Federal auditors have faulted Connecticut”™s lead safety agency for lax fines and actions against public employers, with a possible spillover effect on the private sector.
In an 85-page report, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration says the Connecticut Department of Labor”™s OSHA office must improve its oversight of safe working conditions at state agencies.
OSHA called “a significant area of concern” CONN-OSHA”™s tendency to group serious violations together in order to spare municipalities the burden of aggregate fines; and to cite too-few serious violations in favor of comparably minor infractions.
OSHA also said the state agency had a sub-par record on case file documentation, penalty reductions, and use of informal conferences.
On a positive note, OSHA said nine separate “stakeholders” gave the state agency high marks in their dealings with it.
OSHA called for corrective actions in 25 states, including New York and New Jersey. The report examined only CONN-OSHA”™s record in dealing with public agencies; some states faulted in the report drew fire for their oversight of all employers in their jurisdiction, including private companies. OSHA”™s initial investigation was prompted by a series of fatal construction accidents in Las Vegas, spawning an examination of Nevada”™s OSHA compliance followed by policies in other states.
This past summer, OSHA levied $16.6 million in fines on more than a dozen companies following the explosion of the Kleen-Energy power plant in Middletown, which killed five workers and injured more than 50 others. In multiple speeches the past few months, the head of OSHA has cited the disaster as exhibit A in the need for greater vigilance by companies and OSHA personnel alike.
“Our goal is to identify problems in state-run programs before they result in serious injuries or fatalities,” said David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, in a prepared statement. “While we found many positives in the state programs, we also found deficiencies including concerns about identification of hazards, proper classification of violations, proposed penalty levels, and failure to follow up on violations to ensure that workplace safety and health problems are corrected.”
Last year, OSHA provided $650,000 in funding for OSHA programs to the Connecticut Department of Labor, with the state making up the balance of some $2.3 million in total budget allotments. With that money, a CONN-OSHA staff of 13 people cover some 223,000 public sector employees. The office operated at just 40 percent of its normal staffing levels as of a year ago, but was on pace to fill job vacancies entering this fall.
In the past two years, both former Connecticut DOL Commissioner Patricia Mayfield and state OSHA program director Rich Palo have died of illness, and the state has yet to name permanent replacements. Three more employees took early retirement and another transferred out.
In its 2009 annual report, CONN-OSHA termed “disappointing and unacceptable” its own performance on following up immediately on known workplace hazards, laying the blame on a single safety consultant who has since retired.
Connecticut and New York will have a month to file a formal response to the latest round of criticism, including a detailed corrective action plan for addressing findings and recommendations. Each state”™s formal response will be public information and available online.
