Abstract
This research explores the failures of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to effectively protect workers in the United States. Utilizing a secondary analysis of OSHA records, OSHA regulations, and scholarly and journalistic accounts of occupational violence, this research highlights the role of the state in creating and recreating the structure within which work-related health and safety regulations are routinely violated. Although we acknowledge that regimes of permission emerge from state–corporate symbiosis, our purpose here is not to explore the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the state and corporations which has led to the failure to protect workers. Instead, this research seeks to expose the consequences of the symbiosis, a regime of permission that allows corporations to maximize capital accumulation by ignoring health and safety regulations.
Highlights
In 2014, there were 4,679 workers killed on the job in the United States (US Department of Labor 2014a)
This research seeks to expose the consequences of the symbiosis, a regime of permission that allows corporations to maximize capital accumulation by ignoring health and safety regulations
The Enforcement Program (EEP) had been in operation for five years when it was amended in response to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) staff concerns that the programme was not effectively regulating the employers it had been designed to target (Statement of Jordan Barab, Committee on Education and Labor 2009)
Summary
In the United States, OSHA is recognized as having some of the weakest enforcement capabilities of any government agency (Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 2005). Civil penalties were reduced even further when contested by the employer, which, according to the Senate Committee Report (Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 2008a), rewards resistance to OSHA authority (rather than reinforces it).
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