OSHA published a report (pdf) last week on its role in the federal government’s response to last year’s massive oil spill. Within days of the blowout aboard the Deepwater Horizon, OSHA officials were in Louisiana, working to ensure that the people involved in the response and cleanup had adequate protection from the myriad hazards they would face. The new report is mainly a list of accomplishments, not an introspective “lessons learned” self-evaluation that could have paved the way for policy changes that would improve the federal oil spill response system. Nevertheless, the document is worth the read because it provides a good sense of the difficulty OSHA faced in protecting a huge workforce from so many hazards, as part of an unprecedented government response.
The report covers a handful of areas where OSHA did most of its work: site visits, intervention, and technical support; chemical exposure assessment; personal protective equipment (PPE); training; guidance and publications; community outreach; injury and illness reporting; and efforts to support the Labor Department’s big-picture goals of hiring local and displaced workers.
The report’s sections on enforcement and training missed some key points that I would have liked to see the agency address. First, the report glosses over the issue of enforcement versus compliance assistance. Following the spill, OSHA chose to focus its staff’s efforts on maximizing site visits, at the expense of strong enforcement. The agency made the calculation that its limited staff in the Gulf region would be able to better protect workers by eschewing citations in favor of guidance and assistance to the employer (BP).
Full textOffice of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Cass Sunstein heads to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday morning to speak about federal agencies' plans to "look back" at and review existing regulations. Meanwhile, agencies statutorily obligated to protect public health and safety, such as EPA and OSHA, are diverting resources from pressing work so that they can structure and soon carry out a hunt for a supposed treasure of frivolous old regulations that need to be revised or eliminated. Strikingly, even industry itself has struggled to come up with enthusiasm for the effort -- or even a few specific examples of old rules it believes are unduly burdensome. It adds up to a not pretty picture.
President Obama called for the regulatory “look-backs” in his January 18 Executive Order on regulatory policy; the Order called on each agency to develop a "preliminary plan" within 120 days for how it would conduct its look-back. That time was up last Wednesday.
These existing regulations that are subject to look-back, of course, are not rules that rogue agency staffers made up out of thin air two weeks ago while doing all-nighters in the basement at EPA headquarters in the Ariel Rios building. Instead, in EPA’s case, the rules industry finds so offensive were mandated with great specificity in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Industry and its allies tried to defeat the legislation then and failed. Then they tried to persuade EPA to adopt feeble regulations and failed. Then they challenged the regulations in court and failed. Now industry seeks its umpteenth bite of the apple—in fact, not much of even the apple core is left.
Full textWe noted earlier this month that a U.S. Small Business Administration official had claimed that the danger of workplace noise was solved just as well with earplugs as it is with reducing the noise at its source -- despite extensive research to the contrary ("Presidential Appointee at SBA Maligns OSHA's Industrial Noise Proposal; Claims Ear Plugs 'Solve' the Problem").
The official, Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the SBA, has since given a slightly different line. From BNA's Occupational Safety and Health Reporter (4/28):
We strongly support regulations that protect worker safety and health," Sargeant said. "But with regard to the noise rule, we were unable to evaluate whether this proposal was necessary, as a matter of safety, or whether it was economically feasible.
If SBA has indeed not evaluated the safety necessity, it's troubling that Sargeant had previously made such a strident claim about the safety issue being "solved" by earplugs. Sargeant has no obligation to be an expert on the safety benefits of noise controls; he could simply say, as he has, that he is concerned about the costs. Going further and demeaning the safety benefits as nonexistent -- and then later admitting his office was "unable to evaluate" them -- is not helpful.
Full textSo far as regulatory safeguards are concerned, we've come a long way in 27 months. The Obama Administration started with federal agencies that had been devastated by eight years of an explicitly anti-regulatory president. Turning that around is not easy, and no President could do it in a day. So, as much as you see a lot of criticism in this space, you also see praise, because we've seen this Administration make important progress. From new rules on lead paint removal to construction crane safety to regulating greenhouse gases, there's a lot to applaud -- changes that will make real differences in people's lives.
