Ambrose John "AJ" McNamara Jr., 72, formerly or Worcester and Holden, Mass., most recently living in Los Angeles, died September 21, 2010 in Cedars Sinai Medical Center.
A significant player of the post-OSHA industrial safety field, AJ worked 17 years for Norton Co., an abrasives manufacturer that acquired a string of safety businesses in the early 1970s through AJ’s guidance. These companies were consolidated under the North Safety banner, which became one of the iconic companies in the safety market of the 1970s and 80s. North is now a brand name in the Honeywell staple of safety and health businesses.
When AJ was acquiring small, family-run safety businesses in the early 70s, the new-fangled OSHA agency, run by a Reading, Pa., department store retailer who later would own a tour bus company, (think those credentials would fly today?) was conducting 80,000 inspections a year and scaring businesses into buying all sorts of PPE. For safety distributors and manufacturers, these were the gold rush days. The manufacturing base in the U.S. was still strong, though just beginning to head overseas. Demand for hard hats, gloves, ear plugs, steel-toe shoes, respirators and “Buddy Holly” safety glasses would never be higher.
Membership boomed in the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association. “Engineers” and “Industrial” were reflective of the times, far less applicable in 2010 as the professions have expanded beyond engineering and industrial operations.
The National Safety Council in the 70s and early 80s held its annual National Safety Congress in the basement of the hulking, palatial Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the NSC’s home. Attendees trudged up and down stairs, tripped on rumpled carpet, and got lost trying to find exhibit halls tucked away on different floors and wings of the Hilton. Girls in miniskirts and bikinis waved from swing sets. The aisles were packed. I lunched one day in the Hilton with an air traffic controller recently fired by President Reagan. If Reagan had walked into the restaurant the guy would’ve punched him out. He was so angry he couldn’t shut up.
A far cry from the sleek glass and steel San Diego Convention Center where the 2010 Congress & Expo was held.
It wasn’t exactly “Mad Men,” but the Congress in the 70s and early 80s was typical of trade shows of the time. Sales meetings that wound up with cocktails all around, dinners where at least one sloshed sales manager of my acquaintance ended up face down in his plate of spaghetti, nights carousing up and down Rush Street bars, sales reps showing up for booth duty in the morning, dark circles under their eyes, hoarse and groping for coffee after two hours of shut eye.
I remember getting on the plane Sunday morning in Philadelphia to head out to my first Safety Congress. One of the owners of the magazine saw me get aboard and said, “Dave, relax, break a smile.” It was my first business trip. I had a sales meeting and sales dinner ahead of me with men my father’s age. Loud, guffawing, smoking and drinking peddlers. Reminded me of when my father had his pals over for poker night. Loud and profane. I’d sneak out of bed and peek downstairs. Through the smoke I’d see the fellas around the dining room table. Where the big boys roamed. With those damn deep voices. Scary.
My first client dinner was in a tight private dinner room with about 12-15 people around the table. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. They didn’t teach us in journalism school about small talk at sales dinners. My soon-to-be wife picked me up at the airport on Tuesday night. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Never. I’m never going back to one of those damn dinners again.”
30 years later I’m still flying off to Safety Congresses…
Safety was an easy sell in the 70s and early 80s. The sales pitch was simple: OSHA says you need these products. That was it. The market was far from mature in those salad days. Thousands and thousands of companies were short of the required PPE.
Safety distributors never had it better. It would be decades before the likes of Grainger barged in and started stealing business. The Safety Equipment Distributors Association was a family affair, with a small, close-knit number of family-run distributorships retreating each summer to a resort where scores of their kids would run around like at a summer camp. SEDA enjoyed a good run for about 25 years, or a little more than a generation of distributor owners. Many cashed out in the 90s. Safety distributors are still prospering in niches they’ve carved out, but you won’t find them barbecuing in the Rockies on summer vacation write-offs anymore.
AJ, as those who knew him, was a proud family man. He leave his wife of 46 years, Susan McNamara of Los Angeles, three children, James and wife Olivia of Taiwan, Elizabeth and husband Tom of Los Angeles, Margaret and husband Mike of Grosse Pointe, MI. Six grandchildren, Andrew and Alyssa of Taiwan, Holden and Allison of Michigan, T.J. and Luke of Los Angeles.
AJ was something of a renaissance man: sharp business mind, maverick, natural salesman, an entrepreneur, a battler who came back from a massive heart attack in his 40s, one of For Distributors Only’s founding columnists and supporters, early enthusiast of the Internet and its profit possibilities, technologist, raconteur, formidable networker, tireless idea man.
A.J. was born in Utica, NY, graduated from White Plains High School, Bryant College and received his MBA from Boston University.
After his years at Norton, he launched John Alden Associates, a consulting business in the industrial safety field. After September 11, 2001, he passionately ventured into the field of products for first responders under the ForResponders moniker.
AJ was passionate. I recall debating with him in the 1990s about the money-making potential of the then embryonic Internet. I was the old print Luddite before print became old and said “no way.” AJ was absolutely convinced distributors and manufacturers had to sell online, and get online fast. Of course he had his own idea of how to pull that off, which he tried to sell the industry for years.
And of course now I write more copy for the magazine’s web site than I do for the print edition, and do the Twittering and Facebooking and LinkingIn things.
As a trained journalist, AJ was a mentor for me when it came to understanding the world of businesses, corporations, the likes of General Electric boss Jack Welch. AJ was once loaned out to GE from Norton and traveled with Welch on one of Neutron Jack’s “bombing runs” — riding a small plane to out-of-the-way facilities where Welch would stride in, announce wipe-out layoffs, and hop on the plane to his next nuking site. That was one of a thousand AJ stories. And every one of them ended with a punch line.
Except the time I was sitting in a Pittsburgh motel room, with a nice view of a Pennsylvania Turnpike toll plaza. The phone rang and it was AJ. An aggravated AJ, as he quickly let me know. Seems I ambushed him by publishing his column with edits I didn’t show him. “No surprises, Dave,” he said. I have since told that to every editor I’ve hired.
AJ loved to laugh. He will be missed. And in the modern, consolidated, corporate safety industry, there will never be another one like him.
A celebration of life for AJ will be held in Los Angeles on October 23, 2010. AJ surely celebrated life the way he lived it. And he loved a party.
The family encourages everyone to take care of your health. Donations to Heifer International are suggested.
- by Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
Showing posts with label OSHA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OSHA. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The next new OSHA arrives
Coming out party held in San Antonio
It was a rare treat for safety and health pros. When was the last time the Labor Secretary and the OSHA chief spoke at the same safety and health meeting, from the same stage on the same day?
Every new occupant of the White House, or more specifically the Department of Labor, at some point early on announces their intent to reform, redirect, reinvigorate, recast or “add value” to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Every four or eight years the political pendulum in Washington takes OSHA for a ride to the business-friendly right or organized labor-leaning left, swinging from conciliation and cooperation to revved up enforcement and standards-setting.
After listening to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and acting OSHA boss Jordan Barab speak last Monday, June 29th, at the opening day of the American Society of Safety Engineers’ (ASSE) annual professional development conference, held in San Antonio, it appears OSHA is in for its most pronounced policy swing in decades.
“We’ve got a very activist Secretary of Labor and a very activist head of OSHA,” said a longtime safety professional after the eventful day.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
10 TENETS OF OBAMA’S OSHA
Here are highlights of the new agenda, as laid out by Solis and Barab:
1 — OSHA is back. DOL Secretary Solis and OSHA chief Barab have strong union ties, and are pushing an aggressive OSHA plan that in large part mirrors goals organized labor has promoted for OSHA.
Solis, for instance, spoke of her working class parents in Los Angeles, both union members, “fighting side by side on their shifts to ensure workers came home safe,” and instilling in her the value that you “fight for what is right.”
2 — More than 150 new inspectors will be hired in fiscal year 2010. OSHA’s budget will increase ten percent — with enforcement getting $25.5 million versus less than a $1 million increase for compliance assistance.
3 — Number of annual inspections will increase from 38,000 nationwide to perhaps 44,000, according to some sources. OSHA has not announced any inspection quota or target. Solis puts it simply: “More enforcement, less voluntary protection focus.”
4 — Penalties will be higher for violations. Consider these six-figure-plus enforcement headlines in the five-month span since Inauguration Day in January: more than $1.1 million in penalties against Milk Specialties Co. in Whitehall, Wis.; $500,000 to be paid by Tyson Foods; more than $255,000 in fines against a New Hampshire firearms manufacturer; $217,000 in fines against Delek Refining; more than $141,000 in fines against Hess Corp.; $105,000 in proposed penalties against an Orlando manufacturer; a Petrolia, Pa., chemical company fined more than $121,000; fall hazards at a Torrington, Conn., site lead to more than $118,000 in penalties; $273,000 in fines against a Jamestown, N.Y., employer for lack of asbestos safeguards; $148,000 against Miranda Roofing for fall hazards; and an El Paso, Texas, construction contractor fined $106,200 for alleged workplace safety violations.
5 — New standards will be promulgated for diacetyl flavoring (popcorn lung), combustible dust exposure protection, cranes and derricks, confined space in construction, and rewriting the hazard communication standard in be consistent with new international MSDS laws, commonly called the Global Harmonization System (GHS).
6 — Broad, sweeping new standard proposals will be issued, probably in 2011 or 2012, on ergonomics and basic requirements for maintaining a worksite safety and health program.
7 — OSHA will be more aggressive with standards and policing / enforcement than at any time in the last 20 years, since the late 1980s - early 1990s regime of Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, OSHA chief Jerry Scannell, and OSHA deputy Alan McMillan.
