tl;dr: my company prides itself on safety above all else, yet fails repeatedly to address osha violations and implies i will face retribution if i continue looking at issues that would take a lot of time and/or money to resolve. if i report to OSHA, either the fines would be low enough that the issues would get swept under the rug and ignored, or they would be high enough that my lab could get shut down and I'd be putting all of my coworkers out of a job. i want to leave but won't be able to for at least a few months. what am i supposed to do here?
Sorry for any mistakes in how this is posted, or if this is the wrong place to post it to. I don't ever use Reddit, but I'm at my wit's end and I just don't know what to do. This is going to be a bit long as well, so my apologies for that as well. I've tried to only include enough details to get decent context but the situation is kind of complicated.
So, I work at a small lab with 20 onsite employees. We're part of an international company with a valuation in the billions, so we're beholden to all of their policies and everything. I was made the safety leader for my lab eight months ago. I have no background in safety whatsoever, but I was willing to try because no one else would do it and I had a suspicion that some of our practices weren't really up to code. I received no training, had no predecessor to ask advice from, and had no resources for trying to work things out. I was also expected to continue performing my previous full-time role to the same quotas while also acting as the safety leader. This wasn't dropped as an expectation until a couple of months ago. If I had a question I absolutely could not figure out, my only option was to contact the safety manager for every lab in the same business unit across the Americas (20+ locations in three countries), so I haven't ever been comfortable asking him for something unless it's a very big and time sensitive deal. I only get replies on about half of the emails I send to him anyway.
It was a huge struggle to even figure out what I was supposed to be doing, but I eventually managed to start scraping together some knowledge. Generally I would find out I was supposed to have submitted something because I would get an email asking where it was, and then I would have to spend hours hunting through the completely tangled mess that is my lab's network drives for any kind of template and then reverse engineer the task based on examples from pre-COVID. Our computers still run Windows 7 so even if I knew exactly where something was, it would still take up to fifteen minutes just to get to it because everything is so slow. I tried to talk to my boss multiple times about getting more training or potentially going to shadow with an experienced safety leader at another site, and he would always express interest in the idea and then do absolutely nothing. Reminding him didn't help. I just gave up eventually.
I started finding OSHA violations as the months went by. I would immediately bring them to my boss, and he would generally respond pretty dismissively, citing our flawless safety record (over a decade with no recordables) and questioning the legitimacy of the standards we were in violation of. Thus far it hadn't been anything too severe and I really didn't have a lot of time to look into things due to the double role, so I followed his instruction to set it aside.
Then I finally received OSHA 30 training.
About two hours in, I grabbed an extra notebook and started listing out every standard we were in violation of as we went along. By the end of the class, the maximum fine was well into eight figures. I don't think OSHA would actually give the maximum fine, but it was kind of a massive wake up call to see just how many areas had been neglected.
We work with flammable chemicals and large quantities of compressed gas. No fire prevention plan. No fire detection system. No sprinklers. Our “alarm” system is air horns. Moreover, only four of the nineteen onsite employees (not counting myself) even knew what an MSDS was, let alone where to find them– not that it would have mattered, considering our MSDS are kept digitally and the majority of technicians don't have access to the database. We have exceptionally loud machinery. The hearing conservation program hadn't been touched in three years. We have big testing “buildings” inside the lab with equipment on the roofs that need to be worked on occasionally by contractors, but there is no fall protection of any kind. The list goes on.
These are serious lapses in compliance that pose a severe danger to employees, but when I brought my list to my boss and explained each issue to him point by point with the relevant standards ready to go, he fought me on every. Single. Thing. If it would cost more than $200, inconvenience the technicians, or require him to actually enforce the rules about PPE, he wasn't interested. He communicated this to me by saying I probably shouldn't look so hard because if I found something that would be time consuming and/or expensive to fix, he wouldn't be happy.
Our company's entire Thing is touting safety as number one. It's supposedly our “purpose.”
When one of my coworkers was splashed in the face by acetone and requested a face shield, my boss told him in front of the entire group that he would make fun of him and encourage the rest of us to do the same if he ever wore it. When we had a near miss incident that could easily have resulted in a technician shattering all the bones in his foot, my boss point blank asked me if I was “really sure [I] wanted to do this” before I submitted the report. This is the person I'm supposed to rely on to help me protect our group by enforcing the rules.
I know this summary is making it sound like it's an issue with my boss as an individual. He most certainly contributes to the problem in a major way, but I know this issue goes far above his head. My grandbosses know about most of these issues as well and have also opted to simply ignore them because no one has gotten hurt yet, so surely no one ever could.
Except that isn't even true! We may not have had any recordables (which we actually have but it's a repetitive motion injury so the company is currently fighting like hell to get it written off as a pre-existing condition, so it is not currently being counted against our record) but people get hurt at this job all the time. I myself have received cuts, scrapes, bruises, repetitive motion strains, and several bonks to the head that left me in pain for the rest of the day, and when I surveyed my coworkers about it, they all had those same experiences. These things are happening because we're constantly being pushed to maintain production at any cost, and that has been a nonstop uphill swim for the last 16 months.
This is the only full-time job I've ever had (I'm 24 and started working there at 20, was laid off over Covid, and came back in late 2021) but the sentiment I'm getting from my parents and some family friends who are also in manufacturing type jobs is that this is a really common attitude. I just can't understand how any business could hear “we have an ongoing OSHA violation” and not immediately respond with “how do we fix it?” Many of those standards were written in blood. A decade-long streak of no recordables is going to be cold comfort to your employee's grieving family. And if you want to look at it from a purely clinical logic point of view, it is far less expensive to pay for the additional safety measures than it would be to pay for the injury or fatality. The only way it makes sense to instruct your safety leader to ignore an OSHA violation is if all you're capable of seeing is the revenue you'll get at the end of the month. I would have hoped that an international multi-billion dollar business would have a little bit more foresight than that. Evidently not.
I'm really struggling from a moral point of view. We have a legal right to a safe and healthful workplace, but if I were to report these issues to OSHA, our lab could be shut down. We're a very small node on a very big business and they my not keep us if we incur a massive fine. If the fine is small, I can't see change actually taking place in any meaningful way; it would just get the same lip service and talking about doing things but never actually doing them. I care a lot about my coworkers and I really don't want to be the reason a bunch of people lose their jobs, but I'm not sure if I would be able to sleep at night if one of them died because of a violation I knew about and didn't report to OSHA, even if I tried repeatedly to get it resolved within the company. It would be horrible for our site to get shut down, and it would be horrible if it didn't because we're a small group and even if I requested to stay anonymous, everyone would know exactly who made that call, and I've been implicitly threatened with retaliation already just for trying to fix things.
I've been wanting to quit for a while now but I have some medical stuff I need to get taken care of relatively soon and I really don't want to start a new job and then have to take a month off on medical leave before I've even been there for half a year. If anyone has any ideas for how I should navigate this situation, please feel free to share.