But there are also a lot of rulemakings or other initiatives that fall somewhere in the "pending" category. Delay has a real cost in human health and lives. But the problem's not just that. It's that for many of these important safeguards, the administration runs the risk of not completing them at all, or not during this term. The political pressures against some of these health and safety protections in the name of maintaining industry business as usual can be huge.
A new CPR white paper today, Twelve Crucial Health, Safety, and Environmental Regulations: Will the Obama Administration Finish in Time?, identifies key rules that are critical but unfinished, and urges the administration to adopt a sense of urgency. Nine of the twelve regulations in the report are named as being in danger of not being completed during the President's first term.
Full textCongress charged the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) with the job of representing the interests of small business before regulatory agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As an agency of the federal government, it has an obligation to taxpayers to get its facts straight before it speaks. Lately, it has ignored this basic obligation, most notably sponsoring a study that used flawed methodology to claim that regulations impose $1.75 trillion in costs every year.
Now, Dr. Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the SBA, has upped his attack on OSHA’s efforts to update its noise regulation, making assertions that are highly misleading and at times simply wrong. In an interview last week with the Phoenix Business Journal, Sargeant claimed:
The OSHA rule was a solution to a problem that had already been solved. Basically, this was a noise abatement rule. At some factories, there's noise. The machine makes noise. There's already a solution -- ear plugs, earmuffs that workers would wear. That solved the problem. OSHA came along and said, well, that may solve the problem. But we think companies should buy new equipment with lower noise figures. So now we've gone from a solution of $10 or so to millions of dollars to solve the same problem.
Dr. Sargeant, a presidential appointee, is not arguing that he thinks reducing machine noise isn't worth the cost; he's actually asserting that there is no safety difference whatsoever between using ear plugs and reducing equipment noise. That's not true.
Full textCross-posted from The Pump Handle.
President Obama received an award last week for his efforts to improve openness in federal agencies. Jon Stewart poked fun at it (see clip) and I actually thought it might have been an April Fool's joke because of what I'd learned earlier in the week.
The President's own Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has hosted two meetings with industry representatives who are opposed to an OSHA regulation on crystalline silica, but OIRA fails to disclose these meetings on its website (screenshot 4/11/11.) This is the second time in as many occasions that this OMB office has failed the transparency test when it comes to extra-curricular meetings on OSHA rules. OIRA did the same thing last summer on OSHA's proposed minor change to its injury recording log. Others have identified even more serious infractions by OIRA, but have yet to receive a response from the White House.
The practice of posting a notice about meetings between regulated parties and OMB staff began during the GW Bush Administration, not a group known for transparency. Even that very secretive Administration saw the value in informing the public promptly of such meetings. The Obama Administration's OIRA is now 0-2 when it comes to disclosure of meetings about OSHA rules. (Their performance may actually be even worse. For all I know they've had other meetings. We just don't know to look for them on OIRA's website.)
Full textLast week, the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) approved a survey to be conducted for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as part of the agency's efforts to develop an Injury and Illness Prevention Program (I2P2) standard. Surveys, like this one, have to be approved by OIRA according to the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the lengthy approval may stall development of the I2P2 standard for four or more months for no apparently good reason. OIRA made only minor changes to the draft documents.
The I2P2 standard is OSHA’s signature regulatory initiative, and it comes in the nick of time. With its small and dwindling staff, a result of Congress putting it on a starvation diet of resources, OSHA has found it difficult to update its safety and health standards to protect workers, or to adopt new ones to address hazards that are not yet covered, leaving thousands of workers with inadequate protection. To fill this gap, Dr. David Michaels, OSHA’s administrator, and a public health expert, has proposed I2P2, a standard that would require employers to establish a management program in which employers and employees work together to identify and address workplace hazards. California already has a version of the standard on the books. The USDA uses a similar system to ensure that meat packers address potential sources of contamination in their plants.
While a four-month delay does not sound like very much, it is likely to put OSHA behind schedule in developing the standard. Typically, OSHA’s efforts to comply with the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) involve vetting a detailed draft of a proposed rule with a Small Business Advocacy Review Panel; that's one of the next steps in this process. OSHA had planned to garner SBA Review Panel approval by June, but if the “Baseline Safety and Health Practices Survey” that sat at OIRA for more than four months awaiting approval is an important part of developing the I2P2 proposal and that proposal needs to be nearly finished before SBA review begins, it looks like the June deadline won’t be met. Based on the documentation on OIRA’s website, ERG’s final report to OSHA on the survey results won’t even be submitted until September.
