OSHA and NIOSH have issued a hazard alert to employers in the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) industry warning them about worker exposures to silica, a move that closely follows calls by organized labor and worker safety advocates for the agencies to take action in light of new NIOSH data on silica exposures. OSHA says the hazard alert was developed in consultation with stakeholders, including industry.
September 17, 2026
Top OSHA officials said that the small business review process for the agency’s planned injury and illness prevention program (I2P2) rule will not begin until at least this Labor Day, with one official saying the agency is still putting together alternative “options” to present to employer representatives. Worker safety advocates blame election-year politics for protracted delays in moving the controversial initiative forward and suggest the Obama administration has missed a key opportunity to promulgate the rule.
Date:
State plan and worker advocacy sources say OSHA's 15 new draft performance measures, written in cooperation with the association of state plans to evaluate the effectiveness of state programs, cover many of the areas the federal agency often takes into account, but tread little new ground in other areas, such as measuring the real-world impact of regulations. A former state plan official closely following the issue suggests that the agency, while producing some legitimate measures, is still largely “missing the point” with respect to gauging effectiveness.
Date:
OSHA has come out with 15 draft performance measures that the agency and state plan officials agreed should be considered for future evaluations of state OSHA plan effectiveness. The agency breaks the proposed measures down into seven categories: inspections; complaints; hazard identification and violation classification; discrimination (safety and health whistleblower cases); penalties; responsiveness; and abatement.
Date:
A key standards body in California plans to weigh a controversial plea for Cal/OSHA to form an advisory panel to study whether the agency should issue new regulations aimed at curbing what organized labor says are ergonomic hazards faced by hotel room housekeepers. The vote comes as unions continue pushing for federal OSHA to address the ergo issue in hotel work environments.
Date:
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to strengthen its publicly released 2006 draft toxicity value for ethylene oxide (EtO), a chemical intermediate and medical sterilizer, according to a 2011 working draft Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) assessment, worrying industry officials who fear the upcoming final version will adopt a limit at least as strict as proposed in 2006. OSHA has a permissible exposure limit (PEL) of 1 ppm, 8-hour TWA for EtO, which has come up in stakeholder discussions about top chemicals of concern for tightening PEL standards.
Date:
A key public interest group is pressing OSHA, NIOSH and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to tackle crystalline silica hazards in the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) industry through several measures: a hazard alert that warns the industry of hazards and makes exposure control recommendations; an assessment of mine workers' exposures; and issuance of a new OSHA silica standard which has been delayed at the White House since last year.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date:
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.
Date: