The Trump administration's fiscal year 2019 budget requests renews prior calls to eliminate the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) tasked with investigating industrial facility accidents, just as it did in FY18, while significantly cutting funding and reorganizing NIOSH.
The Trump administration is proposing to continue funding OSHA in fiscal year 2019 at levels similar to recent years, while doubling-down on an FY18 push to scrap certain agency worker training grants, long opposed by industry as sending money to labor unions, in favor of bolstering the agency's compliance assistance programs.
EPA has issued a proposed a rule allowing the agency to collect industry fees to help defray costs of implementing aspects of the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), claiming to have answered industry calls for fees that are proportional to the agency's costs, though an environmentalist says EPA is underestimating those costs.
Labor advocates are increasingly turning to state officials to do more to protect workers in New York and other states, fearing that Trump administration rollbacks have “decimated” OSHA, leaving many workers inadequately protected.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the top Democrat on the Senate labor committee, is seeking bipartisan support to preserve worker safety and other protections that many fear are being eroded by the growing use of “independent contractors” in the gig economy who are generally not covered by such safeguards.
The American Chemistry Council (ACC) is urging EPA to update its criteria for identifying persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) chemicals under the revised toxics law, calling the criteria “outdated”, while environmental groups are opposing that call and pressing EPA to seek OSHA data to better assess exposures.
Democratic lawmakers are urging the Trump administration to adopt recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendations for OSHA to bolster inspections of poultry plants, efforts that may have received a boost from the administration's rejecting of a poultry industry request to ease regulatory oversight of their processing facilities.
With online companies dominating the transportation and delivery sectors, the rise of contracting jobs is at an all-time high, though the trend is raising concerns about how OSHA will address the growing number of workers classified as “independent contractors” who are not covered under the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act.
Labor unions are urging EPA to reject a chemical sector call to defer regulation of new chemicals' risks to workers to OSHA, arguing that the plan would violate the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and that OSHA lacks resources and authority to adequately protect workers.
A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study of occupational respiratory health is arguing that improved monitoring and surveillance of workplace exposures to risk factors for asthma could reduce worker deaths, underscoring a recent National Academies of Sciences (NAS) call for greater OSHA surveillance of workplace hazards.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is criticizing President Donald Trump's rollback of certain OSHA worker safety and other labor protections during his first year in office, teeing up potential issues Democrats plan to raise as the 2018 midterm elections loom.
As companies prepare to comply with a looming Feb. 1 deadline for internally posting their annual work-related injury and illness summaries, an attorney is urging them to delay early compliance with a July 1 deadline for electronically submitting the reports to OSHA as the administration is expected to overhaul the requirements before then.
A Houston-based drilling company with a lengthy record of OSHA violations and dubbed as one of the “worst safety violators in the nation” in a 2008 Senate report, could be the first to be subject to an OSHA enforcement program aimed at severe violators in the oil and gas industry after a fatal rig explosion in Oklahoma, Jordan Barab, a former Obama OSHA official says.
Despite high hopes that the administration would follow through on President Donald Trump's promises to cut so many regulations “it will make your head spin,” industry attorneys are are now tempering their expectations on the extent of any deregulatory efforts at OSHA, saying the impact may be minimal.
Environmentalists have quietly sued to block the Trump administration's framework for reviewing new chemicals under the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), clearing the way for a legal test on whether the administration can proceed with its plan to drop the use of enforcement orders as an interim step in regulating the substances.
Labor groups are criticizing a Trump administration plan to allow faster line speeds at swine processing plants, charging it will increase workplace risks and underscoring their concerns that officials may soon move to finalize a similar plan for poultry processors.
Public Citizen is suing the Labor Department and OSHA for denying Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking injury and illness records submitted under the agency's May 2016 record-keeping and reporting rule update, a suit that could undercut Trump administration plans to withhold public release of the data that was intended to be published under the rule.
A former Obama-era OSHA official is warning of increased risks to workers, uneven safety enforcement by states as well as several other risks that could result from the looming shutdown of the federal government, which is expected to furlough many OSHA employees until funding is restored.
A chemical industry coalition is urging EPA to forgo regulating new chemicals' risks to workers and use new authority under the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to instead inform OSHA enforcement, an approach environmentalists say is “patently illegal” and would undermine worker protections due to OSHA's limited reach and resources.
Industry attorneys say that there is a “heightened risk” the Trump administration will bring “high level criminal prosecutions” targeting worker safety violations under Obama-era practices that rely on stricter environmental laws, despite officials' emphasis on compliance assistance.