regulatory agenda, released yesterday, is on taking care of rulemaking initiatives that are old and in the way, causing gridlock and preventing OSHA from beginning to track bigger and more controversial regulatory game.
This strategy makes senses both administratively and politically. Agenda items such as crane and derrick safety; exposures to silica, beryllium, and methyline chloride; walking/working surfaces; and electrical power transmission safety have stagnated in the standards-setting office for years and must be dealt with.
Taking care of this kind of administrative housekeeping also gives the new OSHA chief, Dr. David Michaels, and his leadership team breathing room to carefully consider how to address politically hot issues such as ergonomics, updating hundreds of permissible exposure limits (PELs), and setting basic mandates for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
Both Barab and his boss, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, repeatedly asserted in live chat webinars yesterday that OSHA has not current plans for having another go at setting an ergo standard. This is a retreat from Barab’s bold comment made earlier this year at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ meeting that it’s time for OSHA to pick up the political football that is ergonomics and run with it, resistance be damned.
Meanwhile, there was no mention on the reg agenda of workplace injury and illness prevention program requirements, one of Dr. Michaels’s stated priorities for OSHA. It’s simply too early in the Obama era at OSHA to take on that comprehensive issue, sure to impact small businesses and cause a political firestorm.
The same goes for updating the PELs. “While the agency has not made a determination about how to proceed at this time, we continue to look at strategies that protect workers from chemical hazards,” was as close as Barab came yesterday to touching the legal complications of justifying new PELs.
“These are very important and complex issues,” said Barab, referring to ergonomics, injury/illness prevention plans, and updating PELs. And he left it at that.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
OSHA will accomplish little without Obama’s reelection
We’re not even out of 2009, so no one is in the mood to start thinking about another long, drawn-out, media-saturated presidential election battle in 2012. At least outside of Washington. Campaign consultants, party leaders and Potomac Fever gossipers are always on to the next race. It’s the habitual pastime in the nation’s capital.
But if you study the OSHA regulatory agenda issued yesterday by the Department of Labor, two political facts of life strike you. One, even when an administration actually has the will to set new standards, as this one does, it still takes years to grind through the process of small business impact studies, stakeholder meetings, comment periods, public hearings, advance notices, proposals, risk assessments, revisions, more in-house soul-searching and public outreach, and trying to get the Office of Management and Budget and the DOL front office to sign off on a new rule.
Two, due to this grind ‘em out process, it requires two presidential terms, eight years, for an OSHA team (like the present one) that actually wants to be innovative and ambitious to have any chance at achieving even some of its goals.
When you see how relatively innocuous standards proposals such as walking/working surfaces, electrical power transmission safety, and crane and derrick safety have been reprinted for years in the regulatory calendar, you begin to grasp the enormity of the resources and resolve necessary to drive through rules on ergonomics, updating permissible exposure limits, and setting baseline requirements for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
To be sure, in Washington agencies can always ram through standards at the midnight hour of an expiring administration, as OSHA did in 2000 with the ergo rule and in 1980 before the Reagan administration took control. But not to any lasting effect. The new powers quickly rescind the old orders, as the Bush administration did with the ergo rule months after taking office (with the help of Congress).
It’s no surprise that ergonomics, workplace safety programs, and updating PELs were not listed on the first regulatory calendar published by the Obama Labor Department. Why borrow trouble before you even know how you want to proceed? OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels has just been sworn in. Give him a year to put together a strategy for addressing the Big Three regulatory issues.
Even when they make their initial appearance on the reg calendar, it’s only the start of the long grind toward final standards. That journey through a battlefield of political action ambushes and counterattacks will take oh, perhaps a half-dozen years. And that’s for maybe one of the Big Three to actually become a final rule.
Without a second Obama term, these key OSHA issues will receive all sorts of attention, but not enough traction.
But if you study the OSHA regulatory agenda issued yesterday by the Department of Labor, two political facts of life strike you. One, even when an administration actually has the will to set new standards, as this one does, it still takes years to grind through the process of small business impact studies, stakeholder meetings, comment periods, public hearings, advance notices, proposals, risk assessments, revisions, more in-house soul-searching and public outreach, and trying to get the Office of Management and Budget and the DOL front office to sign off on a new rule.
Two, due to this grind ‘em out process, it requires two presidential terms, eight years, for an OSHA team (like the present one) that actually wants to be innovative and ambitious to have any chance at achieving even some of its goals.
