Daily News

OSHA has reached a huge settlement with a major steel employer that reverts to an earlier agency stance of negotiating pre-citation penalties and also scores a big victory for OSHA by requiring a comprehensive safety program that a source familiar with the matter says could serve as a model for voluntary injury and illness prevention programs (I2P2), which OSHA has tried for years to push unsuccessfully through a rule.

OSHA standards officials are considering adding new layers of chemical safety oversight to the agency's decades-old rule requiring users of risky chemical processes to develop and put in place “management-system” practices, a concept that could engender opposition down the line as industry argues the performance-based elements of the rule, which already set it apart from most OSHA regulations, have been shown to work.

The chemical industry is likely to push back against new signals by OSHA that regulators may explore revising the process safety management (PSM) standard governing safety requirements in potentially dangerous chemical uses to cover all reactivity hazards, an issue borne out by probes into accidents over the years and which has emerged as a key concern after a massive fertilizer plant explosion in Texas last year.

Several OSHA experts say the agency's planned data request exploring ways to update the agency's permissible exposure limits (PELs) -- which are largely based on 1960s science and widely viewed as antiquated in both industry and labor quarters -- is just a tentative step in tackling a highly complex issue with no clear path to overcoming the restrictions imposed by a key 1991 court decision that dashed OSHA's last wholesale effort to revise the levels. One source says officials concluded they need a novel approach that does not involve grouping chemicals.

NIOSH is expressing concern based on research about rates of obesity keyed to occupations in Washington state, raising broader questions about whether employers need to address such personal worker issues by attempting to improve “poor health behaviors,” with agency officials saying it “likely is in the employer’s best interest to do so.” It was not immediately clear whether the rates are necessarily work-related.

Federal officials engaged in probing chemical disasters pressured OSHA chief David Michaels and other Obama administration officials in a White House meeting after the West, TX, fertilizer plant explosion to embrace the use of inherently safer technologies (IST) where possible and to revisit a range of longstanding OSHA process safety management (PSM) requirements, and continue to push for tougher regulatory policies, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board chairman told Inside OSHA Online in an interview Tuesday.

The industry coalition American Chemistry Council (ACC) is challenging New Jersey's model chemical facility safety program, arguing in comments to the Environmental Protection Agency that the state incorrectly labels facilities' routine safety upgrades as shifts to inherently safer technologies (IST) and fails to account for changes that shift risks to other parts of production processes -- a dispute that occurs as OSHA comes under increasing pressure to embrace IST.

A group of worker health activists issued a scathing report Thursday (April 17) sharply critical in some respects of how OSHA under the Bush administration handled its response to worker hazards in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, calling for several policy changes to beef up enforcement and training in such a future event.

OSHA is making the case for a much stricter standard on respirable crystalline silica by forming an alliance with several groups of occupational health experts in the Atlanta region -- a partnership designed to provide construction employers and workers with guidance and training to prevent overexposure to the toxic dust generated in some building activities.

OSHA is seeking clearance from the White House budget office to publish a formal information request designed to gather stakeholder input on the problematic issue of how to update a host of chemical exposure caps in the workplace, pushing ahead on a subject that has stymied worker health advocates for decades. Regulators, particularly in the Obama administration, have long considered how to overcome an appeals court decision that threw out OSHA's last comprehensive effort to update exposure limits, pushed through in 1989.

OSHA won a closely monitored appellate court review of citations the agency issued in what critics blasted as an overzealous exercise of the OSH Act general duty clause following the much-publicized mauling death of a SeaWorld orca trainer in 2010. Observers said the decision was less about OSHA's expanded use of the controversial language and more a deference to an administrative law judge's (ALJ) findings of fact in the case.

U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) investigators are set to release preliminary findings from their probe into last year's disastrous explosion of a fertilizer processing plant in West, TX, potentially teeing up recommendations to OSHA on how safety regulators could tighten up federal rules covering such facilities. Key points of concern following the West explosion include that OSHA's process safety management (PSM) standard contains an exemption for retail facilities, a category under which the plant was classified, and whether the OSHA explosives standard lacks clarity.

The Obama Administration's pressure on Congress to beef up OSHA's whistleblower law enforcement division could help the agency clear up a persistent backlog in cases including OSH Act 11(c) complaints. A request for additional whistleblower enforcement funding comes as OSHA officials grapple with new federal statutory burdens from recently enacted food safety and consumer financial reform laws, experts say.

GOP lawmakers Wednesday (April 9) quashed any lingering hopes of worker safety and health advocates that Congress could be willing to consider sweeping mine safety legislation pushed in the aftermath of the Upper Big Branch disaster in West Virginia, also spelling defeat for prospects that OSHA reforms could be tied to any such measure – the only recent legislative vehicle to show promise for OSH Act changes. A move by House Democrats to force consideration of the mine safety bill fell short in a committee markup of union-related legislation.

House Republicans will try to block OSHA's controversial policy issued last year interpreting federal law as allowing union and other third-party worker representatives to accompany compliance officers in walkaround inspections, the chair of the House panel that oversees OSHA tells Inside OSHA Online. The comments further add weight to speculation that Republicans will use the appropriations process to short-circuit OSHA's policy.

OSHA officials are looking into unspecified regulatory “alternatives” that would apply to the construction sector as they explore a rulemaking to tackle worker exposures to the toxic metal beryllium, in an effort that a source familiar with the issue says could make it increasingly difficult to get a new standard issued, though worker advocates consider it vital to take into account hazards to workers who use beryllium-containing abrasive blasting agents in construction activities.

Government chemical safety experts are pressuring OSHA to get rid of  key exemptions applying to the oil and gas sector in the agency's process safety management (PSM) standard in response to what they call high rates of injuries and fatalities throughout the industry, after an earlier dispute over covering those work sites ended in industry's favor.

Safety and health activists, in pressing for a new OSHA rule cutting down on worker exposures to crystalline silica dust across the spectrum of both large and small U.S. businesses, have tapped into a long-simmering source of grievance with the federal regulatory process: that agencies often rely heavily on the Small Business Administration's (SBA) expansive view of what constitutes a small entity and as a result over-estimate rules' impact on small businesses.

Industry groups appear split on the role local emergency planning committees (LEPCs) should play in federal efforts to improve the safety and security of industrial plants, with some industry advocates arguing the groups authorized under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) should play a key role and others seeking to largely bypass them – discourse that comes as OSHA seeks to update plant safety policies as a central part of a broad federal push  by President Obama on the issue.

NIOSH officials say a multi-stakeholder partnership involving industry, union and government experts on respirable crystalline silica has evaluated a range of engineering controls in field studies that are effective at keeping exposures to the toxic dust during road milling below the research agency's 50-microgram recommended exposure limit (REL) for silica dust – a level mirroring the compulsory exposure cap in OSHA's planned silica rule – and suggest use of the developed controls could obviate a need for respirator use over full shifts in road milling operations.