On 5/28/12 5:43 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
And it was about the government NOT doing
> anything to protect them.
>
I got the impression that it's partially not so much that the regulators
are not doing their job, but that this falls in an area where there
aren't good rules to follow. The OSHA guy has to follow the process,
and the process doesn't much provide for proactive things. Like most
regulations, they assume that the employer will normally be "doing the
right thing". There's not enough money or time in the world to
proactively police every business in the country.
The other thing is that rules were, for the most part, written in the
days when "big company hires lots of individual employees" and the
concept of "independent contractor" was less common. Think workers in a
steel mill.
Something the show did NOT go into, but which might be interesting to
follow up on is whether there's a worker's comp thing, or if the various
and sundry subcontractors are skating around that by hiring all the
tower workers as independent contractors.
Or maybe its one of those things where there aren't little injuries
(which would make the employer fork out big bucks for WC coverage based
on their experience ratios) but just rare big ones. You could be a
small operator and "get lucky" for a long time before you get bit. It's
only because of the huge number of jobs that this kind of thing shows up
at all.
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