20. Safety and Health
20.1 Create a comprehensive list of safety or health actions taken against the organization.
20.2 Can you identify any patterns in OSHA activity?
20.3 What are the major health and safety problems?
Nonprofits as nongovernmental organization are covered by OSHA.
The safety and health record of a firm is an indication of their corporate responsibility. The information you gather will help you assess what kind of firm they are, and may be important in a public campaign. For example, the deteriorating health and safety conditions in Bridgestone/Firestone’s facilities were a major part of the contract campaign by the Steelworkers.
Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker may provide information on a company’s OSHA violations. Good Job First also provides detailed information on which firms received COVID-19 subsidies with the COVID Stimulus Watch.
You can also search the OSHA website directly for violations, but the information can be sparse at times. You can also search by industry to get a broader sense of what is happening. If your company has made recent acquisitions, you will need to search under that name as well.
NIOSH also provides more general information and you can search by industry.
A general news search may also supplement what you find on the OSHA web site. Serious accidents or injuries are newsworthy, especially in local papers. You can also use news information to make sense of the more formal OSHA data.