Office Managers

OSHA's retreat from its bid to regulate home workplaces sets a subversive precedent.

Walter Olson from the April 2000 issue

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Two University of Virginia academics, women's studies professor Eileen Boris and labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "When today's computerized homebodies find themselves with a pain in their wrist, fatigue in their neck or a crick in the lower back, the cause is remarkably similar to that of their sweatshop ancestors: inadequate equipment, self-exploitation and overwork." Boris and Lichtenstein attributed criticism of the directive to the tendency of "today's Internet capitalists to denounce even the most timid government efforts to regulate such work"--blithely ignoring the fact that telecommuters themselves, and not just their bosses, were up in arms about the directive, and the fact that relatively few home office workers are in fact employed by "Internet capitalists" (most are in more traditional lines of work).

From everyone else, the reaction was a more or less uniform hail of dead cats. "This is nuts," said Pat Cleary, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Editorial page brickbats descended from the HartfordCourant ("Bureaucrats Gone Berserk") and the Dallas Morning News (OSHA "once again has emerged as a poster child for a federal bureaucracy run amok"), among others. "This is one of those regulatory rulings that sets liberalism back a generation," wrote Matthew Cooper at Slate's "Breakfast Table." Even a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) said the directive "seemed excessive."

Equally important in forcing the agency's hand, perhaps, was the reaction of employers--not what they said, but what they did. When the letter hit the front pages, reports The Washington Post, "A number of companies immediately put on hold plans to expand telecommuting privileges to employees." The National Law Journal reported that FINOVA, a financial firm that had made a list of the nation's best employers, intended to reassess its work-at-home program in light of the OSHA directive. In other words, the effort to assign employers more legal responsibility was making them less willing to permit telecommuting at all.

In its retreat, OSHA salvaged what it could for its union constituents: It insisted that manufacturing activities conducted at home would still come under its jurisdiction. This represented another reversal: Earlier, OSHA had denied that there was any legal significance to the distinction between blue- and white-collar work.

There's something deeply subversive, however, in the notion that individuals might actually be trusted to cope by themselves with the hazards to be found in their file cabinets and laser printers. Before long, they might feel competent to manage even more dangerous parts of the house, such as the kitchen and garage. When people work at home, you can see the level of safety they actually demand when they're in charge--and their standards are often rather more relaxed than the one OSHA imposes on businesses. Who knows where that realization might lead? In the meantime, perhaps we can enjoy a respite from the oft-heard refrain that the AFL-CIO's legislative agenda defines what's "progressive," while libertarian principles are a relic of the 19th century.