OSHA's Way Forward
From VPP to standards and PELs, there are many reasons why our industry cheers and jeers OSHA. How can the agency do better?
- By Jerry Laws
- Jan 01, 2007
THE glass is decidedly half
full when some of the U.S. safety profession's leaders contemplate the
Occupational Safety & Health Administration as it enters early middle age.
At age 35, the premier federal agency for ensuring workers' safety is obsolete,
hamstrung, more competently staffed, and more helpful to its regulated
industries, all at once, these experts said in interviews. The bottom line:
OSHA accomplishes too little but succeeds at what it does. Similarly, their opinions
about OSHA's future role vary widely.
"This is an agency that
has become increasingly irrelevant to growing numbers of workers in the economy
because the economy has continued to shift into the service sector," said Bill
Borwegen, MPH, director of occupational safety and health since 1983 for the
1.8-million-member Service Employees International Union. "The vast
majority of injuries and illness today occur in the service sector. Hospitals
now have injury and illness rates higher than mining, manufacturing, or
construction. And in nursing homes, the rate is close to double the rate for
hospitals. We have an epidemic going on in the service sector, and we have an
agency that's ill-equipped and doesn't really have the desire to change to work
in a service-sector economy. They're still stuck in an industrial
mindset."
OSHA's supporters said it is
meeting new challenges. "Certainly, the agency is now poised to be more
effective in responding and in helping emergency responders in
emergencies," said John L. Henshaw, CIH, principal in Sanibel, Fla.'s
Henshaw and Associates Inc. and the OSHA administrator from August 2001 to
December 2004. He was reflecting on the participation of about 70 OSHA
employees during the cleanup of the World Trade Center site in New York City for
weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. Fire chiefs at first rebuffed OSHA officers who
asked them to have their crews wear protective respirators while working on "the
pile," the name given to the WTC towers' debris.
"It was clear to me that
they didn't understand who we were or what expertise we had, from a safety and
health standpoint. And they'd never trained with us," Henshaw said.
"From that point, we decided we've got to let them know who we are and let
them know what expertise we bring and help them. And that's what we are doing
today. Today, our folks are part of the LEPCs--the local emergency response
planning committees. In just about every area office, I believe, we're
participating with the firefighters and police in dealing with emergencies.
They're getting to know us. We're part of the training scenarios. And the next
event, they'll know who we are and what expertise we have."
OSHA's personnel are better
trained and encouraged to become certified, and their participation in industry
events allows the regulated community to know them and respect their abilities,
said Henshaw. "The regulated community and stakeholders see OSHA as a
player, a participant in the process, part of the solution. And our folks,
OSHA, are seeing that they're accepted. . . . We are not just a regulatory
agency, in my mind. We're a safety and health agency. And if you think that
way, it allows you to get into emergency response."
John Pendergrass, CIH, CSP,
P.E., OSHA's administrator from May 1986 to March 1989, was an industrial
hygienist working in 3M's OSH division (now called OH&ESD) when the OSH Act
passed in December 1970 and changed the landscape. "I
think everyone supported it; I was a supporter of it. However, I don't think we
realized what it was going to result in," he said. "Prior to OSHA,
the practice of industry hygiene was to prevent occupational illnesses. With
the implementation of the act, it became compliance with the rules. A different
approach to things, and I don't think most of us really recognized that
or realized that was what was going to happen. I'm not excusing myself,
either--I was a part of it."
This
transformation expanded the scope of practice but "changed the philosophy,"
Pendergrass said. "If you talk to people today, it's always compliance:
'Am I in compliance?' You can be in compliance and still have health problems.
Because the agency has not been able to promulgate standards for everything
that exists."
He said from his vantage
point, OSHA "has been very, very successful at
education, and training, and enforcement, but not the promulgation of
regulations. Not because they haven't tried; I think that every administration
has tried diligently to promulgate effective regulations. But there have been
very few that, first of all, haven't taken an interminable length of time to
get through. Lockout/tagout--a very simple procedure, one that had been in
existence for years, long before OSHA--17 years to get that standard. And then
you wind up in court. There have only been a very few that did not go to court,"
Pendergrass summed up. "So it becomes a very long process, a very
expensive process. It causes a lot of animosity. So why don't we say, 'Let's
forget it. Try something else.' "
Henshaw and many other safety veterans of note agree a
new rulemaking scheme is essential. "The
Congress of the United States has got to look at the whole legislative
landscape that they built--they built it back in 1970 when they passed this
law--around promulgation of standards. It is almost an impossibility to get a
standard out. That isn't something that OSHA can fix," said Alan C.
