Cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Last month, the US Dept of Labor (DOL) and MSHA were celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. Their proclamations said:
“…this law represents a watershed moment in the improvement of occupational health and safety in the United States. It was the precursor to the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which created MSHA, and it was the basis of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) of 1970. The Coal Act forever transformed occupational safety and health in the United States.”
Now, I’m reading news story after news story with these same officials asserting the Mine Act is weak and doesn’t provide MSHA the tools it needs to shut down dangerous workplaces. The spin machine is kicking into high gear.
The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. reports that federal inspectors issued closure orders at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine more than 60 times in 2009 and 2010. The mine was repeatedly cited for allowing potentially explosive coal dust to accumulate and for flagrant violations of its very own ventilation plan. (When a mine operator deviates even slightly from its approved plan for ensuring proper airflow in an underground mine, the consequences can be devastating. Sadly, very sadly, that’s likely a contributing factor in Monday’s explosion that killed 25 coal miners and possibly the four workers who have not yet been found.)
Full textThe Workforce Protections Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the Protecting America’s Workers Act of 2009, legislation that would, among other reforms, modernize workplace health and safety penalties. More than a decade ago, I testified at a similar hearing in the House of Representatives on the same subject. The need for stronger OSHA penalties was apparent then, and it is no less apparent today.
The hearing is memorable to me because I testified along with a father whose son was killed on a construction site while working at a summer job between years of college. His son was working on one of the floors of a multi-story building under construction. He was asked to carry some construction materials across the floor of the building from one side to the other. He piled up the materials in his arms with the result that he could not see clearly in front of himself. When he walked across the floor, he stepped into the hole that was the elevator shaft, falling to his death at the bottom. The contractor had not put up a barricade around the hole in the floor, as it was required to do in order to prevent just such accidents.
OSHA has done much good; workplaces are safer than they were at the time that the agency was founded. But one does not have to look very far to find stories like the one told that day at the hearing. Workers continue to be killed and seriously injured in accidents related to OSHA violations.
Full textImagine opening your medicine cabinet, only to find that the warning and information labels on your over-the-counter medications no longer include dosing information. How would you know how much Benadryl to take or how much aspirin to give to your child? A provision in the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s (OSHA) proposed rule modifying its Hazard Communication (HazCom) Standard threatens to deprive U.S. workers of similar safety information—information they depend upon ever day to protect themselves against the hazardous chemicals that they use in the workplace. CPR Board Member Sidney Shapiro and I have prepared testimony for a public hearing OSHA is holding today on the proposed rule, making the case that the provision is unnecessary and that it would likely leave workers more vulnerable to workplace hazards (full HazCom testimony).
As the name suggests OSHA’s HazCom Standard establishes a system for communicating hazards about dangerous chemicals to the workers who use them. The standard requires manufacturers to provide a “Safety Data Sheet” on each chemical they produce that explains what hazards the chemical might pose to human health or safety, and recommends steps that users of the chemical should take to avoid these hazards.
In this regard, these Safety Data Sheets are a lot like the warning and information labels on over-the-counter medication. Just as you might consult the label before taking over-the-counter medication, workers would consult the relevant Safety Data Sheet before using a potentially dangerous chemical so that they know what precautions to take while using the chemical (For more information about the HazCom standard, see here.)
Full textToday the top brass from OSHA opened their doors to the many stakeholders who have something to say about how the agency is doing in its efforts to protect U.S. workers. Of course, they got an earful.
The event marks a new path for OSHA, in that the head of the agency and top career staff took the time to sit face-to-face with occupational health experts, workers, worker representatives, and even the families of victims of workplace accidents, not just the usual cast of characters from the industry lobbying firms.
And it wasn’t just a cattle call. OSHA head David Michaels, Debbie Berkowitz (Chief of Staff), Richard Fairfax (Director of Enforcement), and Dorothy Dougherty (Director of Standards) engaged the speakers in a way that showed they not only cared about what the speakers were saying but are genuinely interested in taking action to protect workers from occupational hazards – hazards we know about as well as emerging hazards.
My testimony, based on our recent report, Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA, can be found here.
Full textCPR today releases the white paper Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA (press release).
The report examines an Occupational Safety and Health Administration where
Today its enforcement staff is stretched thin and the rulemaking staff struggle to produce health and safety standards that can withstand industry legal challenges. In short, OSHA is a picture of regulatory dysfunction.
The new leadership of the agency has
Full text... inherited a resource-starved agency operating under a statute that has been enfeebled by 30 years of troubling appellate court decisions and White House initiatives that substantially increase the time and effort needed to implement a proactive regulatory agenda.
President Obama’s expected State of the Union announcement that he plans to seek a freeze on non-security discretionary spending is an early warning sign that he and his team have decided to play small ball, abandoning the promise of his newly minted transformative presidency. The President’s decision to borrow this shopworn pander from the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations almost certainly means continued, fatal dysfunction for the five agencies that ensure the quality of the air we breathe and the food we eat, the safety of the drugs we take and the consumer products we buy, and the control of toxic chemical exposures in the workplace.
Let’s be clear: those five protector agencies are severely handicapped in their efforts to protect Americans from a variety of hazards because their budgets have been shrinking or staying flat while the challenges they face have grown. In the scale of the things, it wouldn’t take a lot of money to give them the resources they need to protect us from future iterations of the recent spate of regulatory failures – poisonous peanut butter, toxic drywall, lead-laden toys, etc. Mostly, it just takes political will.
