Safe Workplace and Safety News

This is the safety news blog for the Safe Workplace web site. We cover workplace safety related news with a focus on how safety, or a lack of safety, impacts employers, employees and their families. We also cover topics such as safety training, safety tools, and legal issues related to safety. For regular safety news and information enter your email address in the box above the Subscribe button to the right (then click on the button).

Monday, May 19, 2008

Interpreting Protections Away

The Sunday edition of the Las Vegas Sun continues that newspaper's look at OSHA and construction safety. This article states that OSHA uses directives, which are interpretations of safety requirements, to weaken or abolish the established safety requirements. The article states that in this way, although a safety requirement is on the books, it will not be enforced.

The Las Vegas Sun article states: "OSHA in recent years has issued interpretations of long-standing safety requirements that, in some cases, effectively change or abolish those requirements without public review, critics argue. For nearly three decades after OSHA was created by a Democratic Congress and signed into law in 1972 by a Republican president, the agency issued what are known as compliance directives to instruct field officers in enforcement of OSHA laws.

But in the past decade, OSHA’s construction standards division began using compliance directives more broadly. They were used to interpret safety standards and to tell employers which standards could lead to safety violations."

But labor advocates say the use of directives to interpret or change the meaning of construction safety standards is improper. The directives do not go through the same public review as the standards themselves did.

'A party can challenge a standard within 60 days when it’s issued, but with compliance directives you don’t have the right as a worker or union to challenge it, and it becomes a way of changing the rule,' said Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO’s director of safety and health."

You can read the entire article at the Las Vegas Sun

Labels: Construction Safety, OSHA, politics