When you see how relatively innocuous standards proposals such as walking/working surfaces, electrical power transmission safety, and crane and derrick safety have been reprinted for years in the regulatory calendar, you begin to grasp the enormity of the resources and resolve necessary to drive through rules on ergonomics, updating permissible exposure limits, and setting baseline requirements for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
To be sure, in Washington agencies can always ram through standards at the midnight hour of an expiring administration, as OSHA did in 2000 with the ergo rule and in 1980 before the Reagan administration took control. But not to any lasting effect. The new powers quickly rescind the old orders, as the Bush administration did with the ergo rule months after taking office (with the help of Congress).
It’s no surprise that ergonomics, workplace safety programs, and updating PELs were not listed on the first regulatory calendar published by the Obama Labor Department. Why borrow trouble before you even know how you want to proceed? OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels has just been sworn in. Give him a year to put together a strategy for addressing the Big Three regulatory issues.
Even when they make their initial appearance on the reg calendar, it’s only the start of the long grind toward final standards. That journey through a battlefield of political action ambushes and counterattacks will take oh, perhaps a half-dozen years. And that’s for maybe one of the Big Three to actually become a final rule.
Without a second Obama term, these key OSHA issues will receive all sorts of attention, but not enough traction.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The world's largest safety tailgate party
Last week in Dusseldorf, Germany the world’s largest safety tailgating party was held.
Well, not exactly.
Officially, the event is known as A+A 2009, International Trade Fair for Safety, Security and Health at Work, organized by the German firm Messe Düsseldorf.
But to this American visitor, unaccustomed to the culture of German trade fairs, it seemed like a sprawling party. Part rock concert, part fashion show, part Manhattan boulevard crowd crossing at rush hour. Most men visited A+A wearing suits and ties; most women wore black skirts, black tops, black boots and stockings. Dusseldorf is Germany’s fashion capital, and nearly everyone, everywhere wears black. Very few jeans and windbreakers were seen at A+A.
Beer, only the German variety of course, flowed from most every booth, or so it seemed. And the accommodating bartenders and hostesses would keep refilling your tall, thin beer glass until you threw your hands up and said, “No more.” Many also offered expresso bars. Wines and spirits. Sandwiches.
Fashion shows were held throughout the show days on a carpeted catwalk, with sleek Euro chic models sporting the latest in waterproof yellow, red, and orange hi-viz jackets and trousers. Three rows of seats surrounded the catwalk, occupied by serious men and women dressed in black, legs crossed, arms folded across their chests, as though they were judges. Behind the seats stood attendees, three or four rows deep. Eight to twelve male and female twentysomething models danced, marched, clapped and posed to pounding electronic beats, wearing wool knit caps, rainwear, silver and blue skin-tight body suits, and the bulky outerwear. One break dancing model, doing hand stands and back flips in turnout gear, brought the loudest applause from the audience of several hundred.
Europeans have a more nonchalant attitude toward matters of sex, and throughout the exhibits nude mannequins, some flesh colored, others silver metallic and Terminator-like, wore only fall protection harnesses, long-sleeve synthetic gloves, or a hi-viz jacket top.
Electronic synthesized dance music, and Michael Jackson beats, pumped from the PA systems of many booths, often made conversation difficult. Exhibit space often seemed quadruple the size of what you would see at a U.S. workplace safety and health show. Many had white bar stools and pedestal tables to seat up to 50 visitors. I counted more than 100 sales reps and guests packed into the Sperian booth.
Vendor signs often took on proportions of highway billboards. One featured three young women wearing ripped jeans and tank tops, and two young men in tee-shirts and jeans, straight out of a Gap or Urban Outfitters catalog. What were they selling? Safety shoes.
CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?
For four days, 55,800 visitors — up from 55,200 in 2007 — packed the narrow aisles of nine exhibit halls.
Recession, what recession?
Pump in the loud, thick disco-like music beats, mix in thousands of animated sales conversations in any number of tongues, fuel the exchanges with dark beer or extremely strong German coffee, put all this against a backdrop of vendor signage right out of Times Square, and A+A 2009 had the throbbing, pulsating feel of a long and winding party snaking across acres and acres of exhibit space. A record-setting 1,541 exhibitors came from 62 nations.
Don’t be fooled by the party atmosphere, though. It does nothing to distract vendors from serious negotiations. So what if beer kegs are tapped and the drinking starts by ten a.m.? For all the thousands and thousands of safety and health officers visiting, there is little good old American “tire-kicking” going on, with attendees filling their bags with stress balls, pens, kewpie dolls and magnets.
