Word: osha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that is true, some of the responsibility may rest with the President. In his 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan attacked OSHA for imposing nitpicking, burdensome regulations on business. Within nine months after Reagan took office, the agency made a major policy shift. In the most dangerous industries, OSHA began to target its inspections. It stopped making surprise visits to factory floors and instead began relying on checks of the companies' own records. Only if employers' safety logs showed illness and injury rates to be above the national average in manufacturing did OSHA staffers consider wall-to-wall inspections. To lessen...
Directing OSHA's current policies is Assistant Labor Secretary John Pendergrass, 62, a former 3M industrial hygienist. Pendergrass argues that OSHA's emphasis on encouraging companies to upgrade their record keeping has fostered self-regulation and a new spirit of cooperation between Government and business. "Playing policeman wasn't working," Pendergrass says. "We are nonconfrontational. We can't be the safety director at every plant." Since 1980, he asserts, 1.5 million safety hazards have been eradicated in America's 7 million workplaces. Indeed, Labor Department statistics suggest that workplace safety has improved substantially since OSHA was created...
When Americans report to work each day, many of them encounter hazards as endemic to the job as lunch pails and the morning coffee break. In July OSHA penalized Chrysler, alleging that workers at a Newark, Del., assembly plant were exposed to high levels of arsenic and lead in the paint and soldering areas. (The company plans to pay the $1.6 million fine.) In Chicago, ten of the 5,000 workers who have helped build the so-called Deep Tunnel project, which has created 50 miles of underground passageways for flood and sewage control, have died in construction accidents since...
...American workplaces have become more diverse, the task of regulating safety practices has grown complex. Meanwhile, though, OSHA's staff of inspectors has shrunk to 1,125, from 1,336 in 1980, and the agency has been notoriously slow to set standards. OSHA has issued only 18 health and 23 safety rules in its 16-year history, which even Pendergrass calls "embarrassing...
...reliance on self-regulation by companies has obvious shortcomings. At a John Morrell meat-packing plant in Sioux Falls, S. Dak., inspectors found 69 record-keeping infractions in a company log. On a list of injuries that supposedly resulted in no lost workdays: an amputation and a chemical burn. OSHA proposed a $690,000 fine on Morrell in April. After meat-packer IBP learned that its records would be inspected last January, OSHA alleges, the company assembled 50 employees to revise its logs. IBP, which is fighting the case, has been charged with 1,038 instances of underreporting injuries...