8 — The boom years are over for VPP growth. Unions do not like VPP because they argue OSHA’s audits of candidate companies to gain entry to VPP program are too weak and inconsistent. Barab says there will be no more annual quotas to drive VPP expansion.
9 — Incentive programs, no favorites of the new OSHA leaders, will be scrutinized during inspections. Again, this reflects union thinking. Unions argue incentive programs too often lead to workers not reporting injuries in order to win prizes, and a focus on worker behaviors over plant physical conditions. How OSHA might penalize employers operating incentive contests that inspectors can document as promoting under-reporting is unclear. Employers’ general duty to provide a safe and healthful workplace, the so-called General Duty Clause, may be invoked, as OSHA announced it will do earlier this year to protect workers against influenza exposure, and it has done in the past where a hazard exists but no corresponding standard.
10 — Recordkeeping accuracy and safety in the chemical industry will receive particular scrutiny as the objects of forthcoming OSHA National Emphasis Programs.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“WE’RE BACK”
“We’re back,” said the diminutive and energetic Solis, smiling as she stood in a concrete back hallway that exits the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, talking with Barab following a brief press conference that came after her ten-minute speech to about 3,300 ASSE members at the meeting’s opening session, held in a cavernous, generic convention ballroom.
“Make no mistake about it,” she told the standing room only crowd which lined the hall’s walls and had attendees sitting on the floor, “the Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business. We are serious, very serious.”
Labor Secretary Solis comes across as the toughest talking DOL head since Elizabeth Dole in the early 1990s took an active interest in OSHA affairs and informed business and the safety profession “the cop is back on the beat.”
And Jordan Barab, a Washington safety and health player for more than 25 years, spoke at the ASSE meeting with an authority not usually associated with someone wearing the “acting” label. He was specific about OSHA’s future plans and did not deflect or defer any questions to the yet-to-be-named permanent OSHA chief.
Both Solis and Barab spoke in tempered, determined and “make no mistake about it “ tones. Barab a bit more witty and quick with a joke, befitting his decades of been there, seen that experience inside the Washington Beltway and years authoring his acerbic blog, “Confined Space.”
In her speech that began at eight in the morning, Solis was clear about the kind of leadership safety and health pros can expect from OSHA and the DOL in the next three-plus years, referencing “OSHA’s renewal of vigorous enforcement,” “intolerable” construction industry fatalities, and again, “We are serious about safety.” After talking about unsafe scaffolding, trenching cave-ins and falls in construction, Solis asserted, “As long as I am Secretary of Labor the department will go after anyone who puts worker lives needlessly at risk.”
She used her speech to announce a Texas construction safety initiative. “Texas has the dubious distinction of having more workers die than any other state,” she said. Beginning in July, OSHA will increase the number of inspectors in Texas and prevent injuries and fatalities at construction sites. Later in the day Barab referred to them as SWAT teams.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
PARALLEL MESSAGES
Both Solis and Barab came to San Antonio to deliver two distinct messages, actually. One intended for the ASSE audience. The second used the ASSE meeting as a platform to fire warning shots at negligent employers, corner cutters, and the non-compliant unwashed operating outside the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center.
Message number one from Solis: “It’s really an honor to be here with so many people so keenly involved in protecting employees,” she said. “You make a meaningful contribution. The work you do is not easy, especially to sell your message in these hard times.”
Message number two: “As I have said since my first day on the job, the U.S. Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
HEROES AND VILLIANS
Barab continued the parallel messaging in his speech to attendees after lunch on Monday. “We appreciate your work,” he told ASSE members. “We have your back. Your fight is our fight, that’s why we (Solis and Barab) came here today. Fifteen minutes later, he closed his speech saying, “It’s a new day. We’re in this fight together. You’re all heroes in my book.”
Here’s one example how Barab balanced his twin themes: “You look at some of these horrible accidents and wonder how someone isn’t in jail,” he said. “We’re looking at legislation to go after those responsible. Not ASSE members. As far as you are concerned, OSHA standards are the floor. You ultimately bear the burden or reap the benefits of what we do in Washington. Participate in the process, in hearings and comment periods. We need to hear from you.”
On the other hand, Barab several times made reference to “a lot of companies out there” who are cutting corners with safety and health. “Every day someone gets ground up in a piece of machinery or falls,” he said. “I can’t understand how anyone can be killed in a trench. These are obvious hazards and completely unacceptable deaths that need to be prevented.”
The duality of Solis’s and Barab’s talks were lost on at least some ASSE members. It seemed a matter of listeners hearing what they choose to hear.
“I thought Barab’s message was very, very to the left,” said a longtime ASSE member. “Both he and Solis, I thought their message to this audience was horrible. They’re preaching to the choir here. Standards definitely need to be updated. But I don’t want to hear more talk about all this. Let’s see what action happens.”
“These people here (at the ASSE meeting) are professionals, they have programs, some are very good, almost all are at minimum compliant. Enforcement, stronger enforcement, doesn’t mean much to them,” said a safety vet with a long string of ribbons hanging from his attendees’ badge listing various honors and ASSE affiliations. (ASSE members interviewed for this article are quoted anonymously due to the longstanding fear that any criticism of OSHA might bring the wrath of regulators down on their employers.)
One attendee thought Barab over-reached with his speech. “He’s only the acting head of OSHA,” he said. “He sure doesn’t talk like he’s ‘acting’. He should wait for his permanent replacement.”
Another thought Barab had toned down his speech from one given in May. “I heard him in Washington and it was a “we’re coming after you” speech. “He had EHS pros scared, especially at the prospects of going to jail for fatalities if Congress passes tougher criminal penalties.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FULL SPEED AHEAD
“The Secretary asked me to go full speed ahead on an agenda, “ Barab told his audience.
(The Department of Labor has made Barab a deputy assistant secretary for occupational safety and health, a position he’ll occupy once a permanent chief is confirmed. Sources in San Antonio believed a short list of candidates is being vetted, which includes Barab. Indeed, in her morning press conference, Solis referred to Barab as “a candidate with excellent insights and experience,” while explaining why she named an acting head of OSHA rather than a permanent appointment. “I didn’t want to wait,” she said. Barab in his afternoon speech, predicted a White House nomination for a permanent OSHA chief probably won’t come until September or October.)
Here’s a quick overview of the future agenda of “the new OSHA,” as Barab described the agency:
● “OSHA will not wait any longer to deal with construction fatalities. SWAT teams of inspectors will sweep over Texas in the coming weeks” as part of a new initiative aimed specifically at the Texas construction industry.
● National Emphasis Programs are in the works for enforcement action in the chemical industry and closer review of injury and illness recordkeeping for evidence of under-reporting.
OSHA’s look into the recordkeeping accuracy of a select number of companies will also include reviewing medical records and safety program policies that might affect injury and illness reporting. “I know safety bingo and incentive contests are a very big business, along with the behavioral philosophies that back up many of these programs” said Barab. “But we are going to take a very close look at incentive programs that award prizes for fewest recorded injuries. That make workers reluctant to report.” In general, said Barab, “we believe the focus should be on engineering out the hazards, on physical conditions,” not worker behaviors.
● “Standards-setting is not broken, it’s ailing,” said Barab. He made an exception for updating decades-old permissible exposure limits (PELs). That process “may be broken,” and OSHA “may not be able to do anything within” its existing regulatory framework, he said. New legislation from Congress may be required, he said.
● “We’ve got a long way to go, a lot of catching up to do with standards-setting,” he said. “The days are over of delayed standards-setting, starving OSHA’s budget,” and signing too many superficial industry and association alliances, he said. “It’s a new day. We want strongly protective standards that make sense.“ The lack of standards action in recent years impacts OSHA’s credibility, he said.
● Short-term standards priorities are requirements for combustible dust, “popcorn lung disease,” cranes and derricks, revising the hazcom standard to align MSDS requirements with the UN-backed globally harmonized system (GHS) and confined spaces in construction,” said Barab.
Longer term, ergonomics and a standard for safety and health programs basics are on OSHA’s radar.
● “We must confront the elephant in the room, ergonomics,” said Barab, who coordinated the Clinton administration’s ergonomics standard-setting in the late 1990s. “Ergonomics is a political football with powerful players who don’t want to see it on the field. Well, we’re going to pick up that football” and work with stakeholders to fix what Barab described as an enormous occupational problem. “Too many people are getting hurt” with ergo-related injuries and illnesses, he said.
“We must address (this occupational safety and health problem), our name is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.” First, OSHA must study the legalities of the Congressional law used by the Bush administration in 2001 to repeal the ergo rule, and come to an understanding of how the law interprets the requirement for OSHA to come out with a substantially different version of the standard if it intends to move ahead with standards-setting, round two.
● Barab several times asked the ASSE community for its engagement in standards-setting activity. “Give us your input. Your experience is really a reality check. We didn’t get the engagement we expected from industry when working on the ergonomics standard in the late 1990s. We wanted them to come forward and describe successful ergonomics programs. We need to hear from you. It gets boring hearing from the same five associations at every hearing.”
● As for setting requirements for the basic foundation elements of a safety and health program, Barab said OSHA is heavily engaged now in studying options. Barab believes much support exists for this standard, which he said would be on OSHA’s regulatory radar screen in one or two years.
● A thorough review of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program will be conducted, with an overall de-emphasis on VPP, but no elimination.
● Oversight of state OSHA programs will be strengthened.
