OSHA Complaint tracker
Workplace health and safety is more important now, than ever. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers—whether unionized or not—have fought employers to ensure that workers and the public are protected.
One tool available to workers: complaints made to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. We’ve compiled an interactive map of COVID-19 complaints made nationwide including the names of employers, narrative descriptions of their offenses, and an overall breakdown of complaints by industry.
Data comes from OSHA's releases of Closed and Open complaints related to COVID-19. Complaints were geolocated using geocodio in the case of Closed complaints; Open complaints were added to industry totals and will be added to the map as employer information is released. Industries were identified using the "Primary NAICS" code in the original data. Data is available from OSHA through February March 21st.
NAICS codes were matched against NAICS codebooks from 2007, 2012, and 2017. For codes that were still not found (28 in total) they were marked as 'NOT FOUND'. A spot check found some of these missing ones as Canadian NAICS codes (example). We've emailed OSHA for more information.
Our thanks to J. Dale Shoemaker, who reported on closed OSHA complaints in New Jersey based on original reporting by the Washington Post. The data was compiled and plotted by Kevin Reuning, a frequent contributor to Strikewave.
We will make our dataset available to journalists and unionists upon request. If you are interested, please e-mail news@thestrikewave.com. Additional information on individual complaints can be found utilizing OSHA’s complaint database. There are many open COVID-19 health and safety complaints for which employer data and narrative summaries are not available. We will update the map as more information becomes available.
