Daily News

OSHA is about to unveil comprehensive new guidance materials for hospitals to tackle a range of worker hazards, with a strong focus on safe patient handling, that in part offers a self-assessment tool for health care employers to learn more about where they stand on addressing the issue, sources familiar with the plan tell Inside OSHA Online. The wide-ranging guidance is expected to come out Wednesday.

A GOP senator who contends that OSHA is violating congressional intent through an enforcement policy aimed at preventing grain bin accidents on small farming operations has attached a rider to the newly crafted omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2014 that effectively tells the Labor Department to scrap the controversial policy. The rider comes in the wake of a controversial debate over whether OSHA's grain bin enforcement policy clashes with a congressionally mandated small farm OSHA enforcement exemption.

OSHA would receive a $17 million funding increase over the course of fiscal year 2014, including more funds targeted to whistleblower enforcement, under an omnibus spending bill agreed to by House and Senate negotiators. The Labor spending plan for the balance of the year is part of a $1.012 trillion package meeting the targets of two-year bipartisan budget plan reached last month.

The retirement later this year of Rep. George Miller, a veteran California Democrat who took office just four years after OSHA was created and who has fought vigorously for worker rights reforms over four decades in Congress, will leave nothing short of an institutional vacuum on issues keyed to worker safety and health, congressional observers say.

Some employers could try to suppress the number of injuries and illness reports that formally show up on their OSHA logs, resulting in incomplete and less useful overall data, under a proposed new system requiring large employers to submit the records electronically every quarter, say experts on both sides of a rapidly escalating debate over OSHA's planned rule.

A federal working group of OSHA and other agencies is floating a broad set of policy options to improve chemical facility safety, including controversial measures such as first-time rules requiring the use of "safer" technologies, prompting concern from industry groups over the sweeping range of new mandates that the group is considering.

Industry's growing apprehension over the open-ended policy review comes as OSHA encourages use of inherently safer technology (IST) to broadly address chemical safety and health concerns.

OSHA has prevailed in a tort reform group's legal challenge of the preemption position OSHA took when issuing a final rule nearly two years ago to align the country's hazard communication standards with the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of classifying and labeling chemicals, with a federal judge tossing out an appeal that said OSHA's rule should not have included language shielding state-level failure to warn suits from the rule.

White House regulatory officials have given the go-ahead for OSHA to publish a final rule revising employer requirements for safety in electrical transmission and distribution activities, a rule that has been in the making for more than a decade and which has been through several regulatory quagmires over the years.

A bipartisan group of more than 40 senators say OSHA exercised too much latitude when translating into enforcement policy a congressional rider dating to the 1970s that exempts small family farms from OSHA jurisdiction, raising larger questions about how much leeway the agency has in interpreting its governing statutes and also sparking a public relations fiasco for OSHA. The lawmakers accuse OSHA of trying to make an end run around the congressional policy rider through interpretations and “bureaucratic mission creep” in its new grain handling enforcement focus.

OSHA has extended by 30 days the public comment period on a contentious planned rule unveiled last fall that would require quarterly electronic reporting of OSHA logs by large companies, to March 8, 2014 -- bowing to calls from industry for more time to review and prepare feedback on the proposed regulations, which eventually would result in injury and illness data logged by employers being put on the web. But the delay is just a third of the time sought by the residential construction sector, which formally urged a 90-day extension.

Studies have shown the evidence of lung cancer risks from prolonged exposures to crystalline silica dust to be “strong and consistent” and OSHA is taking “appropriate” steps in trying to reduce the health hazard through a regulatory effort, two cancer researchers say in a new American Cancer Society journal article.

OSHA chief David Michaels made a point of addressing two major issues, crystalline silica exposures and temporary worker hazards, as central priorities as the agency marks its 43rd birthday. OSHA, along with research agency NIOSH, came into being after President Richard Nixon signed the OSH Act on Dec. 29, 1970, with the agency ramping up operations the next year.

A key Senate Democrat on labor issues is calling on the Labor Department to create a searchable database system containing records of OSHA and other labor law violations that would help agencies weed out employers with dismal compliance records from being considered for federal contracts. Sources tell Inside OSHA Online the concept emerged due to difficulties in navigating OSHA's online data system for specific company safety records.

OSHA regulators are taking a close look at removing from the agency's process safety management (PSM) standard a longtime exemption for flammable liquids kept inside atmospheric storage tanks, a move they believe would override a 1997 administrative law judge ruling that OSHA says has allowed companies to skirt the PSM requirements even when the tanks are connected to a process covered by the safety standard.

A major union engaged in a joint organized labor/industry effort to come up with feasible approaches to dramatically lower beryllium exposures in the workplace is strongly urging OSHA to consider adopting as a regulatory proposal a set of recommendations unveiled by the partnership and sent to OSHA nearly two years ago. The union also suggests that adoption of OSHA's own version of the model would set a useful precedent for future union/industry efforts to update substance standards.

Federal chemical safety experts are urging California regulators to adopt the “safety case” approach to chemical plants that is used in some European countries, saying similar regulations at the state level would effectively patch holes in federal OSHA's regulatory regime, and citing a report from their probe of the 2012 Chevron refinery blast in Richmond, CA, as underscoring the need for a change in direction.

Arizona's state OSHA plan has taken aggressive enforcement action against the state's forestry agency after probing the circumstances of the Yarnell Hill fire that took the lives of 19 fire fighters in June, an event that focused national attention among safety professionals on the need for implementing fire fighter protections under the OSH Act. The Arizona Forestry Division is formally contesting the Yarnell Hill citations, which totaling $559,000 are among the largest penalties ever by the state plan.

OSHA stands to reap millions of dollars that could go back toward compliance assistance and enforcement efforts as House and Senate lawmakers sign off on a two-year budget accord that provides partial “relief,” as budget negotiators describe it, of the government-wide sequester of agency funds that kicked in this year under the Budget Control Act.

Public Citizen was planning a lawsuit to force the Obama administration's hand on OSHA's long-sought regulatory proposal to clamp down on worker exposures to crystalline silica and probably would have gone forward with the suit if the agency had not recently issued a proposed rule tackling the issue, the consumer interest group's president tells Inside OSHA Online in an exclusive interview. The group would dust off its legal plan if another protracted review delays the final silica rule, Public Citizen chief Robert Weissman warns.

Supreme Court justices decided in conference Friday (Dec. 13) to turn down review of a case with broad implications for OSHA preemption of local safety codes, letting stand a lower court ruling that favored the Labor Department's legal position that the federal agency's workplace requirements do not take precedence over more stringent municipal laws intended to protect both workers and the general public.