OSHA is feeling the heat after a series of articles in the New York Times in late December documented the agency's meager efforts to prosecute willful violators of safety and health standards whose attitudes and actions resulted in deaths on the job.

In its report, the Times looked at 2,192 cases of willful violations of workplace safety laws that resulted in death. Two-thirds of these violations were investigated by OSHA, but the agency only referred 3.9 percent of the 1,242 cases it investigated to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.