The new regulatory agenda for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will result in new worker protections against at most a small handful of health hazards by the end of the presidential term, leaving untouched the absence of standards for thousands of chemicals and hundreds of existing standards that are much weaker than needed to protect workers, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). While OSHA is beginning some new initiatives, it is also pushing back the deadlines for completing some ongoing health standards.
Published in the Federal Register on April 26, 2010, the OSHA regulatory agenda lays out what new rules the agency expects to finalize and under what schedule. The agenda does outline a new initiative on infectious disease control for health workers and begins a long process for issuing an omnibus "injury and illness prevention program standard" (that would, much like the food safety rules industry now operates under, allow each company to write its own plant-specific plans). At the same time, it would extend the rulemaking process for stricter limits on beryllium and silica – a substance whose dangers have been known since the Roman Empire.
This latest semiannual agenda is the third attempt by the Obama administration to lay out its plans. While a contrast from the almost total inaction during the last several years of the Clinton administration and all the Bush years, even if OSHA meets all its new deadlines, it will promulgate at most two or three new health standards by the time of the 2013 Inauguration.
- Look at the OSHA regulatory agenda (PDF)
- Compare the yawning regulatory backlog in exposure limits
- Read David Michael's explanation via web-chat
- See the PEER plan for Putting the "H" Back in OSHA