Seeking Safety

n May 5, 1997, during the night shift at the Postal Service's Bulk Mail Center in Atlanta, a maintenance worker was fixing a conveyor belt when the power accidentally switched on and sliced off three of his fingers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration later cited the facility for violations that for a private employer would have carried fines of nearly $300,000. The citations came on the heels of four other OSHA inspections at the site a year earlier that would have triggered $1.5 million in private-sector penalties.

But for the Postal Service, there were no fines at all--because until recently, OSHA couldn't fine USPS or any other agency for safety violations.

Even without penalty authority, OSHA has cited nearly 6,000 federal work sites for more than 24,000 violations since 1993. Some agencies have such lax safety practices that their injury and illness rates dwarf those of the private sector. These high rates, in turn, translate into high workers' compensation costs. From July 1996 through June 1997, federal agencies were responsible for about $1.8 billion in workers' compensation and related expenses.

In part, accidents at federal facilities result from complex operations involving varied safety and health challenges. The approximately 800,000 postal workers, for example, face the prospect of vehicle accidents, repetitive motion injuries from machinery, gunshots from disgruntled employees and customers, dog bites, back problems from heavy lifting, and accidental machine start-ups like that at the Atlanta facility.

But observers say another factor contributing to the federal accident rate is that because agencies haven't operated under the threat of OSHA fines, they have had little incentive to make safety a top priority.

For the Postal Service, all that changed two months ago, when the Postal Employees Safety Enhancement Act brought the agency under OSHA's full enforcement umbrella. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., who proposed the legislation along with Rep. Jim Greenwood, R-Pa., views the law as a first step in an incremental process that ultimately may subject the entire federal government to OSHA enforcement.

OSHA wouldn't be the first regulatory agency to gain such power. The Environmental Protection Agency, through a series of laws and court decisions, has had the authority to levy fines against agencies for violating certain environmental laws since 1992.

From the start, Postal Service officials opposed the OSHA measure. "The flawed premise of this legislation ignores the fact that the Postal Service was created to function as a part of government, providing a fundamental public service to the American people," Deborah Willhite, postal vice president of government relations, wrote in a letter last July to Sen. James Jeffords, R-Vt., chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over OSHA. Willhite said extra compliance costs would hamper the agency's ability to provide universal mail service.

The Clinton administration, meanwhile, not only supported the proposal, but pushed for an amendment to bring all federal employees except military service members under full OSHA purview, something the American Federation of Government Employees has long advocated. That floor amendment didn't materialize, but OSHA officials say one agency at a time is better than nothing.

"Having a penalty . . . certainly has a deterrent effect," says Richard Fairfax, OSHA's deputy director of compliance. "There's an incentive to comply with the standards. I wouldn't want to say that all federal agencies need that incentive, but it certainly helps."

Federal Responsibilities

Under the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, agencies must meet the same worker safety standards that apply to private companies. These include providing clearly marked and easily reached emergency exits, special gear to protect people working on scaffolds, respirators for employees working in toxic environments, and adequate training on safety and health matters.

The law also requires federal agencies to have written safety and health programs, a mandate that hasn't yet been imposed on the private sector. Those programs must be supported by top managers and must go beyond compliance to proactively identify and prevent potential hazards.

In 1980, President Carter ordered agency chiefs to designate a safety and health official, preferably at the assistant secretary level, to manage the program. Carter's executive order also calls for annual self-
inspections, employee representation on groups responsible for safety and health, and prompt response to employee complaints. Perhaps most importantly, the order gives OSHA the authority to inspect federal work sites, whether in response to complaints, accidents or targeted enforcement programs.

Taken together, all these requirements "challenge federal agencies to be the leaders in the national goal to achieve a safe and healthful working environment for all employees," OSHA noted in its fiscal 1995 federal agency report, the most recent available. According to OSHA data, however, many agencies are falling short of this challenge.

How Safe is Government?

In 1995, after discovering that federal injury and illness rates were at a 10-year high, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich ordered a survey of the 20 largest agencies employing 95 percent of federal workers to assess the state of federal sector safety and health.

The results were disappointing. Five agency heads reported that they had not appointed a designated safety and health official at the assistant secretary level. Of the remaining 15 who did have assistant secretaries with OSHA-related responsibilities, eight said they spent less than 5 percent of their time on safety and health. Four agencies reported not having a written safety and health policy statement. Only one agency said it conducted the annual self-evaluations required by law.

"The most striking finding was that nearly half of the federal agency safety and health programs are still developing--25 years after the passage of the OSH Act," concluded OSHA in its 1995 federal sector report, which included the survey findings. In their defense, agency officials expressed frustration at rarely having enough money to do the job right.