Of the exhibitors, 538 were German and 238 were Chinese. Germans and Chinese are not big on small talk. Most likely you won’t be handed a business card from one of their sales reps until you’ve been sized up for your buying intentions. Visitors ready to do business are often whisked upstairs to the second floor of many booths, which is often laid out like a restaurant with round or square tables, usually minimalist white, and four seats to a table. Here you find mostly men hunched over or huddled together, empty beer bottles on the tables, engrossed in poker-faced deal-making.
“Generally German trade shows are conducted in a more formal matter than in the United States,” says a Messe Dusseldorf brochure on the country’s business customs and practices. The one downside for U.S. safety and health pros accustomed to business casual: “Khakis and golf shirts are generally too informal for shows in Europe.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The directness of foreign sales reps at a booth can be another culture shock. “Take the direct approach and ask if your booth visitor makes the purchasing decisions,” advises the customs brochure. “In negotiating, Germans tend to start with something close to what they expect to receive in the end. A supplier who asks for much more than they agree to in the end lacks credibility in the eyes of the Germans.”
I got a taste of this visiting the China Pavilion, jam-packed with 10-foot by 10-foot stalls. In one stall, machinery noisily churned out terrycloth gloves. With no machine guarding that I could see. Xinghua Niu, president of Shandong Best Serve Safety Shoe, Ltd., invited me to sit down in his cramped stall. A week earlier he had exhibited at the National Safety Congress and Expo in Orlando, Fla. “U.S. financial crisis hurt very much,” he said through a young woman translator. “Attendance very low.” I asked about the Chinese domestic market for safety goods. It is slowly developing, he explained, as new safety laws come on the books. “People will learn and grow and do better,” he said. He asked if I was a supplier or buyer of safety shoes. I explained I was a magazine editor. Xinghua Niu smiled and replied, “Maybe you introduce me to major. U.S. brands to manufacture for them?”
“I’m no here,” said an Asian munching on sausage and sitting at a table at the booth for the 5th China International Occupational Safety and Health Exhibition. I moved on to the KCL hand protection exhibit featuring two glassed-encased displays of miniature railroad villages, incredibly detailed down to the moving construction cranes, tiny flashing blue welding light, a machine shop, a jet wing assembly operation, a twirling cement truck, and five miniature workers eating lunch at a picnic table, with what looked like the ubiquitous green beer bottles. The only glitch: the machines appeared unguarded and many of the workers were without hard hats and gloves.
A+A 2009, as with all A+A shows (which are held in Dusseldorf every other year), has an unmistakable consumer feel to it. You see it in the names of companies and brands: Rock Star shoes, Mad Dog safety boots and shoes, Job Man, Orbit International, Otter Premium sport footwear, Puma, Dickies, W.L. Gore, Goodyear, Myrtle Beach ball caps, James & Nicholson long and short sleeved dress shirts.
A CONSUMER VIBE
What Germans call “wire and tube” booths largely present consumer designs, signage and entertainment. Halls 3 to 5 and 9 to 10 were reserved for PPE, “corporate fashion” and “safe appliances.” Fire protection, enviro protection, and “measurement and control technology” were pooled in Hall 6. Special exhibits focused on the “Success Factor Office” (something is lost in translation here) and the “Innovation Park Hazardous Substances” (innovative hazardous substances?)
At one booth a bartender mixes vodka and OJ. Another has large photographs of white polar bears wearing insulated black work boots from Sweden. At the corner of one exhibit stands a mannequin wearing a black doo-rag, a double-breasted black-buttoned white top with stiff black and white striped cuffs and upturned collar, and black and white striped pajama bottoms, No shoes, gloves or goggles. One booth has 20 U-shaped black leather chairs for comfortable negotiations. Another is dwarfed by an actual red and black multi-ton trash truck, slightly tilted to one side on a bed of real rocks and gravel, with four-foot diameter tires. The theme? “Power to keep you fit.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you turn a corner and there stands a statuesque blond ponytailed female DJ up on a blue stage-lit carpeted platform with speaker amps, turntables, a Mac laptop and a mixing board. Wearing tight black jeans, the black boots with four-inch heels you see women wearing everywhere in Dusseldorf, a tight gray tank top and head phones draped around her neck, the DJ smiles and sways to disco beats. Next to her stand two technicians working a concert-size mixing board, and next to them, what else, a keg with a tap.
Germany and China were the two leading countries for number of exhibitors. Asia was well-represented with 62 exhibitors from India, 42 from Pakistan, 35 from Taiwan, 25 from South Korea, and 20 from Hong Kong. Eleven of the 37 U.S. exhibitors were grouped under the North American Pavilion banner. The North American hostesses seemed prudish in comparison to their international counterparts, offering coffee and Coca-Cola from a countertop.
