Piss OSHA off and they will fine you into the stone age and put your studio out of business because you can’t cover the fines.

@rawalex

Been to the circus lately? The highwire has for all intents been replaced with vertical ropes/fabric. Shriner’s still have motorcycle on highwire WITH guide wires.

Producers and agents are in the same boat garment factory, saw mill and other labor intensive industries when they didn’t want to comply with labor safety.

Rawalex: The problem is not two-fold at all.

The problem is that porn wants to continue to fight the last war, which it has already lost. It’s over and porn waived the white flag of surrender.

First, there is no First Amendment right to film condomless porn. None. Nada. Zippo. That was porn’s argument in the Vivid v LA County suit. A federal judge ruled against porn – he specifically said there is no infringement on porn’s First Amendment rights. Porn appealed that ruling and lost. At that point, porn had a choice: It could appeal further to the Supreme Court, or it could accept the ruling as law and move on. Porn chose to move on. Anyone who continues to argue porn’s First Amendment right is wrong on the law.

Second, whether condoms are sufficient or effective doesn’t matter. The second part of the federal judge’s ruling, upheld on appeal, is that there are workplace health and public health issues at stake and that requiring condom usage was legal. While porn people talk all the time about condoms breaking, condom rashes, condom whatevers, they never argued that in court. It was not part of their legal argument for why condoms are unnecessary. Porn’s legal argument – which is all that matters – is that its testing system is great and condoms are unnecessary. The judge rejected that out of hand and said: Condoms are the law. Porn appealed and lost. Porn then surrendered.

So, all the talk about First Amendment and effectiveness is interesting, but its not the law. It’s a little like arguing with a Massachusetts State Trooper that the Click It Or Ticket law isn’t really constitutional because seat belts in and of themselves have problems. Then, he gives you a ticket for $250 because, as the sign says: Click It or Ticket Is The Law.

If porn is really serious about this, it can start filing suits every time OSHA issues a fine and make your arguments. But again, the problem is: Condoms are the law as a direct result of a lawsuit filed by the porn industry, and porn accepted the verdict.

From a legal standpoint, porn brought this on itself.

Anytime anything happens that can lead to a potential loss of life or catastrophic illness the govt. will regulate that industry thru OSHA. Yesterday 16 people died when a hot air balloon caught fire and fell to the ground killing everyone on board. It was started that hot air balloons are not regulated. You can be sure that soon that will change.

Porn is no different. OSHA is responsible for work place safety. In porn’s case the workplace safety is the health of those that are engaging in acts that can lead to illness or death (STDs, Herpes, HIV).

Rawalex,
The free speech here belongs to the producer, not the performer. The performer is just a ‘cog’ if you will for the PRODUCER to produce his product. Producing speech does not trump the health and safety of those PAID to perform your speech for you.
OSHA laws always account for the fact that no matter what protections are used that accidents can still happen. It is how the employer reacts to those situations when they happen that is the crux of the problem here. In porn, history has proven over and over again that producers do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING when performers are exposed to disease while creating their product. That is why every business is supposed to have written plans (IIPP) on what they will do in case of exposure. Many of the companies fined by OSHA in the past have been fined for not having an IIPP. And other companies have been fined for not following the IIPP plans they had in place.

Simply put, your right to free speech does not make you immune from the consequences of producing commercial speech.

BT, the problem however is twofold:

1 – is a condom enough? Condom plus testing? Condom plus testing plus no kissing and no other fluid exchanges in any manner? The truly “safest” thing would be not to have sex at all. Everything else from there is like a sliding scale of risk. So unlike, say, working with chemicals in an industrial process, there is in fact little or no real actual need for porn.

2 – As porn is “art” and free speech, at what point do the health and safety regulations impinge on free speech? If a girl expresses her “art” by doing a Bukkake scene, is it up to the state to stop her because of the risk inherent in exposure to cum and uncovered dicks?

No agency really wants to enforce safety standards because they are pinned between the two: Don’t do enough, and people get sick and sue the state for failing to protect them, and do too much and get sued by someone who is losing their free speech rights.

No matter how nicely people try to put it, being in porn is like being a high wire walker. There is a point where the choice of profession is itself the risk, and not the equipment.

Random testing sounds like a great idea. It will help to weed out folks like Mr. Marcus that faked his positive test.

Ever since a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Vivid in its suit against LA County – a ruling that was upheld on appeal – I have been writing on this site that the real threat to porn was not LA County, which has shown no interest in policing porn, but in OSHA. Why? Because this is a workplace safety issue and a public health issue. That’s not just my opinion – or even just OSHA’s opinion: It was written into the decision of the federal judge, which again, was upheld on appeal. Porn could have further appealed but chose not to. As if it needed more, that gave OSHA ammo.

