rulemaking

That simple phrase “No dust, no silica,” was the way that Donald Hulk characterized his firm’s attitude about controlling respirable crystalline silica. Hulk is the corporate safety director for Manafort Brothers based in Plainville, CT. His presentation was one of the highlights during last week’s nearly 40 hours of testimony. The other memorable moment came from six workers who traveled from Houston, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia to speak personally about working in silica dust. Their participation interjected a dose of reality. More below about their testimony. Manafort’s Don Hulk…

Who paid for the study?  That's an important piece of information to have when considering a study's methods and reported findings.  Financial ties are the most obvious conflicts of interest, but others include pre-publication review and other requirements imposed by a study’s sponsors. Scientists publishing papers in the leading biomedical journals have, for at least ten years, been providing readers with disclosures of real or potential conflicts.  The editors of more than 1,300 medical journals require authors to comply with specific disclosure policies. Researchers from other disciplines…

Here we go again.  Worker killed on-the-job.  The employer decides---after the fact----it would be smart to install a piece of safety equipment that likely would have prevented the death.  That's what happened after coal miner John Houston "Hollywood" Myles, 44, was killed on-the-job. Myles worked at the Metinvest's Affinity Mine in Raleigh County, WV.  The veteran of Operation Desert Storm (1991) had worked as a coal miner for a total of four years, one of which at the Affinity mine.  On February 19, 2013, Myles was shoveling loose coal and material from the mine floor.  In an adjacent entry…

I'll be the first to admit I've criticized the Obama Administration's OSHA for failing to issue or even propose many new worker safety and health standards.   As I wrote earlier this month, under President Obama and Secretary Solis, OSHA has only issued three new worker safety rules, two of which were safety standards affecting discrete industries and the third, a rule broadly endorsed by big business.  Some colleagues and commentators attribute this mediocre record to regulatory resistance in the White House, pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill, too few staff in the OSHA standards…

Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail's pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., 24 in the 1980's and 23 in the 1990's), but during the 2000's, OSHA only issued 10 final rules. Although some of these regulations only affected a fraction of all U.S. businesses because the hazards are industry-specific (e.g., servicing of rim wheels, grain…

Before too long the US Department of Labor (DOL) and other federal agencies should be issuing their annual regulatory plans and semi-annual agendas. These documents serve as official public notice of agencies' regulatory (and deregulatory) priorities. The Regulatory Flexibility Act and Executive Order (EO) 12866 direct agency heads to release these documents in April (agenda) and October (plan and agenda), but the Obama Administration doesn't have a good track record meeting those deadlines. I'm not going to predict when the next agenda and plan will be issued or, as I did in the Spring, on…