● Penalty structures, last updated in 1990, are being examined within the confines of current OSHA legislation. Congressional proposals have already been drafted to raise penalties. “Right now the average penalty for a serious OSHA violation is about $900,” said Barab. “It basically doesn’t add up to a lot. That’s not much of a disincentive.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
WILL PROS BUY THE NEW OSHA?
Barab ended his speech by returning to his twin messages. “I’m speaking to the choir here.” But he added, “Economic hardship is no excuse for taking short cuts with safety and health. When companies start cutting corners, I know you are unfortunately often the first to go. Your job probably is more important in hard times because workers afraid to lose their jobs won’t raise concerns.”
The coming months will tell whether Solis and Barab: 1) have motivated ASSE members to get more involved in the regulatory process; 2) insulted their professionalism and accomplishments with the talk of a lot of bad actors out there; or 3) sacred them with union-like battle cries about winning “the fight” for safety and health justice that many ASSE members feel they have already fought within their organizations at a number of points in their careers.
Most ASSE members interviewed after Solis’s and Barab’s speeches made it clear they don’t want to be drawn into a fight that is not theirs, a fight between OSHA and risk-taking small contractors and some larger employers who blame workers for accidents and shirk needed safety and health investments.
For one thing, there’s a profound philosophical difference between the majority of ASSE members who believe most employers want to do what is right for worker protection, and the new OSHA’s belief that there are a lot of bad guys out there. And second, most ASSE members have their hands full with an overloaded plate of stressful responsibilities, leaving them ill-equipped to stand by OSHA and fight for what is right, as Solis said.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
It was a rare treat for safety and health pros. When was the last time the Labor Secretary and the OSHA chief spoke at the same safety and health meeting, from the same stage on the same day?
Every new occupant of the White House, or more specifically the Department of Labor, at some point early on announces their intent to reform, redirect, reinvigorate, recast or “add value” to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Every four or eight years the political pendulum in Washington takes OSHA for a ride to the business-friendly right or organized labor-leaning left, swinging from conciliation and cooperation to revved up enforcement and standards-setting.
After listening to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and acting OSHA boss Jordan Barab speak last Monday, June 29th, at the opening day of the American Society of Safety Engineers’ (ASSE) annual professional development conference, held in San Antonio, it appears OSHA is in for its most pronounced policy swing in decades.
“We’ve got a very activist Secretary of Labor and a very activist head of OSHA,” said a longtime safety professional after the eventful day.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
10 TENETS OF OBAMA’S OSHA
Here are highlights of the new agenda, as laid out by Solis and Barab:
1 — OSHA is back. DOL Secretary Solis and OSHA chief Barab have strong union ties, and are pushing an aggressive OSHA plan that in large part mirrors goals organized labor has promoted for OSHA.
Solis, for instance, spoke of her working class parents in Los Angeles, both union members, “fighting side by side on their shifts to ensure workers came home safe,” and instilling in her the value that you “fight for what is right.”
2 — More than 150 new inspectors will be hired in fiscal year 2010. OSHA’s budget will increase ten percent — with enforcement getting $25.5 million versus less than a $1 million increase for compliance assistance.
3 — Number of annual inspections will increase from 38,000 nationwide to perhaps 44,000, according to some sources. OSHA has not announced any inspection quota or target. Solis puts it simply: “More enforcement, less voluntary protection focus.”
4 — Penalties will be higher for violations. Consider these six-figure-plus enforcement headlines in the five-month span since Inauguration Day in January: more than $1.1 million in penalties against Milk Specialties Co. in Whitehall, Wis.; $500,000 to be paid by Tyson Foods; more than $255,000 in fines against a New Hampshire firearms manufacturer; $217,000 in fines against Delek Refining; more than $141,000 in fines against Hess Corp.; $105,000 in proposed penalties against an Orlando manufacturer; a Petrolia, Pa., chemical company fined more than $121,000; fall hazards at a Torrington, Conn., site lead to more than $118,000 in penalties; $273,000 in fines against a Jamestown, N.Y., employer for lack of asbestos safeguards; $148,000 against Miranda Roofing for fall hazards; and an El Paso, Texas, construction contractor fined $106,200 for alleged workplace safety violations.
5 — New standards will be promulgated for diacetyl flavoring (popcorn lung), combustible dust exposure protection, cranes and derricks, confined space in construction, and rewriting the hazard communication standard in be consistent with new international MSDS laws, commonly called the Global Harmonization System (GHS).
6 — Broad, sweeping new standard proposals will be issued, probably in 2011 or 2012, on ergonomics and basic requirements for maintaining a worksite safety and health program.
7 — OSHA will be more aggressive with standards and policing / enforcement than at any time in the last 20 years, since the late 1980s - early 1990s regime of Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, OSHA chief Jerry Scannell, and OSHA deputy Alan McMillan.
8 — The boom years are over for VPP growth. Unions do not like VPP because they argue OSHA’s audits of candidate companies to gain entry to VPP program are too weak and inconsistent. Barab says there will be no more annual quotas to drive VPP expansion.
9 — Incentive programs, no favorites of the new OSHA leaders, will be scrutinized during inspections. Again, this reflects union thinking. Unions argue incentive programs too often lead to workers not reporting injuries in order to win prizes, and a focus on worker behaviors over plant physical conditions. How OSHA might penalize employers operating incentive contests that inspectors can document as promoting under-reporting is unclear. Employers’ general duty to provide a safe and healthful workplace, the so-called General Duty Clause, may be invoked, as OSHA announced it will do earlier this year to protect workers against influenza exposure, and it has done in the past where a hazard exists but no corresponding standard.
10 — Recordkeeping accuracy and safety in the chemical industry will receive particular scrutiny as the objects of forthcoming OSHA National Emphasis Programs.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“WE’RE BACK”
“We’re back,” said the diminutive and energetic Solis, smiling as she stood in a concrete back hallway that exits the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, talking with Barab following a brief press conference that came after her ten-minute speech to about 3,300 ASSE members at the meeting’s opening session, held in a cavernous, generic convention ballroom.
“Make no mistake about it,” she told the standing room only crowd which lined the hall’s walls and had attendees sitting on the floor, “the Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business. We are serious, very serious.”
Labor Secretary Solis comes across as the toughest talking DOL head since Elizabeth Dole in the early 1990s took an active interest in OSHA affairs and informed business and the safety profession “the cop is back on the beat.”
And Jordan Barab, a Washington safety and health player for more than 25 years, spoke at the ASSE meeting with an authority not usually associated with someone wearing the “acting” label. He was specific about OSHA’s future plans and did not deflect or defer any questions to the yet-to-be-named permanent OSHA chief.
Both Solis and Barab spoke in tempered, determined and “make no mistake about it “ tones. Barab a bit more witty and quick with a joke, befitting his decades of been there, seen that experience inside the Washington Beltway and years authoring his acerbic blog, “Confined Space.”
In her speech that began at eight in the morning, Solis was clear about the kind of leadership safety and health pros can expect from OSHA and the DOL in the next three-plus years, referencing “OSHA’s renewal of vigorous enforcement,” “intolerable” construction industry fatalities, and again, “We are serious about safety.” After talking about unsafe scaffolding, trenching cave-ins and falls in construction, Solis asserted, “As long as I am Secretary of Labor the department will go after anyone who puts worker lives needlessly at risk.”
She used her speech to announce a Texas construction safety initiative. “Texas has the dubious distinction of having more workers die than any other state,” she said. Beginning in July, OSHA will increase the number of inspectors in Texas and prevent injuries and fatalities at construction sites. Later in the day Barab referred to them as SWAT teams.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
PARALLEL MESSAGES
Both Solis and Barab came to San Antonio to deliver two distinct messages, actually. One intended for the ASSE audience. The second used the ASSE meeting as a platform to fire warning shots at negligent employers, corner cutters, and the non-compliant unwashed operating outside the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center.
Message number one from Solis: “It’s really an honor to be here with so many people so keenly involved in protecting employees,” she said. “You make a meaningful contribution. The work you do is not easy, especially to sell your message in these hard times.”
Message number two: “As I have said since my first day on the job, the U.S. Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
HEROES AND VILLIANS
Barab continued the parallel messaging in his speech to attendees after lunch on Monday. “We appreciate your work,” he told ASSE members. “We have your back. Your fight is our fight, that’s why we (Solis and Barab) came here today. Fifteen minutes later, he closed his speech saying, “It’s a new day. We’re in this fight together. You’re all heroes in my book.”
Here’s one example how Barab balanced his twin themes: “You look at some of these horrible accidents and wonder how someone isn’t in jail,” he said. “We’re looking at legislation to go after those responsible. Not ASSE members. As far as you are concerned, OSHA standards are the floor. You ultimately bear the burden or reap the benefits of what we do in Washington. Participate in the process, in hearings and comment periods. We need to hear from you.”
On the other hand, Barab several times made reference to “a lot of companies out there” who are cutting corners with safety and health. “Every day someone gets ground up in a piece of machinery or falls,” he said. “I can’t understand how anyone can be killed in a trench. These are obvious hazards and completely unacceptable deaths that need to be prevented.”
The duality of Solis’s and Barab’s talks were lost on at least some ASSE members. It seemed a matter of listeners hearing what they choose to hear.
“I thought Barab’s message was very, very to the left,” said a longtime ASSE member. “Both he and Solis, I thought their message to this audience was horrible. They’re preaching to the choir here. Standards definitely need to be updated. But I don’t want to hear more talk about all this. Let’s see what action happens.”
