What Will DOGE’s Moves on Government Agencies Mean for OSHA?

Shortly before midnight February 4, a bulletin began to circulate on social media, and urged the members of the Federation and their allies in Washington, DC, on their way to a protest on the Street of 200 North West Constitution – the headquarters of the Ministry of Labor – below the afternoon. “The struggle for workers: Stay Doug outside countries! “I announce.
By the time when the bulletin was drafted, it was widely understood that a visit by the Ministry of Governmental efficiency was a budget -run budget initiative. Elon MuskIt can be spent for the public agency. Among the entities that prompted such visits because Donald Trump assumed that his position was the Ministry of Education, which Musk pledged to close, and UsaidWhere all workers were placed except for a few hundred workers on leave and financing was cut for almost all programs. (On Friday, in response to a lawsuit filed by federal unions, the judge who appointed by Trump prevented the government from placing employees of the US agency “irreparable damage”. Dodge It is not a real agency, the tactics that you used – to conduct the federal payments approved by Congress, access to government systems that carry sensitive personal information, and to purify civil service employees by promising to pay them until September if they leave their jobs – illegal. This did not prevent Trump from praising musk performance. “I think he is doing a great job,” the president told reporters last week.
The dismantling of the Ministry of Labor will be a bold task for a head of hands and his second thief, in part, to support voters from the working class. DOL’s mission is to enhance workers’ welfare and protect their rights and advantages. Like an increasing number of technical few, Musk appears to be the idea of enabling the government to perform these jobs as an insult. Last year, his company SACEX filed a lawsuit against the National Council for Labor Relations – which is assigned to prevent unfair work practices and works with DOL to impose compliance with labor laws – which indicates that the agency is unconstitutional. (The lawsuit was filed shortly after the NLRB, a complaint against Spacex, was claimed by allegedly launching eight employees who criticized musk in an open letter.)
Musk is unlikely to have a more charitable vision for the Department of Occupational Safety and Health, a branch of the Ministry of Labor whose mission is to protect employees from dangerous working conditions and hold the employers who put them at risk. In recent years, Osha It has repeatedly fined the Musk companies due to serious safety violations, including an accident at the Spacex facility in Texas in which the worker fell until his death from a truck whose charge was not properly secured. The death was revealed for the first time in Expose It was published in 2023 by Reuters, which documented at least six hundred unnamed injuries previously in the company; Its facility in Bronzville, Texas, had a six times a rate higher than the average industry. (Spacex defended safety practices in written responses to Osha California OshaWhere the employee was injured during the missile engine test.) Osha It also fined other companies from Musk, Tesla, to display the workers for dangerous chemicals and issued a fine for multiple violations that include chemical burns and other injuries to the employees of a company owned by the third musk, a boring company.
DodgeInvasions have not been met with the American Agency for International Development and many other agencies with pre -protests on the site, in part due to the fact that they were held very quickly, but a different scenario was played on February 5th, in DOL, where hundreds of people appeared. Some demonstrators were members of AFL-CIO, which helped spread the word DodgeUnderstanding visit. Others came from groups such as the National Employment Bill, which is the Labor Rights Organization with an office in Washington.
Many of the information gathered by the Ministry of Labor-Medical Registration, allegations to compensate the workers, and the complaints of the disturbance-is a secret, a point that has been confirmed in a lawsuit in which a group of federal employees unions are rushing to submit them in a tight American region. The lawsuit sought to prevent the Ministry of Labor from exchanging sensitive information with Dodge; Some of the union members that I brought (supposed, DOL employees) said that the administration had ordered them to comply with it DodgeDemands. “The Ministry of Labor and its current leadership leads this acquisition, which orders the administration employees to access everything they ask,” the lawsuit states. Facing such a guidance would violate the privacy of workers and can offer the identities of individuals who submitted complaints about the theft of wages and other unfair employment practices with the DOL department in the hours, and the charge of the lawsuit – struggling with which remains secret to protect people from revenge. Converting these files to the “unprecedented, non -elected and temporary service” can be harmful to its members
David Michaels, a professor at the Faculty of Public Health at George Washington University who was president Osha During the era of President Barack Obama, he told me that similar concerns apply to Osha Files that Dodge It may arrive. “Osha Investigations depend on the confidential information provided by the workers, and the names of these workers are always protected. From submitting future complaints. “They will lose their confidence Osha Michaels expected that maintaining their confidentiality. “If you know that your name will not remain a secret, you certainly have second ideas about reporting anything.”
Every year, five thousand workers in America are killed in the job and more than two million It suffers from injuries and diseases. According to a report It was published by AFL-CIO last year, which is a reason for that Osha It has a lot of federal inspectors on salary statements but very few: only one per eighty thousand workers in the country. However, Trump did not show any tendency to address this problem. On the contrary, during his first term, forty -two percent of the leadership positions in OshaIncluding the job of officials, left vacant. The vacancies continued at the beginning of the epidemic, when they appealed to the unions Eugene ScalliaLawyer of the Ain company Trump as the Minister of Labor, to issue an interim emergency standard that requires employers to follow specific rules to protect their safety and slow down the spread Corona virus disease19. Skalia, who devoted a lot of his career to help companies evade government regulations, was aside. The Ministry of Labor issued voluntary guidelines for employers. However, although more than ten thousand complaints from workers who claim unsafe conditions in their workplace are received in the months that followed,, Osha He only released two categories.