OSHA Trial Balloon Bursts at Takeoff

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 21, 2000 | by Woody West

A story "has legs," in the argot of the press, if it appears significant or interesting enough to grab attention for more than a day or so. A recent emanation from Washington, an apparent federal directive to make employers liable for the safety of telecommuters' offices in their homes, did not have legs.

Too bad. It should have had a sturdy pair, illustrating another insatiable attempt to extend the sticky web of regulation. Even though it rated a sentence or two on the nightly TV newscasts, the alacrity with which the feds bailed out drained the story of media sex appeal.

The evident lack of public reaction even to the tepid press was dispiriting. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the first century B.C., compared the conquered Gauls with the vigorous Britons resisting Rome: Once "warriors of repute," decadence had set in, wrote Tacitus, and the Gauls' "courage has been lost along with their liberty." Americans are far from that extreme, but increasing passivity to the dictates of imperial Washington leaches liberty bit by bit and the courage to sustain it.

The latest episode sprouted in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. This is the same alert bunch of bureaucrats who once warned farmers that manure could make barn floors slippery and, therefore, dangerous. A fiefdom within the Department of Labor, OSHA published a document that was interpreted as holding employers responsible for the safety of home offices, from ventilation and lighting to fire safety, adequate sanitary facilities -- and so extensively forth, probably including daily flossing.

The letter either was a policy directive, i.e., a mandate, or simply (once the sushi hit the fan) advice from your buds in Washington. The obvious implication was that operatives from OSHA might be rapping on the doors of the 18 million Americans now working at home to inspect the spare bedroom or the converted basement to ensure they meet federal standards. Wow, we'll have to hire lots and lots of inspectors here at OSHA, won't we?

Think of it: 18 million of us working at least one day a week out of our homes, a number that's swelling as technology continues to diminish distance and time. The personal and social convenience of expanding telecommuting only vastly can increase that number.

One might suppose that the federal government heartily would support telecommuting as allowing more flexible working conditions in a stressful culture of two-worker families and, as a dandy ancillary benefit, decreasing the murderous bumper-to-bumper traffic that clots urban highways. This latest OSHA effort, however, demonstrates the voracious appetite for control by government grown so obese that it would like to keep its hungry eye out for every sparrow, its flight patterns and nest designs. The duplications and multiplications of chores that the feds (and state governments, to be sure) have assumed ensure that fewer and fewer will be done effectively or with a sense of proportionate authority.

This recent shuffle also illustrates how devious and/or mindless is the bureaucratic beast when questioned why it is out of its cage. When the story broke, a Labor Department apparatchik who is supposed to monitor OSHA said curtly, "If an employer is allowing it to happen, it is covered" -- the "it" referring to telecommuting. Thus, the OSHA letter was defined as a declaration of policy, nothing advisory about it.

By the next day, though, with the intrusive absurdity now evident, the Department of Labor retreated like Napoleon from Moscow. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman resorted to the standard dance of denial and said the whole dang thing had been "misinterpreted." She then withdrew the noxious letter, asserting that it never had been sent to her office for review.

The White House also waded into the sludge when congressional Republicans formed a line-of-battle, and a number of companies slammed into reverse plans to expand their telecommuting. An administration official expressed "surprise and shock." (The White House actually might have been so on this occasion.)

Herman used the usual deflecting tactic when a spotlight of publicity lights up a dark bureaucratic corner: She called for a "national dialogue." Really. "The nature of work is changing," she said, and "we need to examine what it is." Indeed, preferably before imposing a fine-mesh net of confining regulation as OSHA was intent on doing to millions of home offices.

Initiating that dialogue at the end of January, Herman sent her subaltern, Assistant Secretary Charles N. Jeffress, to wave the white flag to a Senate subcommittee. "We believe that the ... act does not apply for work activities in employees' home offices," he said abjectly.

They never sleep in Washington.