DEATH ON THE JOB: Via Amptoons I find Confined Space, a blog devoted to workplace safety and health. You should go there now for the NYTimes pieces at the top of the page: “A Trench Caves In, A Young Worker Is Dead. Is It a Crime?” and “US Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace.” Sad, angering, and gripping stories.

A while back, I did a chunk of research and several interviews on various OSHA reform proposals, for a “news analysis” story that never quite jelled. I generally prefer market-based solutions–for reasons including a) market solutions tend to be suppler and better able to respond to changing conditions and practices; and b) governmental, top-down regulatory solutions are often hijacked–is the phrase I’m looking for “regulatory capture”?–as the biggest players write the regulations to favor themselves and disfavor smaller competitors. So I read some libertarian-oriented analyses of OSHA (though I don’t think any were dogmatically, or “rigorously” if you prefer, libertarian) and also spoke with various scholars about proposed regulatory tweaks meant to give the governmental structures some of the flexibility of market structures. E.g. attempts to make workplace regulations focus more on outcomes rather than on processes (= “reduce death and injury at your workplace by X amount or X percent by time T–we don’t care how you do it, just do it–here’s a guide to best practices if you need ideas, but basically, just get your deaths and injuries down”). Many of these sounded like good ideas, but none seemed sufficient. This is an area where I’m not especially libertarian, though I’ll note that I’m far from an expert here–not even an “insta-expert” of the faking-it-in-the-service-of-journalism kind.

My point (and I do have one) is that, wonk proposals and counterproposals aside, this should change: “[Even companies that willfully violated the law and killed workers] face lighter sanctions than those who deliberately break environmental or financial laws.

“For those 2,197 deaths, employers faced $106 million in civil OSHA fines and jail sentences totaling less than 30 years, The Times found. Twenty of those years were from one case, a chicken-plant fire in North Carolina that killed 25 workers in 1991.”