OSHA should come clean about union ties
By Jeremy Lott and F. Vincent Vernuccio • 11/10/16 11:50 PM
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2016/11/10/osha-union-ties/93629532/
When Ronald Reagan said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” it’s unlikely he had the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in mind.
OSHA inspectors are supposed to help workers by looking for health and safety code violations that might put them at risk of harm. It turns out many inspectors have been instructed by their own agency to focus on things more helpful to union organizing than worker safety.
That charge comes from the International Franchise Association, a group representing franchised businesses across the country. Last year, the group furnished an email purportedly sent from OSHA by mistake to one of its members.
Michael Layman, vice president of regulatory affairs for IFA, has been fighting to bring this to light. The memo, he said, provided “dozens of questions” OSHA investigators “should use to determine a joint employer relationship whenever they are inspecting a franchise location, rather than do their real jobs to pursue worker safety.”
The memo sparked a letter from Congress to OSHA’s parent agency, the Labor Department. An October 2015 letter from the House Education & Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minnesota, and Workforce Protections Subcommittee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Michigan, to Labor requested more information on the memo echoed the concern that it “would instruct OSHA inspectors to delve into unrelated matters — financial and otherwise — far outside their expertise.”
Because of this, the congressmen argued OSHA “may be drifting from its core mission” of looking after worker safety.
The ongoing legal battle between the National Labor Relations Board and McDonald’s can help ups understand what’s going on here. The NLRB is trying to establish that franchise-granting corporations are really “joint employers” of the people who work for the locations, independent franchises owned by individuals and small business, across the country.
If this push is successful, instead of having to organize a multitude of small mom-and-pop shops unions would have the simpler task of organizing one mammoth corporation such as the Golden Arches.
As with NLRB, so with OSHA. Companies have been complaining for several years now about OSHA’s close and unfair ties to unions.
A Houston janitorial company complained in 2014 that OSHA was helping the Service Employees International Union by allowing union organizers to accompany inspectors on site visits. This September, a jury awarded that same company $5.3 million in damages against SEIU for its dishonest and slanderous organizing tactics.
Layman said the memo mistakenly sent to one of his members is clear evidence of a Labor Department “that is more interested in ideologically transforming the workplace than catching bad actors.” His group filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Aug. 15, 2015, asking the Department to explain the reasoning behind the memo.
What the Labor Department returned to IFA was nearly 1,000 pages long, according to Layman. Eighty percent of it was redacted.
It took IFA 11 months to obtain these redacted documents and even Congress fared no better. An October 26, 2016, follow-up letter from Congress to the Labor Department complains that “more than a year later, the Department still has not produced all responsive documents; and, many of the documents it has produced contain redacted information.”
Granted, OSHA looking into joint-employer status doesn’t bar investigators from looking for health and safety violations too. But the time of both inspectors and businesses is limited. It seems a waste and a distraction that inspectors were ordered to go bark up the wrong tree.
OSHA ought to focus on safety, not furthering the legal interpretations of the NLRB and certainly not on anything that tips the scales on union organizing.
At the very least, OSHA should disclose the unredacted reasoning behind its memo and any connection between the new instructions and organized labor. The public has a right to know.
F. Vincent Vernuccio is the director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Jeremy Lott is an adjunct scholar at the Center.
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