OSHA Has the Highest Murder Rate

July 13, 2023 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

OSHA Has the Highest Murder Rate

Paul Craig Roberts

For  30 years, perhaps longer, I have been reading articles that noise is a great stressor and that stress is a great killer. A day or so ago I read the latest report that stress produced by noise is a leading killer.

Air bases cause a huge amount of noise, but OSHA construction regulations are the worst producers of noise stress.  Some decades ago an inattentive construction site worker or inattentive equipment operator resulted in a death.  OSHA went into action. Henceforth every piece of construction equipment that has a reverse gear must have a penetrating beep-beep system.  Today the regulation has expanded to every truck, so that even delivery trucks are beep-beepers.

Now consider a construction site where there are bobcats operating, larger bulldozers and frontend loaders, cranes, and delivery trucks.  The myriad of beep-beeps from 7am to 7pm is 12 hours of noise infliction on residents from the construction.

In civilized countries, such as Japan, this is not permitted, but in barbaric countries like the US it is.  

By the time the work day finishes, those affected by the noise are stressed to the hilt and need three martinis to calm down, thus adding excessive alcohol to the stress damage of the noise.

The beep-beep is deadly and is a gratuitous regulation.  All that is needed is that an equipment operator who runs over someone faces manslaughter charges and the construction company has civil liability.  That would ensure the equipment operator paid attention.  The fact that he might not pay attention incentivizes construction companies to make sure workers are not sharing the same space with equipment operators.

Instead, the cost, which should be born by the construction company, is imposed on the surrounding neighborhood.

OSHA is a regulatory agency that is all cost and zero benefit.  Liability law can restrain unsafe work activities far better–and without the stress-killing noise–of OSHA regulations.

But in America don’t expect any intelligent policy to be formulated.