Study: California Workplace Safety Program Only Superficially Enforced

An occupational safety program that requires California businesses to eliminate workplace hazards only works when it’s adequately enforced.

That revelation comes from Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank RAND Corp., which recently released a study evaluating the California Injury and Illness Prevention Program.

The study by RAND, which says this is the first study to be conducted on the program, shows the program reduces workplace injuries, but only at businesses that had been cited for not addressing the regulation’s more-specific safety mandates.

The program is designed to save countless dollars in workplace injury payouts. There is one underlying question that arises from the study, its authors say: Are there more firms with non-compliance problems that went undetected because of “superficial” inspections?

CIIPP, which began in 1991, mandates certain procedures for employers, including communicating to employees about risks, carrying out workplace surveys, abating hazards, safety training and investigating causes of injuries.

The program has been the most frequently violated California Division of Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard in every year since its inception, being cited in about 25 percent of all inspections, according to RAND.

“We found the safety effects to be real, but not very large,” said John Mendeloff, lead author of the study and a senior public policy researcher for RAND. “We think that the most important reason for the limited impact of this program is that inspectors often did not go beyond a review of the employer’s written document.”

In other words, CIIPP forces compliance, but those in charge of enforcing that compliance do not go far enough to see the provisions of CIIPP are being carried out. And that could mean there are more companies out there violating these provisions that is generally know, Mendeloff said.

“People generally improved their compliance,” he said. “The problem is the manner in which the enforcement being carried seemed to often to allow a superficial compliance.”

A Cal-OSHA spokeswoman said the administration is still reviewing the study, and cannot comment until the review has been completed.

Mendeloff said CIIPP is almost analogous to “a paper program.”

“It’s on paper that you’re doing what you say,” he added.

Mendeloff said he wouldn’t go as far as classifying the entire program as a paper program, “but I’m saying that there is some of that.”

By that he means that during many inspections, Cal-OSHA inspectors merely cited businesses for not having a written program, and apparently looked no further at the business.

The study shows that when Cal-OSHA inspectors did investigate further and found failures to comply with provisions that specific businesses must train workers, identify and abate hazards, and investigate injury causes, the average injury rates at targeted businesses declined more than 20 percent in the following two years.

However, these provisions were cited in only about 5 percent of Cal-OSHA inspections, the study shows. In the other 20 percent of inspections where a violation of the rule was cited, it was only for the section requiring the employer have a written program, which carries a fine of $150.

“We found that when companies were cited not for the general failure to have a written program, but rather for specific failings, like not training workers and doing hazard surveys, then they had improvement,” Mendeloff said.

The 20 percent reduction in injuries following citations for the specific CIIPP requirements translates to about one injury per year at a workplace with 100 employees, and most estimates of the value of preventing a work injury are in the range of $15,000 to $50,000, according to RAND.

The study of injury effects was carried out using several different injury data sets. Inspections were included in the data if “before and after” injury rates could be obtained for inspected business. According to its authors, the study was limited manufacturing, transportation, utilities, wholesale trade and health care sectors and included inspections through 2006.

RAND examined three different data sources to get the injury rate data: Cal-OSHA data, in which the division collects injury rates from 80,000 companies each year, looking for entities that had been included before and after inspection; the Workers’ Comp Information System—a database in which workers’ comp carriers forward the first reports of injury forms they get form employers to the state—which RAND compared with Employment Development Department data on the number of employees at each company to derive the injury rate; and the California Workers Compensation Insurance Rating Board’s Experience Modification Factor, which measures whether injury rates are above or below for given establishment, to see how companies that got cited were complying following their citation.

With this data in hand, RAND carried out two tests: First, to see if compliance was a preventative. With the program in place, the study’s authors should have noticed companies had lower injury rates than those who were not in compliance.

“Basically what we found was that was not true if we just looked at the provision about having a written program,” Mendeloff said. “It was true if they had these other specific violations.”

The second test conducted, Mendeloff said, was, “if the CIIPP is effective at preventing injuries, then we should find companies that are cited for (violations of the provisions), and presumably companies would have lower injury rates subsequent to the inspections.”

He added, “In this case we find no affect if they were cited just for failing to have a written program, but preventive effects if inspectors cited a specific provision.”

The results of the study pose a frightening question that Mendeloff’s study doesn’t answer: Are there more firms with non-compliance problems that went undetected because inspectors merely focused on whether a company had a written program?

But the bottom-line is that the study’s suggests that if Cal-OSHA wants to be more effective, “inspectors should go beyond checking the paperwork,” Mendeloff said.

While the study notes that higher penalties for noncompliance with the program and more extensive activities to make employers aware of their obligations could enhance compliance, approaches that could have a greater impact include having inspectors conduct more in-depth assessments of employer programs and having inspectors link the violations they find and the injuries that have occurred to the program by asking “Why weren’t these prevented by your Injury and Illness Prevention Program?”

The study was sponsored by the California Commission for Health, Safety and Workers’ Compensation, a public body with management, labor and public representatives located in the state’s Department of Industrial Relations.

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