A new audit from the California State Auditor has revealed what many workers have long known from bitter experience: the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) is in a state of profound and deliberate decay. 

The agency, charged with protecting the lives of millions of workers in one of the world’s largest economies, is crippled by chronic understaffing, enforcement failures and bureaucratic rot—symptoms of conscious political decisions made by the Democratic Party establishment that controls the state government.

The audit, released earlier this month, confirms that nearly one-third of Cal/OSHA’s 800 authorized positions sat vacant in 2023, leaving entire districts unable to fulfill even their most basic mandates. In some offices, staffing levels were so low that only a single inspector was available to handle an entire region. 

The 32 percent vacancy rate, a direct result of low salaries, bureaucratic hiring delays and chronic underfunding, has rendered the agency structurally incapable of enforcing workplace safety regulations.

In its review of just 60 case files between 2019 and 2024, the State Auditor found at least 15 instances—including serious injuries and accidents—where Cal/OSHA failed to perform even an on-site inspection. These include cases involving hospitalizations, chainsaw injuries requiring surgery and heat-related illnesses in dangerous working conditions. Instead of dispatching inspectors, the agency sent perfunctory letters, many of which were ignored by employers without consequence.

Such “letter investigations” are not isolated bureaucratic mishaps. They are, in the words of Assembly Labor Committee Chair Liz Ortega, “fake investigations.” But the stakes are far from fake: in just two weeks earlier this year, three teenage workers were killed on the job—one fell into a meat grinder at the Tina’s Burritos factory in Vernon; two others (along with five adults) died in a fireworks warehouse explosion. In both cases, clear and elementary safety precautions were absent. These are not accidents. These are industrial killings facilitated by a system that no longer functions.

Cal/OSHA’s enforcement, when it does occur, is toothless. Inspectors often close cases without verifying that hazards were fixed. Basic practices—such as reviewing required injury-prevention plans or conducting worker interviews—are routinely skipped. 

Fines issued are frequently slashed by over 50 percent after employer appeals, with no documentation explaining why. The supposed “watchdog” for California workers operates more like a concierge service for corporate law firms.

To even file a complaint is an ordeal. Workers cannot file directly through Cal/OSHA’s website. They must call, email or navigate the federal OSHA site, a barrier especially high for non-English speakers, low-wage workers or the undocumented. This by design excludes precisely those in the most dangerous, hyper-exploitative sectors.

What emerges from the audit is not just a portrait of bureaucratic incompetence but of a deliberate political strategy: dismantle regulatory bodies, starve them of resources, blame their failure on inefficiency and open the door for further deregulation. The result is measured in blood: horrific deaths, often of the youngest and most vulnerable workers, whose lives are snuffed out because safety protocols are ignored, inspections are skipped and employers operate with impunity.

This is not unique to California. On July 1, Trump’s Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced 63 new deregulatory actions, accelerating the destruction of federal worker protections. Dubbed the “most ambitious federal rollback” to date, the initiative seeks to eliminate ten regulations for every new one, building on Trump’s previous “two-for-one” mandate. The pretext is to “spur job creation.” The reality is to enrich corporations by reducing human beings to expendable inputs in the profit machine.

Under Trump’s second term, OSHA’s budget is being slashed by nearly 8 percent, eliminating 223 staff positions and cutting 10,000 inspections-- more than 30 percent of the total--per year. While Trump claims this is about “modernization,” the truth is obvious: fewer inspectors means more injuries, more deaths and more profits.

Trump is not alone in this campaign. Gavin Newsom’s California is already implementing the same policies. The refusal to fund Cal/OSHA, the toleration of its disintegration, the reliance on fake investigations and token fines—none of this is accidental. It is the direct result of Democratic Party governance, which, like its Republican counterpart, serves the interests of capital not labor.

The audit points to a false dichotomy in American politics: on one side, Republicans like Trump advocate open deregulation and budget cuts; on the other, Democrats collude with the trade union bureaucracy to suppress the class struggle and maintain the veneer of regulatory oversight while gutting it from within.

Even as the California Labor Commissioner’s Office was found in 2024 to take two years on average to resolve wage theft claims—six times the legal limit—the same structural conditions of underfunding and delay persist across all agencies nominally tasked with defending workers. 

California, long glorified as a liberal bastion, is in fact a state where workers are left to die in unsafe factories, fall into unguarded machines and burn in unregulated warehouses, all while Democratic legislators and their backers in the labor bureaucracy issue press releases about “worker dignity.”

Cal/OSHA was created in 1973, two years after the federal OSHA, in response to massive pressure from the working class amid the explosive labor and social struggles of the late 1960s and early 70s. This was part of a broader movement that wrested critical gains in safety, wages and civil rights from the capitalist state. But what was won through struggle has been dismantled through bipartisan sabotage.

Just as in health care, housing and education, the same logic applies: starve the public function, declare it broken and hand it over to private interests. And just as predictably, the working class pays with its lives.

The way forward will not come through appeals to the same politicians who have enabled these deaths. Assemblymember Liz Ortega’s suggestion that Cal/OSHA make “criminal referrals” in five percent of cases is toothless grandstanding. What about the other 95 percent? What about an entire system that accepts preventable workplace deaths as routine business costs?

The only viable path forward is the independent mobilization of the working class, organized through rank-and-file safety committees that operate independently of both the corporations and the state agencies that protect them. These committees must fight for:

• Democratic control by workers over safety inspections
• Immediate shutdowns of unsafe workplaces
• The abolition of the “letter investigation” farce
• Criminal prosecution of negligent employers and complicit officials

The necessity of such committees is underscored by the investigation led by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr., which is exposing the company’s cover-up and the union’s complicity. 

In the course of the investigation, a former Cal/OSHA officer confirmed that widespread use of “cheater keys” at Stellantis’ Dundee, Michigan engine plant bypassed lockout/tagout safety systems—likely causing Adams’s death when a crane activated unexpectedly. The UAW and MIOSHA are withholding details, while the IWA-RFC continues investigating to expose systemic hazards.

Workers themselves, not state inspectors or union officials tied to management, are the only ones who can be trusted to uncover the truth and enforce safety on the shop floor.

But even these measures point to a deeper necessity. As long as the capitalist system remains intact, workers will continue to be maimed and killed in the name of profit. The solution is the replacement of a system based on exploitation with one based on social need. A socialist transformation of society would place the health and safety of workers above the quarterly earnings reports of CEOs.

In the meantime, workers must treat every inspection skipped, every fine reduced and every injury ignored as a clarion call for the expansion of rank-and-file committees in every workplace and workers’ control of production and safety.