OSHA has been dipping its toe in the water, with fines against John Stagliano, Kink.com, James Deen and others. Now, we read the following quote from Mike’s reporting: “These standards are federal OSHA standards and use of barrier protection IS the federal standard and no state may have a standard that is lower than the federal standard, what the FSC has proposed is significantly lower. This is now a priority for OSHA, it isn’t going away, you will comply or we will hurt you financially way more than using condoms would….WAY more.”

If OSHA truly has set its sites on porn, then the industry will have to decide how much it is willing to spend to go underground, go off-shore, go wherever to skirt OSHA. But remember – there is a federal ruling. Any other jurisdiction can hang its hat on that if it wishes to regulate porn within its boundaries.

Jaybarry writes: “We’re entertaining people, if we want to take a risk so be it!”

Would that it were so. Unfortunately that’s not the law. Entertainment is an industry, a porn site is a workplace and porn performers are workers. As such, they have to abide by workplace safety regulations the same as any other industry, workplace and worker.

In your personal life, you’re free to do whatever with another individual as long as its consensual and everyone is of a legal age. Heck, you don’t even have to be educated. But as soon as it becomes work for pay, that all changes.

The porn industry doesn’t like to hear that, and to date, no regulatory agency has been willing to enforce it, so porn has managed to chug along. But, if OSHA really does get serious about this, that’ll change.

Again, its the law, its been upheld by a federal judge and appeals court and porn chose not to argue.

@jaybarry. Never say never. We are all at risk and luck plays a great role, when it comes to other people involved in your decisions. However, this doesn’t go against what you are saying, to the contrary, and I know what you mean. Laws, rules, regulations…it’s all good eventually, but they don’t eliminate the risk. People do (at least they can diminish it greatly). If we don’t work on performers education and we keep not holding them responsible for their actions nothing is due to change ever. I keep hearing that there are performers with level 2 gonhorrea and stuff like that: who are they? Someone must know them if they mention them. Whoever knows, they must be named and put on quarantine and medications. Stop them from working until they are clean. We need a code of conduct and a pact of honor, deliberately breaking which can also lead to radiation from sets. It’s not that difficult, really. If you know that you are sick, you shouldn’t work until you are healthy again. All the rest are palliatives: condoms, preemptive antibiotics…they are all fallible screens which don’t eliminate the bad health problem, but they rather encourage people with bad health to not give a shit about it. And condoms break. And preemptive antibiotics can fail too, on top of causing other health issues.
– code of conduct
– 6 weeks total moratorium
– sex history passport *
– random test on performers who have shot in the last 4 weeks
– HIV test on site
– 8 weeks halt on any positivity
– radiation from sets after the 3rd episode within a certain lapse of time

*(Obligation for anybody who shoots porn to insert the performers into a common database for every shoot. This way if a case rise, you test all the people involved and it’s easy to figure out who fucked in private without the due safety parachutes and whoever did should be halted until eventual radiation at 3rd offense. Come on guys…stds originate from private sex, ultimately. If you work in porn you should pay the same if not even more attention to whom you fuck in private and how that you pay when you fuck another performer. If you’re not professional, medal and goodbye…there’s plenty of other jobs in life.)

Is it harsh? No, it is necessary. People in many sports already go through much worse stuff than that.
Is it costly? Yes it is. But with a serious plan, funds can be found. For a start, let’s decapitate the testing mafia and open the testing market creating competition. What tests cost in the US right now is outrageous and there are no reasons for it. In Europe I pay 55$ (45 euros) or less for a full set of tests which includes also Hepatitis C [aHCV] and with a much more sophisticated and secure results delivery system, compared to 155$ from talentesting. It’s ridiculous. If I was part of the union, that would have been the first thing I would have focused on: stop the robbery. The second thing would have been to sit with IRS and demand total deduction from taxes of tests costs for adult performers. Those are the battles that I expect a performers’ union to fight for. And don’t tell me that especially test costs reduction can’t be achieved: talenttesting alone claims to perform about 500 tests a month (by the way…doesn’t it look like a scary low number to you?)…let’s go on strike one month and let’s see. Anyway…too much meat on the grill, I guess. But it’s clear to me that without drastic and radical structural changes and especially without an official code of conduct for performers there is no way out. You gotta hit the bottom to rise up. That’s why, discarded for obvious reasons the FSC idiotic and nazi idea of drugging performers preemptively, I hope for the condoms thing to take over: it will make things worse within a year (more serious contagious cases, sorry Mike…you know it too well too that if you give a condom to an irresponsible performer, that performer will act even more irresponsible, shielded by the condom excuse) and then hopefully people will start focusing on real changes, rather than palliatives.

The answer is to educate people on the risks and let them make their own decisions, we’re not kids riding bikes, we’re adults.

Mike, you’re sound like a typical politician. fighting for one thing but practicing the opposite in your personal life. How can a bukkake site be safe went you’re dumping cum in a girls eyes and month?

We’re entertaining people, if we want to take a risk so be it! What people should be concerned about is the mental abuse in porn. In a lot of cases girls don’t get to make their own choices on how they’re treated. Emotional abuse can last a life time.