OSH GEOPOLITICS
Far from the maddening din of the exhibit halls, at the south end of the Messe Dusseldorf “Kompound,” was the A+A 31st International Congress for Occupational Safety and Health. Here, in a dimly-lit room where attendees sat at long rows of white tables, many wearing headphones listening to translations emanating from a glass-enclosed booth with twelve translators at the back of the room, proceedings took on the air of a United Nations meeting. In fact, the accompanying conference of the International Labour Office (ILO), which is a sub-organization of the UN, had more than 300 delegates from almost 60 countries. The mood was somber and subdued. Several hundred attendees listened on Thursday afternoon to a series of short speeches all emphasizing the significance of the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work.
Crafted in 2008 in Seoul, South Korea at a world conference organized by the ILO, the International Social Security Association, and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the declaration states that promoting high levels of safety and health at work is the responsibility of society as a whole, calls for a national preventive safety and health culture, and emphasizes that continuous improvement of occupational safety and health (OSH) should be promoted by a systems approach to the management of OSH.
Culture. Management systems. Continuous improvement. Sound familiar?
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
The themes of the A+A Congress, attended by 5,000 registrants, could have come straight out of the National Safety Council’s Orlando meeting this year, or the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s 2009 meetings: “Economic Crisis and Safety and Health at Work;” “Safety and Health as Core Elements of Sustainable Corporate Action;” “No Compromise in Times of Crisis;” and “New OSH Culture and Strategies to Claim the Right to a Safe and Healthful Workplace in Times of Global Financial Crisis.”
Birgit Horn, the 36-year-old new project director of A+A 2009, spoke the universal language of safety when asked in an interview for her first impressions of the OSH industry. “The difference between safety and other industries is the emphasis OSH officers put into it,” she said. “People are really touched by the topic.”
Martin-Ulf Koch, manager of the Messe Dusseldorf press department, which oversaw a thriving press room with 300 reporters and journalists, added: “Safety is a mission for these people.”
“It is a very emotional topic I think,” said Ms. Horn. “It makes you really start to look at work differently.” She went on to say workplaces must change to meet the needs of German workers who are “getting older and older” and putting off retirement. “There is a need to keep strength and posture because we will work longer.”
In the states we call that “battling boomeritis.”
Well, not exactly.
Officially, the event is known as A+A 2009, International Trade Fair for Safety, Security and Health at Work, organized by the German firm Messe Düsseldorf.
But to this American visitor, unaccustomed to the culture of German trade fairs, it seemed like a sprawling party. Part rock concert, part fashion show, part Manhattan boulevard crowd crossing at rush hour. Most men visited A+A wearing suits and ties; most women wore black skirts, black tops, black boots and stockings. Dusseldorf is Germany’s fashion capital, and nearly everyone, everywhere wears black. Very few jeans and windbreakers were seen at A+A.
Beer, only the German variety of course, flowed from most every booth, or so it seemed. And the accommodating bartenders and hostesses would keep refilling your tall, thin beer glass until you threw your hands up and said, “No more.” Many also offered expresso bars. Wines and spirits. Sandwiches.
Fashion shows were held throughout the show days on a carpeted catwalk, with sleek Euro chic models sporting the latest in waterproof yellow, red, and orange hi-viz jackets and trousers. Three rows of seats surrounded the catwalk, occupied by serious men and women dressed in black, legs crossed, arms folded across their chests, as though they were judges. Behind the seats stood attendees, three or four rows deep. Eight to twelve male and female twentysomething models danced, marched, clapped and posed to pounding electronic beats, wearing wool knit caps, rainwear, silver and blue skin-tight body suits, and the bulky outerwear. One break dancing model, doing hand stands and back flips in turnout gear, brought the loudest applause from the audience of several hundred.
Europeans have a more nonchalant attitude toward matters of sex, and throughout the exhibits nude mannequins, some flesh colored, others silver metallic and Terminator-like, wore only fall protection harnesses, long-sleeve synthetic gloves, or a hi-viz jacket top.
Electronic synthesized dance music, and Michael Jackson beats, pumped from the PA systems of many booths, often made conversation difficult. Exhibit space often seemed quadruple the size of what you would see at a U.S. workplace safety and health show. Many had white bar stools and pedestal tables to seat up to 50 visitors. I counted more than 100 sales reps and guests packed into the Sperian booth.
