Safety inspectors keep leaving Cal-OSHA. Now it has a mandate to hire dozens more
With COVID-19 raging in the state, officials at California’s workplace safety agency in November vowed to fill as many vacancies as quickly as possible so it could carry out more inspections at hospitals, warehouses, factories and offices.
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal-OSHA, at the time committed to filling nearly 120 vacancies by July 1, Department of Industrial Relations’ Director Katie Hagen who oversees Cal-OSHA told state legislators at a hearing that month.
Yet, since then, the agency has been bleeding inspectors.
As of May, the agency was down more than a quarter of its inspector staff, with the number of vacancies going up nearly every month since the start of the pandemic, according to records obtained by The Sacramento Bee.
The department stands to gain a $14 million boost in the new state budget, allowing it to add up to 70 positions. That would increase its total staff by nearly 10% and the number of inspectors by nearly 15%.
But just giving Cal-OSHA money isn’t enough to solve the agency’s staffing issues that have hindered it from protecting California workers, agency watchdogs and workplace safety experts said.
“How are you going to fill those (vacancies) if there’s something broken inside?” said Garrett Brown, a former Cal-OSHA inspector and a longtime watchdog of the agency.
CAL-OSHA’S vacancy challenge
Cal-OSHA was struggling to meet the needs of California workers even before the pandemic, Brown said.
In 2018, Cal-OSHA had one inspector to 87,926 workers, nearly quadruple the ratio of Oregon’s OSHA, Brown said. A 2019 federal report found that Cal-OSHA is struggling to quickly process and inspect the complaints it receives from California workers. It took an average of nearly 10 workdays for Cal-OSHA to initiate inspections after receiving complaints, according to the report.
The agency has an aging workforce. Over the past 18 months, two-thirds of 36 inspectors who left the agency did so because they retired, the agency said in an e-mail response to The Bee.
The agency also faced a slew of issues: Low pay for industrial hygienists inspecting workplace health measures, outdated tests for entry-level workers, and a nepotism scandal that had required the agency to seek approval from the state human resources department before hiring, according to a Senate budget subcommittee report in February.
Then, the pandemic struck, leading workers to file thousands of COVID-related complaints to Cal-OSHA.
“It was always bad, but COVID made it ten times worse,” Brown said of the agency’s staffing issues.
A CalMatters analysis in October found that Cal-OSHA conducted an on-site investigation for only 5% of COVID-related complaints, with the agency instead relying heavily on talking with employers via letters.
The understaffed agency also had significantly undercounted the number of workers who have fallen ill or died because of the coronavirus, the Bee found in February.
Advocates helping workers file Cal-OSHA complaints said they’ve often found the agency to be slow in its response.
“Workers who filed the complaints felt unseen and unrecognized by the system that’s set up to protect them,” said Alice Berliner, director of the Southern California Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health.
Berliner said workers sometimes didn’t hear a response to their complaint for nearly four months.
What’s in the budget for Cal-OSHA?
The state budget will give Cal-OSHA the money to expand its inspector staff for the first time in years. The additional 70 positions — of which 33 are for inspectors, with the rest for managers and support staff such as lawyers — could lead to 1,000 additional on-site inspections a year, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration noted in the Senate budget subcommittee report.
The money is contingent upon Cal-OSHA continuing to fill current vacancies, the agency said.
The state could add even more positions to Cal-OSHA in the future. The 70 positions are part of a multi-phase approach to expand the agency’s staffing, depending on the state’s economic and other conditions, according to the report.
An independent study commissioned by Cal-OSHA found that the agency needs to add more than 150 full-time inspector positions by the middle of 2022 to meet its expected workload.
Worker advocates praised the budget, saying it will provide a much-needed boost for the short-staffed agency. But Brown noted the agency’s vacancy rate among its inspectors, which has increased by 20% since the beginning of the pandemic and has more than doubled to 25.7% since February 2019.
As of May, the agency had 65 vacant inspector positions, according to records Brown obtained through a California Public Records Act request.
Cal-OSHA said it gave job offers to four inspectors in the past week. Seven more are nearing the final stages of approval for an offer, the agency said. The agency added that it has hired 67 inspectors since January 2020.
Still, in the agency’s Oakland office, where Brown worked part-time from September to April, he said he saw the workplace lose candidates because it was waiting weeks for the human resources staff to approve making a job offer.
Cal-OSHA did not specifically comment on Brown’s observation, but said there are a variety of reasons why candidates decline job offers.
“The candidate pool for safety engineers and industrial hygienists is quite a bit shallower than other state classifications, and job candidates may receive competitive job offers, or may opt to take jobs in other locations,” the agency said.
This story was originally published July 14, 2021 at 5:25 AM.
