Massachusetts readers will be interested to hear that the Department of Labor will now review a workplace safety program implemented by Ronald Reagan in 1982. The Voluntary Protection Program has allowed companies to be exempt from surprise inspections by OSHA, if those companies are deemed by OSHA to have their own adequate safety measures in place. According to the rules of the program, OSHA provides funding for businesses to train their own employees to implement safety standards, and if OSHA decides that a decent program is in place, then the federal agency will not inspect the worksite.

However, the Voluntary Protection Program has not proven to be as effective as advocates might have hoped. A 2009 study revealed that the Voluntary Protection Program was not producing work sites that were any safer than sites inspected by OSHA, which is often stretched thin by understaffing.

About 2,400 workplaces across the nation make use of the voluntary program. But a recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that more than 80 workers have died on those sites since 2000. The same investigation indicated that, in 47 of the 80 deaths under the Voluntary Protection Program, OSHA later recorded major workplace safety infractions that contributed to the deaths. According to the rules of the voluntary program, companies are supposed to be disallowed from continuing to self-police if a death occurs on the worksite. However, the CPI investigation showed that the rule was not being followed. In fact, 65 percent of the workplaces where workers had died remained in the Voluntary Protection Program. Moreover, OSHA had not even recorded all of the workplace deaths that had occurred on voluntarily protected sites.

The investigation has led the Department of Labor to form a task force assigned to review the Voluntary Protection Program, which has been popular among businesses that seek to do their own safety policing. However, critics of the program have said that it functions as little more than a corporate welfare system by which companies avoid real safety regulations and receive free training from OSHA.

Source: In These Times, "Labor Department to Review OSHA's Voluntary Workplace Safety Program," Mike Elk, Jan. 5, 2012