Full textLizzie Grossman has a nice post over at The Pump Handle highlighting how the National Contingency Plan for major oil spills has significant gaps, which left government agencies and cleanup workers in the Gulf scrambling to figure out the right training programs and the best ways to protect workers' health and safety in the days, weeks, and months following the BP spill.
But, as Lizzie points out, one of the most powerful advocates for fixing the NCP -- the National Spill Commission -- has left the issue of cleanup workers' by the wayside:
Occupational health issues for responders are simply not [the] focus of the Commission's review: OSHA is only mentioned twice in the body of the report. The role of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in the response is not described at all, nor is the health impacts roster maintained by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. The body of the report mentions neither the National Institutes of Health nor the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Tens of thousands of people participated in cleanup efforts last summer. Despite the sweltering heat and some areas overrun with heavy equipment, no workers died and injury and illness rates were relatively low. Long-term health impacts of cleanup work will be more difficult to measure. But OSHA, NIEHS, and NIOSH deserve recognition for their work.
Full textOn March 23, 2005, the worst industrial accident in 15 years killed 15 workers and injured more than 180 others as highly flammable liquids from a distillation tower were vented directly to the ground and were ignited by a spark at the huge BP Corporation Refinery in Texas City, Texas. A two-year investigation by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSHIB) concluded that the BP Texas City refinery was “an extremely dangerous workplace by any objective standard.” An “Independent Review Panel” that BP assembled to investigate the explosion and BP’s safety practices throughout all of its operations issued a similarly devastating critique.
The CSHIB also found that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had acted irresponsibly. The facility was subject to OSHA’s 1992 process safety management standard, but plant managers had failed to implement many of its requirements. The standard itself was out of date, but, lacking the resources to update it, the agency substituted ineffective guidance documents and voluntary outreach programs. Even though the BP plant was the third largest refinery in the United States, OSHA had never undertaken a comprehensive, planned process safety inspection at the facility. Indeed, between 1995 and 2005, the agency had undertaken only nine process safety inspections in the entire country, and none of those were at refineries.
The problem was by no means limited to the BP plant. Similar explosions had killed or seriously injured workers at five other refineries and chemical plants during the preceding seven years, but OSHA had lacked the resources to step up its enforcement efforts.
Indeed, for most of its 40-plus years, OSHA has lacked sufficient resources to protect American workers from irresponsible employers who all too often treat their employees as expendable pieces of equipment.
Full textGOP leaders in the House of Representatives will push a resolution today directing the various committees of the House to “inventory and review existing, pending, and proposed regulations and orders from agencies of the federal government, particularly with respect to their effect on jobs and economic growth.” Thus begins what Republicans and their industry friends hope will be a productive hunting season in the rich woods of regulatory safeguards that protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. Not content to leave the agencies alone to eliminate gratuitous and outmoded rules, as President Obama has directed them to do, House Republicans are in search of far bigger game.
They’ll have plenty of help. Also this week, House Government Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrel Issa released a passel of letters (57 megs and 1,947 pages in all) from a variety of corporate interests targeting virtually every conceivable kind of regulation. (If you’d like to cut to the chase and see the letters without their voluminous attachments, go to the OMBWatch site for a searchable, workable 606-page version.) In a move certain to attract lots of campaign cash for Republicans during next election cycle, Issa wrote to some 150 trade associations soliciting their nominations for a “job-killing” rules hall of fame.
Although most of the proposed targets from industry are quite specific, and many attach dozens of pages of past technical comments to agencies complaining about their every move, the spirit of the enterprise is best expressed by someone named Steve Towe, otherwise unidentified, who writes on page 1,820:
Full textBottom Line: Government has become massive, meddling, and for the most part useless. It's a parasite that takes and takes and gives next to nothing back. 90% of what government tries to do, it does so poorly, inefficiently, and at far too great of an expense. The Constitution limits government for that reason, and I contend that most of what government is trying to do today is patently unconstitutional.