While it continues to work on new standards on heat stress and infectious disease, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is emphasizing its willingness to work with businesses to improve worker protection.
Speaking last week at the American Society of Safety Professionals’ (ASSP) Safety 2024 conference, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Douglas Parker said it’s important to remember the price paid by the families of workers who die on the job. He met with surviving family members of fallen workers and was struck by the fact that despite their grief, they wanted to ensure that others wouldn’t have to go through something similar.
“If families can be so selfless in the face of a loss like that, then as a health and safety community, we can fight for that change, too,” Parker said. “And we can recommit ourselves to the moral imperative that workers have the training and the systems and the leadership and the values and the engagement to go home safe every day.”
VPP modernization
One of the ways OSHA is looking to improve worker safety is by modernizing its Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP), which recognize employers and workers in private industry and federal agencies who have implemented effective safety and health management systems and maintain injury and illness rates below national averages. VPP participants are re-evaluated every three to five years and are exempt from OSHA inspections while they maintain their VPP status.
“We want to make VPP much more usable and much more effective,” Parker said. “We love VPP, but it’s not scalable because of the effort that it takes and just because of the general intensity and the fact that it’s an elite program that not everyone can achieve or wants to achieve.”
OSHA has met with VPP stakeholders and is developing a framework with different levels, he added. “We’re looking to incentivize participation and achievement.”
The plan is to start with very low barriers to entry, so even an employer that’s having problems can start with something as simple as a pledge, said Parker. At the higher levels, there would be more robust requirements, accreditations, implementation of basic health and safety system templates, and certification.
“We think that if this program is successful, it could have the most significant impact on values-driven health and safety from OSHA’s perspective in years and we’re very excited about it,” he noted.
Another successful OSHA initiative is happening right now. OSHA’s Safe + Sound Week is a national event that recognizes the successes of workplace health and safety programs and offers resources. For 2024’s Safe + Sound Week, August 12-18, the focus is job hazard analysis (JHA), “which is a crucial process for identifying hazards before they occur,” Parker said.
Last year’s focus was mental health. Parker said OSHA is hoping to triple participation this year, with a goal of 9,000 participants.
Current focus areas
Through its National Emphasis Programs (NEP), OSHA is targeting areas where worker safety is lacking.
“We really have to focus on high-hazard industries, vulnerable workers, and employers whose actions demonstrate a disregard for health and safety,” Parker said. “We also have to look at areas where we see high injury rates for our program inspections, so there are a couple of significant NEPs we have recently launched.”
Last year, OSHA launched an NEP on fall prevention. Of the 5,500 workplace fatalities in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 700 of those were associated with falls from elevation and about 400 of those were in construction alone, Parker said.
“Under our National Emphasis Program, we’re following the data, conducting proactive interventions in high-risk sectors, and we’re using strategies to find problems in industries like residential construction through how we do our targeting,” he added. “We are really hoping that we finally can bend the curve on what is really an epidemic of noncompliance. That is the problem that we have year in and year out, with workers dying needlessly because their employer has not properly implemented fall protection.”
The agency has also launched an emphasis program on warehousing, distribution, and higher-risk retail sectors.
“This is an area with tremendous growth over the last 10 years with more than 1.9 million workers in this industry,” Parker said. “The BLS shows injury and illness rates that are higher than the private sector overall and, in some subsectors, more than double the rate of private industry.”
OSHA inspections have also “focused on things like material handling, walking and working surfaces, fire protection—very nuts and bolts issues—but we’re also evaluating for ergonomic and heat hazards while we are doing these inspections,” he noted.
Rulemaking efforts
Parker also detailed OSHA’s latest rulemaking efforts.
“Last month, we released our proposed rule to protect outdoor and indoor workers from heat,” he said. The proposal hasn’t been published yet while the agency solicits more public comments.
“It’s a complex rule, it covers a lot of industries, so it’s critically important that we get it right, that we’re protective of workers and that we understand its implications in the real world,” said Parker. “We’ve had more than 6,300 heat inspections and the states have had 8,000, most of those resulting in outreach and conversations with employers and relatively few citations. We’ve really had an outreach focus.”
Parker said the rule is very similar to rules that have been implemented in states that have heat programs with some variations.
“We do have some empirical evidence that his approach has worked, has been effective, and is workable,” he said. “
Parker added that progress has been made on an infectious disease standard for healthcare, which the agency hopes to have out this year. Once the infectious disease standard is out, OSHA plans to focus on a standard on workplace violence prevention in healthcare.
Another area OSHA is working on is a worker walkaround rule, which would allow employees to designate a representative during an inspection.
Broader initiatives
The agency has also been taking a broader view at workplace safety, Parker said.
“It’s critical that where we see corporatewide issues that we have the tools to address them,” he added.
The Severe Violator Enforcement Program (SVEP) has been expanded “to cover any industry with the understanding that you can have high-hazard industries but you can also have a high-hazard employer in any sector,” said Parker.
The SVEP has helped OSHA resolve two major national cases, he added. The agency announced corporatewide national settlements in the discount retail sector with Dollar General and with Dollar Tree/Family Dollar family of companies.
“As a result, those companies have made significant safety investments or will, they are reviewing their logistics and inventory controls, they’re implementing more worker participation and rapid response programs to abate hazards in their facilities, with short time frames and daily penalties if they fail to abate properly,” said Parker.
Parker noted that following up with the companies is also important.
“While the Dollar General settlement is fairly new, we have had tremendous success in our quarterly meetings with Dollar Tree seeing how they have really made a difference in their implementation of a safety health management system to address the concerns that were really at the heart and the root cause of why we had so much unfortunate activity at their plants,” he said. “It’s an example of how in the post-enforcement, post-settlement context we can have a positive relationship with a corporation.”
When it comes to repeat offenders, OSHA is getting more aggressive.
“In a limited number of cases, we have employers who are either not abating hazards after they’re cited or they continue to have recurring issues, a pattern of disregard for safety, and we have to go back and back and back,” Parker said. “We are taking a more comprehensive approach where we are seeing the same issues over and over again. We’re taking more aggressive interventions to ensure abatement.”
One success story is with trench safety, he said. “We have used the threat of prosecution and in some cases, actual prosecutions to deter the inexcusable situation where workers are in an unprotected trench,” Parker added. “We have reduced trenching deaths by 50% since we launched this program.”