Employer attorneys are urging California companies to begin crafting documents and developing training procedures to comply with the state’s newly enacted law requiring general industry employers to implement workplace violence-prevention plans -- measures that must be fully in place by next summer.
Two environmental groups are renewing their push for EPA to strengthen its upcoming Risk Management Program (RMP) update, citing data on chemical-facility accidents as recent as Oct. 15, as supporters of a strict policy continue to raise public concerns that the agency’s upcoming final rule will fall short of their goals in several key areas.
The Office of Management & Budget (OMB) has finalized the first major update to its cost-benefit review guide in two decades, including changes that aim to put new emphasis on the distributional effects of regulations on disadvantaged populations.
EPA has sent its proposed TSCA rule governing the solvent n-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), likely teeing up renewed battles over the Trump-era risk evaluation and any workplace exposure limit based on it, after industry groups asked the agency to rewrite the review over alleged scientific errors.
In an early sign of how EPA will defend its TSCA proposal phasing out uses of trichloroethylene (TCE), the agency is arguing in supporting documents that less-stringent alternatives backed by industry groups would be impractical -- including a statement that the rule’s short-term worker protections are not “feasible” over the long term.
OSHA has sent a long-promised proposal to update its safety standards for emergency responders for White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review -- a move that means the plan will likely miss its November target but could see release by the end of the year or in early 2024, more than 16 years after it was first announced.
EPA’s proposed TSCA rule for trichloroethylene (TCE) avoids taking a definitive stance on the long-simmering debate over contested research linking it to fetal heart defects, proposing a worker exposure limit based on that effect but also a less-stringent alternative that uses other effects, though even that option is much tougher than OSHA’s limits.
California OSHA (Cal/OSHA) officials are defending their proposal to strengthen worker-safety rules for lead exposure in the construction and general industry sectors from ongoing attacks by employer and industry groups, touting the science behind stringent new health-risk thresholds and arguing that industry has overstated their likely compliance costs.
Employer attorneys are raising concerns that OSHA’s upcoming revisions to the Hazard Communication Standard, or HazCom, will impose an array of new and unpredictable burdens for the chemical industry on an international scale, most prominently a mandate to gather data on “any hazards” substances may cause.
A workplace safety lawyer says OSHA could seek to cite employers for failing to comply with EPA's planned TSCA workplace exposure limits for several chemicals given the "very clear" intersection of the two agencies' missions, but will face several key legal questions if it tries to invoke "reach-over" authority to directly enforce TSCA mandates.