Editing 76-08-B7 (section)

=== Transcript ===
Not too long ago, I told you of the lady in New Mexico (President of a small company) who turned away inspectors for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration -- OSHA, as it is called -- on the grounds that her constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment were being violated. Her case was that the government inspector had no right to come into a privately owned business on a hunting expedition for possible violation of safety regulations adopted by the government agency unless those inspectors had a warrant showing probable cause. Her case was upheld by a panel of three federal judges.

Now, a member of Congress, Representative George Hansen of Idaho, has become the founding chairman of an organization called "Stop OSHA"; a happy brainchild of the American Conservative Union. This doesn't mean that Representative Hansen or the ACU want to see workers maimed and killed by accidents in the places where they work. It does mean they recognize that OSHA hasn't succeeded in reducing hazards for the numbers of workers suffering injury. But it has added billions of dollars to the cost of doing business, to say nothing of the cost of OSHA itself. Nearly 600,000 people have been killed at their jobs since OSHA started and there has continued to be a steady increase in job related injuries. Nothing, however, can match the increase in regulations spawned by the busy bees at OSHA.

Ironically, the General Accounting Office, which is set up to ride herd on its fellow bureaucrats reports there are more than 300 hazardous conditions in -- guess where? -- the working quarters of OSHA in Washington, D.C.! In fact, G.A.O., in its own sleuthing, found violations in several other government agencies in the capital, a goodly number of which would have resulted in costly fines had they been found in private businesses.

Congressman Hansen has done more than put his name on the new organization's letterhead. He encouraged and backed a South Dakota businessman who, like the lady in New Mexico, is fighting OSHA as a matter of principle.

Let me repeat -- no one, least of all the average employer, wants his employees to risk life and limb in the pursuit of their job. There are hazards to safety in many occupations and no one can guarantee that accidents won't happen. But OSHA, spawning regulations by the thousands (regulations that no one can possibly be familiar with) and refusing to help employers by looking at their operations and pointing out where safety can be improved, has done nothing -- as figures indicate -- to reduce worker related accidents.

What if OSHA, instead of snooping, busied itself with studying the causes of industrial accidents and offered its services to employers to help reduce those causes? What if OSHA started out by believing that employers do want to protect the health and safety of their employees and, believing that, provided a consulting service to help them? What if OSHA remembered that this is a nation created to be run by its citizens and those citizens are the employers of everyone who works for OSHA -- not the other way around? 

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.

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