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Playing With / No OSHA Compliance

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Basic Trope: A location is unsafe for its notional purpose, to the point where no sane regulatory body would ever let people work there.

  • Straight: Bob fights Charlie in a factory, where there are bottomless pits with no railings, catwalks that break when punched, and fire and steam belching everywhere.
  • Exaggerated: The factory has an X Days Since counter that measures in nanoseconds.
  • Downplayed: The factory met basic safety guidelines when it was built, but hasn't been maintained properly, so some of the safety measures break when actually used.
  • Justified:
    • The location was made for the express purpose of being a deathtrap.
    • Alternatively: The story takes place in a country with literally no equivalent to OSHA.
    • The story takes place before OSHA, or any other relevant organizations, were founded.
    • The factory is run by a Corrupt Corporate Executive who bribed the safety inspectors so he wouldn't have to pay to install safety measures.
    • The factory is an illegal sweatshop/drug operation/something similar. It was constructed on the cheap and the owners both don't care about the workers' safety (there's always desperate people to hire, and what are they going to do- admit they were involved in illegal operations) and don't have to answer to OSHA anyways.
    • The factory met safety standards when it was built, but they've since been tightened and the OSHA hasn't gotten around to a second inspection.
    • The factory is a linchpin of a local economy and there really isn't another way to reliably make a living around that area, and the owners know this and play fast and loose with health and safety because they know that no one wants to be the dick who calls the relevant regulatory authority and ruins it for everyone.
    • The factory is abandoned and falling apart, many of the original safety features rotted away or stripped out for reclamation or scrap years ago.
    • Bob or Charlie is deliberately making the factory more unsafe to hopefully catch their opponent in an environmental hazard.
    • The place is getting torn apart as collateral damage of the battle and this is going to bite somebody in the ass.
    • The building is currently closed for remodeling, and Bob and Charlie entered illegally for whatever reason.
    • People aren't actually supposed to be in the part of the factory where the fight is taking place without special protections and shutting down active machinery. Bob and Charlie are too busy fighting each other to care about that.
  • Inverted: A Safety Freak either designs or retrofits the factory. Things that are normally harmless come with overly elaborate safeguards, like a baby carriage with locks, or a three-inch drop with a five-foot railing and foam padding. Even when there's practically no need for another safeguard, it's still added because why the hell not.
  • Subverted:
    • The factory turns out to actually be a movie set.
    • Alternatively, there are invisible forcefields protecting everyone.
    • While it may seem like an OSHA violation, the circumstances were way beyond what OSHA regulations accounted for. (EG: the regulations call for the electronics to withstand (and safely dissipate) a power spike of 10 times operational voltage, but this was a 1,000,000,000 times spike).
  • Double Subverted:
    • The factory turns out to actually be a movie set, which is also horribly unsafe.
    • It's not a movie set, they're shooting on location at a horribly unsafe factory.
    • Alternatively, there are invisible forcefields protecting... the machinery, not the people.
  • Parodied: The building has a blueprint where all the deathtraps are clearly spelled out. ("The bottomless pit with no railings goes here.")
    • The factory is cartoonishly evil toward the characters (see Malevolent Architecture) and requires regular human sacrifices to function.
  • Zig Zagged: The safety conditions in the factory vary on a room-by-room basis, with some rooms meeting every guideline OSHA has ever published and others that would give a safety inspector massive heart failure.
    • The factory does actually comply with safety regulations...except the regulations are decades out of date, and based on the assumption that the factory hadn't changed in size, or factoring in the addition of new technologies and dangers.
  • Averted: There are proper safety features in place in all the environments the characters enter.
  • Enforced:
  • Lampshaded:
    • "Why don't they ever put railings over these bottomless pits?"
    • The music is Chemical Worker's Song, Work 20 Hours, etc.
  • Invoked: Charlie deliberately rigs the location to be a deathtrap, or chooses a deathtrap for a location, in the hopes of luring Bob to fight him there.
  • Exploited:
  • Defied: Charlie deliberately installs proper safety features in his Supervillain Lair, because he's not a Bad Boss and doesn't want his minions getting hurt.
  • Discussed: "The Alpha Factory was shut down because of all the accidents. Wouldn't it suck to have to fight Charlie there?"
  • Conversed: "Bob is trash. Most useless safety guy I've ever met. This place is like something you'd fight the bad guy in in a bad action movie and I keep telling him about stuff that needed to be fixed last year, but nothing gets done." "I understand you're new here and it may feel like Bob is useless, but trust me, he's just as sick of this as you are. We go through a new safety guy almost every year because the company doesn't value safety in any way, shape, or form and they quickly learn that the only way to do your job here as a safety guy is to abandon all ethics and turn a blind eye to everything because all they want you to do is make things look good for OSHA. I know for a fact that he's sending out resumes like a madman right now - frankly, I would judge him a lot more harshly if he wasn't trying to leave this place."
  • Implied: The factory's owners are last seen being handcuffed by the Occupational Health and Safety Agency, but it could easily be for issues at another place.
  • Deconstructed:
    • The location was condemned precisely because it was so unsafe and caused so many accidents. Warning signs are clearly posted to this effect, and the characters suffer severe injuries as a consequence of venturing inside.
    • The factory is so unsafe and dangerous that workers die or get injured every two seconds, wasting precious labor force. Coupled with public outrage, the factory becomes unprofitable and closes down.
    • The higher-ups see safety as overhead and nothing more and refuse to pay for anything that they do not absolutely have to or budge on production demands, and they churn though safety managers almost yearly as a result. This also leads to numerous inspections by OSHA that turn up serious violations, and the company's refusal to take responsibility and consistently hostile and combative attitude towards OSHA earns them a spot on their shitlist. After a worker is seriously injured and almost killed in an accident, OSHA doesn't waste time in throwing the book at them and assesses everything as either a willful or repeat in the ensuing investigation, and by the time they have finished their investigation, the fines are well into the six figures.
    • A battleground that unsafe is going to end with both sides hurt, regardless of who actually wins.
  • Reconstructed:
    • A Big Bad looking for a bargain purchases the condemned property for a laughably low price and turns it into his headquarters...without making any improvements.
    • The work is set in a time before OSHA, and the factory was built by a Corrupt Corporate Executive who cared little for the safety of the workers.
  • Played For Laughs: The central premise of the film is the extravagant lengths management goes to in order to keep the factory from being condemned. The cover-ups and bribes end up becoming more expensive then the repairs themselves, but management doesn't notice or doesn't care.
  • Played For Drama: The factory's unsafe conditions have caused the deaths of Bob's father and brother, so he makes it his mission in life to make the owners pay...
  • Played For Horror:
    • So many people died because of the factory's unsafe conditions that a Curse manifested from their collective desire for payback, which will kill or maim anybody who enters the factory (or the factory's perimeter, if anything else was built to replace it). And of course, you don't wanna find out what will happen when they finally get their hands on the person responsible for their deaths...
    • The factory was deliberately built as a death trap by a sociopath or Serial Killer who was aiming for maximum casualties to get their kicks.
    • The reason why everything is unsafe is because it's possessed by demons/aliens/psychotic AI, and no amount of OSHA inspection is going to be able to stop it.
    • The reason there's no OSHA compliance is because any OSHA inspectors assigned to investigate the factory have a particularly nasty habit of disappearing without a trace.

Back to No OSHA Compliance, if you dare. Watch your step, and the railing's a little wobbly.

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