Mar 27, 2013

Is it Time to Stop Exempting Farms from Safety Rules? #OHS via @ALLGOV

...48% of all grain entrapments took place at commercial facilities and 52% on farms. But most farms aren't subject to oversight by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which regulates working conditions in most businesses.

 "At some point we're going to have to decide whether these incidents are just accidental … [or] somebody's really making horrendous decisions that approach a criminal level," William Field, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University who has studied entrapments since 1978, told The Center for Public Integrity. "It's intentional risk-taking on the part of the managers or someone in a supervisory capacity that ends up in some horrific incidents. The bottom line is if you ask them why they did it, it was because it was more profitable to do it that way." -David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff

Read on at: http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/is-it-time-to-stop-exempting-farms-from-safety-rules-130326