OSHA Telecommute Rules

July 7, 2000

By Douglas B. Wakeman

Anyone who believes that OSHA was created to ensure a safer workplace is dreaming. Governments do not care for anybody's safety. The purpose of OSHA is to expand government control and power over the private sector. It is the same motive that has saddled us with the FDA, the FCC, the EPA and the ADA. All have had the exact effect you would expect from a government program: they have made their respective problems worse, have placed crippling and for some, insumountable obstacles in the way of American achievement and have expanded the grounds for government intrusion into our lives and businesses.

Now, OSHA decrees from on high that employers who have workers who work from home are responsible for those workers' safety. They have done this for several reasons and they all revolve around government antipathy for any trend that transfers the least little bit of control over our lives from the government to the people.

The workplace has become a tremendous resource for government manipulation and social experimentation. It is the place where we must go to procure the wherewithal to live, to put a roof over our heads, to feed our families, to ply our trade and to perform that basic task of all living organisms, to work. Look around your workplace and you see the signs of government intrusion everywhere, from the EEOC placards to the huge handicap stalls. As soon as some Marxist terror group comes up with a new grievance it is paraded in the workplace through lawsuits based on such absurdities as sexual harrassment and non-accomodation of disabilities. Our time away from home is bemoaned by demaguoging politicians as the excuse to impose government-funded daycare and mandatory pre-school. Our commutes are used as excuses to steal more and more of our hard-earned money to be handed off to their pals for light-rail, high-occupancy vehicle lanes, tolls and, of course, the politicians' masters in the oil, insurance and union businesses.

The building-bound employee is less likely to think about self-employment and we know that the self-employed are a real nuisance to the taxman. It is difficult for the government to come into our homes and impose their experiments and atrocities. Ahhh, but the workplace... yeah, businesses can be pushed around because they have so much to lose from government enmity. Here is the place to control our lives prior to that day when complete tyranny is imposed and they CAN come into our homes. That is why work-from-home scares these busy-body-bureaucrats to death. A tremendous loss of control and neutralization of those control processes already in place is presented by the notion of people working in their own homes, their castles, this refuge from government intrusion.

There is another reason beyond the need of government control in the workplace that motivates these commissars and that is the freedom obtained by the home worker to live outside the government lines. The home worker and their spouse can schedule their workdays to leave time for childcare IN THE HOME, BY THE PARENTS. They might even find a way to home-school their children. You know the government is not hot on those eventualities. The home worker can also listen to talk radio and browse the internet while working. In effect, the home worker could become an independant self-reliant individual, insulated from government control and may raise kids who are likewise.

That is why this move by OSHA is so diabolically brilliant. Look at what it accomplishes. First, employers must have some incentve to allow their employees to work out of their immediate supervision. Such an incentive is the lessening of infrastructure. Virtual offices already exist where all employees work from home. There are none of the costs of a physical building, from structure to insurance, to parking, to weather closures and on and on. These advantages can be realized for conventional businesses on an individual scale for each employee who works from home. The OSHA plan not only removes these incentives, but actually reverses them. After all, insurance is already in place at the worksite, now the employer will need to insure the home of all work-at-home employees. He will also need to make “improvements” at the employee’s home. He will need to install handicap accessable bath facilities for one thing. He will need to ensure that the requisite EEOC placards are in prominent display in all of those homes. Use the imagination. Employers will now be penalized in many ways readily thought of and countless ways undreamed of. That should take care of that nasty work-at-home problem. Having your employees work from home goes from being an attractive option for employer and employee to a bureaucratic nightmare for both.

Government will have extended the boundaries of its control, ensured the flow of lucre to their friends, discouraged and punished independence and herded those children who might stray from their grasp back into the socialist fold.