Construction industry trade groups are mounting an informal challenge to OSHA's crystalline silica rulemaking that hinges on an argument that agency officials did not adequately consult with their construction advisory panel on details of the planned regulations as required by OSHA procedures before issuing the proposal last year.

A national group of occupational hygiene experts wants OSHA to craft a formal regulatory definition of “recognized and generally accepted good engineering practices” (RAGAGEP) as it explores a range of options for potential revisions to its process safety management (PSM) standard designed to protect workers from chemical disasters, urging OSHA to help clarify an issue that has become the subject of enforcement disputes.

Organized labor has launched an assault backed by economic expertise against the business community's assertion OSHA's planned rule on respirable silica would cost countless U.S. jobs, with unions arguing the regulatory scheme would actually yield more economic benefits and result in less costs than even OSHA estimates.

Administration officials working to implement President Obama's executive order on improving safety and security at industrial plants are considering strengthening local emergency planning committees (LEPCs) overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency but are not addressing calls to require controversial new safety requirements at facilities.

Labor Department lawyers are fighting back against industry complaints that OSHA set aside too short a time at its public hearings on silica to respond to stakeholder questions about the rule, citing procedures that govern the hearings and declaring that while OSHA will accept written queries as suggested by an administrative law judge (ALJ), the agency has not agreed to respond to any of them.

Worker health activists want to know why OSHA proposes that employers offer medical surveillance to workers when silica exposure levels reach the permissible exposure limit of 50 micrograms per cubic meter, TWA, rather than triggering such surveillance when exposures reach the action level, which is half the PEL's level.

Employer-side groups are in an uproar that OSHA allotted only two and a half hours for stakeholders to question agency officials at the opening of a roughly three-week series of hearings on agency's hotly contested crystalline silica rulemaking before moving on to testimony from various stakeholders, saying they had several more hours' worth of inquiries for regulators and pleading for a whole day to be set aside to interrogate OSHA.

Business advocates intend to make the privacy of employees and OSHA's logistical ability to scrub employer injury and illness reports of any worker-identifying information part of the backbone of their vigorous effort to thwart OSHA's planned rulemaking to mandate electronic submission of records which would then be disseminated on the Internet.

OSHA's proposal to mandate electronic submission and online posting of injury and illness data has ignited a dispute among worker and industry advocates over the precedence of federal agencies collecting data in that manner and over OSHA's statutory authority to issue the planned regulations, sources told Inside OSHA Online as comments flowed into the regulatory docket to meet a Monday (March 10) deadline for feedback on the contentious rule proposed last fall.

Environmental Protection Agency waste chief Mathy Stanislaus declined at a March 6 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) hearing to commit the agency to mandating the use of inherently safer technologies (IST) to prevent or reduce the consequences of accidents or attacks at industrial facilities, despite strong urging from several Democratic senators.