“These people here (at the ASSE meeting) are professionals, they have programs, some are very good, almost all are at minimum compliant. Enforcement, stronger enforcement, doesn’t mean much to them,” said a safety vet with a long string of ribbons hanging from his attendees’ badge listing various honors and ASSE affiliations. (ASSE members interviewed for this article are quoted anonymously due to the longstanding fear that any criticism of OSHA might bring the wrath of regulators down on their employers.)
One attendee thought Barab over-reached with his speech. “He’s only the acting head of OSHA,” he said. “He sure doesn’t talk like he’s ‘acting’. He should wait for his permanent replacement.”
Another thought Barab had toned down his speech from one given in May. “I heard him in Washington and it was a “we’re coming after you” speech. “He had EHS pros scared, especially at the prospects of going to jail for fatalities if Congress passes tougher criminal penalties.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FULL SPEED AHEAD
“The Secretary asked me to go full speed ahead on an agenda, “ Barab told his audience.
(The Department of Labor has made Barab a deputy assistant secretary for occupational safety and health, a position he’ll occupy once a permanent chief is confirmed. Sources in San Antonio believed a short list of candidates is being vetted, which includes Barab. Indeed, in her morning press conference, Solis referred to Barab as “a candidate with excellent insights and experience,” while explaining why she named an acting head of OSHA rather than a permanent appointment. “I didn’t want to wait,” she said. Barab in his afternoon speech, predicted a White House nomination for a permanent OSHA chief probably won’t come until September or October.)
Here’s a quick overview of the future agenda of “the new OSHA,” as Barab described the agency:
● “OSHA will not wait any longer to deal with construction fatalities. SWAT teams of inspectors will sweep over Texas in the coming weeks” as part of a new initiative aimed specifically at the Texas construction industry.
● National Emphasis Programs are in the works for enforcement action in the chemical industry and closer review of injury and illness recordkeeping for evidence of under-reporting.
OSHA’s look into the recordkeeping accuracy of a select number of companies will also include reviewing medical records and safety program policies that might affect injury and illness reporting. “I know safety bingo and incentive contests are a very big business, along with the behavioral philosophies that back up many of these programs” said Barab. “But we are going to take a very close look at incentive programs that award prizes for fewest recorded injuries. That make workers reluctant to report.” In general, said Barab, “we believe the focus should be on engineering out the hazards, on physical conditions,” not worker behaviors.
● “Standards-setting is not broken, it’s ailing,” said Barab. He made an exception for updating decades-old permissible exposure limits (PELs). That process “may be broken,” and OSHA “may not be able to do anything within” its existing regulatory framework, he said. New legislation from Congress may be required, he said.
● “We’ve got a long way to go, a lot of catching up to do with standards-setting,” he said. “The days are over of delayed standards-setting, starving OSHA’s budget,” and signing too many superficial industry and association alliances, he said. “It’s a new day. We want strongly protective standards that make sense.“ The lack of standards action in recent years impacts OSHA’s credibility, he said.
● Short-term standards priorities are requirements for combustible dust, “popcorn lung disease,” cranes and derricks, revising the hazcom standard to align MSDS requirements with the UN-backed globally harmonized system (GHS) and confined spaces in construction,” said Barab.
Longer term, ergonomics and a standard for safety and health programs basics are on OSHA’s radar.
● “We must confront the elephant in the room, ergonomics,” said Barab, who coordinated the Clinton administration’s ergonomics standard-setting in the late 1990s. “Ergonomics is a political football with powerful players who don’t want to see it on the field. Well, we’re going to pick up that football” and work with stakeholders to fix what Barab described as an enormous occupational problem. “Too many people are getting hurt” with ergo-related injuries and illnesses, he said.
“We must address (this occupational safety and health problem), our name is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.” First, OSHA must study the legalities of the Congressional law used by the Bush administration in 2001 to repeal the ergo rule, and come to an understanding of how the law interprets the requirement for OSHA to come out with a substantially different version of the standard if it intends to move ahead with standards-setting, round two.
● Barab several times asked the ASSE community for its engagement in standards-setting activity. “Give us your input. Your experience is really a reality check. We didn’t get the engagement we expected from industry when working on the ergonomics standard in the late 1990s. We wanted them to come forward and describe successful ergonomics programs. We need to hear from you. It gets boring hearing from the same five associations at every hearing.”
● As for setting requirements for the basic foundation elements of a safety and health program, Barab said OSHA is heavily engaged now in studying options. Barab believes much support exists for this standard, which he said would be on OSHA’s regulatory radar screen in one or two years.
● A thorough review of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program will be conducted, with an overall de-emphasis on VPP, but no elimination.
● Oversight of state OSHA programs will be strengthened.
● Penalty structures, last updated in 1990, are being examined within the confines of current OSHA legislation. Congressional proposals have already been drafted to raise penalties. “Right now the average penalty for a serious OSHA violation is about $900,” said Barab. “It basically doesn’t add up to a lot. That’s not much of a disincentive.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
WILL PROS BUY THE NEW OSHA?
Barab ended his speech by returning to his twin messages. “I’m speaking to the choir here.” But he added, “Economic hardship is no excuse for taking short cuts with safety and health. When companies start cutting corners, I know you are unfortunately often the first to go. Your job probably is more important in hard times because workers afraid to lose their jobs won’t raise concerns.”
The coming months will tell whether Solis and Barab: 1) have motivated ASSE members to get more involved in the regulatory process; 2) insulted their professionalism and accomplishments with the talk of a lot of bad actors out there; or 3) sacred them with union-like battle cries about winning “the fight” for safety and health justice that many ASSE members feel they have already fought within their organizations at a number of points in their careers.
Most ASSE members interviewed after Solis’s and Barab’s speeches made it clear they don’t want to be drawn into a fight that is not theirs, a fight between OSHA and risk-taking small contractors and some larger employers who blame workers for accidents and shirk needed safety and health investments.
For one thing, there’s a profound philosophical difference between the majority of ASSE members who believe most employers want to do what is right for worker protection, and the new OSHA’s belief that there are a lot of bad guys out there. And second, most ASSE members have their hands full with an overloaded plate of stressful responsibilities, leaving them ill-equipped to stand by OSHA and fight for what is right, as Solis said.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Could it be? OSHA senile at 38?
Regulatory bodies, like people, have distinct life cycles
…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth, they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D, “The Great Crash, 1929,” published originally in 1955
Could it be the venerable good doctor, a titan of economics, possessed the prescience to be describing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 16 years before it began operation in 1971? And more importantly, could he have been explaining why so many occupational safety and health professionals today are disengaged from OSHA?
The profession’s disconnect from OSHA is palpable, almost raw with frustration. “Leave me the hell alone and let me do what I know how to do,” emailed a pro with almost four decades in the field. He laments the agency’s “misleading and often confusing direction” in recent years, and the lack of any significant regulatory agenda items “or public outcries to fix what may not be broken.”
“OSHA is almost 39 years old now” writes Tom Lawrence, whose safety and health career pre-dates the birth of the agency, in an email to us. “Politics in abundance and budgets in scarcity. Potential for significant change? Not likely.”
It’s time to cut the ties that have bound professionals to Washington for almost 40 years, argues Lawrence, and press ahead with innovation and resourceful not in abundance inside the beltway.
Who’s in charge here?
Or as American Industrial Hygiene Association Director of Government Affairs Aaron Trippler recently wrote in his newsletter: “Many of those who live and work here, including yours truly, also shake our head when we see Congress and the agencies attempt to do the work of governing.” Trippler went on to describe the consultant hired by OSHA who worked for 27 months, ending in mid-2008. His fee: $572,946 billed for labor and $108,434 in compensation for his commuting costs. “This was more pay than that of the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, the Secretary of Labor, the Vice President of the U.S., or any member of Congress. Who in the heck is in charge?” asks Trippler.
That confusion, in terms of OSHA’s management, is the one issue regarding the agency labor and business camps both can agree on. But that’s as far as any consensus goes. Borrowing from Galbraith’s depiction of a federal regulator, labor will argue the agency has devolved into an arm of the industry it regulates. Numerous businesses look at OSHA’s actions or inaction and see bureaucratic senility.
An agency evolves
OSHA’s life cycle can be traced in a way that parallels Galbraith’s evolutionary stages. First, in its youthful heyday of the 1970s, the agency was vigorous and aggressive with inspections and standards-setting. After a bureaucratic start-up phase, committed health and safety experts led OSHA — Dr. Mort Corn (1975-1977) and Dr. Eula Bingham (1976 – 1980). Dr. Bingham, the most fervent regulator and activist agency head ever, was evangelical in her endeavors to protect workers. Meanwhile, a growing number of employers, employer associations, and Republican politicians found OSHA’s actions increasingly “intolerant.”
Surprisingly, the agency did not “mellow” during the 1980s Reagan years and the term of President George H.W. Bush (1988-1992). “I remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s when we saw a flurry of new standards — hazard communication, respiratory protection, lockout-tagout, process safety management — and thought that OSHA had a decent handle on driving safety improvements at the national level,” writes Jeff LaBelle, a safety and risk assessment manager, in an email to us. “Since then we’ve seen much too little and much too late.”
Ironically, the mellowing and winding-down occurred during a Democratic regime, the two terms of President Clinton (1992-2000). It was the vision of Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore that a more mature OSHA would reinvent itself as a customer-focused, problem-solving partner with industry. In this context, OSHA’s much ballyhooed ergonomics standard, rushed out the door mere days after Gore lost the 2000 election, could be considered a mid-life crisis binge.
