Second, workers paid subsistence wages would assume the inspector's responsibilities, but the rule doesn't require any training on how they might approach that critical job.
Then there was a sharp drop in the number of violations issued, starting in 1992, when the city gave Housing Authority inspectors the primary responsibility for elevator oversight in the authority's buildings.
To implement the lead law, the city hired and trained four new lead inspectors whose primary responsibility was to perform dust-wipe tests in high-risk units that passed a visual inspection for deteriorated paint.
He befriended the agency's inspector general, whose watchdog responsibilities require keeping an arm's-length relationship, and the investigator attended his wedding.
"When you pay people who have the responsibility as inspectors so little, they're prone to having their hand out," said Daniel J. Castleman, a former chief assistant in the Manhattan district attorney's office who is now a managing director at FTI Consulting, an investigations firm.
Rather than invest in ineffective audits, companies should pay prices to their suppliers sufficient to support living wages and adequate health and safety protections, as well as taxes that support the government regulators and inspectors who have the responsibility to protect workers' rights.
The chief inspector must view responsibility for children's services with the utmost gravity, but no one supposes that Ms Spielman would do anything else.
Responsibility for the inspectors' security, and therefore for negotiating access to sites, lies with the United Nations.
Officials from such monitoring groups say they generally focus on internal matters, like smoke detectors and whether exit doors are locked, and not on matters like fire escapes or the soundness of a building's structure, which are normally the responsibility of government inspectors.
They have no statutory responsibility, yet when their inspectors turn up in uniform it's as a private organisation, there is something rather sinister and nasty about it.
