Amid rising illness and deaths, California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) standards board has adopted an emergency temporary standard (ETS) for crystalline silica exposure in “engineered stone fabrication shops,” rejecting calls by industry representatives to consider amendments that would ease some of the rule’s stringent new worker-safety requirements.
The Biden administration is launching a new government-wide initiative to strengthen cost-benefit analyses that OSHA and other agencies use to justify key rules, signaling that officials are planning to collaborate with private sector researchers to help identify data gaps and obstacles to improving quantification and monetization of costs and benefits.
EPA has released a draft TSCA evaluation of the flame retardant tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP), finding that nine of 20 uses the agency considered contribute to unreasonable risk from the “whole chemical” and floating a workplace limit for airborne exposures -- measures that if finalized could support broad regulation under the toxics law.
OSHA’s latest regulatory agenda says it intends to advance several long-promised rules in either the final days of 2023 or early 2024, including updated safety standards for powered industrial trucks and elevated walking surfaces, even higher-profile rulemakings such as those for heat danger, workplace violence and infectious diseases remain on uncertain timelines.
EPA staff are weighing whether individual industrial sectors can “effectively administer” stringent workplace chemical exposure limits as they craft the agency’s ongoing raft of TSCA risk management rules amid a barrage of objections from industry that the proposals are too strict, according to one source with knowledge of the toxics program’s work.
The semiconductor industry is urging the White House to limit workplace safety provisions in EPA’s upcoming TSCA rule for the solvent n-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) to codifying the sector’s existing practices, arguing that those safeguards already reduce exposures to near zero.
A Small Business Advocacy Review (SBAR) panel that OSHA convened to gather input on its long-awaited heat safety standard has issued a report laying out a wide range of recommendations for the rulemaking, such as flexibility for employers to tailor worker protection plans to their sectors and generous exemptions for small companies.
An industry attorney is highlighting novel language in EPA’s proposed TSCA rule for the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE) that requires companies to limit worker exposures only “to the extent possible” as evidence that its occupational exposure standard is unworkably strict, underlining likely objections to the policy from trade groups and employers.
The Labor Department (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) has again identified worker safety issues among the top “management challenges” facing the department in its annual report on those high-priority issues, and is recommending a slew of new actions at both OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
Unions and their allies, including elected Democrats, are supporting OSHA’s proposal to allow compliance officers inspecting a workplace to bring worker representatives on walkarounds even if they are not affiliated with that employer, arguing that the policy will bolster workers’ rights while seeking relatively minor changes to the agency’s text.