The “much too little and much too late” phase of OSHA’s evolution, which critics peg from 1992 until the present, could be interpreted, using Galbraith’s life cycle of a regulator, as the disorientation and cognitive failures that accompany aging. But although OSHA chiefs Joe Dear, Charles Jeffress and John Henshaw during that time were attacked on many counts, senility never came up; all were in their prime when at the agency. Critics contend that as OSHA has aged, it has become more than ever an arm of the industry it regulates. Ergo, the never-ending announcements of industry alliances in recent years. And, to be sure, a fantastically rich web site with deep resources and “tools” to help businesses.
Life on the beach?
So what have we here in 2009?
Will OSHA continue to slumber in what Galbraith would ascribe as its sunset years? Overworked and under-staffed safety and health professionals in industry are not of a mind to wake the agency and confront possibly a slew of new standards. That’s not going to happen anyway, not with an army of attorneys at the disposal of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for OSHA to continue to drift listlessly in its old (by Galbraith’s definition) age. Big business is global, with its workers at risk around the world and up and down supply chains, but OSHA is not an energetic global regulatory thought-leader. It must be.
And small business, which still dominates the domestic workplace landscape, cannot continue to put workers at risk, increasingly non-English speaking employees, through ignorance, lack of resources, or knowing non-compliance.
In this economy, retirees return to work and workers put off retirement. Old age ain’t what it used to be. Yes, there’s much talk of the graying of OSHA, of the coming wave of retirements. Still, hundreds if not thousands of careerists at OSHA aren’t ready to cash it in. They need strong, vibrant leadership. And here in 2009, when OSHA needs direction and vision, the safety and health profession can’t be caught “decoupling” and leaving the agency to close its eyes and stretch out on a beach chair somewhere.
Dave Johnson, Editor
…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth, they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age — after a matter of ten or fifteen years — they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Ph.D, “The Great Crash, 1929,” published originally in 1955
Could it be the venerable good doctor, a titan of economics, possessed the prescience to be describing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 16 years before it began operation in 1971? And more importantly, could he have been explaining why so many occupational safety and health professionals today are disengaged from OSHA?
The profession’s disconnect from OSHA is palpable, almost raw with frustration. “Leave me the hell alone and let me do what I know how to do,” emailed a pro with almost four decades in the field. He laments the agency’s “misleading and often confusing direction” in recent years, and the lack of any significant regulatory agenda items “or public outcries to fix what may not be broken.”
“OSHA is almost 39 years old now” writes Tom Lawrence, whose safety and health career pre-dates the birth of the agency, in an email to us. “Politics in abundance and budgets in scarcity. Potential for significant change? Not likely.”
It’s time to cut the ties that have bound professionals to Washington for almost 40 years, argues Lawrence, and press ahead with innovation and resourceful not in abundance inside the beltway.
Who’s in charge here?
Or as American Industrial Hygiene Association Director of Government Affairs Aaron Trippler recently wrote in his newsletter: “Many of those who live and work here, including yours truly, also shake our head when we see Congress and the agencies attempt to do the work of governing.” Trippler went on to describe the consultant hired by OSHA who worked for 27 months, ending in mid-2008. His fee: $572,946 billed for labor and $108,434 in compensation for his commuting costs. “This was more pay than that of the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA, the Secretary of Labor, the Vice President of the U.S., or any member of Congress. Who in the heck is in charge?” asks Trippler.
That confusion, in terms of OSHA’s management, is the one issue regarding the agency labor and business camps both can agree on. But that’s as far as any consensus goes. Borrowing from Galbraith’s depiction of a federal regulator, labor will argue the agency has devolved into an arm of the industry it regulates. Numerous businesses look at OSHA’s actions or inaction and see bureaucratic senility.
An agency evolves
OSHA’s life cycle can be traced in a way that parallels Galbraith’s evolutionary stages. First, in its youthful heyday of the 1970s, the agency was vigorous and aggressive with inspections and standards-setting. After a bureaucratic start-up phase, committed health and safety experts led OSHA — Dr. Mort Corn (1975-1977) and Dr. Eula Bingham (1976 – 1980). Dr. Bingham, the most fervent regulator and activist agency head ever, was evangelical in her endeavors to protect workers. Meanwhile, a growing number of employers, employer associations, and Republican politicians found OSHA’s actions increasingly “intolerant.”
Surprisingly, the agency did not “mellow” during the 1980s Reagan years and the term of President George H.W. Bush (1988-1992). “I remember the ‘80s and early ‘90s when we saw a flurry of new standards — hazard communication, respiratory protection, lockout-tagout, process safety management — and thought that OSHA had a decent handle on driving safety improvements at the national level,” writes Jeff LaBelle, a safety and risk assessment manager, in an email to us. “Since then we’ve seen much too little and much too late.”
Ironically, the mellowing and winding-down occurred during a Democratic regime, the two terms of President Clinton (1992-2000). It was the vision of Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore that a more mature OSHA would reinvent itself as a customer-focused, problem-solving partner with industry. In this context, OSHA’s much ballyhooed ergonomics standard, rushed out the door mere days after Gore lost the 2000 election, could be considered a mid-life crisis binge.
The “much too little and much too late” phase of OSHA’s evolution, which critics peg from 1992 until the present, could be interpreted, using Galbraith’s life cycle of a regulator, as the disorientation and cognitive failures that accompany aging. But although OSHA chiefs Joe Dear, Charles Jeffress and John Henshaw during that time were attacked on many counts, senility never came up; all were in their prime when at the agency. Critics contend that as OSHA has aged, it has become more than ever an arm of the industry it regulates. Ergo, the never-ending announcements of industry alliances in recent years. And, to be sure, a fantastically rich web site with deep resources and “tools” to help businesses.
Life on the beach?
So what have we here in 2009?
Will OSHA continue to slumber in what Galbraith would ascribe as its sunset years? Overworked and under-staffed safety and health professionals in industry are not of a mind to wake the agency and confront possibly a slew of new standards. That’s not going to happen anyway, not with an army of attorneys at the disposal of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What cannot be allowed to happen is for OSHA to continue to drift listlessly in its old (by Galbraith’s definition) age. Big business is global, with its workers at risk around the world and up and down supply chains, but OSHA is not an energetic global regulatory thought-leader. It must be.
And small business, which still dominates the domestic workplace landscape, cannot continue to put workers at risk, increasingly non-English speaking employees, through ignorance, lack of resources, or knowing non-compliance.
In this economy, retirees return to work and workers put off retirement. Old age ain’t what it used to be. Yes, there’s much talk of the graying of OSHA, of the coming wave of retirements. Still, hundreds if not thousands of careerists at OSHA aren’t ready to cash it in. They need strong, vibrant leadership. And here in 2009, when OSHA needs direction and vision, the safety and health profession can’t be caught “decoupling” and leaving the agency to close its eyes and stretch out on a beach chair somewhere.
Dave Johnson, Editor
A cheap shot
OSHA lobs spitball at Battleship Wal-Mart
Last month, OSHA’s area office for Long Island, New York, cited Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., $7,000 for inadequate crowd control following the November 28, 2008 death of a temporary Wal-Mart employee. The man was knocked to the ground and trampled by a frenzied mob of some 2,000 bargain-hunters in a pre-dawn, Black Friday holiday sales stampede at Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream, N.Y. store, about 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy-tree) 34, had only been on the job a week as a so-called “seasonal worker” and died of asphyxiation. $7,000 is the maximum penalty OSHA can cite for a single serious violation, which was what the tragedy was judged to be. $374.5 billion was the sales total racked up by Wal-Mart for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2008. Inspectors used Section 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the so-called general duty clause, to cite Wal-Mart the maximum $7,000 fine for a serious violation of the clause.
There’s something pathetic here, though perfectly legal, about a $374.5 billion business being fined $7,000 for an employee’s gruesome death on the job.
A belated gold standard
In all-too-typical reactive fashion, Wal-Mart, as part of a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office to avoid prosecution, has gone out and hired the finest crowd security consultants in the country. They’ve worked NFL Super Bowls and Olympic games. Now they’ll devise “protocols set up to be the gold standard for crowd management” in the retail industry, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
A $10,000 fine is the max the D.A. could have sought.
Wal-Mart will implement the new plan at its 92 New York stores as part of the deal with the D.A.’s office. The deal also calls for Wal-Mart to set up a $400,000 victims’ compensation and remuneration fund (11 others, including a pregnant women, were injured in the crush), contribute $1.2 million for Nassau County’s Youth Board, donate $300,000 to the United Way of Long Island, and hire 50 high school students every year to work in its five stores in the county. Call it knee-jerk corporate social responsibility.
Here’s hoping the high schoolers receive the training in security and crowd control Mr. Damour never got.
Monetizing life
This story isn’t about Wal-Mart, OSHA, or the Nassau Country DA. It’s about the impossible and demeaning task of putting a price tag on human life. Here there can be no “gold standard.”
The mathematics of loss doesn’t add up. In 25 major aviation accidents between 1970 and 1984, the average compensation for victims who went to trial was $1 million, according to a Rand Corporation analysis. Average comp for cases settled out of court was $415,000. The wife of a currency trader killed in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers was eligible for $138,000. The widow of a security guard killed in Tower 1 will get $444,010.
For some, money doesn’t matter. There were about a dozen families so clinically depressed about 9/11 they never filed a claim to the compensation fund. Those families would have received on average $2 million each tax-free.
OSHA’s $7,000 fine of course is not intended to compensate for a life lost. But it’s ridiculous to read OSHA’s press release stating a $374.5 billion company has been hit with a $7,000 penalty for the death of one of its employees trampled on the job like a human doormat. Like it or not, the $7,000 is interpreted as the price tag for this fatality. It’s grotesque.
