Chamber Notes Archives

March 2006

So what are you really afraid of?

In the world of seismology, Blair County has never been among the hot-spots for potential earthquake activity.

Next Friday though, there’s bound to be at least a few minor tremors. After all, that’s the day Bob Szymanski comes to town.

Szymanski is a nice man – very polite and articulate. He dresses well and appears to be in fairly good physical shape. In most circles, he’d be unlikely to attract a whole lot of attention.

In the business community he’s viewed differently. In the business community he’s a demon.

You see it’s not who Bob Szymanski is but whom he represents. As regional director of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, he’s every business’s worst nightmare. Even businesses that do everything by the book.

As the nation’s premier oversight agency for health and safety compliance, OSHA is the iron fist that reputedly strikes when a business least expects it. In reality it is a far less menacing organization that, over time, has adopted more of a conciliatory approach to corporate wrongdoing. That transformation will take a long time to catch-on. It’s one of the reasons why Szymanski relishes the opportunity to take his show on the road.

Szymanski’s excursion to Blair County comes at the invitation of The Chamber’s Safety/Risk Committee. That committee spends a significant amount of time and effort focusing on ways to help businesses better understand the benefits of maintaining a safe environment. Most businesses appreciate the guidance. Yet far too many still take the run-for-cover approach. It’s that second group that The Chamber is hoping to lure out of hiding.

The message is not a complicated one. The decision to attend an OSHA seminar does not make a business a target for future inspection. Two factors likely trigger that – an employee complaint or the bad karma that comes from being part of an industry with a poor track record for performance.

Similarly, attending a seminar won’t ingratiate a business to OSHA. The Chamber doesn’t provide a list of attendees to Szymanski and he has never asked us for one. The only practical way of endearing yourself to OSHA is knowing what to expect, learning how to apply it and regarding it with the highest priority.

Szymanski’s presentation to The Chamber will focus on three related topics: OSHA’s Compliance Priorities, the targets that have emerged as the result of those priorities and an overview of recent citations and remedies. That scope of information may come across as intimidating but it’s also valuable. While many businesses will admit that they would prefer not to be “scared into compliance,” it ultimately makes no difference how you get there. Only that you do. And despite a kinder, gentler OSHA in the punitive sense, statistics show that more businesses are on its radar screen than at any time in recent memory.

According to OSHA’s Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor Jonathan L. Snare, the agency cited 85,307 total violations of OSHA standards and regulations during 2005. That’s an increase of 9.5% over the last five years. A high percentage of those come under the “willful violations” category. That means that not all the health and safety shortcomings that businesses have are materializing solely out of ignorance.

. The Chamber’s current membership consists of 956 businesses and organizations. One thing is clear. The number of businesses attending Bob Szymanski’s presentation should be at least 956. A prudent business would send a second person in case the first one gets scared and passes-out.

What will really happen is that forty or fifty people will show-up. They will listen intently to the tales of businesses that were careless, conniving or intentionally non-compliant. They will grow from the experience, value the information and will return to work to get their houses in order.

And what of the rest? They will say that they were too busy to leave the office, even for a few hours. Or that the chance of OSHA knocking on their doors is just too remote. They will continue to operate as they always have, throwing caution to the wind yet always taking a chance moment here and there to glance back over their shoulders.

It’s a tough way to do business. It’s an even tougher way to live. The worst part is, it doesn’t have to be either.

Chamber Notes Archives