Even federal managers who are trying their best to prevent accidents sometimes have trouble translating good intentions into practice, just as some private employers do, Fairfax says. "A lot of companies have nice safety and health programs on paper," he notes. "But somewhere between having it written and having it implemented, something gets lost. It's the same with federal agencies."

The Postal Service is a good example, Fairfax adds. "If you look at their written safety and health program, it's excellent," he says. "You can go out to some facilities and they have wonderful programs in place and they're following [them]. They're protecting workers; they've identified hazards; they've done everything. And then you can go to another facility and it will either be not implemented or it will be partially implemented and they'll have problems."

Spotty implementation is reflected in varying injury and illness rates. In fiscal 1997, the Postal Service as a whole posted a lost workday rate of 3.39, according to OSHA data. The standard measure for lost workdays is the average number of days per 100 workers that employees had to be put on restricted work duty or could not report to work at all because of an occupational injury or illness in a given year. However, during their inspections, OSHA found that the Atlanta facility mentioned above had a rate of 13.08.

The Politics of Safety

How the Postal Service came to be targeted by the new law has as much to do with politics as with safety and health. For Enzi, a freshman Senator who believes too much taxpayer money is spent on federal workers' compensation bills and thinks government should abide by the same rules the private sector does, the agency was an easy target.

The Postal Service accounts for about a third of federal workers' compensation costs each year. That amounted to $550 million from July 1996 to June 1997. During the same period, the agency had a budget surplus exceeding $1 billion, plenty of money to boost safety and health prevention and in the process lower workers' compensation costs, Enzi says.

"If the Postal Service were a private company, it would be the ninth largest business in the United States and the 29th in the entire world," he told fellow lawmakers upon introducing his bill, adding that the agency is bigger in revenues than Coca Cola, Xerox and Kodak combined. "The Postal Service exhibits almost every characteristic of a private business. Still, it's reluctant to fully comply with federal occupational safety and health law."

So is Congress. Legislative offices must meet OSHA standards, but they are not subject to OSHA fines--or even to inspections. As a result, safety hazards abound in some Capitol Hill offices. Staffers often sit amidst tangles of computer wires, surrounded by stacks of paper that could be fire hazards. Crowded conditions mean emergency escape routes sometimes are not easily reached. Last summer's tragic shootings that left two Capitol police officers dead attest to the fact that working for Congress can be dangerous.

In fact, the Architect of the Capitol and the Government Printing Office, both of which are congressional agencies, have average lost workday rates that are significantly higher than the Postal Service's. But Congress doesn't have a billion-dollar surplus that potentially could be spent on beefed-up safety; nor does it have a competitor who happens to have one of the most powerful OSHA-related lobbying operations in Washington.

United Parcel Service, which faces stiff Postal Service competition in the express delivery service arena, believes the agency has had an unfair financial advantage because it hasn't had to spend money litigating contested OSHA fines or implementing mandated changes. This advantage, UPS argues, is partly responsible for the huge surpluses the Postal Service has registered over the last few years. UPS pushed for the law in an effort to level the competitive playing field, says company spokesman Tad Segal.

Postal Service officials are proud of recent efficiency gains but insist the surpluses, which are being used to offset the agency's $9 billion in cumulative net losses racked up between 1971 and 1994, shouldn't cause them to be treated like the private sector. "We serve the American public by providing a public service," says Larry Anderson, the Postal Service's manager of safety and workplace assistance. "That's not the same as General Motors, which has a very clear financial objective in all of their programs. They respond to money. If you fine us, you just pile on more debt [to the federal government]. Our motive is different."

Postal Problems

Anderson acknowledges that the Postal Service has its share of safety and health problems. But major management changes in recent years have dramatically improved the situation, he insists. OSHA data appear to support that statement. In fiscal 1993, 280 OSHA inspections uncovered more than 1,000 violations at postal facilities. About the same number of inspections last year found fewer than 500 violations.

It's a transformation that has been well-earned, Anderson says. A major downsizing effort from 1992 to 1994, which included abolishing such things as an in-house driver training program, triggered the problems, he says. "We assumed that if you had a valid state driver's license it was OK for you to drive a postal vehicle," Anderson says. "It was a change that didn't serve us well in terms of our motor vehicle accident experience. By 1994 our accident rates had skyrocketed to where we were reaching all-time highs."

So postal officials demanded renewed attention to safety, tying facility managers' bonus payments to injury and illness rates. They set a goal of 5 percent reduction in accident rates each year. "We pay our managers for making this goal," Anderson says. "We pay them hard cash money. They're very motivated by that."

Anderson insists the cash incentive has not led managers to discourage workers from filing safety and health complaints. In fact, the new policy has encouraged managers to follow up on accidents faster, he says.

Some postal workers tell a different story. "There is a lot of pressure put on people to not report injuries," says Sarah Ryan, a steward for the American Postal Workers Union who works at the Processing and Distribution Center in Seattle. Employees fear that if they complain they'll be put under surveillance, have their requests for time off scrutinized or be subjected to other hassles, she adds.

