Cal-OSHA Blasted By Auditor for Bay Bridge Illnesses and Underreporting. Understaffing Blamed - posted by Jordan Barab, Confined Space
“Cal/OSHA does not have enough field inspectors to meet its day-to-day responsibilities, let alone effectively investigate complaints at a huge project like the Bay Bridge retrofit,” charged representative Matt Austin of the California Association of Professional Scientists. “A compilation of the agency’s own organization charts shows that there are only 169 Cal/OSHA inspectors in the field for an economy of 17.9 million workers and more than one million workplaces.”
“Cal/OSHA’s worker-to-inspector ratio is double that of Federal OSHA’s ratio, worse still than neighboring states like Oregon and Washington, and dramatically worse than Canadian provinces like Ontario and British Columbia,” Austin pointed out. “In fact, there are 66 more Fish and Game Wardens in California than there are Cal/OSHA inspectors.”