Instead, we get a freeze that will do little to trim the budget, and nothing to help the economy – it might even harm it! And to what end? Within the first brief news cycle that contained his announcement, Michael Steel, spokesman for the House Minority Leader John Boehner, compared the freeze to a pie-eating contestant’s promise to go on a diet, perhaps not the warm bipartisan embrace the President’s team had in mind. In the ultimate irony, the total expenditure for all these agencies and the Food and Drug Administration is about $10.3 billion, 50 percent less than the supposedly piddling amount the freeze will save annually through the end of the president’s first term. You could increase their funding by 50 or even 100 percent without having much impact on the deficit.
Full textThis post is the sixth in a series on the new CPR report Obama’s Regulators: A First-Year Report Card.
During the Bush Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) became a regulatory wasteland. Political interference, outdated laws, and chronic underfunding reduced the agency’s regulatory output to a mere trickle. For example, in the last 10 years, OSHA has issued comprehensive regulations for only two chemicals; in total, it has established legally enforceable exposure limits for fewer than 200 of the 3,000 most widely used industrial chemicals. Outdated laws and inadequate resources have also hindered OSHA’s ability to inspect workplaces and enforce worker safety regulations.
The Obama Administration faced a difficult challenge in trying to reawaken this vital protector agency from its dormant state. By and large, the Administration succeeded in placing OSHA in a promising upward trajectory this past year, strengthening its inspection and enforcement efforts. But it made little progress in terms of launching an affirmative regulatory agenda.
Full textOver the weekend, the Associated Press ran a story on the results of its enterprising investigation into the toxic content of children’s jewelry imported from China. Pressed to abandon the use of toxic lead in toys and jewelry, manufacturers have apparently begun using an even more dangerous metal, cadmium, which can cause neurological damage – brain damage – to children and give them cancer. AP tested 103 pieces of jewelry bought in American stores within the last few months, and found that 12 percent contained at least 10 percent cadmium. One item, a cute little Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer trinket, was 91 percent cadmium.
Addressing the question that leaps to mind – How did these extraordinarily dangerous trinkets get onto store shelves in the first place? – reporter Justin Pritchard writes these utterly terrifying and completely truthful words:
A patchwork of federal consumer protection regulations does nothing to keep these nuggets of cadmium from U.S. store shelves. If the products were painted toys, they would face a recall. If they were industrial garbage, they could qualify as hazardous waste. But since there are no cadmium restrictions on jewelry, such items are sold legally.
Of course, this is just the latest in a series of startling tales of dangerous products making it to market in the United States – poisoned peanut butter, toxic drywall, lead-painted toys, and more. Not to put too fine a point on it, but such products often kill people – sometimes immediately, from acute exposure to toxins, and sometimes over a longer period of time by way of cancer. If folks are lucky, their lives simply become miserable, with headaches, nausea, respiratory and heart problems a daily occurrence.
Full textCPRBlog asked some of our regular bloggers to give us some suggestions for the high and low points of the regulatory year. We began by taking the Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations” off the table, so that we could focus in on the Obama Administration’s impact to date. CPR Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz offers up a number of items, below, focusing on the positive:
At OSHA, several high points:
The leadership of David Michaels (as Assistant Secretary, the head of OSHA) and Jordan Barab (as Deputy Assistant Secretary), both of whom seem intent on putting OSHA back on task – protecting workers – after years of agency wheel-spinning.
OSHA’s enforcement sweep of construction sites in Texas, in which the agency brought inspectors from other regions to conduct unannounced inspections. Actual enforcement of the laws! Texas earned the honor because it has the highest rate of construction fatalities in the nation.
Assessing meaningful fines. OSHA proposed the largest fine in its history this year. Under the proposal, BP would pay $87.4 million for safety violations and its failure to correct hazards at the Texas City refinery, where an explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170 in 2005.
The Concord Monitor has identified a New Hampshire factory (Franklin Non-Ferrous Foundry) that has been the subject of previous OSHA investigations and fines, yet continues to expose its workers to dangerous conditions. OSHA’s most recent fine, $250,000, came after the agency found that a worker had high levels of lead in his blood. The newspaper obtained OSHA documents that revealed a pattern of violations by the company. The New Hampshire case is a troubling reminder of how weak OSHA is -- and of how that weakness puts many workers at danger in this country today.
OSHA has cited the foundry for 57 violations over the last four years, including 25 “serious” violations, which means the violation has potential to kill or seriously harm an employee. The violations included exit doors that could not be opened from the inside without keys or tools. OSHA inspectors also found that employees who were pouring molten metal were protected by heat shields with "large holes" in the front, while other workers wore no protective clothing even though they were working only inches from materials bubbling at 2,300 degrees. The foundry’s employees were exposed to airborne concentrations of copper dust nearly six times higher than OSHA regulations permit. And the inspectors observed an employee climb on the top railing of a series of catwalks along the factory ceiling to look at damaged machinery below without any fall protection equipment, another OSHA violation.
In 2006, OSHA fined the business $387,000 in penalties, and after a follow up investigation in 2007, it levied another $17,000 in penalties. The owner of the foundry has contested the latest fine and expressed skepticism about the dangers posed by lead. OSHA refused to divulge to the newspaper whether the foundry paid any of the earlier fines, and if so, what amount. OSHA, however, often settles cases for pennies on the dollar.
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