The Omaha area OSHA office is no longer investigating a May grain elevator explosion that led to the death of an employee after determining that the farm is not subject to OSHA enforcement under a longstanding 1970s-era congressional policy rider that limits the agency's jurisdiction over farms with 10 or fewer employees.
Employers are facing a July 1 deadline for submitting to OSHA 2017 data summarizing their workers' injuries and illnesses under an Obama-era electronic reporting rule that has faced significant implementation hurdles, and that the Trump administration has already moved to revise.
The National Employment Law Project (NELP) in a new report is faulting OSHA for scaling back enforcement in the first years of the Trump administration, arguing that enforcement is continuing to decline at an “accelerated pace,” despite the agency's recent touting of an uptick in inspection numbers in fiscal year (FY) 2017 over the prior year.
OSHA has scaled back its termination procedures for participants in the agency's Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP), narrowing conditions spelled out in a 2013 Obama-era policy for when participating sites must be removed from the program that is designed to recognize exemplary workplace safety and health efforts.
With OSHA's silica rule slated to be enforceable on June 23, the agency is planning to provide compliance assistance to employers that make “good faith efforts” to meet the general industry and maritime standard's requirements, and any citations issued will be subject to federal review during the rule's first 30 days of enforcement.
States and industry attorneys are instructing employers who operate under OSHA-approved state plans to ignore a recent enforcement directive from federal OSHA that stated that the employers are required to submit their injury and illness data as required under the 2016 Obama-era recordkeeping update rule by July 1.
Reversing an earlier guidance, OSHA is now requiring employers in the 26 states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands that operate under OSHA-approved state plans to submit injury and illness data as required under the 2016 Obama-era recordkeeping update rule by July 1, even if the employer is covered by a state plan that has not yet adopted an equivalent state rule.
A coalition of local safety and health groups say that an uptick in worker deaths in 2016 should prompt the Trump administration to boost OSHA funding for inspections, arguing that increased resources for workplace safety and health programs and more robust agency follow-up enforcement would help prevent worker deaths.
OSHA's review commission is seeking unusual public input on whether and how regulators can address workplace heat stress cases under the agency's general duty clause, as a company is challenging a citation arguing that the Secretary failed to establish that the hazard existed or that the employer could have reasonably recognized such a hazard.
OSHA's Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC), which reviews administrative decisions, has found that inspectors with expired credentials still have the authority to cite employers for alleged violations and that it is the employers' responsibility to examine the officer's card before the inspection to ensure that they are “appropriate credentials."