For instance, no safety rule is created unless something bad happened. No one knew that a sheet of Masonite needed to be tacked down until someone tripped on that piece of loose Masonite. The only way to create a safer environment is by learning from experience, and if incident reports can’t be shared and learned from, what’s the point of them? The incidents will continue to happen, creating more lawsuits, injuries, and mistakes.
This is exactly what is wring with the way that Donald Jay Trump is leading himself in office as the President of the United States. OSHA is important because it protects the middle class, the type of people that Donald Trump was catering to when he was running for election back in 2016. OSHA standards have been in need of a closer look, not less of one. To put things in perspective, taking care of the labor and the working class of America should be the primary job of the administration, and its disheartening to see the only protection that many workers in the United States have against otherwise unjust bosses who continue to get away with dangerous work practices. Who can be surprised, thats the business practice that Donald Trump's industry thrives on. In order to protect the working class and to make sure that all Americans are being looked after, policy in OSHA needs to be revised and its office needs to be properly staffed
My initial reaction reading this is just why? Of all of the things to pursue, it’s like he’s trying to make a point by going out of his way to disregard people’s safety and well-being. It’s absurd. I’m sure that it’s about money in more than one way, but I think it’s already been established that Trump has a pretty twisted idea of what is worth spending money on and what isn’t. I am clearly not trying to hide my distaste for Donald Trump, but this is one of those things that I just can not wrap my mind around. Other propositions and repeals he’s made align with his views in a very clear way, but I do not see where repealing safety standards falls into that agenda. Maybe I’m just a little too biased and pissed off to see further into it, but I think it’s a ridiculous repeal.
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