"Until Last Year, No One Was Tracking Workplace Injuries", 22 March 2016

The federal agency that was established to keep workers safe has decided, for the first time in its 45-year history, that it should know who exactly is getting hurt at work. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which has historically focused on tracking work-related deaths, in 2015 began systematically requiring employers “to report any severe work-related injury—defined as a hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye—within 24 hours.” We now have 10,388 new workplace horror stories (7,636 hospitalizations and 2,644 amputations). Here are a few examples... [refers to  St. Charles/Resurrection Cemeteries, Primex, Walmart]  But OSHA reporting and enforcement actions focus on the immediate term, often missing the dormant health and safety threats...

[The] AFL-CIO points out that OSHA’s inspector workforce currently only has the capacity to “inspect workplaces once every 140 years, on average,” about once every 91 years on the state level. The level of public investment required to effectively regulate workplaces is evidently too expensive for “small government” lawmakers.

So life remains perilously cheap at work. Still, OSHA’s new reporting rule is still a major step forward in workplace monitoring...

The big unknown variable in all this, of course, is what happens after these 10,000 reports: The casualties might have been left unable to work, saddled with debt, or bilked by an insurance company. We don’t know what their medical bills looked like, only that their pain cost them a hell of a lot more than it cost the boss who hurt them.