OSHA fines Exum after death, water-knot probe

If it did, then the atrocious workplaces, worker injury and death rates of the past wouldn't have existed.

The usual fringe-right, hate-all-things-guberment nonsense.

I used to program that thing instead of using the mainframe (lol, you young guys know what a mainframe is?)

Feb 22, 2017 - 02:21pm PT
If it did, then the atrocious workplaces, worker injury and death rates of the past wouldn't have existed.

And OSHA eliminated such things, due to its wonderful oversight?

And OSHA's wonderful oversight could have kept this incident from happening?

And the fine is going to make guiding services really shape up to keep such things from happening again?

The usual fringe-right, hate-all-things-guberment nonsense.

The usual fringe-left, government-does-all-things-well nonsense.

And OSHA eliminated such things, due to its wonderful oversight?

And OSHA's wonderful oversight could have kept this incident from happening?

And the fine is going to make guiding services really shape up to keep such things from happening again?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 3,849 workplace deaths in Texas from 2003 through 2010 – the years available in the online database. That was 10 percent higher than the 3,589 workers who died at work in California in the same period.

That's not a negligible difference when you note that California – despite all its faults – has a far larger workforce than Texas. (Even if in this period, Texas jobs grew 10 percent as California payrolls shrank by 3 percent!)

So when you look at workplace deaths vs. the BLS count of all non-farm workers by state, Texas had 4.79 fatalities per 100,000 workers in 2003-2008 vs. California's 3.07. Basically, Texas workers died on the job at roughly a 50 percent faster pace than Californians.

O.K. Not all jobs are the same in terms of risks.

So I then looked at a particularly dangerous slice of the workplace – the so-called "goods producing" jobs. You know, where folks actually make things vs. pushing papers or providing services.

In Texas, in 2003-10, there were 1,780 deaths in goods-producing jobs – or 46 percent of the state's total job-related fatalities in the period. That was 32 percent higher than California job deaths in the same period.

But, believe it or not, California has more goods-producing workers than Texas – despite the many manufacturing challenges in the Golden State that sliced California good-producing work by 23 percent in this period. (Meanwhile, Texas job count was flat in 2003-10!)

As for good-producing, job-related deaths -- per equal number of employees, Texas workers are almost twice as likely to get killed than a Californian.

Could Texas goods-producing jobs themselves be more dangerous than the ones in California? So I took one more mathematical step – comparing what's seemingly a rather ubiquitous yet dangerous trade: construction work.

From 2003 to 2010, 999 Texas construction workers died on the job – a quarter of the state's job fatalities and 42 percent more than California.

I never did understand the reasons for keeping it wired open

the truth is, regulation works.

the "war on drugs" also "works."

when you are trimming a very small amount of material the guard makes it difficult.

I would just use a nail to hold the guard up when I needed to do that, then removed it.

Having it up all the time was a hassle because you could not set the saw down without worrying about the blade doing damage.