Office Managers

Reason, April, 2000 by Walter Olson

OSHA's retreat from its bid to regulate home workplaces sets a subversive precedent.

In late January the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced, as The New York Times put it, a "clarification" meant to dispel "confusion" about its policies. Contrary to earlier reports, the agency had decided that federal law did not require the homes of the nation's 20 million telecommuting employees to be free of such hazards as inadequate lighting, dangling power cords, ergonomically incorrect seating, rickety stairs, and drafty or stuffy ventilation conditions.

Accordingly, OSHA would not expect the nation's employers to carry out periodic inspections of their workers' home offices, or obtain from them checklists certifying that the employees' dens and basements were safe. Nor would employees who placed the occasional work-related phone call or sent the occasional e-mail message from home on evenings and weekends, or brought a spreadsheet home to work on while tending a sick child, be expected to map out emergency evacuation plans for their homes, keep OSHA-approved fire extinguishers and first aid kits on hand, or mount posters in their hallways to remind themselves of their right to a safe workplace.

Readers could be excused if their heads spun at the idea that all this could count as a mere "clarification" by the agency. A better description would be "abject, tail-between-its-legs retreat." Only two weeks earlier, a front-page story in The Washington Post had publicized an agency directive decreeing that businesses were indeed responsible for making sure that their employees' home work sites were free of federal safety violations. But by the time OSHA Director Charles Jeffress got done clarifying agency policy, you might have thought it was the nation's employers who'd been threatening to wrap home offices in red tape, and OSHA that had been waging a gallant fight against such a prospect. The "bottom line" for his agency, Jeffress said, had "always been" the same: "OSHA will respect the privacy of the home and expects that employers will as well."

What had actually taken place, of course, was a crash exercise in that time-honored Washington art, getting a story off the front pages. It more or less worked: News coverage practically ceased once the agency disclaimed an intent to regulate. But the agency's home office directive was no mere frolic by low-level staffers. It sprang from deep philosophic roots in the federal labor law we live under, and the premises of that law, inherited from the New Deal, unfortunately have not changed. Which means there's no principled reason for OSHA to stay out of this area in the future.

For most of this century, fights over "industrial homework" mostly arose from the activities of embroiderers, glove makers, and others on the margins of the American economy. Until the 1980s, only two groups in public life really seemed to care deeply about the homework issue: organized unionists, who wanted to ban it, and libertarians, who wanted it made legal. Both groups sensed what few others did: Far more was at stake in the practice than its economic importance at the time might have suggested.

Homework in the old-fashioned needle trades had long been an appealing option for many women, especially in rural and immigrant communities. Many already exercised the relevant skills; language barriers were of small importance; the pace of work could be lit around family responsibilities; and piecework for a commercial distributor was likely to provide more steady and lucrative employment than blouse and wedding gown projects for friends and family. But garment unions were determined to stamp out the practice, and their influence helped win passage of the New Deal--era Fair Labor Standards Act. This law authorized the federal government to ban homework, which it soon did with regard to a series of garment trades. Since the economic logic of the practice did not go away, constant vigilance and repeated crackdowns were needed in the ensuing decades to suppress such menaces to society as at-home knitting, tatting, and plush animal stitching.

Libertarians vocally opposed these laws as an infringement on individual rights. By what principle, exactly, had it become unlawful to sit in one's own home and carry on a peaceful, productive economic activity? And the sporadic crackdowns were nearly always bad news for the workers themselves, who were often either unable or unwilling to take up the unionists' implicit let-'em-punch-time-clocks suggestion of going to work in factories. A late-1970s crackdown on Vermont companies that distributed sweaters knitted in private homes, for example, wiped out the jobs of hundreds of retirees and other local residents for whom factory work was hardly a plausible substitute.

Moreover, like other measures directed at controlling consensual private activity, the homework law tended to bestow on authorities disturbingly intrusive powers. In his 1994 book Lost Rights James Bovard writes that New York City kept a staff of 40 investigators to snoop for violations of its homework regulations--this at a time when the city was having trouble protecting its citizens from genuine crimes. "What we do is send out our investigators on surveillance," said one official. "If our investigators identify someone they feel is a likely homeworker, then they merely follow that person to where they may go....If it is in a manufacturing area and you see a person carrying a well-worn shopping bag, and particularly if there are several people doing that, going in, the chances are quite good that it is going to be homework when you get in there." Hardened perps in the home knitting racket presumably could also be identified by their tendency to carry around with them long needles and wicker baskets for the concealment of their contraband.