Assistant Secretary of Labor Dr. David Michaels, the current Chief of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), recently spoke candidly about the challenges facing the agency before a crowd of safety professionals at the Safety 2010 Exposition held in Baltimore, Maryland.
The chief outlined what he referred to as an "aggressive" agenda for OSHA while also calling on the help of other safety professionals to modernize the agency's policies.
Employers Must Be Proactive in Workplace Safety
Dr. Michaels talked about OSHA's new mantra, "to plan, to prevent and to protect." He said that OSHA would never have enough inspectors to visit every job site in America, so some of the responsibility must fall on employers to take action to make their workplaces safe.
In particular, Dr. Michaels said that employers must be proactive and not wait for OSHA to show up and give them citations for violating safety regulations. Instead, employers must implement their own injury and illness prevention programs tailor-made to their particular jobsites, which he referred to as "I2P2s."
Much to the crowd's delight, Dr. Michaels said that employers who continue to violate safety regulations and put their workers' lives at risk should be subject to criminal penalties because monetary sanctions have not proven to be enough of a deterrent.
Workplace Safety Lessons from the Gulf
During his presentation, the OSHA head also discussed OSHA's role in dealing with the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Dr. Michaels has made two visits to the area and described OSHA's role there as one of identifying potential problems, bringing them to BP's attention and finding timely solutions.
Dr. Michaels pointed out that there were important lessons to be taken away from the BP disaster, including the fact that past injury rates are a poor indicator for future catastrophic events. For example, the unit working on the ocean platform where the initial explosion occurred had just celebrated seven years of workplace safety and health prior to the disaster.
Some of the other issues Dr. Michaels touched upon included OSHA's need to adopt better whistleblower protections, incentive programs and out-reach programs directed at non-English speaking workers. He also discussed updating Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs), which he said were out-of-date by the time they were first adopted in 1968.
Safety 2010 was an educational conference sponsored by the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE). More than 4,000 safety, health and environmental professionals attended the conference this year.