Vendor signs often took on proportions of highway billboards. One featured three young women wearing ripped jeans and tank tops, and two young men in tee-shirts and jeans, straight out of a Gap or Urban Outfitters catalog. What were they selling? Safety shoes.
CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?
For four days, 55,800 visitors — up from 55,200 in 2007 — packed the narrow aisles of nine exhibit halls.
Recession, what recession?
Pump in the loud, thick disco-like music beats, mix in thousands of animated sales conversations in any number of tongues, fuel the exchanges with dark beer or extremely strong German coffee, put all this against a backdrop of vendor signage right out of Times Square, and A+A 2009 had the throbbing, pulsating feel of a long and winding party snaking across acres and acres of exhibit space. A record-setting 1,541 exhibitors came from 62 nations.
Don’t be fooled by the party atmosphere, though. It does nothing to distract vendors from serious negotiations. So what if beer kegs are tapped and the drinking starts by ten a.m.? For all the thousands and thousands of safety and health officers visiting, there is little good old American “tire-kicking” going on, with attendees filling their bags with stress balls, pens, kewpie dolls and magnets.
Of the exhibitors, 538 were German and 238 were Chinese. Germans and Chinese are not big on small talk. Most likely you won’t be handed a business card from one of their sales reps until you’ve been sized up for your buying intentions. Visitors ready to do business are often whisked upstairs to the second floor of many booths, which is often laid out like a restaurant with round or square tables, usually minimalist white, and four seats to a table. Here you find mostly men hunched over or huddled together, empty beer bottles on the tables, engrossed in poker-faced deal-making.
“Generally German trade shows are conducted in a more formal matter than in the United States,” says a Messe Dusseldorf brochure on the country’s business customs and practices. The one downside for U.S. safety and health pros accustomed to business casual: “Khakis and golf shirts are generally too informal for shows in Europe.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The directness of foreign sales reps at a booth can be another culture shock. “Take the direct approach and ask if your booth visitor makes the purchasing decisions,” advises the customs brochure. “In negotiating, Germans tend to start with something close to what they expect to receive in the end. A supplier who asks for much more than they agree to in the end lacks credibility in the eyes of the Germans.”
I got a taste of this visiting the China Pavilion, jam-packed with 10-foot by 10-foot stalls. In one stall, machinery noisily churned out terrycloth gloves. With no machine guarding that I could see. Xinghua Niu, president of Shandong Best Serve Safety Shoe, Ltd., invited me to sit down in his cramped stall. A week earlier he had exhibited at the National Safety Congress and Expo in Orlando, Fla. “U.S. financial crisis hurt very much,” he said through a young woman translator. “Attendance very low.” I asked about the Chinese domestic market for safety goods. It is slowly developing, he explained, as new safety laws come on the books. “People will learn and grow and do better,” he said. He asked if I was a supplier or buyer of safety shoes. I explained I was a magazine editor. Xinghua Niu smiled and replied, “Maybe you introduce me to major. U.S. brands to manufacture for them?”
“I’m no here,” said an Asian munching on sausage and sitting at a table at the booth for the 5th China International Occupational Safety and Health Exhibition. I moved on to the KCL hand protection exhibit featuring two glassed-encased displays of miniature railroad villages, incredibly detailed down to the moving construction cranes, tiny flashing blue welding light, a machine shop, a jet wing assembly operation, a twirling cement truck, and five miniature workers eating lunch at a picnic table, with what looked like the ubiquitous green beer bottles. The only glitch: the machines appeared unguarded and many of the workers were without hard hats and gloves.
A+A 2009, as with all A+A shows (which are held in Dusseldorf every other year), has an unmistakable consumer feel to it. You see it in the names of companies and brands: Rock Star shoes, Mad Dog safety boots and shoes, Job Man, Orbit International, Otter Premium sport footwear, Puma, Dickies, W.L. Gore, Goodyear, Myrtle Beach ball caps, James & Nicholson long and short sleeved dress shirts.
A CONSUMER VIBE
What Germans call “wire and tube” booths largely present consumer designs, signage and entertainment. Halls 3 to 5 and 9 to 10 were reserved for PPE, “corporate fashion” and “safe appliances.” Fire protection, enviro protection, and “measurement and control technology” were pooled in Hall 6. Special exhibits focused on the “Success Factor Office” (something is lost in translation here) and the “Innovation Park Hazardous Substances” (innovative hazardous substances?)
