The Structure and Enforcement of Job Safety Regulation

For more than a decade, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been regulating the technology and work practices of employers. This governmental function is relatively new and is quite different from the usual governmental involvement in labor market policies. Some government efforts, such as job training and unemployment compensation, involve no direct impact on workplace operations, except that which may be induced indirectly through the incentives these policies generate. Even the minimum wage law does not directly lead to any governmental intrusion into the nature of the work relationship. In contrast, OSHA regulations specify what safety guards must be on machines, the characteristics of a safe ladder, the permissible levels of exposure to various hazardous substances, and situations where protective equipment must be worn. Such policies are certain to generate resistance from management and, to the extent that these regulations are not well formulated, they will provoke widespread controversy. Indeed, OSHA policies have done just this. Although some controversy was inevitable, OSHA has been the object of particularly harsh criticism because of the ineptness of much of its original standards design and the ineffectiveness of its enforcement policies. The enforcement policies, however, have undergone substantial alteration since the agency\u27s creation. The original standards have been modified and new standards have been added. In particular, each of the last two presidential administrations has attempted to overhaul the enforcement policy through fundamental changes in the enforcement strategy. This article will explore how these policies have evolved as well as whether these changes are desirable. Section II focuses on issues of standards design, and sections III and IV focus on the efficacy of the enforcement process. The fundamental issue discussed in those sections is whether or not OSHA is now more effective in promoting safety than it was at the time of its creation. Section V provides an overall assessment on OSHA\u27s performance and suggestions for further reforms in the agency\u27s operations

What We Learn in Troubled Times: Deregulation and Safe Work in the New Economy

Reviews of how federal agencies functioned during George W. Bush’s presidency reveal many instances of regulatory capture by industry. One prototypical example is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency responsible for occupational safety and health (OSH) standard setting and enforcement. In contrast, a broad array of stakeholders during the Bush years gave good marks to an entirely separate agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which conducts research and develops recommendations to prevent workplace injury and illness. By reviewing the disparate performance of OSHA and NIOSH during the Bush administration, this article sheds light on the OSH challenges facing employees in the new economy, highlights better ways of protecting workplace safety and health, and identifies sustainable practices worth preserving and strengthening. To those ends, the academic debates surrounding new governance scholarship and responsive regulatory techniques provide a backdrop. Situating the safety agencies\u27 recent records within those debates reveals the pitfalls of traditional and new approaches to regulation and the synergies between them. To improve the safety and health of America’s increasingly vulnerable workers, both approaches are required but must be linked. Yet the necessary links between them may be more diffuse than many scholars assume. In other words, it is not necessary or advisable for all cooperative, reflexive, and participatory programs to be housed in traditional regulatory agencies. During periods when, as in the last administration, deregulation is ascendant, agencies that lack enforcement powers may be better positioned to obtain substantive results than are their regulatory counterparts

Cumulative Trauma Disorders: OSHA\u27s General Duty Clause and the Need for an Ergonomics Standard

This Note argues that neither the Act nor its underlying policies supports OSHA\u27s current use of the general duty clause to prosecute alleged ergonomics violations and that the only way to protect workers from CTDs fairly and effectively is through the promulgation of an ergonomics standard. Part I examines the purposes of the Act, as well as the function of the Act\u27s general duty clause. Part II analyzes the four requirements of the general duty clause in the context of CTDs and finds that the clause does not apply to CTDs. Part III argues that the Act\u27s intended policies support the promulgation of an ergonomics standard rather than the use of the general duty clause. This Note concludes that the Secretary of Labor should promulgate an ergonomics standard33 as soon as possible and that, until then, the general duty clause should not be used to prosecute employers for alleged ergonomics violations