OSHA's High Hazard Industries – a Look at Some Data
Every year, OSHA mails a letter to about 15,000 employers who run high-hazard worksites, warning them that their most recent annual injury and illness rates were well above average. According to OSHA,
For every 100 full-time workers, the 15,000 employers had 4.5 or more injuries or illnesses which resulted in days away from work, restricted work or job transfer. The national average is 2.0.
The letters went out in March, but I just got around to digging into the list of recipients (zip file), and thought I’d share some analysis that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Sorting the list by industry code, I put together a chart of the industries that received the most total letters -- down through the top 10 percent of them. The chart gives some additional detail (like the percent of surveyed employers who received letters in each industry), but here’s the rub:
- Nursing Care Facilities– 2291 letters sent
- Home Centers– 1065 letters sent
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors– 362 letters sent
- Continuing Care Retirement Communities– 342 letters sent
- General Warehousing and Storage– 262 letters sent
- General Freight Trucking, Long-Distance, Truckload– 261 letters sent
- All Other Plastics Product Manufacturing– 239 …
In a post the other week, Celeste Monforton at The Pump Handle gives a great example of health/safety protection being evaluated the wrong way ("Contractor racks up mine safety violations and unpaid penalties, also wins safety awards.") Monforton points to a large construction company that seems to be collecting safety awards while simultaneously being cited for numerous safety violations (and in January, an employee was killed at a work site).
The problem:
Sure, whether workers sustain an injury is something to pay attention to, no doubt. But, with some employers' policies that discourage injury reporting, workers' reticence about telling their boss about a chronic work-related health problems, or workers' comp rules that compel workers to return to work before they are fully healed, lost-time injury rates alone don't cut it.
Laws like the Occupational Safety and Health Act set out goals; to what extent are …
Today, OSHA released a “proposed interpretation” of its 39-year old noise exposure standards. Talk about making up for lost time. All joking aside, this move truly is a positive step for American workers, and may demonstrate a path of action that could help OSHA address hazards in addition to excessive noise.
Over the years, the federal courts and the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) have muddied the waters of many OSHA regulations, enforcement policies, and rulemaking procedures. Their sometimes contradictory, sometimes ambiguous decisions have left OSHA struggling to write new standards in a cumbersome rulemaking process and unable to stringently enforce existing standards—or even employers’ fundamental obligations under the General Duty Clause. The story of the noise exposure standards, as told in today’s Federal Register notice, is a prime example.
OSHA first promulgated the noise exposure standards in 1971, under its authority to …
Cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and MSHA asst. secretary Joe Main are proposing new rules to protect U.S. coal mine workers from developing illnesses related to exposure to respirable coal mine dust. The most commonly known adverse health effect is black lung disease, but exposure is also associated with excess risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, progressive massive fibrosis, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema. The proposal, scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Oct 19,* takes a comprehensive approach to the problem. I've not had a chance to read carefully the entire lengthy document, but I see provisions to reduce the permissible exposure limit for respirable coal dust from 2.0 mg/m3 to 1.0 mg/m3 (phased-in over 2 years), change the way miners' exposure to coal dust is measured from an average over five shifts to a …
Over at The Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton looks at federal OSHA's review, issued this week, of the state worker safety programs.
Cross posted from The Pump Handle.
MSHA announced Tuesday that it will be issuing on September 23 an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to improve a practice to prevent coal dust explosions. The rule addresses "rock dusting"--the decades old practice of generously applying pulverized limestone dust throughout a coal mine to dilute the potential power of a coal dust explosion. As NIOSH's Man and Teacoach explain:
"...the rock dust disperses, mixes with the coal dust and prevents flame propagation by acting as a thermal inhibitor or heat sink; i.e., the rock dust reduces the flame temperature to the point where devolatilization of the coal particles can no longer occur; thus, the explosion is inhibited."
Investigators suspect that the deadly blast that killed 29 miners on April 5 at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine may have been fueled by coal dust.
When the Labor …
Today CPR releases a new white paper, From Ship to Shore: Reforming the National Contingency Plan to Improve Protections for Oil Spill Cleanup Workers (press release), a look at how decisions were made about safety protections for cleanup workers in the aftermath of the BP oil spill -- and the lessons for the future.
The federal government's pre-disaster planning on worker safety issues didn't adequately consult the safety experts, and that meant the decision-making in the immediate wake of the spill couldn't be adequate. Too many cleanup workers in the Gulf were given inadequate training on the use of personal protective equipment. Employers and individual workers were left to determine on their own how to resolve the difficult question of what level of protections, such as respirators, to use.
OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) are constrained to limited roles …
On Wednesday, EPA announced its intention to revise (pdf) the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR). The TSCA Inventory is the official list of chemicals in commerce, and the IUR is the regulation that requires companies to submit production and use data to EPA to ensure the Inventory accurately represents all of the chemicals out there. This week's announcement marks the second time in ten years that EPA has decided the IUR needs improvement, based on agency staff’s efforts to regulate toxic chemicals using the data available to them.
As Dan Rosenberg points out over at Switchboard, the changes are mostly good, although EPA certainly could have gone further on a few fronts. For one, EPA has expressed some interest in changing the IUR’s requirements for reporting occupational exposures—changes that would be a huge improvement—but hasn’t yet decided exactly how to implement the …
Just before the July 4 recess, Representative George Miller, Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, introduced the Miner Safety and Health Act of 2010. Recent explosions at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, Tesoro’s Anacortes (WA) refinery, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, and U.S. Steel’s coke oven in Clairton (PA), highlight the life-threatening hazards that American workers face on a daily basis. Despite these hazards—and the myriad other less serious or even chronic hazards that don’t make headlines—workers continue to do their jobs day in and day out.
Contrast these workers’ diligence with that of certain members of Congress, who, in advance of today’s committee vote on the Miner Safety and Health Act, have said that they want to hold off on legislating until they see the official reports on the causes of the Upper Big …
A report released in Washington this morning highlights "The Hidden Struggles of Migrant Worker Women In The Maryland Crab Industry." The paper, by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. and the International Human Right Law Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, is focused mostly on immigration policy issues (a little outside our purview), but I wanted to note the section on worker safety.
The report looks at the hundreds of Mexican women who travel every year to the Eastern Shore of Maryland on H-2B guestworker visas to work in the crab industry. The researchers interviewed more than 40 current or former workers, and found that:
Work-related injuries are common for many of the migrant workers in the Maryland crab industry. Use of sharp knives, contact with chemicals, lack of formal training, and the pace of work all contribute to injuries. ... In fact, cuts, scrapes …