Ryan also says she's noticed no effort to prevent hazards related to ergonomics--the science of adapting the work environment to the worker to prevent injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome caused by excessive repetitive motion. "Nothing has changed in the last few years on the work floor" to prevent these injuries, Ryan says.

OSHA officials also are concerned about ergonomics problems. They have cited postal facilities for ergonomics hazards and urged USPS officials to enter an agreement like ones in place with General Motors and the meatpacking industry designed to cooperatively improve ergonomic conditions. The Postal Service declined to participate.

Anderson admits that his agency struggles with ergonomics. But he believes there are more pressing safety issues demanding more immediate attention--motor vehicle accidents and dog bites, for example.

"I understand why the Post Office thinks that," OSHA's Fairfax counters. But the fact remains that "the majority of complaints we get from employees who work at the Post Office deal with repetitive motion."

Differences of Opinion

Last February, OSHA and the Postal Service launched a task force with postal unions in an effort to reach consensus on the most serious hazards facing agency employees. They soon realized that first they had to reconcile a fundamental disagreement on how to calculate injury and illness rates, which are critical measures in assessing safety and health. "Our data doesn't exactly mesh," Anderson says. "We have a battle about whether or not their data is collected properly and whether they're interpreting it properly."

OSHA data, calculated using workers' compensation claims numbers gathered by the Labor Department, show higher rates than the Postal Service tallies. Using a more expansive definition of lost workdays, OSHA includes any case involving a worker who could not do his or her usual job but may have been assigned to a limited duty position elsewhere in the organization.

The Postal Service, however, only includes cases where a worker was so severely wounded or ill that he or she could not report to work at all. In Anderson's view, it doesn't make sense to count cases where a worker may be back at the job, albeit doing a different, possibly less taxing, task. While testifying on Postal Service ergonomics issues several years ago, OSHA's ergonomics chief Roger Stephens called this approach to calculating rates "at best bizarre."

Data discrepancies exist at other agencies too, although not always to this degree. The OSHA law allows agencies to design and use their own data collection methods. But private employers--and now the Postal Service--must record injuries and illnesses on uniform OSHA logs that allow comparison across industries. It was unclear in late September precisely how the data issue would be resolved at the Postal Service under the new law.

To Fine or Not to Fine

Despite disagreements over the years, Anderson says OSHA's input has had its benefits. Penalty-free OSHA citations are helpful, he says. A citation "allows me to focus senior management on the right issues. And it gives me some leverage with local management because it's not Mr. Anderson coming down and saying let's make a [safety-related] change here, it's OSHA saying it."

But attaching financial penalties would be a mistake, he said just before the law passed. "What fining us would do is divert our limited resources away from accident prevention to contesting the fines. I think it would be quite counterproductive to our program efforts to spend all our money on enforcement issues and not on fixing issues. I'm sure that the fines are not going to focus us better on problems."

Not true, say other federal agency safety managers. "There's no question" that penalties would help focus management attention on safety and health issues, says Richard Powell, risk management program manager for the National Park Service, who thinks OSHA fines could help all agencies. "That would get their attention real fast. It would be taken seriously."

Things have certainly played out that way for the Environmental Protection Agency. "Until we had penalty authority [in 1992], there was very little incentive for the feds to comply" with environmental standards, says Sally Dalzell, an attorney in EPA's Federal Facilities Enforcement Office. "Getting penalty authority has made a huge difference." What's changed, Dalzell notes, is that agency leaders have now made environmental compliance a priority.

She recalls one Defense Department site that EPA repeatedly reprimanded, without penalty, for storing 2,000 pounds of hazardous waste outdoors in violation of its storage permit. Not until EPA slapped on a $1 million penalty--which was later reduced in exchange for promised abatement work--did DoD take the matter seriously, Dalzell says.

From OSHA's perspective, the power to fine postal facilities or other federal operations will seriously strain already limited resources. Not only will the agency receive more complaints requiring inspection due to the issue's elevated profile, Fairfax predicts, but those inspections will be more time-consuming than in the past, because inspectors will have to do the detailed documentation essential to win cases that are contested in court. In turn, more solicitors will have to be hired to handle those cases. But the net result of improving safety and health will be worth the extra effort, he says.

"When penalties are issued, certainly the relationship becomes a little bit more adversarial," Fairfax acknowledges, but there's still ample room for cooperation. Indeed, the threat of penalties tends to encourage private employers to seek out consultative compliance help, notes Linda Anku, OSHA administrator in Region III, which includes the mid-Atlantic states. There is a direct correlation between the number of penalty-carrying inspections OSHA does and the number of requests the agency gets for assistance, Anku says. "People communicate at a different level if they're faced with significant financial outlays. Money talks."