Word: osha
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Regulatory Agencies Businessmen have been complaining ever more loudly in recent years that federal regulators are saddling them with expensive and unrealistically stringent health, safety and environmental standards. The Supreme Court last week struck down one such standard set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but left unclear just what kind of standard might be legal...
...issue was benzene, a chemical whose vapors are known to be toxic. By the time OSHA was functioning in 1971, the Government and industry had agreed on a benzene standard of 10 parts per million (p.p.m.) in the air in workplaces. OSHA, concerned about new evidence that breathing benzene vapors could cause leukemia, slashed the standard in 1978 to 1 p.p.m. The American Petroleum Institute contended that OSHA was forcing industry to spend $500 million or more to meet a standard that it had not proved to be any safer than...
Four Justices agreed in an opinion written by Stevens. OSHA, they said, had failed to show that there was any significant risk to workers' health at the 10 p.p.m. standard; most of the cancer cases occurred among workers who had breathed much higher concentrations of benzene many years earlier. OSHA took the position that if a substance causes cancer, the agency will set the permitted level in a workplace at the lowest point that can be achieved without bankrupting an industry. But, said the Justices, a "safe" workplace does not mean one that is completely free of risk: "There...
Rehnquist agreed in the decision, but on a totally different ground: he found a section of the congressional act that created OSHA to be unconstitutional. Four dissenters, led by Marshall, protested that OSHA had been conscientiously trying to carry out its mandate to make workplaces safe and healthy...
Untrained workers "very infrequently" worked with asbestos material, Kevin McManus, Industrial Hygienist for OSHA, said last week...