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OSHA Taking Its Eye off the Ball with Misguided Changes to Recordkeeping Standards

The Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, chaired by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), held a hearing today to examine regulatory changes to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) recordkeeping standards, and whether or not these changes will advance worker safety.

“Reducing occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities is a priority that crosses party lines, and stretches from the White House to the halls of Congress,” Rep. Walberg said. “However, there are times when we share a difference of opinion in how to reach that goal … Bad actors who cut corners and put workers in harm’s way must be held accountable. At the same time, the administration should work with employers to address gaps in safety in order to prevent injuries and illnesses before they occur.”

As part of an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of federal health and safety policies, employers are required to record and report workplace injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. The Obama administration has put forward a number of regulatory changes to these requirements, and witnesses testified how these changes will create confusion for employers and fail to deliver the protections workers need.

“OSHA seems stuck in a ‘Washington, DC, knows best’ mode of regulating our industry, and it is not helping to make workplaces safer,” said Lisa Sprick, who owns a small roofing company that employs 25 Oregon workers. “OSHA should focus on working cooperatively with responsible contractors who are making every effort to implement the most effective safety programs rather than moving forward with regulatory approaches that merely divert time, resources, and best practices away from efforts to truly make workplaces safer.”

The agency’s “DC knows best” mentality comes with a cost. As Arthur Sapper, who practices occupational safety and health law testified, OSHA is imposing a “massive burden on American employers—and for little gain.”

The latest example of OSHA’s flawed approach is a rule finalized earlier this month that requires employers to publicly post injury and illness records. Witnesses testified how this rule will do little to improve worker safety and even jeopardize the privacy of employees’ personal information.

“Without presenting the whole picture of how certain injuries and illnesses occurred, the information is meaningless, so it is unclear how this information being made public will help advance the cause of improved workplaces safety,” said Sprick. “Given the very serious and numerous concerns with privacy in today’s interconnected world, the possibility of inadvertent publication or intentionally hacked data of sensitive employee information should be of paramount concern.”

In addition to putting employees’ personal information at risk, the agency is opening the door for third parties, including unions and trial lawyers, to mischaracterize employer records without any meaningful context.

“By publishing injury and illness data, OSHA will be making sensitive employer data available without any context or obligation,” said David Sarvadi, who testified on behalf of the Coalition for Workplace Safety. This rule is “meant only to have the very real effect of shaming employers who have had a workplace injury or illness during the reporting period … To actually improve workplace safety, OSHA and employers should be focusing on identifying true causes of injuries and illnesses and developing new technological means of correcting them to prevent injuries from occurring in the first place. Instead OSHA’s proposals on recordkeeping focus on how and whether all injuries are documented.”

Rep. Walberg emphasized how the rule is an example of OSHA taking its eye off the ball when it comes to worker safety, pointing out that “recording an injury is not preventing an injury.” The agency’s priority should be implementing preventive safety measures, not “this special interest tool which will shift scarce resources away from proactive policies to improve safety, such as inspections and compliance assistance programs,” he said.

In closing, Rep. Walberg called on OSHA to adopt a different approach that serves the best interests of America’s workers, saying, “We owe it to working families to hold the administration accountable for its misguided policies and to call on OSHA to take a more responsible, effective, and collaborative approach.”

 

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