Word: osha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LAST weeks of 1970, Congress created a new governmental agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA was charged with the task of safeguarding the lives and health of over 63 million American workers. In signing the bill into law, President Nixon called it "an example of the American system at its best." In the years since its establishment, however, OSHA has been a major disappointment to many of its original backers. In a 1974 interview, Sen. Harrison Williams (D-N.J.), then chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare subcommittee and one of the co-sponsors...
Prior to the establishment of OSHA, most American workers were protected against hazardous working conditions only by state and local laws. During the Johnson Administration, several studies were published that highlighted the general inadequacy of and lack of uniformity among the various state standards. To remedy this situation, the Johnson Administration proposed a federal agency to promulgate and enforce a set of health and safety standards. The idea ran into strong business opposition however, and no legislation emerged...
...however, differed significantly from the original proposal, which, strongly supported by the AFL-CIO, had given the Secretary of Labor the authority to shut down immediately any plant presenting an imminent danger to employee health and safety. The Nixon Administration proposal, supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, required OSHA to obtain a court injunction to shut down a plant, and hence virtually eliminated the possibility of effective, immediate preventive action in emergency cases. Also, the fines that could be levied for violations of the OSHA standards were smaller in the Administration bill than in the labor-supported bill...
...Finally, OSHA was directed to encourage the states to operate their own safety plans as long as their standards were at least as effective as OSHA's. State plans approved by OSHA were to then receive 50 per cent of their funding from OSHA. Labor unions were particularly opposed to these last provisions; they feared that state administration would result in a return to the conditions that had necessitated the creation of a federal agency in the first place...
...OSHA AS ESTABLISHED still might have served fairly and effectively to protect the workers for whose lives and health it was responsible. OSHA inspectors were empowered to visit workplaces without prior notice, making inspections in the event of an accident, the filing of a valid worker complaint, or at random. For each violation found, inspectors were required to hand out a citation, which was to be posted for three days or until the violation was corrected. For each citation issued, the inspector was required to propose a penalty (up to $1000 for non-willful violations) to be paid...