(FORTUNE Magazine) – Waste not, want not is the motto of the present writer, so he would be all- over sad if unable to work in certain facts that turned up unexpectedly during recent major excavations among desktop papers and that bear inescapably on the increasingly familiar question of who needs OSHA. If you will bear with him one more time, the writer will promise to thereafter not even hint at the redundancy of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for conceivably as many as four fortnights. The previously buried desktop data were compiled by the National Safety Council and pertain to workplace deaths in the period before and after OSHA's establishment. In 1948 the death rate was 29 per 100,000 workers. The rate then drifted down unevenly to 17 in 1971 -- this being the year OSHA got into business. A linear regression of these annual rates provides a trend line, and it enables you to state that continuation of the pre-OSHA trend would have produced a death rate of 11 by 1983. The data for 1983 have recently become available, and guess what? The death rate was 11. You are once again looking at evidence proclaiming that OSHA is redundant. Also that it pays to never throw out a fact.