Daily News

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has granted EPA’s request to remand without vacatur the Trump-era risk evaluation of methylene chloride, rejecting objections from unions, states and environmental groups that the agency’s plan to rework its analysis of the toxic solvent will not address several elements they claim are unlawful.

The House Appropriations Committee is pushing OSHA to impose higher penalties for safety violations, update its standard for workplace noise and quickly craft a rule to protect workers from heat illness, arguing that those and other steps are needed to undo long-term “erosion” of the agency’s enforcement program.

A new draft guide from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) says key data needed to set exposure limits for engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) remains scarce despite an EPA reporting requirement, while touting several agencies’ assessments of the substances as models for workplace protections.

House appropriators voted July 12 to advance a fiscal year 2022 Labor Department spending bill that includes $692 million for OSHA -- $100 million more than current levels and $27 million more than the Biden administration requested, though with few details on how the committee would allocate that money among the agency’s programs.

Environmentalists and industry groups are starting to draw battle lines over how or whether the Biden administration should revise the Trump-era rule governing chemical facility-safety requirements, with environmentalists urging officials to restore and strengthen the Obama-era rule while industry is arguing for retaining the Trump rule.

Oregon’s worker safety agency has issued an emergency heat illness standard in response to June’s record-breaking heat wave, in a possible sign that the regional “heat dome” event already linked to more than 100 deaths in the Beaver State alone could boost OSHA’s newly-announced plans to enact a similar standard nationwide.

The labor union National Nurses United (NNU) has dropped its court challenge to OSHA’s COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) without explanation, leaving a challenge by the AFL-CIO and United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) as apparently the only active litigation over the medical-sector rule.

OSHA has published its first handbook for compliance officers to enforce the COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) just as the rule’s first wave of employer mandates are going into effect, with guidelines for both remote and in-person inspections at healthcare facilities as well as criteria for applying the rule’s site-specific exemptions.

Four staff scientists at EPA’s chemical safety office are asking the Office of Inspector General (OIG) to review their claims of long-running “fraud and corruption” in the TSCA program, saying managers and political officials across multiple administrations intervened in a host of cases to ease chemical risk findings, workplace safety mandates and other aspects of their risk evaluations.

The Agriculture Department (USDA) has let pass the deadline for appealing or seeking a stay of a federal judge’s ruling that scrapped its line-speed waiver program for pork plants over worker safety concerns, reinstating stricter caps on production speeds even as several firms are seeking permission to file their own appeals.

EPA chemicals chief Michal Freedhoff says the agency could begin to finalize new versions of at least seven of the 10 chemical evaluations issued by the Trump administration starting in spring 2022, while three of the documents have been deemed “likely sufficient” in their current forms and will drive proposed management rules.

OSHA plans to make a heat-illness standard one of its top priorities early in the Biden administration, touting California’s heat standard as a potential model and warning that without a new federal rule, Trump-era judicial precedent will block use of the OSH Act’s general duty clause to combat heat dangers.

Labor unions are suing the Biden OSHA over its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS), setting the stage for a ruling on whether regulators and the White House lawfully found that only medical workers face “grave danger” from the pandemic, just as newly released draft materials show officials originally sought an economy-wide ETS.

House and Senate Republicans are pushing the Biden administration to appeal a federal district judge’s ruling that vacated a controversial line-speed waiver program at pork plants over worker-safety fears, arguing that allowing the waivers to end would cut the sector’s capacity and cost farmers as much as $80 million in lost sales this year.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is seeking data and expert advice on use of personal protective equipment (PPE) by “underserved” workers -- a project that could aid not just workplace regulations but also EPA’s effort to tighten its approach to PPE in its chemical risk assessments and rules.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) gearing up to peer-review the Defense Department’s (DOD) revised approach to developing a standard for workplace exposures to trichloroethylene (TCE), marking the latest step in DOD’s long-running struggle to reconcile EPA and OSHA’s drastically different findings on the solvent.

Speakers at EPA’s June 16 environmental justice (EJ) consultation for impending rules on trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE or perc) urged the agency to focus on impacts to workers, and heard praise from industry on what one official said is a new promise from officials to seek briefings on industrial hygiene practices.

Employer and industry groups are splitting over the latest revised California OSHA (Cal/OSHA) COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS), after the agency relaxed masking and distancing requirements for vaccinated workers -- a move some firms are welcoming while others say the new rule is still too strict and should be repealed.

At the same time, labor union and employee representatives are raising concerns that the revised ETS goes too far in allowing many workers to go without masks, which one lobbyist charged would undoubtedly result in lost lives.

OSHA will publish its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) in the June 21 Federal Register, making the rule effective for the healthcare sector upon publication, meaning the 14-day compliance deadline for most of its provisions will arrive on July 5.

The Register notice set for publication on June 21 will codify, apparently without substantive changes, the ETS that OSHA released online June 10.

EPA’s top waste official is promising that the agency’s plan to revise the Trump-era rule setting safety mandates for chemical facilities will require that industry provides the “maximum protection possible” and will make environmental justice a key focus, bolstering environmental groups that have pushed for such approaches.