What's Your Opinion: Are you in favor of OSHA’s proposal to make workplace-specific injury and illness data available to the public?
Add a comment below.
(Anonymous comments are welcome; merely skip the “name” field in the comment box. An email address is required but will not be included with your comment.)
Post a comment to this article
Safety+Health welcomes comments that promote respectful dialogue. Please stay on topic. Comments that contain personal attacks, profanity or abusive language – or those aggressively promoting products or services – will be removed. We reserve the right to determine which comments violate our comment policy. (Anonymous comments are welcome; merely skip the “name” field in the comment box. An email address is required but will not be included with your comment.)
Title
January 24, 2014
Never in their 40+ year history has OSHA been as mismanaged as they are now, nor have they ever been less relevant. Directed by their union masters, the agency is intent on embarassing as many employers as possible. It's a terrible shame they do not focus on their mission, instead of politics.
Title
January 27, 2014
If we have a good program in place and we are making an effort every day to do the right thing, I would not be ashamed to publish our results. Yes we have had injuries but we perform vigorous investigation to ensure they are not repeated and provide training to staff if we find we are lacking any where after an accident does occur; then we incorporate that in to our existing program moving forward.
Title
January 29, 2014
If HIPPA is required for an individual's personal medical conditions and treatment, why expose injured employes and their companies to public scrutiny. The fact that an injury has occurred does not indicate the lifetime performance of an employee on the job or a companies ability to institute and maintain a valid and well communicated Safety Program. Corporate Safety Manager
Title
January 31, 2014
To what end? What does providing the information publicly do for anyone? Will it reduce injuries? Create more honest reporting? Shame companies? What is the benefit and to whom? It seems the only thing we can be sure of is that it will be more administrative work for employers and, for the bad eggs (few that they may be) likely encourage more non-reporting so as not to draw attention to themselves.
Title
February 8, 2014
The OSHA website's Data & Statistics section offers a wealth of information to benefit those who wish to perform legitimate safety research. The addition of a public database that invades an employer's illness & injury record invites misinterpretation, intentional manipulation and misuse of data.
(commenter is a forensic engineer and professional accident investigator)