McMillan, who headed OSHA in 1989 during his career with the Labor Department.
Today, he's president/CEO of the National Safety Council.
Better Off Without OSHA?
Some prominent and
experienced safety professionals look at OSHA's very existence with dismay. "When
OSHA came into existence, we put our primary emphasis on the OSHA incident
rate, which is a frequency-based thing rather than a severity-based one. And so
we put our emphasis on minor stuff, bee stings and paper cuts, so that we count
to a large degree those kinds of things as much as we do a fatality. And to me,
that's ridiculous," Dan Petersen, the author of several fundamental texts
in the field of safety and a practitioner for more than 50 years, said in a
November 2005 interview.
Petersen went to work as a
safety engineer for an insurance company in 1954, when that title was new. He
earned his Ph.D. in human error reduction concepts and how they related to
safety management in 1972 at the University of Colorado. "I got out of
graduate school in 1972 and said, this is where safety ought to be going,"
he said. "And, of course, 1972 was just about the time when OSHA became
full-blown. Nobody in safety paid any attention to any of this human error
stuff or industrial psychology stuff. They said, 'We've got to get back to the
basics. Our savior has arrived.' "
Would we be better off if
OSHA had never been created, I asked him. "Can I say yes? I don't think
we'd be any worse off. That's not the right thing to say, but I guess I'd say
it anyway," Petersen answered. "I was in the profession for 25 years
before it came along, and I'm not saying we did well, but I'm not saying we're
doing well after, either.
"We're pretty much
plateaued. What I think has happened after depends upon which measuring stick
you're going to look at. In terms of seriousness of injuries, we've
plateaued--very much so. I'm uncomfortable with what we've got today. I do a
lot of work with energy companies, and I'm not sure but what we have not had
more explosions in fossil fuel plants in this country after OSHA than before.
"If we pay attention to
the minor stuff, I'm afraid we've let the major stuff get away from us. I don't
see anything pushing us to get us tremendously better," Petersen said.
Edward D. "Jed"
Bullard, chairman of 108-year-old PPE manufacturer E.D. Bullard Company and a
past chairman of both the National Safety Council and the ISEA Board of
Trustees, said OSHA's regulations remain important for employers. "I think
in today's world, the absence of an OSHA would just send the wrong signal to
the people who are asked to perform the work. OSHA is really our society's
commitment to the workforce," said Bullard, who received the 2006 Robert
B. Hurley Distinguished Service Award last October from the International
Safety Equipment Association. "I think you would find probably in the
preponderance of workplaces, at least in the United States, in most cases and
in most areas the employer is probably doing more than OSHA requires."
"What a great job they've done,"
the Safety Council's McMillan said of OSHA's personnel. Then he listed four
areas of needed improvement, starting with a new scheme created by Congress to
promulgate safety standards. Standards don't need to be easy because we don't
want overregulation or a rush to complete a standard for everything in the
American workplace, said McMillan, "but we need a balance and to get to a place
that's better than today."
His other recommendations: Get rid of the mix
of federal and state programs and instead use federal standards and enforcement
everywhere. Put the federal government's workplaces and agencies under the
safety and health law, not under executive orders. Turn voluntary compliance,
non-technical support, education, consultation, and on-site review over to the private
sector, consultants, and nonprofits so OSHA instead can focus on standards
promulgation, enforcement schemes and methodology, and leadership globally,
including harmonization of standards. "These aren't enormous matters; they
don't have to happen for us to have a successful, national, federally led
safety program," McMillan said. "The biggest one is improving standards,
and that's up to Congress."
VPP and Other Triumphs
Charles D. Reese, who retired
at the end of 2004 from leading the safety instructional program at the
University of Connecticut College of Continuing Studies, had worked during his
career for NIOSH's Division of Safety Research, EPA, and the National Mine
Health and Safety Academy in Beckley, W.Va. All 25 of OSHA's administrators
have contributed significantly to the industry's growth and success, he said.
