Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week called on the Pentagon and the nation’s workplace safety regulator to tighten oversight to prevent companies from winning lucrative contracts if they have put workers in harm’s way.
In letters to the Department of Defense and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Warren cited a report released in February by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency, which examined how the Pentagon tracks and responds to defense contractors’ workplace safety violations. Nearly 80 percent of the contractors inspected by labor regulators that were reviewed had been cited for at least one violation that endangered workers. Nearly half of the contractors had at least one serious violation. In multiple cases, as many as seven workers died.
The GAO review complied with a provision Warren wrote into the 2018 defense policy bill, a provision prompted by an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Our reporting found that major private shipbuilders for the Navy and Coast Guard had received more than $100 billion in public money despite serious safety lapses that endangered, injured and killed workers. At the time, the Navy did not take public action in response to these findings, saying, “We are not the overlords of private shipyards when it comes to workplace safety.”
“These (GAO) findings are disturbing, because they strongly suggest that many companies receiving billions of dollars in manufacturing and construction contracts from DOD are seriously endangering the health and safety of their employees in violation of federal law,” Warren, of Massachusetts, wrote in her letter to Ellen Lord, undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. “The prevalence of workplace safety and health violations among DOD contractors revealed by GAO’s findings is unacceptable.”
Officials at the Defense Department and OSHA did not respond to Reveal’s requests for comment.
In her requests this week, Warren asked the Pentagon and OSHA to provide details by July 8 on how they will carry out the GAO’s recommendations to improve oversight of the contracting process. The GAO found Pentagon officials do not always consider the safety records of companies when reviewing contracting bids. In addition, it found that missing OSHA data makes it difficult to track down some companies in OSHA’s database.
In response to the GAO’s recommendations, the Defense Department said that by June 30 it would advise contracting officials to look up health and safety violations, which are published on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s website, when evaluating prospective contractors. Warren’s office asked whether Pentagon officials met this goal and whether they will train contracting officers to search for citations and severe injuries. Defense officials also promised to complete an assessment by Jan. 31, 2020, on how the agency could rate all contractors on safety.
Warren also asked whether Pentagon officials have reviewed the efficacy of safety performance ratings and whether they should be applied more broadly for all contracts in construction and high–risk industries such as shipbuilding and manufacturing.
The GAO also suggested OSHA collect unique identifiers from all employers to help contracting officials determine whether prospective federal contractors had incurred safety violations, or whether projects under federal contracts had resulted in worker injuries or deaths. Warren asked how the agency will accomplish this goal. Further, she asked whether agency officials would help the Defense Department review the safety records of contractors in dangerous industries.
“It is unacceptable that the government would be finding labor law violations and then doing business with the violators,” said Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program. “I’m no shipbuilder, but it’s hard to believe that you can’t build a ship and keep the workers safe. Government agencies need to coordinate so that government contractors are at the very least following basic workplace laws.”
Jennifer Gollan can be reached at jgollan@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @jennifergollan.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.