OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, yet another nanny-state relic of the 1970s actually signed into law by Richard Nixon early that decade. The intent was to provide Federal oversight and regulation of workplaces that were particularly unsafe and, only incidentally, create a regulatory workforce of more government employees.
The problem with such agencies is that when you create a regulatory workforce like that, they actually have to go find things to justify their existence, whether (in this case) they entail an actual work hazard or not.
I have a good friend from Chicago, a reader of this site, whom I have known for nearly sixty years since college. We ushered at each other's weddings (a week apart) and although we've not been together much since, distance being what it is, have tried to stay in touch. I'll call him "Tony", because it's his name. When I was traveling on business in the late '70s, I visited him on my frequent trips to and through the Chicago area, getting to know his parents pretty well.
[On a side note, Tony's mother was from Chisholm, the small town near Hibbing, MN, that was the home of Moonlight Graham, the physician/ballplayer in the movie "Field of Dreams" and a long scene there. The actual Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, who really did play in one game for the Giants and practiced medicine in Chisholm, MN, was her pediatrician. You can't make this up.]
Tony's father had an electronics component factory in the Chicago area. I believe I was there once, so I recall either the actual factory or Tony's description quite well. To my recollection, it was a fairly straightforward structure, a huge open area about two or three stories high, metal roof. All the assembly, packaging, shipping and the rest was done from that huge open area. Go with that.
In one corner of the building, the office area was raised up a flight of stairs, a level higher than the work floor. The offices were there, and if you wanted to reach the offices, you climbed the stair a flight up to a small landing area and walked to the door of the office you wanted. Well, something like that; if you imagine that, the point of this piece will be easily understood.
Imagine the stairs, those exposed industrial metal staircases, just steps and a railing, up to a landing area. Then imagine that at the top of the stairs, in the landing area, there is a pay phone about five feet up the wall for the use of employees needing to make calls in those days long before iPhones and Blackberries.
[Realizing that not everyone who reads this is as old as I, or even half as old as I, a "pay phone" is a communications unit that sits on a wall, or an even more forgotten location called a "phone booth." You didn't need a cell phone or an app; you just put coins in little slots on top of it, and you'd get a dial tone. You push buttons and call whomever you want.]
Now imagine one other thing. A little inspector from OSHA comes around to the factory for his annual safety review according to OSHA rules. He walks around the shop floor, inspects the assembly area and sees that everyone is properly dressed and the floors are clean and not slippery. He sees that the shipping area is properly overseen and tools everywhere are properly put away when not in use. Safety thrives here.
Finally, he goes up the stairs. The ridged metal stairs are rough and grip well, and the railing is secured well, no slip, no rattle. He makes it upstairs with no problem.
Except that he has nothing to write up.
Then he sees the pay phone on the wall. "Aha!", he shouts. "A problem. That phone is five feet off the wall, a perfect height for you, me, and almost everyone else."
But not, he declares, would it be a good height for someone -- I'm not making this part up -- in a wheelchair. Nope, someone in a wheelchair would not be able to make a call from that pay phone, and it would have to be lowered in order to allow wheelchair-bound employees to use it. Otherwise, the factory would be cited by OSHA and fined.
Before you start thinking how stupid that citation would have been, let me help you understand that it is even more inane than that. Yes, I know that your first thought is to ask if anyone in a wheelchair actually worked there, and the answer was "no." But OSHA was a forward-looking organization, and didn't want to rule out the possibility that the company might actually hire someone in a wheelchair. And except for every other reason, that one is legitimate.
It should be obvious to you any now that, no matter how inaccurate my description of the building was, in actuality the pay phone -- and any access to the one-flight-up office area, for that matter -- required one to go up a flight of stairs.
That's right; in order to use that wheelchair-accessible pay phone that OSHA demanded be lowered to three feet off the floor, the person would either have to maneuver a wheelchair up a flight of stairs (think about that one) or be carried up the stairs by one person, have the wheelchair be brought up the stairs by another person, and then use the newly-relocated phone.
They would need the wheelchair brought up, because -- oh, yeah -- if you lowered the phone from a normal standing-human-accessible height to three feet off the ground, you could only use it from a wheelchair. The rest of the employees, meaning all of them, could not stand and make a call.
Even if you simply lowered the phone to three feet and put a normal chair next to it to pacify OSHA and facilitate calls from the handicapped, you still have to appreciate the idiocy of the OSHA guy requiring this to be done for a phone whose use would require the person to ride a wheelchair up a flight of stairs.
It has been over fifty years since this happened, so forgive me if I can't recall what Tony's dad decided to do -- probably either lowered the phone and put a chair next to it, or just put a second pay phone on the main floor at three feet.
I'd be delighted to know if sanity has returned to the OSHA Inspectors' Guideline Book, or at least the one used by their staff in the Greater Chicago area.
I would imagine that, regardless, some DOGEing over there might even now be in order.
Copyright 2025 by Robert Sutton. Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
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