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OSHA says its new whistleblower advisory panel of outside stakeholders will include an even ratio of management and organized labor interests, with additional representatives from the public and state plan states -- along with several nonvoting members from government agencies with jurisdiction over statutes with whistleblower provisions. The agency is calling for nominations to the panel, announced last month as its latest step in efforts to revamp the beleaguered whistleblower protection program (WPP) housed within OSHA.

Industry officials are concerned that if the Environmental Protection Agency approves a novel proposed regulatory limit to prevent cardiac birth defects and other harms due to acute inhalation of the ubiquitous solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), it could slow brownfields redevelopment, spur personal injury claims and drive up mitigation costs at workplaces near waste sites. OSHA has a permissible exposure limit (PEL) on the solvent of 100 ppm, TWA -- with NIOSH and the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists recommending lower limits.

House Republicans have filed another friend of the court brief backing an industry group's challenge of a workplace notice posting rule by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that they say undermines congressional intent not only with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) but also with other statutes including the OSH Act. Meanwhile the rule, which was supposed to take effect by April 30, pending legal challenges, has been put on hold indefinitely while the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hears the case.

Federal and state OSHA plan officials met a half-dozen times or so over the course of a year and a half to jointly come up with new performance measures to gauge the effectiveness of both the federal agency and state programs in response to concerns borne out by an internal Labor Department probe of effectiveness measures, a source familiar with the talks tells Inside OSHA Online. One key measure likely to arise from the discussions will center on enforcement presence in high-hazard industries, the source says.

The Obama administration has ordered all executive branch departments and agencies except the Pentagon to cut their budget requests for fiscal 2014 by 5 percent below the 2014 level proposed in the 2013 budget, as part of a broader deficit reduction plan the White House says is needed even if Congress is able to avert the sequesters mandated by the Budget Control Act. The order, which targets “lower-priority spending,” is detailed in a May 18 memo from Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to department and agency heads.

OSHA hailed a recent decision by a federal judge upholding the agency's use of the OSH Act general duty clause in the highly publicized case of a whale trainer who was fatally mauled by an orca at SeaWorld, saying the decision shows that the broad requirement in the OSH Act can be effectively used in cases where there is a recognized hazard but no specific regulation. The decision prompted concern from industry, with one attorney who has criticized the administration's expanded use of the general duty clause questioning why OSHA has not instead proposed a rule.

The Joint Commission, the health care facility accrediting group, is rolling out sweeping new policies requiring that all organizations receiving accreditation offer annual influenza vaccination programs for licensed independent practitioners and staff.

The Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to develop a rule to manage hazardous waste pharmaceuticals at health care facilities could address some recent calls from the agency's Inspector General (IG) for new waste rules, though the IG continues to press EPA to update its process for identifying which pharmaceuticals should be handled as hazardous waste.

The Environmental Protection Agency is elevating internal review of its controversial rulemaking to strengthen requirements for pesticide manufacturers to disclose “inert” ingredients in their products, citing the complexity of the rulemaking, controversial legal issues surrounding confidential business information (CBI) protection and a high level of public interest.

Hyatt Hotels Corp. is confronting OSHA over a letter in which the agency warns of numerous alleged ergonomic hazards potentially faced by hotel room housekeepers, furthering a dispute for which the outcome could signal how OSHA tries to tackle ergonomics even though it lacks a specific standard on the hotly contested issue.

A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a top ex-OSHA official who claims he blew the whistle by questioning the agency's recordkeeping enforcement activities, and that OSHA retaliated by placing him on paid leave for two years before eventually firing him in July 2009. The court remanded Robert Whitmore's case to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), saying an administrative judge ignored key evidence that should have been taken into account.

OSHA has created a working group under its national advisory panel to study effectiveness measures for the agency, and the group will first meet in June -- just days before OSHA convenes a public stakeholder meeting on performance measures to evaluate state plans. A source familiar with the new work group tells Inside OSHA Online the pair of overarching issues -- how federal OSHA measures its own effectiveness, as well as how it defines the effectiveness of state plans as required by the OSH Act -- are tied together and will be scrutinized by the work panel.

OSHA will hold an informal stakeholder meeting June 25 in Washington to solicit comments on how to determine whether state plans are at least as effective as the federal OSHA program as required by the OSH Act.

Environmentalists, steelworkers and others are asking a federal court to allow them to intervene in an industry suit challenging the administration's decision to list styrene as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” a move that if granted would allow the activists to defend the listing even if President Obama is not re-elected in November.

Organized labor groups are pressuring OSHA to make an enforcement push against crystalline silica hazards in the fast-growing shale gas extraction industry -- especially in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), the controversial method of extracting oil and gas that uses a huge amount of dust-generating sand along with water and chemicals. They cite new NIOSH data showing measures of non-compliance at fracking sites with OSHA's permissible exposure limit (PEL) for silica.

A former top OSHA regulator has started floating legal arguments for a potential path forward for OSHA to explore a new ergonomics regulation that he argues could potentially overcome the OSHA rule's biggest obstacle to date -- the veto by Congress that killed the agency's last attempt to tackle the issue in 2001. The former official calls for OSHA to target a new rule “squarely” on workplace ergo hazards and recast design and exposure-reduction requirements as recommended controls.

OSHA chief David Michaels recently told congressional investigators the agency “will soon provide policy guidance” putting employers on notice that they risk losing their cooperative program status if their worker safety incentives have the potential to discourage workers from reporting injuries, echoing a message the agency sent to Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) participants.

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A nonprofit public interest group has launched an investigation of OSHA cases and the results of the agency's probes, opening a planned series of reports on workplace issues with a piece about a deadly 2009 explosion at a Pennsylvania plant that ended without any citations against the company.

President Obama has issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to assess the cumulative economic impacts of existing rules that are selected for review under the administration's ongoing burden-reduction effort and to prioritize reforms to reduce those burdens, a stronger requirement than past suggestions but one that appears to fall short of critics' calls to assess the cumulative effects of new rules.

OSHA has unveiled plans to form an advisory panel to offer outside guidance to the agency on making improvements to the agency's whistleblower protection program (WPP), which OSHA officials have been trying to revamp in recent months in response to persistent concerns about the program's effectiveness in enforcing 21 federal laws dealing with employer retaliation. Whistleblower advocates lauded the move to open the restructuring process to outside input, but cautioned that it will be difficult to tell how useful panel is until OSHA releases more details.