New Sheriff, New Attitude for Occupational Safety and Health

In the past year, the Obama administration has worked to restore the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's mission to protect workers on the job. It's a real contrast to the previous eight years, when the Bush administration did everything possible to deregulate OSHA, slash funds and hand out jobs to business and management friends. Here are some immediate improvements put in place this year:

• Increased OSHA's funding by $27 million in 2009, and is seeking an additional $50.6 million for 2010, to enable the agency to hire 130 more inspectors, 25 more discrimination investigators and other critical staff.
• Appointed officials who bring a workers' focus to OSHA. 
• Launched a "Severe Violator Enforcement Program" focusing on employers who are repeat offenders. Now, any systemic problems that OSHA identifies trigger additional, mandatory inspections. 
• Reacts more quickly to trouble, as in the case of the "Texas Sweep." Because Texas has more workplace fatalities than any other state, OSHA did a safety sweep of construction sites there this summer, conducting nearly 300 inspections in less than a month and identifying numerous fall and cave-in hazards. 
• Accelerating efforts to develop long-awaited standards for hazardous exposure to crystalline silica, beryllium, and food flavorings containing diacetyl.
• Working to streamline the rulemaking process for new workplace safety and health protections.

• Awarded more than $6.8 million in training grants to help workers and employers learn how to prevent job-related injuries and illnesses.

'We Need to Move from Reaction To Prevention'

Jordan Barab, the acting assistant secretary for OSHA, comes from a union to his new job. Here are excerpts of remarks he made to CWA Safety and Health Conference in October.

I didn't come back to OSHA just to make the agency better. I came back to ensure that American workplaces are safer and fewer workers are injured and killed in the workplace. A strong and effective OSHA is one means to that end; another, equally important means is a strong and knowledgeable labor movement, and that's a large part of the reason that you're here at this conference.

Let's remember that there are great benefits to working together — not just on paper, but also through joint health and safety committees, joint incident investigations, partnering full-time union and management health and safety representatives, and providing training for reps and their members. This is how we anticipate hazards, share solutions, and prevent tragedies.

However, we need to change our thinking in one critical way: We need to move from reaction to prevention and to focus on problems before they can cause harm. This focus on prevention is very much on the mind of the new leadership in the Department of Labor and in OSHA as we take note that more than 5,000 people continue to die on the job in America every year. We must do more to reverse this deadly toll.

1st Photo Caption: Hector Capote, left, a vice president of Local 3122, was one of several workers who spoke with Labor Secretary Solis, right, in Miami, Fla., as she gave her first official speech as labor secretary.

2nd Photo Caption: Acting OSHA Adminisrator Jordan Barab speaks out on Workers' Memorial Day 2009 in front of the Labor Department, where workers and family members of workers killed on the job gathered. Some of them held pictures of workers who died.