"You Have Bad Luck”

It's an article of faith among free-marketeers that Americans are overregulated. But most Americans have forgotten what freedom from regulation really looks like.

The Washington Post details [1] the foot dragging and stonewalling of safety enforcement at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2001. The Bush administration took a somewhat different view of the agency’s mission.

The agency's first director under Bush, John L. Henshaw, startled career officials by telling them in an early meeting that employers were OSHA's real customers, not the nation's workers. "Everybody was pretty amazed," one of those present recalled. "Our purpose is to ensure employee safety and health. . . . He just looked at things differently."

OSHA – or rather, the lack of it – interrupted my movie-watching experience during Slumdog Millionaire [2]. The film takes place during the construction boom in Mumbai. A scene inside a high-rise under construction has teens sitting on the edge of a floor slab many stories up. There are no safety rails. Among the workers, no safety harnesses and few hard hats. As an engineering consultant who regularly visits OSHA-regulated sites in this country, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

In a restaurant kitchen scene in Slumdog, an actor refills a water bottle from the tap, resealing the breakaway cap with super glue. It reminded me of stories by an engineering associate who spent time building a factory in China, free from burdensome American regulations.

Their company had a contract with a local supplier to provide clean, bottled water for dispensers in their construction offices. On his way out of the plant one day, he spied the service’s delivery men refilling jugs from a tap on the side of the road.

Chinese high-rise workers regularly scramble up swaying bamboo scaffolding [3] many floors above grade, he observed. Deaths from high-rise accidents [4] occur regularly. Safety standards seemed nonexistent.

Even pedestrians are at risk, he said. “If a worker drops a hammer on you from many floors up and it kills you, tough.” They have an expression for it in Chinese, he said. It means, roughly, “You have bad luck [5].”

Ah, but you have freedom.