It’s all legit
EPA recently fined an apartment complex owner and property management firm more than $300,000 for failing to disclose information about lead paint to tenants. Failure to simply disclose info about lead paint is 40 times worse of a transgression than having an employee stampeded to death? OSHA recently fined a Texas piping manufacturer $146,500 — more than 20 times the Wal-Mart fine — for 29 serious violations, though no one was injured or killed.
These discrepancies are legitimized by laws that on the books. They also cheapen respect for life and dignity.
Stronger medicine
In Congress, there is a proposal to increase the OSHA serious/fatality violation penalty maximum to $12,000, allowing up to $50,000 for a fatality.
$7,000, $12,000, $50,000 — no matter how many zeroes you affix to the penalty, it won’t modify corporate behavior or change corporate culture. As someone once told me, only greed (see financial meltdown) or fear (of a brand meltdown) will do that.
OK, so how about mandatory referral to the Justice Department and jail time with no parole for managers found guilty of willfully or seriously neglecting their duty to protect employees when the outcome is an on-the-job fatality?
How about a memorial, a small white cross with a marker perhaps, to Jdimytai Damour set up inside the electronic doors of Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream store. Shoppers entering might stop to consider, “What the hell happened here?” Or maybe their curious kids will ask. I’d like to hear the explanation.
And OSHA needs get with the 21st century service-driven “new” economy. The symbolism of the Wal-Mart penalty is unnecessary. Issue retail industry safety and health guidelines. Put more of a priority on evaluating work environments where public behavior can be hazardous, such as retailing, health care (patients and visitors), and highway construction work zones.
Don’t lob spitballs at battleships and in doing so belittle lives lost. Do something of consequence. What’s $7,000 to a $374.5 billion multinational? A dwarf kicking grains of sand at a giant. Stop degrading victims, victims’ families and OSHA’s credibility. Rewrite the legal technicalities that lawmakers, attorneys and companies hide behind. Stop making it so easy for all of us to quickly turn the page and forget another life lost unnecessarily.
Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
Last month, OSHA’s area office for Long Island, New York, cited Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., $7,000 for inadequate crowd control following the November 28, 2008 death of a temporary Wal-Mart employee. The man was knocked to the ground and trampled by a frenzied mob of some 2,000 bargain-hunters in a pre-dawn, Black Friday holiday sales stampede at Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream, N.Y. store, about 20 miles east of Manhattan.
Jdimytai Damour (Jimmy-tree) 34, had only been on the job a week as a so-called “seasonal worker” and died of asphyxiation. $7,000 is the maximum penalty OSHA can cite for a single serious violation, which was what the tragedy was judged to be. $374.5 billion was the sales total racked up by Wal-Mart for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2008. Inspectors used Section 5 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the so-called general duty clause, to cite Wal-Mart the maximum $7,000 fine for a serious violation of the clause.
There’s something pathetic here, though perfectly legal, about a $374.5 billion business being fined $7,000 for an employee’s gruesome death on the job.
A belated gold standard
In all-too-typical reactive fashion, Wal-Mart, as part of a settlement agreement with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office to avoid prosecution, has gone out and hired the finest crowd security consultants in the country. They’ve worked NFL Super Bowls and Olympic games. Now they’ll devise “protocols set up to be the gold standard for crowd management” in the retail industry, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
A $10,000 fine is the max the D.A. could have sought.
Wal-Mart will implement the new plan at its 92 New York stores as part of the deal with the D.A.’s office. The deal also calls for Wal-Mart to set up a $400,000 victims’ compensation and remuneration fund (11 others, including a pregnant women, were injured in the crush), contribute $1.2 million for Nassau County’s Youth Board, donate $300,000 to the United Way of Long Island, and hire 50 high school students every year to work in its five stores in the county. Call it knee-jerk corporate social responsibility.
Here’s hoping the high schoolers receive the training in security and crowd control Mr. Damour never got.
Monetizing life
This story isn’t about Wal-Mart, OSHA, or the Nassau Country DA. It’s about the impossible and demeaning task of putting a price tag on human life. Here there can be no “gold standard.”
The mathematics of loss doesn’t add up. In 25 major aviation accidents between 1970 and 1984, the average compensation for victims who went to trial was $1 million, according to a Rand Corporation analysis. Average comp for cases settled out of court was $415,000. The wife of a currency trader killed in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers was eligible for $138,000. The widow of a security guard killed in Tower 1 will get $444,010.
For some, money doesn’t matter. There were about a dozen families so clinically depressed about 9/11 they never filed a claim to the compensation fund. Those families would have received on average $2 million each tax-free.
OSHA’s $7,000 fine of course is not intended to compensate for a life lost. But it’s ridiculous to read OSHA’s press release stating a $374.5 billion company has been hit with a $7,000 penalty for the death of one of its employees trampled on the job like a human doormat. Like it or not, the $7,000 is interpreted as the price tag for this fatality. It’s grotesque.
It’s all legit
EPA recently fined an apartment complex owner and property management firm more than $300,000 for failing to disclose information about lead paint to tenants. Failure to simply disclose info about lead paint is 40 times worse of a transgression than having an employee stampeded to death? OSHA recently fined a Texas piping manufacturer $146,500 — more than 20 times the Wal-Mart fine — for 29 serious violations, though no one was injured or killed.
These discrepancies are legitimized by laws that on the books. They also cheapen respect for life and dignity.
Stronger medicine
In Congress, there is a proposal to increase the OSHA serious/fatality violation penalty maximum to $12,000, allowing up to $50,000 for a fatality.
$7,000, $12,000, $50,000 — no matter how many zeroes you affix to the penalty, it won’t modify corporate behavior or change corporate culture. As someone once told me, only greed (see financial meltdown) or fear (of a brand meltdown) will do that.
OK, so how about mandatory referral to the Justice Department and jail time with no parole for managers found guilty of willfully or seriously neglecting their duty to protect employees when the outcome is an on-the-job fatality?
How about a memorial, a small white cross with a marker perhaps, to Jdimytai Damour set up inside the electronic doors of Wal-Mart’s Valley Stream store. Shoppers entering might stop to consider, “What the hell happened here?” Or maybe their curious kids will ask. I’d like to hear the explanation.
And OSHA needs get with the 21st century service-driven “new” economy. The symbolism of the Wal-Mart penalty is unnecessary. Issue retail industry safety and health guidelines. Put more of a priority on evaluating work environments where public behavior can be hazardous, such as retailing, health care (patients and visitors), and highway construction work zones.
Don’t lob spitballs at battleships and in doing so belittle lives lost. Do something of consequence. What’s $7,000 to a $374.5 billion multinational? A dwarf kicking grains of sand at a giant. Stop degrading victims, victims’ families and OSHA’s credibility. Rewrite the legal technicalities that lawmakers, attorneys and companies hide behind. Stop making it so easy for all of us to quickly turn the page and forget another life lost unnecessarily.
Dave Johnson, ISHN Editor
“Most of the parents were desperate…”
It’s time to truly engage victims and their kin
I’m reading the new book, “Columbine,” (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009) and I can’t get Ron Hayes out of my head. Ron, from Fairhope, Alabama near Mobile, has been raising hell as a worker safety and victims’ rights activist since 1993, when his 19-year-old son Pat was killed on the job. Pat was "walking down the corn" — scraping the inside walls of a grain bin in Florida. As Pat knocked down the corn, 60 tons of it collapsed in a rush, suffocating him to death.
In “Columbine,” author Dave Cullen describes how the families of the 12 dead students, one dead teacher, and the 24 injured were misled and mistreated by public officials. Ron knows that pain.
Panicked parents of Columbine students frantically tried to learn the fate of their kids in the hours immediately after the shooting spree. “No word, for hours on end,” writes Cullen. Day stretched into night. The wife of the murdered teacher couldn’t sleep, still not knowing if her husband was dead or alive. She curled up with a pair of his socks.
The father of one murdered boy had his son’s death confirmed the next morning, flipping through a Denver newspaper. He stopped when he saw a half-page aerial photo of his son’s body stretched out on a sidewalk, next to a large pool of blood.
Fog of catastrophe
Chaos and confusion are partially to blame for the stonewalling and lack of cooperation that often confronts survivors and families of victims after a fatality — especially a large-scale catastrophe. At Columbine High, law enforcement officials had no clue how many perpetrators there might have been. A conspiracy was suspected due to scale of the attack. School officials needed a day to confirm how many of Columbine’s 2,000 students were safe, where they were, how many had been sent to hospitals.
“I knew Cassie was in there (the high school) somewhere,” said her father. “It was terrible to know she was on the other side of the fence and there was nothing we could do.”
“Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died,” writes Cullen.
The official Jefferson County (Jeffco) Sheriff Department’s report had been promised in the summer of 1999, but as the first anniversary (April 20, 2000) approached county officials said the report still had six to eight weeks to go.
“Investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information,” writes Cullen. Finally, two families filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately. They asked for videos made by the two killers, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. The father of one of the families who filed wanted to compare the raw data with the written report. “They lie as a practice,” he said.
“Treated like dirt”
That’s what Ron Hayes discovered, too. “There was no help or justice for Pat. OSHA treated us like we were dirt,” Hayes told a Senate Labor Committee hearing in April, 2008. “Losing a loved one on the job is very difficult to deal with but when the very agency that is supposed to protect them, fails in correcting, investigating and prosecuting the company that killed your loved one, it is even harder to bare.”
A district judge in Colorado approved the request of the two Columbine families. Days later, the judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. What emerged was about seven hundred pages of who, what, where, when and how information. “The logistics were useful, but hardly what people had been waiting for,” writes Cullen. The essential question of why had been ducked.