At one booth a bartender mixes vodka and OJ. Another has large photographs of white polar bears wearing insulated black work boots from Sweden. At the corner of one exhibit stands a mannequin wearing a black doo-rag, a double-breasted black-buttoned white top with stiff black and white striped cuffs and upturned collar, and black and white striped pajama bottoms, No shoes, gloves or goggles. One booth has 20 U-shaped black leather chairs for comfortable negotiations. Another is dwarfed by an actual red and black multi-ton trash truck, slightly tilted to one side on a bed of real rocks and gravel, with four-foot diameter tires. The theme? “Power to keep you fit.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you turn a corner and there stands a statuesque blond ponytailed female DJ up on a blue stage-lit carpeted platform with speaker amps, turntables, a Mac laptop and a mixing board. Wearing tight black jeans, the black boots with four-inch heels you see women wearing everywhere in Dusseldorf, a tight gray tank top and head phones draped around her neck, the DJ smiles and sways to disco beats. Next to her stand two technicians working a concert-size mixing board, and next to them, what else, a keg with a tap.
Germany and China were the two leading countries for number of exhibitors. Asia was well-represented with 62 exhibitors from India, 42 from Pakistan, 35 from Taiwan, 25 from South Korea, and 20 from Hong Kong. Eleven of the 37 U.S. exhibitors were grouped under the North American Pavilion banner. The North American hostesses seemed prudish in comparison to their international counterparts, offering coffee and Coca-Cola from a countertop.
OSH GEOPOLITICS
Far from the maddening din of the exhibit halls, at the south end of the Messe Dusseldorf “Kompound,” was the A+A 31st International Congress for Occupational Safety and Health. Here, in a dimly-lit room where attendees sat at long rows of white tables, many wearing headphones listening to translations emanating from a glass-enclosed booth with twelve translators at the back of the room, proceedings took on the air of a United Nations meeting. In fact, the accompanying conference of the International Labour Office (ILO), which is a sub-organization of the UN, had more than 300 delegates from almost 60 countries. The mood was somber and subdued. Several hundred attendees listened on Thursday afternoon to a series of short speeches all emphasizing the significance of the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work.
Crafted in 2008 in Seoul, South Korea at a world conference organized by the ILO, the International Social Security Association, and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the declaration states that promoting high levels of safety and health at work is the responsibility of society as a whole, calls for a national preventive safety and health culture, and emphasizes that continuous improvement of occupational safety and health (OSH) should be promoted by a systems approach to the management of OSH.
Culture. Management systems. Continuous improvement. Sound familiar?
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
The themes of the A+A Congress, attended by 5,000 registrants, could have come straight out of the National Safety Council’s Orlando meeting this year, or the American Society of Safety Engineers and the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s 2009 meetings: “Economic Crisis and Safety and Health at Work;” “Safety and Health as Core Elements of Sustainable Corporate Action;” “No Compromise in Times of Crisis;” and “New OSH Culture and Strategies to Claim the Right to a Safe and Healthful Workplace in Times of Global Financial Crisis.”
Birgit Horn, the 36-year-old new project director of A+A 2009, spoke the universal language of safety when asked in an interview for her first impressions of the OSH industry. “The difference between safety and other industries is the emphasis OSH officers put into it,” she said. “People are really touched by the topic.”
Martin-Ulf Koch, manager of the Messe Dusseldorf press department, which oversaw a thriving press room with 300 reporters and journalists, added: “Safety is a mission for these people.”
“It is a very emotional topic I think,” said Ms. Horn. “It makes you really start to look at work differently.” She went on to say workplaces must change to meet the needs of German workers who are “getting older and older” and putting off retirement. “There is a need to keep strength and posture because we will work longer.”
In the states we call that “battling boomeritis.”
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
The limitations of “safety”
It’s time to expand the profession’s vocabulary
Do you believe the United States is in the midst of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character,” to use the words of pollster John Zogby?
Or are our attitudes and behaviors simply adjusting to this recession, and we’ll revert to our old “orientation,” however you want to interpret that, once this storm passes?
Zogby argues, based on zillions of polls and interviews he has conducted during the past decade, that we are on our way to becoming a society that is “less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
To be sure, changes of all sorts are occurring around us at what seems dizzying speed.
The Big Three U.S. automakers, it’s been said, must fundamentally change how they operate to survive. The banking system is obviously ripe for systemic change. Our foreign policies with numerous countries, particularly in the Middle East and Far East, are under review and subject to new strategies. The same goes for the country’s position on climate change. Our energy consumption must become greener, less oily, according to the White House. The nation’s highways, bridges, tunnels, our concrete and asphalt infrastructure, is in for massive rebuilding. Healthcare coverage, patient safety, pharmaceutical marketing, education, labor laws, the Internet grid, the unemployment safety net are all subject to near-term Washington intervention. Creative destruction is wreaking havoc in mass communications, with newspapers disappearing, network news watched by a dwindling audience, and web sites and Internet feeds increasingly becoming primary news sources.
