I’ve often wondered if a lot of the pushback against OSHA regulations and workplace safety…

So in my union work two of the people I worked with the closest were experts on workplace injury and OSHA(OHS in Alberta) rules and why this stuff exists.

Sometimes it's people having a bad attitude to safety. Most of the time, it's bosses who wanna cut corners on safety to maximize profits. This kills people more than anything.

Even perspective is relative. There's a saying that sort of applies...

"Familiarity breeds contempt".

When it comes to safety though, those work in hazardous fields often forget this saying.

The safety regulations often have to get around this concept and why repetition on recertification often happens yearly.

Having worked with hazardous materials for over a decade this becomes very obvious. I had to be recertified in over a dozen areas yearly even though much of it was very similar.

I've always sort of thought of OSHA as just the shallow end or the casual end of safety. The depth of killer type dangers in some workplaces are only really apparent to the insiders and the best OSHA can do is make sure that there are safety placards and warnings posted, and that people are trained and warned. But even with all that, a simple misstep or a single skipped step in a procedure can can be a killer.

In my experience (largely EMS and public safety), OSHA is treated as King, and for the reasons you just outlined. We've never even questioned the guidelines; we just follow them because we know they're sound.

But no protection in the known world would get me to work with electricity. 😲

Eh, as a worker it's love/hate relationship.

They're good to have in general to keep the bosses and profiteers from killing you at work. Yet there's quite a few rules that are kinda eye rolly and/or make doing the actual work just nore difficult or obnoxious. Sometimes even near impossible. Murphy's law then just dictates that on onebof these cases where you bend a minor OSHA rule where it really isn't a big deal that over zealous OSHA inspector in perfectly creased jeans, sparkling clean steal toes, and a 5 year old hard hat that looks brand new comes and writes you up because the saftey cones are spaced 30 inches instead of 24 or some other dumb ass infraction. Or you didn't put a saftey harness on while moving the boom lift across the parking lot even though you never went up anywherr in it and the basket is solid wire fence up to your tits.