Victims and their families are often kept in the dark, and the truth suppressed, out of fear of lawsuits. Columbine was no exception. The sheriff’s report described a complaint that had been filed 13 months before the shooting by a family whose son was the subject of death threats from one of the killers. Ten pages of annihilation rants from the same murderer’s web site had been obtained. The report spent one paragraph summarizing these warnings and two defending police actions, or inaction.
“The department claimed it had been unable to access one of the killer’s web site, despite the fact that officials had printed pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found,” writes Cullen.
“Just heartbroken”
After an OSHA investigation into Pat’s death, agency investigators determined that his employer, Showell Farms, was guilty of six willful safety violations and recommended that the company pay more than $500,000 in fines. But OSHA's area director later reduced the fine to $42,000, citing a lack of clarity about whether OSHA's standards applied.
Ron Hayes and his family learned of the reduced fines and citations from a local news broadcast — despite repeated requests to OSHA for information. "When I saw it on TV that day," he recalled in article in Mother Jones magazine, "I was just heartbroken."
At last year’s Senate hearing Hayes testified, “These cases fall by the wayside and no one seems to care, except for the family.”
Misery at the church
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., discovered this firsthand when he and three other senators visited with the families of 12 coal miners killed in the January 2, 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. These families had been pained beyond the pale by a horrible communication breakdown. Gathered at the Sago Baptist Church, they first received word through widespread press announcements that 12 survivors were found and only one had died. Families ran outside, celebrating a “miracle.” Hours later completely contradictary and correct reports arrived. Only one miner survived while the other 12 had perished.
Kennedy said he was troubled to hear the families had not yet been involved in the accident investigation. He urged state and federal investigators to take time to talk to the relatives, who he said are extremely knowledgeable about the industry.
Congress jumps in
Earlier this year the “Protecting America’s Workers Act” was introduced in the U.S. House a Representatives. Among the bill’s provisions: a series of legal rights to allow “workers and their families to hold dangerous employers accountable,” according the language of the legislation.
These rights include:
● Workers and employee representatives have the right to contest OSHA’s failure to issue citations, classification of its citations, and proposed penalties.
● Injured workers, their families and families of workers who died in work-related incidents have the right to meet with investigators, receive copies of citations, and to have an opportunity to make a statement before any settlement negotiations.
● Any worker or their representative can object to a modification or withdrawal of a citation, and this entitles them to a hearing before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
You can argue whether these rights go too far, and Congress will. But it’s time, past time, to stop callous treatment of victims and their families and bring them in from the dark. They need to be engaged, not ignored.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
I’m reading the new book, “Columbine,” (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009) and I can’t get Ron Hayes out of my head. Ron, from Fairhope, Alabama near Mobile, has been raising hell as a worker safety and victims’ rights activist since 1993, when his 19-year-old son Pat was killed on the job. Pat was "walking down the corn" — scraping the inside walls of a grain bin in Florida. As Pat knocked down the corn, 60 tons of it collapsed in a rush, suffocating him to death.
In “Columbine,” author Dave Cullen describes how the families of the 12 dead students, one dead teacher, and the 24 injured were misled and mistreated by public officials. Ron knows that pain.
Panicked parents of Columbine students frantically tried to learn the fate of their kids in the hours immediately after the shooting spree. “No word, for hours on end,” writes Cullen. Day stretched into night. The wife of the murdered teacher couldn’t sleep, still not knowing if her husband was dead or alive. She curled up with a pair of his socks.
The father of one murdered boy had his son’s death confirmed the next morning, flipping through a Denver newspaper. He stopped when he saw a half-page aerial photo of his son’s body stretched out on a sidewalk, next to a large pool of blood.
Fog of catastrophe
Chaos and confusion are partially to blame for the stonewalling and lack of cooperation that often confronts survivors and families of victims after a fatality — especially a large-scale catastrophe. At Columbine High, law enforcement officials had no clue how many perpetrators there might have been. A conspiracy was suspected due to scale of the attack. School officials needed a day to confirm how many of Columbine’s 2,000 students were safe, where they were, how many had been sent to hospitals.
“I knew Cassie was in there (the high school) somewhere,” said her father. “It was terrible to know she was on the other side of the fence and there was nothing we could do.”
“Most of the parents were desperate to learn how their child had died,” writes Cullen.
The official Jefferson County (Jeffco) Sheriff Department’s report had been promised in the summer of 1999, but as the first anniversary (April 20, 2000) approached county officials said the report still had six to eight weeks to go.
“Investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information,” writes Cullen. Finally, two families filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately. They asked for videos made by the two killers, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. The father of one of the families who filed wanted to compare the raw data with the written report. “They lie as a practice,” he said.
“Treated like dirt”
That’s what Ron Hayes discovered, too. “There was no help or justice for Pat. OSHA treated us like we were dirt,” Hayes told a Senate Labor Committee hearing in April, 2008. “Losing a loved one on the job is very difficult to deal with but when the very agency that is supposed to protect them, fails in correcting, investigating and prosecuting the company that killed your loved one, it is even harder to bare.”
A district judge in Colorado approved the request of the two Columbine families. Days later, the judge ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. What emerged was about seven hundred pages of who, what, where, when and how information. “The logistics were useful, but hardly what people had been waiting for,” writes Cullen. The essential question of why had been ducked.
Victims and their families are often kept in the dark, and the truth suppressed, out of fear of lawsuits. Columbine was no exception. The sheriff’s report described a complaint that had been filed 13 months before the shooting by a family whose son was the subject of death threats from one of the killers. Ten pages of annihilation rants from the same murderer’s web site had been obtained. The report spent one paragraph summarizing these warnings and two defending police actions, or inaction.
“The department claimed it had been unable to access one of the killer’s web site, despite the fact that officials had printed pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found,” writes Cullen.
“Just heartbroken”
After an OSHA investigation into Pat’s death, agency investigators determined that his employer, Showell Farms, was guilty of six willful safety violations and recommended that the company pay more than $500,000 in fines. But OSHA's area director later reduced the fine to $42,000, citing a lack of clarity about whether OSHA's standards applied.
Ron Hayes and his family learned of the reduced fines and citations from a local news broadcast — despite repeated requests to OSHA for information. "When I saw it on TV that day," he recalled in article in Mother Jones magazine, "I was just heartbroken."
At last year’s Senate hearing Hayes testified, “These cases fall by the wayside and no one seems to care, except for the family.”
Misery at the church
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., discovered this firsthand when he and three other senators visited with the families of 12 coal miners killed in the January 2, 2006 explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. These families had been pained beyond the pale by a horrible communication breakdown. Gathered at the Sago Baptist Church, they first received word through widespread press announcements that 12 survivors were found and only one had died. Families ran outside, celebrating a “miracle.” Hours later completely contradictary and correct reports arrived. Only one miner survived while the other 12 had perished.
Kennedy said he was troubled to hear the families had not yet been involved in the accident investigation. He urged state and federal investigators to take time to talk to the relatives, who he said are extremely knowledgeable about the industry.
Congress jumps in
Earlier this year the “Protecting America’s Workers Act” was introduced in the U.S. House a Representatives. Among the bill’s provisions: a series of legal rights to allow “workers and their families to hold dangerous employers accountable,” according the language of the legislation.
These rights include:
● Workers and employee representatives have the right to contest OSHA’s failure to issue citations, classification of its citations, and proposed penalties.
● Injured workers, their families and families of workers who died in work-related incidents have the right to meet with investigators, receive copies of citations, and to have an opportunity to make a statement before any settlement negotiations.
● Any worker or their representative can object to a modification or withdrawal of a citation, and this entitles them to a hearing before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
You can argue whether these rights go too far, and Congress will. But it’s time, past time, to stop callous treatment of victims and their families and bring them in from the dark. They need to be engaged, not ignored.
By Dave Johnson, Editor
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
The Vision Thing
Are your goals shared by others?
Two weeks ago we emailed scores of EHS experts asking: What are the big stories shaping the EHS world today? Our analysis of nearly three dozen responses will be the cover story of ISHN's October issue.
But we received one response that deserves to be singled out.
"Where are the BIG IDEAS and the vision and determination to make them happen?" asked Frank White, former MSHA and OSHA official, now senior vice president for ORC Worldwide.
Here is White's assessment: The business community is content in the post-regulatory era. Unions are just trying to survive. OSHA standards-setting? "Fuggetaboutit." And the EHS profession, broadly defined, "is focused on (some would say obsessed with) just retaining some discrete identity and preventing cataclysmic future membership loss in an outsourcing, off-shoring competitive corporate environment."
"This guy is deep," wrote one EHS veteran, applauding his insights that identify "the quagmire we call the profession. I agree with Frank 100 percent…we’re in deep ‘do – do’ in the not to distant future!"
"He reflected a lot of the feeling throughout the safety and health community about the lack of leadership," said another respondent.
To be sure, not everyone agrees. "I just shake my head at the fact that many of us continue to link safety and its future existence to OSHA," said a long-time safety pro and ASSE officer. "In the 'post regulatory era' we just seem to be in despair. I am not in despair. I believe we have a great future but we have to get serious about determining how to best move forward."
Calling Dr. Howard
White, an extremely well-connected Washington insider, does see a bright spot — NIOSH. Yes, the little institute that Congress created 35 years ago and promptly forgot about. (Except for NIOSH patron Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) who has faithfully funneled millions into its Morgantown, W.Va., facilities.)
"With strong, creative leadership by Linda Rosenstock and now John Howard over the last decade plus, NIOSH has moved into the forefront as the new leading national voice of safety and health," said White.