What about the profession of occupational safety and health?
Current status
Sure, the profession has taken its share of blows in this recession. What job, other than coal miners and debt collectors, hasn’t? Pros with outstanding resumes are out of work. Consultants are scrambling to hold onto clients.
A compliance officer in California emailed me: “In the private sector, most of the big employers have outsourced a lot of the (EHS) work, so there are not many people to lay off anymore. What takes the hit is funding for outside consultants to come in and do ‘preventive maintenance’ type of work. So my impression is that a lot of the PM type monitoring, hazard evaluation, extra training when not legally required, is going to go by the wayside. Emergency situations will be dealt with, but the old list of routine activities is in for a significant reduction.”
Return to old ways?
Sooner (hopefully) or later the country will pull out of this recession. But do you seriously believe “things” — everything from loan policies to energy consumption to news consumption to foreign relations to how companies manage safety and health programs — will all return to their previous “orientation,” to use pollster Zoby’s term?
Cynics, who are never in short supply, will assert yes, old habits run deep. But when talking about the occupational safety and health profession’s future, I say the timing couldn’t be better for a “fundamental reorientation.” In fact, I’ll up the ante and say it is overdue and essential. Not regarding the profession’s character, which will always be grounded in a unique mix of science, passion, empathy, and initiative. What must change is how professionals communicate to the world at large — to management, employees, the media, politicians, the public — all who, let’s be honest, give workplace safety and health little thought unless a crane topples over in Manhattan or a refinery blows in Texas.
Workplace safety and health is too narrowly defined by accidents, incidents, losses, call them what you will, they are negatives. Plus, the word “safety” does not inspire or motivate commitment. “Health” is more readily embraced by society. “Safety” reminds us of school safety patrols, seat belts, NASCAR SAFER Barriers or public safety — policing, firefighting, inspecting restaurants.
The profession, for long-term sustainability’s sake, needs to communicate that it is about more than inspecting, patrolling, policing, putting out fires, and reacting. These characterizations are old school and restraining. I agree with Carl Metzgar, CSP, a longtime safety and loss control consultant in Winston-Salem, N.C., who recently wrote a letter to me (yes, not an email) in which he commented, “Boy, do I hate that misused, misunderstood, meaningless word.”
Carl was referring to the word “safety.”
Good riddance
Let’s get rid of it. No, we can’t do that. It’s in the title of our magazine, of every other similar magazine, just about all the major professional societies, and maybe a hundred thousand business cards.
But we can begin to expand the profession’s vocabulary and self-definition. I offer up the term “risk” as a substitute for “safety” in many instances.
In a paper on reinventing OSHA, Gary Rosenblum, CIH, writes, “The game must be changed, and risk management should be used to do this. Risk management is many things, but focusing on reducing uncertainty and increasing desired outcomes by scientific anticipation and effective flexibility is a big part of it.
“Today businesses are in dire straits and looking to cut costs drastically. It is inevitable that without dramatic change, business will stop investing in safety and health, with the hopes that perhaps the downside won’t be that bad. This is bad risk management. Risk management means protecting assets against loss from an uncertain world by reducing risks wherever they may be.”
Put aside the evidence that financial risk management went out the window in the past ten years. “Risk” resonates and grabs the attention of managers, reporters, consumers, and yes, students considering a career in occupational safety and health.
Its applications are expansive. Think of its association to “enterprise,” “exposure,” “value,” “ethics,” “vulnerability,” “uncertainty,” “liability,” “assets,” “assessments,” “severity,” “outcomes,” “perceptions,” “behavior,” “decision analysis,” “scenario planning,” “investments,” “communication,” “protection,” “security” and “management.”
We’re overdue to bring about an expanded reorientation of how people think about workplace safety, how the profession defines itself, and how it’s understood by those outside the field.
Do you believe the United States is in the midst of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character,” to use the words of pollster John Zogby?
Or are our attitudes and behaviors simply adjusting to this recession, and we’ll revert to our old “orientation,” however you want to interpret that, once this storm passes?
Zogby argues, based on zillions of polls and interviews he has conducted during the past decade, that we are on our way to becoming a society that is “less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
To be sure, changes of all sorts are occurring around us at what seems dizzying speed.
