According to testimony before the Senate Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions Committee, OSHA takes far too long to adopt new safety
standards in response to industrial and construction injuries and deaths. A
report from GAO points out that promulgation of new OSHA rules takes just a
little less than eight years. Washington state’s former OSHA director Michael
Silverstein told the committee, “We have created barriers based on false
alarms, and the need now is to lower them so that worker protection can proceed
again without delay. It is no exaggeration to say that lives are at stake.”
Senate HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin echoed Silverstein’s
sentiments. “It is simply unconcsionable that workers must suffer while an OSHA
rule is mired in bureaucracy,” he remarked. In delivering the agency’s report
to the Committee, GAO’s Director of Education, Workforce and Income Security
Revae Moran testified, “Why it would take 19 years to set a scaffolding
standard doesn’t necessarily make sense.” The GAO report found that a quarter
of OSHA regulations approved since 1981 have taken more than a decade to
complete. As one extreme example, the GAO report notes that OSHA has been
studying silica dust exposure since 1974, but still has not issued even a
proposed regulation.
OSHA issued 47 new safety rules between 1980 and 1999, but
has issued only 11 new rules since the beginning of 2000. HELP Committee
Ranking Member Mike Enzi also bemoaned the Obama administration’s reluctance to
use voluntary safety programs, such as OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs, to
fill in safety regulation gaps. “Voluntary programs involving employees and
management such as the Voluntary Protection Programs have been shown to make
workplaces considerably safer and save money,” Enzi said. “Yet under the
current administration VPP has been threatened and undermined.”
