Hon if he hates OSHA you gotta run and run fast
I don’t care if you’re the most anti-government anarcho-communist in the Western World, if he hates OSHA you gotta run
If your man looks at the dudes whose job is making sure workers don’t kill themselves or get killed and goes “Fuck those guys” then he is NOT going to be a good man to you
If he bitches and complains that OSHA is a bunch of bureaucrats that bitch for a living, he is absolutely the kind of dude who doesn’t wear basic PPE. Let that inform your opinion of him.
Murmurmur OSHA is government and I hate the government blah blah dude this is a fucking safety inspector. This isn’t your local senator that takes cash from oil execs. This isn’t your shitass local representative that votes to bomb kids. This is a fucking safety inspector here to tell you that sadly you are not allowed to take up valuable hospital space because you decided to leave your skull exposed as you ascended the tippy top of the ladder.
In general: almost everybody on a construction site.
They view OSHA inspectors as know-it-all desk jockies that come on site to condescend to them and be big meanies because they don’t wanna wear hard hats and safety glasses.
You get all fucking kinds of rationales to hate OSHA on a jobsite. Some people think they’re paying their own checks with fines (they aren’t), some people think that safety regulations don’t need enforcing and are just there to slow down work (they aren’t), some people actively want workers to get killed because “if you’re stupid enough to get killed on site you deserve it” (you… don’t. also you aren’t the only one that suffers the consequences of your incompetence.)
Most people in ‘general industry’ (i.e., any occupation that isn’t construction, since OSHA delineates the two due to vastly different demands for safety regs) don’t mind OSHA or actively support them, because in general industry it’s usually your boss making you do unsafe shit or not keeping the workplace a safe and healthy place to be, and OSHA is the one keeping you safe.
In construction the culture is totally different, especially since a lot of construction workers are technically self-employed contractors, which means you have a site full of people who are technically ‘bosses’ and are therefore subject to a lot of OSHA scrutiny because, as you may know, the legislation that OSHA was created to enforce very explicitly puts the burden of safety on the employer. So there’s a natural animosity between OSHA and employers, and since construction is full of ‘employers…’ you get the idea.
I could get into how machismo and reactionary politics play a part but that’s another post.
Machismo in dangerous jobs is real. And fucking deadly.
When Iceland first made swimming lessons mandatory for sailors, so many older fishermen mocked the idea. Sure, every one of them knew guys who’d died at sea. Sure, a decent number of those who died at sea did so within easy sight of shore. But still, being told that they HAD to know how to swim, when their fathers and their father’s fathers had never learned? Absurd!
It’s the same these days with survival suits. Captains and crew who err on the side of caution and get into survival suits when the weather is getting worse rather than waiting until disaster seems inevitable are mocked for being wimps when they get back to shore. Often by older fishermen who, again, have all known someone who died at sea.
There was a captain my father in law told me about. He was of the “wait until it seems absolutely necessary” mindset when it comes to survival suits. Except, the sea doesn’t always give you a lot of time between “bad” and “deadly”. Sometimes the change in conditions is quick, too quick to make the call that survival suits are no longer wimpy but sensible. And sometimes, your quick inflation lifeboats are faulty and you’re stuck on a dangerously listing boat with no time to climb up the deck to reach the survival suits, let alone get into one. The boat capsized. The crew managed to get out, swim to the surface, and climb aboard the hull, but the captain was gone. If he’d been wearing the survival suit, he’d have floated. He’d have been visible to the crew, who might have been able to get to him. And had the crew been wearing them, they would have had emergency strobe beacons and emergency transmitters. They were incredibly lucky in that a man on another vessel happened to be looking at the AIS display at the moment the ship capsized and saw their transponder blink off.
People in that village no longer find survival suits wimpy. But my father in law genuinely believes that if some new safety regulation or technology appears, people will mock it just as much as they did survival suits and swimming lessons and anything else. Fishermen as a group have a sort of mythology they’ve built up around themselves that very much romanticises danger and dying at sea, and is very tied into machismo. One local captain dying needlessly isn’t enough to dismantle that.
As a safety inspector, it’s wild how different General Industry and Construction is. Even non-subcontractors go wildly out of their way to protect their bosses at all costs, even to the point of lying to me. I expect it from certain groups, who might not understand that I do not work for or report to immigration (ignoring the fact that in the past ICE has staged stings by impersonating an OSHA inspector), but every non-union job site I’ve been to the workers will look me dead in the eye and say, “Yes, I wear fall protection every single day, but not today. I just forgot.” Despite the fact that we’ve busted them 3-4 times this year. If fact to OPs point, when I was a trainee we went out to do a roofing inspection and when we showed up, they were not wearing fall protection. My trainer asked the owner if he understood that if one of them fell they could die, even on a one story roof. The guy said that he knew and that his cousin had died falling off a roof a month before. It absolutely blew my mind.
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