Hiding Worker Injuries
It’s painful enough to be injured on the job, but it adds insult to injury when your employer strives to keep your pain a secret from safety authorities.
The failure of corporations to report work-related injuries is not a rare occurrence, says the Government Accountability Office – it is routine. In a review of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s policies, GAO investigators found that some two-thirds of job injuries are simply hidden from the agency, even though the law requires full reporting on injuries that require anything more than first aid.
Why flout the law? Because corporate executives, always guarding their own bottom line, know that a record of frequent injuries will increase the company’s worker compensation costs and will hurt its chances of winning government contracts.
So why do they get away with it? Several reasons. First – get this – OSHA relies solely on employers to report worker injuries! Inspectors do not interview employees in the workplace to determine if their bosses are being honest about job hazards and injury rates.
Second, managers pressure clinics, doctors, and others to limit treatment of a worker’s injury to first aid, thus requiring no report. This cold ploy includes taking the injured person to several medical providers until finding one who will certify that first aid is enough. More than a third of the medical providers surveyed by GAO said they’d been pressured by corporate officials to play down injuries. Third, workers themselves are intimidated, fearing they’ll be punished or fired for getting a reportable injury.
As long as safety officials take a see-no-evil/hear-no-evil approach, corporate bosses have no incentive besides their own sense of decency to make America’s workplaces safe – and, as the GAO report makes clear, putting our trust in executive decency doesn’t seem to be working out very well for workers.
The Good Food Movement
What better time than the holidays to celebrate our country’s food rebels!
I’m talking about the growing movement of small farmers, food artisans, local retailers, co-ops, community organizers, restaurateurs, environmentalists, consumers, and others – perhaps including you. This movement has spread the rich ideas of sustainability; organic, local economies; and the common good from the fringe of our food economy into the mainstream.
It began as an “upchuck rebellion” – ordinary folks rejecting the industrialized, chemicalized, corporatized, and globalized food system. Farmers wanted a more natural connection to the good earth that they were working. Meanwhile, consumers began seeking edibles that were not saturated with pesticides, injected with antibiotics, ripened with chemicals, dosed with artificial flavorings, or otherwise tortured.
These two interests began to connect with each other and to create an alternative way of thinking about food. Today, more than 8,000 organic farmers produce everything from wheat to meat, and organic sales top $20 billion a year. Some 4,000 vibrant farmers’ markets operate in cities and towns across the land, linking farmers and foodmakers directly to consumers in a local, supportive economy. Restaurants, supermarkets, food wholesalers, and school districts are now buying foodstuffs that are produced sustainably and locally.
No one in a position of power – corporate or governmental – made any of these changes happen. Instead, the movement rose up from the grassroots, and it has become a groundswell as ordinary people inform themselves, organize locally, and assert their own democratic values over those of the corporate structure.
Family by family, town by town, this movement has changed not only the market but also the culture of food. That’s a change worthy of our thanks.
This article appears in December 11 • 2009.