GOP Win Signals Tough Political Times For OSHA, More Oversight

The Republican takeover of the House and the party's gains in the Senate will likely wipe out a long-sought union-backed push to pass reforms that would expand OSHA's authority, stakeholders said in interviews with Inside OSHA Online. The mid-term elections present OSHA with a far more adversarial political environment than at the outset of the Obama administration, with a more conservative Capitol Hill also likely to stand in the way of contentious rulemaking efforts and restart oversight functions that have stymied the agency in the past, sources say. OSHA reforms, long sought by unions, wer