"With leadership in areas like nanotechnology and control banding, NIOSH has emerged as an institution that recognizes the importance of becoming involved in the global arena and identifying future trends," he wrote.
John Howard took over as director of NIOSH on July 15, 2002, and it can certainly be argued that no one has the credentials and resume to lead the EHS field that Dr. Howard possesses. An impressive string of letters follow his name: M.D., M.P.H., J.D., LL.M. Dr. Howard headed Cal/OSHA from 1991 to 2002. He's also been a professor of environment and occupational medicine, medical director of an AIDS prevention clinic, and worked closely with asbestos-exposed shipyard workers.
And he does articulate a vision. Consider these comments from the past four years:
• "It is no longer enough for us to say that our job is to ensure that workers go home from work as healthy as they came to work. We need to ensure that workers return to work the next day as safe and healthy as they can be."
• "Ensuring total workforce health… has to become as important a goal of occupational safety and health programs as health protection against workplace risks currently is…"
• "Work organization needs to be promoted as a cohesive field of study"… because an employee's physical and psychological stability in the midst of radical organization pressures "is critical to his or her survival as a human being."
• "Occupational genomics should become a field of interest for every occupational safety and health professional."
• "For too long, we've paid scant attention to the threat that communicable diseases pose to workers and workplace productivity."
• "It has become inescapable that business workplaces are indeed at risk of terrorist workplace violence."
Can you think of anyone in the EHS field who speaks with this kind of humane passion and conviction about a breadth of subjects ranging from occupational genomics and communicable diseases to terrorism and an employee's physical and psychological stability?
Many people in safety and health emphasize goals and outcomes, but only Dr. Howard describes "a holism where work is self-defining in the most enhancing way possible, where a worker can enjoy any retirement years with intact health, and where health-enhancing behaviors are valued and promoted in the workplace along with safety and health protection."
And one of our EHS experts thinks Frank White is deep…
Howard Gardner’s “Leading Minds”
Dr. Howard has leadership qualities, a vision, but is anyone listening? The central thesis of Howard Gardner's "Leading Minds" (Basic Books, 1995) is that leaders must have a story to relate, and an audience ready to hear it, if they are to succeed.
Dr. Howard has a story — a central theme or message delivered with knowledge and conviction. But as Gardner writes, a leader's ability to persuade and be effective depends on fit. The message must make sense to audience members, in terms of where they have been and where they want to go, he writes.
Many employers, employees, and EHS pros and organizations listening to Dr. Howard's message don't want to go there. Few businesses put the "psychological stability" of employees high on their "to do" lists. Nor are most interested in the off-hours lifestyle behaviors of their employees. Many employees don't want bosses nosing around those behaviors, anyway. And there are not enough hours in the day for most overworked EHS pros to take up the study of work organization and occupational genomics.
Complacency is the biggest challenge EHS leaders like Dr. Howard face today.
Workplace injury and illness "outcomes" are at record low levels. Most employers are satisfied with the current performance and scope of their safety and health programs.
Most employees are complacent about their own health (how many of us go for annual physicals?) and their own safety (Violent crime and natural disasters worry most workers more than unintentional injuries on and off the job, according to a National Safety Council survey. But as the NSC points out, violent crimes and natural disasters are far less common.)
Dr. Howard is a leader with "big ideas." But in contrast to EHS's golden age of expansive thinking — the 1970s and early '80s when most current standards and policies were set — in 2006 "big ideas" don't have a big following. They are too costly. Or anti-competitive. Or what's their ROI?
One example: EHS performance metrics. Everyone in the EHS professional world understands the shortcomings of OSHA's after-the-fact injury and illness records. "Dashboards" of leading, lagging, and financial metrics have been proposed for years now. But with the exception of some leading corporations that use leading indicators, industry has learned to live with the OSHA numbers and doesn't want to change recordkeeping practices.
It's tough to lead — in EHS or any field — with vision and big ideas when your followers see no compelling reason or need to think or act differently.
Two weeks ago we emailed scores of EHS experts asking: What are the big stories shaping the EHS world today? Our analysis of nearly three dozen responses will be the cover story of ISHN's October issue.
But we received one response that deserves to be singled out.
"Where are the BIG IDEAS and the vision and determination to make them happen?" asked Frank White, former MSHA and OSHA official, now senior vice president for ORC Worldwide.
Here is White's assessment: The business community is content in the post-regulatory era. Unions are just trying to survive. OSHA standards-setting? "Fuggetaboutit." And the EHS profession, broadly defined, "is focused on (some would say obsessed with) just retaining some discrete identity and preventing cataclysmic future membership loss in an outsourcing, off-shoring competitive corporate environment."
"This guy is deep," wrote one EHS veteran, applauding his insights that identify "the quagmire we call the profession. I agree with Frank 100 percent…we’re in deep ‘do – do’ in the not to distant future!"
"He reflected a lot of the feeling throughout the safety and health community about the lack of leadership," said another respondent.
To be sure, not everyone agrees. "I just shake my head at the fact that many of us continue to link safety and its future existence to OSHA," said a long-time safety pro and ASSE officer. "In the 'post regulatory era' we just seem to be in despair. I am not in despair. I believe we have a great future but we have to get serious about determining how to best move forward."
Calling Dr. Howard
White, an extremely well-connected Washington insider, does see a bright spot — NIOSH. Yes, the little institute that Congress created 35 years ago and promptly forgot about. (Except for NIOSH patron Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) who has faithfully funneled millions into its Morgantown, W.Va., facilities.)
"With strong, creative leadership by Linda Rosenstock and now John Howard over the last decade plus, NIOSH has moved into the forefront as the new leading national voice of safety and health," said White.
"With leadership in areas like nanotechnology and control banding, NIOSH has emerged as an institution that recognizes the importance of becoming involved in the global arena and identifying future trends," he wrote.
John Howard took over as director of NIOSH on July 15, 2002, and it can certainly be argued that no one has the credentials and resume to lead the EHS field that Dr. Howard possesses. An impressive string of letters follow his name: M.D., M.P.H., J.D., LL.M. Dr. Howard headed Cal/OSHA from 1991 to 2002. He's also been a professor of environment and occupational medicine, medical director of an AIDS prevention clinic, and worked closely with asbestos-exposed shipyard workers.
And he does articulate a vision. Consider these comments from the past four years:
• "It is no longer enough for us to say that our job is to ensure that workers go home from work as healthy as they came to work. We need to ensure that workers return to work the next day as safe and healthy as they can be."
• "Ensuring total workforce health… has to become as important a goal of occupational safety and health programs as health protection against workplace risks currently is…"
• "Work organization needs to be promoted as a cohesive field of study"… because an employee's physical and psychological stability in the midst of radical organization pressures "is critical to his or her survival as a human being."
• "Occupational genomics should become a field of interest for every occupational safety and health professional."
• "For too long, we've paid scant attention to the threat that communicable diseases pose to workers and workplace productivity."
• "It has become inescapable that business workplaces are indeed at risk of terrorist workplace violence."
Can you think of anyone in the EHS field who speaks with this kind of humane passion and conviction about a breadth of subjects ranging from occupational genomics and communicable diseases to terrorism and an employee's physical and psychological stability?
Many people in safety and health emphasize goals and outcomes, but only Dr. Howard describes "a holism where work is self-defining in the most enhancing way possible, where a worker can enjoy any retirement years with intact health, and where health-enhancing behaviors are valued and promoted in the workplace along with safety and health protection."
And one of our EHS experts thinks Frank White is deep…
Howard Gardner’s “Leading Minds”
Dr. Howard has leadership qualities, a vision, but is anyone listening? The central thesis of Howard Gardner's "Leading Minds" (Basic Books, 1995) is that leaders must have a story to relate, and an audience ready to hear it, if they are to succeed.
Dr. Howard has a story — a central theme or message delivered with knowledge and conviction. But as Gardner writes, a leader's ability to persuade and be effective depends on fit. The message must make sense to audience members, in terms of where they have been and where they want to go, he writes.
Many employers, employees, and EHS pros and organizations listening to Dr. Howard's message don't want to go there. Few businesses put the "psychological stability" of employees high on their "to do" lists. Nor are most interested in the off-hours lifestyle behaviors of their employees. Many employees don't want bosses nosing around those behaviors, anyway. And there are not enough hours in the day for most overworked EHS pros to take up the study of work organization and occupational genomics.
Complacency is the biggest challenge EHS leaders like Dr. Howard face today.
Workplace injury and illness "outcomes" are at record low levels. Most employers are satisfied with the current performance and scope of their safety and health programs.
Most employees are complacent about their own health (how many of us go for annual physicals?) and their own safety (Violent crime and natural disasters worry most workers more than unintentional injuries on and off the job, according to a National Safety Council survey. But as the NSC points out, violent crimes and natural disasters are far less common.)
Dr. Howard is a leader with "big ideas." But in contrast to EHS's golden age of expansive thinking — the 1970s and early '80s when most current standards and policies were set — in 2006 "big ideas" don't have a big following. They are too costly. Or anti-competitive. Or what's their ROI?
One example: EHS performance metrics. Everyone in the EHS professional world understands the shortcomings of OSHA's after-the-fact injury and illness records. "Dashboards" of leading, lagging, and financial metrics have been proposed for years now. But with the exception of some leading corporations that use leading indicators, industry has learned to live with the OSHA numbers and doesn't want to change recordkeeping practices.
It's tough to lead — in EHS or any field — with vision and big ideas when your followers see no compelling reason or need to think or act differently.
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