"That's not an easy job,
to balance the political and the concerns of safety and health for the
workforce. Every one of those directors at OSHA have attempted to do the very
best job they could do," said Reese. "When you consider that OSHA's
budgets at one time, added together, did not equal one year of EPA's
budget--you were less than a dollar a worker--you can actually get a picture of
the true support that really exists for OSHA. It really is nominal in
comparison."
"OSHA has done an awful
lot in 35 years and has come an awful long ways," Henshaw said.
"Regardless of the political spin, they have made some major strides. And
they've got to continue to be innovative and creative. Not just OSHA, but
Congress, on improving, enhancing the statute [and] the agency's
performance." He said he regards streamlining the agency's regulatory
agenda during his tenure as an accomplishment, as was upgrading the quality of
its people and encouraging them to become certified.
VPP is one of OSHA's biggest
successes, said R. Davis Layne, who began his 34-year OSHA career as a
compliance officer and eventually was acting assistant secretary. He left to
become executive director of the Voluntary Protection Programs Participants'
Association in January 2005.
VPP is an ambassador for U.S.
safety practices and our high expectations for safe work to both Europe and
Asia, he said. With VPPPA up to 1,600 sites as of October 2006 from 647 just
six years earlier, the VPP concept also is spreading the gospel of safety
domestically, Layne said. The Department of Defense created its own Voluntary
Protection Programs Center of Excellence in 2005 and has active VPP Star sites
at several shipyards and the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania. DoD VPP CX, as the center is
known, says expected outcomes from the program include reduced injuries, higher
readiness, lower worker's compensation costs, improved safety, and higher
morale.
Participating VPP sites
frequently invite companies from the surrounding area to their recognition
ceremonies, and safety personnel from VPP sites are eager proponents of the
concept, Layne said. "I think it's like a snowball that's going down the
hill," he said. "I see a great deal of interest in this in the
federal government as a way to certainly address worker safety and health, but
also the government is interested in reducing their worker's compensation costs
themselves. They see VPP as a real advantage." So do construction firms,
who clamored for a shot at VPP. OSHA wrestled for years with how to do it before
launching a construction demonstration project recently.
Construction VPP will work,
Henshaw said, because the best companies in that industry already have rules
that exceed OSHA's (e.g., a 6-foot fall protection rule rather than 15 feet).
"They can sell that value and they can get better jobs. Ultimately,
they're doing it because their worker's comp costs are going to be lower,"
he said. "I'm hoping the VPP will be a competitive advantage and create
that paradigm where you have people saying, 'If I want to get more jobs, I need
to get VPP.' That'll be a great driver, once we can get that in. Of all places,
the construction side is the place where you can achieve that kind of
paradigm."
Layne also cited five other
OSHA successes: OSHA's Hazard Communication standard, its vinyl chloride
standard, its standard and emphasis on safe construction trenching/excavation,
its much-improved relationship with state programs, and its evolution from a
pure enforcement entity in the 1970s to today's more effective role mixing
enforcement with cooperation and guidance. "OSHA's trenching and
excavation standard and the emphasis that the agency has put on trenching and
excavation has saved hundreds of lives, I absolutely believe that," he
said. "You still occasionally will hear about a trenching or excavation
fatality or serious injury, but it is certainly not with the frequency that you
heard about going back 20 years ago."
OSHA's biggest failure is
that it did not commit itself to involve safety and health courses in academic
curricula, he said. There were efforts aimed at business schools' courses, but
they failed, said Layne. "If it could just be part of the educational
process," he said.
Bullard and McMillan said
safety has made inroads into the business school curricula at Georgetown
University's McDonough School of Business and at Northwestern University's
Kellogg School of Management, among others. "It does get picked up a
little bit more than it did in the past. But it gets picked up not per se as
safety, but more likely in the ethics classes that have become widespread,
especially in the past five years," Bullard said. He said at Harvard Business School,
for example, there are classes taught on a manager's responsibility for
maintaining a safe and healthy workplace, both domestically and globally.
Brooks C. Holtom, Ph.D., an
assistant professor of business at the McDonough School,
said he has completed case studies on the first two winners of the National Safety Council's Robert W. Campbell Award, Noble Corp. and Johnson &
Johnson, and is sharing them with other schools. The studies connect the
language of safety to the language of business/finance and are the foundation
of what will become a portfolio of studies used to educate corporate leaders,
Holtom said.
