The team at Stratus Building Solutions analyzed workplace cleanliness across the United States. People who work in an office spend many hours there, so the space’s cleanliness can have a tremendous impact on their health and safety. In fact, OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, sets federal sanitation standards to protect workers.
The team developed a methodology to score and rank workplaces across the U.S. This scoring system considered the number of OSHA violations per capita, the number of janitors per capita, population density, air pollution levels, and state-mandated sick leave laws. According to the team’s rankings, these states had the cleanest workspaces:
• Nebraska
• Colorado
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Washington
• Missouri
• Montana
• Idaho
• Michigan
• New Mexico
These states had low OSHA violation rates, clean air, and a high number of janitors per person.
These states ranked the lowest with the dirtiest workspaces:
• Tennessee
• North Carolina
• Mississippi
• Virginia
• Connecticut
• Oregon
• Nevada
• Rhode Island
• Alabama
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania
Many of these states lack laws requiring sick leave, and they have low ratios of cleaning staff, which seems to go hand in hand with the number of OSHA violations in these states.
A few locations defied typical ratios. New York has a large number of janitors, yet it’s still in the bottom half of our rankings because of poor air quality and high numbers of OSHA violations. Vermont is another exception. This is a low-population-density state, yet there are a high number of OSHA violations, proving that high population density doesn’t necessarily lead to more OSHA violations. Studies like this one bring important visibility to issues that affect millions of people. People who work in unsanitary conditions have much higher levels of respiratory and gastrointestinal issues, along with other health problems.
