The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) was created to assure the safety and health of America's workers by setting and enforcing standards, providing training and education in safety and health. OSHA was established in the late sixties, by the Nixon administration. They feared for the workingman, especially in the booming of the modern American industrialism. Nixon was concerned that the workingman would be pushed aside and forgot about as machines took over, but he made a plan to prevent all that from happening with the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The purpose of this act was to prevent the times when the workingman ...view middle of the document...
OSHA makes regulations for nearly every working man and woman in the country (with exceptions such as miners, transportation workers, many public employees, and the self-employed). Also OSHA provides services to occupational safety and health professionals, the academic community, lawyers, journalists, and personnel of other government entities.Since 1970 when congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, OSHA has grown to 2100 inspectors, complaint discrimination, investigators, engineers, physicians, educators, standards writers, and other technical and support personnel spread over more than 200 offices throughout the country. OSHA has to have so many different agencies to account for the 100 million working men and women who work for six and a half million employers. Since 1970 workplace deaths have been reduced by half. Occupational injury and illness rates have been declining for the past six years. Even with this decline there are still fifty American workers that are injured every minute of the forty hour work week and almost seventeen die every day. This averages out to about 6000 people dieing and being injured each year.That is why OSHA officials have been steadily increasing inspections adding more officials and establishing new standards of safety to further serve the working community. As long as OSHA is in an ongoing operation to protect the working man from hazardous situations and products in the workplace we will all be a little safer.