Another major success in
OSHA's history is the bloodborne pathogens standard, 29 CFR 1910.1030,
which OSHA promulgated on Dec. 6, 1991, after the Service Employees
International Union petitioned for it. Borwegen said the union began asking for
it after SEIU members at San
Francisco General Hospital
provided some of the earliest care for AIDS patients, before the disease's causation
was understood. "That standard had a remarkable impact," he said. "CDC's
published data show that Hepatitis B cases have plummeted from 17,000 a year
among health care workers to about 400 a year. Deaths have plummeted from about
300 a year to a negligible level. They directly credit it to the passage of the
bloodborne pathogens standard."
The union was already focused
on safe sharps when the standard came out, so it began working toward an
amended standard that would require safer needles. Getting it took 11 years,
the passage of safe needle legislation in about 20 states, and help from
members of Congress who included Sens. Mike Enzi and Ted Kennedy and Rep. Cass
Ballenger. Borwegen said the latest research shows needlesticks have dropped
about 51 percent because of the amended standard.
What's the Solution for OSHA's PELs?
Fossilized permissible
exposure limits--a sore point for many in the profession because OSHA's existing
ones are badly out of date--can be resolved only by having Congress
significantly reduce the rulemaking process and updating them en masse, or
perhaps by having OSHA adopt consensus standards of professional organizations
once they have shored up their consensus process to make their limits less
controversial, Henshaw said.
Updating the PELs
for the first time since OSHA's creation was the principal accomplishment
Pendergrass named when asked about his tenure as assistant secretary. The
AFL-CIO and the American Iron and Steel Institute soon sued, won the case, and
the updates were wiped out. Now everyone agrees the limits should be updated,
but the lawsuit makes it difficult, he said. "There hasn't been any strong
effort to, and I can understand why. Rulemaking is part of the problem. It's
the basic problem."
"OSHA
doesn't have many friends," Pendergrass summarized. "They don't have
many friends across the country, and they don't have many friends in Congress.
. . . I found out that, yeah, you can [make changes]. It's sort of like taking
a canoe and putting it on the bow of an aircraft carrier and changing the
aircraft carrier's direction. It's not impossible, but it's highly
improbable."
When Borwegen of the Service
Employees union reflects on the PELs and OSHA standards in general, he thinks
of an entirely different problem: "You have lots of chemical hazards, like
glutaraldehyde, which OSHA does not have a PEL on. Cal/OSHA, fortunately, just
issued one. There's a whole range of chemicals," Borwegen said. "Really,
the only standard that is that important for our members is the bloodborne
pathogens standard. OSHA has been largely silent on addressing the major
hazards that our members face, whether it's workplace
violence--37 percent of non-fatal assaults that occur in the United States occur in a health
care workplace . . . [or] ergonomics--again, more CTS disorder injuries occur
in the health care sector than any other sector in OSHA; OSHA has not dealt
with that issue.
"In a nutshell, in my
opinion, I consider OSHA as basically being dead, quite frankly," said
Borwegen. "We have an agency now that's spending over $170 million on
employer assistance. The inspections that are done are relatively meaningless
for workers in the service sector because they don't have standards that
apply."
Nursing homes always are near
the top of the list for OSHA's targeting program, he noted. "The bottom
line is, I have sympathy for the inspectors. They walk into these nursing
homes, they look on the logs, and the biggest hazards are musculoskeletal, and
workplace violence, and maybe some bloodborne pathogens. They really have
nothing to cite. Maybe a couple of BBP citations. But then they usually cite
for frayed electrical cords, eyewash stations. Which aren't insignificant, but
they're basically walking around the elephant in the middle of the room. It
must make them feel frustrated."
One sign of the sector's
importance is AIHA's health care work group, which has really taken off,
Borwegen said. "To me, this is the future of the profession. Health care
is where the hazards are. It's where the economy is. The health care industry
is still, in my opinion, decades behind other sectors of the economy."
"There's so much
potential out there. You could make a lot more progress. Instead, we have OSHA
inspectors who, on the way to the chemical plant where 12 people work, they
drive by the hospital where 2,000 people work."
This article appeared in the January 2007 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.
This article originally appeared in the January 2007 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.