The Big Three U.S. automakers, it’s been said, must fundamentally change how they operate to survive. The banking system is obviously ripe for systemic change. Our foreign policies with numerous countries, particularly in the Middle East and Far East, are under review and subject to new strategies. The same goes for the country’s position on climate change. Our energy consumption must become greener, less oily, according to the White House. The nation’s highways, bridges, tunnels, our concrete and asphalt infrastructure, is in for massive rebuilding. Healthcare coverage, patient safety, pharmaceutical marketing, education, labor laws, the Internet grid, the unemployment safety net are all subject to near-term Washington intervention. Creative destruction is wreaking havoc in mass communications, with newspapers disappearing, network news watched by a dwindling audience, and web sites and Internet feeds increasingly becoming primary news sources.
What about the profession of occupational safety and health?
Current status
Sure, the profession has taken its share of blows in this recession. What job, other than coal miners and debt collectors, hasn’t? Pros with outstanding resumes are out of work. Consultants are scrambling to hold onto clients.
A compliance officer in California emailed me: “In the private sector, most of the big employers have outsourced a lot of the (EHS) work, so there are not many people to lay off anymore. What takes the hit is funding for outside consultants to come in and do ‘preventive maintenance’ type of work. So my impression is that a lot of the PM type monitoring, hazard evaluation, extra training when not legally required, is going to go by the wayside. Emergency situations will be dealt with, but the old list of routine activities is in for a significant reduction.”
Return to old ways?
Sooner (hopefully) or later the country will pull out of this recession. But do you seriously believe “things” — everything from loan policies to energy consumption to news consumption to foreign relations to how companies manage safety and health programs — will all return to their previous “orientation,” to use pollster Zoby’s term?
Cynics, who are never in short supply, will assert yes, old habits run deep. But when talking about the occupational safety and health profession’s future, I say the timing couldn’t be better for a “fundamental reorientation.” In fact, I’ll up the ante and say it is overdue and essential. Not regarding the profession’s character, which will always be grounded in a unique mix of science, passion, empathy, and initiative. What must change is how professionals communicate to the world at large — to management, employees, the media, politicians, the public — all who, let’s be honest, give workplace safety and health little thought unless a crane topples over in Manhattan or a refinery blows in Texas.
Workplace safety and health is too narrowly defined by accidents, incidents, losses, call them what you will, they are negatives. Plus, the word “safety” does not inspire or motivate commitment. “Health” is more readily embraced by society. “Safety” reminds us of school safety patrols, seat belts, NASCAR SAFER Barriers or public safety — policing, firefighting, inspecting restaurants.
The profession, for long-term sustainability’s sake, needs to communicate that it is about more than inspecting, patrolling, policing, putting out fires, and reacting. These characterizations are old school and restraining. I agree with Carl Metzgar, CSP, a longtime safety and loss control consultant in Winston-Salem, N.C., who recently wrote a letter to me (yes, not an email) in which he commented, “Boy, do I hate that misused, misunderstood, meaningless word.”
Carl was referring to the word “safety.”
Good riddance
Let’s get rid of it. No, we can’t do that. It’s in the title of our magazine, of every other similar magazine, just about all the major professional societies, and maybe a hundred thousand business cards.
But we can begin to expand the profession’s vocabulary and self-definition. I offer up the term “risk” as a substitute for “safety” in many instances.
In a paper on reinventing OSHA, Gary Rosenblum, CIH, writes, “The game must be changed, and risk management should be used to do this. Risk management is many things, but focusing on reducing uncertainty and increasing desired outcomes by scientific anticipation and effective flexibility is a big part of it.
“Today businesses are in dire straits and looking to cut costs drastically. It is inevitable that without dramatic change, business will stop investing in safety and health, with the hopes that perhaps the downside won’t be that bad. This is bad risk management. Risk management means protecting assets against loss from an uncertain world by reducing risks wherever they may be.”
Put aside the evidence that financial risk management went out the window in the past ten years. “Risk” resonates and grabs the attention of managers, reporters, consumers, and yes, students considering a career in occupational safety and health.
Its applications are expansive. Think of its association to “enterprise,” “exposure,” “value,” “ethics,” “vulnerability,” “uncertainty,” “liability,” “assets,” “assessments,” “severity,” “outcomes,” “perceptions,” “behavior,” “decision analysis,” “scenario planning,” “investments,” “communication,” “protection,” “security” and “management.”
We’re overdue to bring about an expanded reorientation of how people think about workplace safety, how the profession defines itself, and how it’s understood by those outside the field.
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
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