Policy Recommendations from the National Worker Safety and Health Summit

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Over 160 people representing COSH groups (Committees/Coalitions on Occupational Safety and Health), unions, universities, public health departments, immigrant advocacy organizations, environmental organizations, community-based organizations, government agencies, and others attended the 2009 National Worker Safety and Health Summit. The goal of the Summit was to bring together a wide range of individuals concerned about workers' health and safety to develop common goals and strategies for improving occupational safety and health conditions in the United States.

The Summit was organized by the Protecting Workers Alliance, a coalition of organizations and individuals including the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health; United in Support and Memorial of Workplace Fatalities (a family rights advocacy organization); individual members of the Occupational Health and Safety Section of the American Public Health Association; and other concerned individuals.

The one day event featured presentations by leaders in the field, including Acting OSHA Director Jordan Barab and leading worker health and safety advocates from around the country. The Summit was a working meeting with the bulk of the day spent on small group sessions divided into issue areas. The workgroups that met included:

• Ergonomics
• Family Rights
• Farmworkers
• Green Jobs Health and Safety
• Immigrant Workers
• OSHA Reform/the Protecting America's Workers Act
• Toxic Chemicals
• Worker Education and Training

This document presents the policy recommendations from each workgroup's discussions. If you would like more information about the Protecting Workers Alliance, please send us a message at protectingworkers@gmail.com and take a look at our website: www.protectingworkers.org.




A. Reform of the Occupational Safety and Health Act
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, originally written into law under the Nixon administration, is long overdue for an overhaul. Monetary penalties under the Act are far lower than those governed by other federal laws and fail to act as an effective deterrent to unsafe working conditions. The system for protecting those who exercise their rights under the Act (“whistleblower protections”) has proven time and again to be an utter failure, as documented by multiple investigations by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Millions of public employees in states governed by federal OSHA jurisdiction are left out of the Act and are left unprotected, despite often working in highly hazardous jobs. Victims of job injuries and their families are often shut out of the process of OSHA investigations and left in the dark, exacerbating the trauma they experience. A comprehensive overhaul of the Act is needed to address these failings.
Policy Recommendations

1) Congress should pass legislation such as the Protecting America's Workers Act (HR 2067 and S. 1580) to strengthen and update the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The legislation should:
• Strengthen penalties for serious violations.
• Allow for felony prosecution in cases in which willful violations of the Act result in serious injuries or deaths of workers.
• Provide OSHA coverage for all public employees in the nation (millions of state, county, and municipal employees are currently not covered under the Act.)
• Strengthen protections for whistleblowers to ensure that workers truly enjoy the right to seek help from OSHA without fear of losing their jobs.
• Increase victims' and family members' rights (see the “Family Rights” section of this document for details.)
2) Congress should pass HR 2199, the Protecting Workers from Imminent Danger Act, to ensure that workers are not forced to choose between risking their lives and saving their jobs.



B. Worker Health and Safety Education and Training
Worker education and training is a vital component of any safety and health program. Effective training develops workers who are educated and empowered to improve the working conditions in their places of employment. This document outlines key steps OSHA should take to improve the state of worker safety and health training in the U.S.

Policy Recommendations

1. A Worker Health and Safety Education Task Force needs to be funded to review the various worker training programs and mandates that currently exist (e.g. OSHA training grants, NIEHS Hazardous waste worker grants, OSHA 10/30 training programs, MSHA training programs, OSHA standards with training requirements, Hazard Communication, etc.) in order to identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps. This task force needs to have representatives from organizations that have shown an ability and commitment to health and safety education.

2. Revitalize and expand the OSHA Training Grants:
• OSHA should significantly increase funds available for grants to outside providers of education and training (Approx. $50 million per year would bring the level back to what it was during the New Directions era, in 2009 dollars) . OSHA should seek funding partners (the National Cancer Institute partnered with OSHA in the past).
• Training grants should be multi-year to make programs sustainable and to build capacity. Many OSH professionals and activists came into the field through New Directions grants; it is important to revitalize the field by creating opportunities and jobs for the next generation.
• Supported grant activities should be defined more broadly (e.g. multilingual educational materials development, technical assistance, needs assessment etc.) and not focused so narrowly on training numbers accumulated.
• Emphasis should be on worker/union training programs and joint labor-management activities, not employer training, as there are significant other resources available for employers (VPP, OSHA Consultation).
• A “train-the-trainer” model should be emphasized in order to maximize reach, as well as taking advantage of the effectiveness of worker educators/peer education.
• Grantee organizations should be able to conduct a wide range of education and training activities, including how to identify, control and eliminate hazards, workers’ rights, effective health and safety committees, collective bargaining for OSH, and other core topics necessary to develop worker leadership in safety and health.
• Priorities should include training and educational materials that address a range of literacy and language needs, that make technical information readily accessible to worker populations, and that reach underserved audiences including youth, immigrant and low-wage workers, the contingent workforce, etc.
• OSHA should develop meaningful evaluation methods for the grants program that go beyond “head counting” and look at effectiveness/worker preparedness to actively participate in injury and illness prevention.
• Training programs should be required to address a systems approach to OSH that emphasizes the hierarchy of controls and safety and health by design. Training should NOT include approaches that blame the worker or inhibit reporting of hazards and/or injuries.
• Training grant funds should allow payment for time off the job for workers to attend training for those who could not otherwise participate in training.
• Encourage linkages between training programs and OSHA field staff. (In the past OSHA staff were detailed to unions for various periods of time.)
• OSHA and other Federal Agencies involved in worker education should fund a “best practices in training” meeting or other public meeting on training as soon as possible.
• OSHA should hold an annual meeting of grantees where best practices in training can be shared. These meetings should include participation from trainers (Trainer Exchange model) as well as program administrators.

3. OSHA needs new leadership for training and education. There should be a Director of Education with staff support in the Assistant Secretary’s office in Washington, D.C., who will provide vision and leadership in terms of:
• Improving the quality of staff training for OSHA personnel using participatory methods of adult education that rely less on lecture methods;
• Leading the effort to revitalize OSHA training grants program;
• Creating minimum criteria for effective training and education (similar to the NIEHS guidelines), to include an emphasis on training that is participatory, hands-on, action-oriented, linguistically and culturally appropriate, etc.;
• Developing a clearinghouse to share resources, best practices, curricula, problem-solving, innovations, translation skills, etc., among the various training efforts;
• Creating and supporting a community of OSH worker educators and professionals to carry out programs that can translate into safer and healthier workplaces.

4. Reach youth before they enter the workforce:
• Develop a national campaign to build OSH curriculum into K-12 schools (building on NIOSH efforts to date);
• Incorporate OSH into youth employment and job development programs (for both youth and adults);
• Sustain and expand the Young Worker Safety Resource Center (currently funded through an OSHA ICB grant that will be ending).

5. Promulgate a strong Safety and Health Program Standard that incorporates a comprehensive training requirement and mandates worker participation in workplace OSH activities.
• Examine existing state models to determine the best approaches (e.g. California IIPP standard, Washington state standards, etc.)
• Look at international models/mandates for worker training and worker engagement (e.g. committees, safety reps, etc.)
• Look at ANSI standard for possible language (Criteria for accepted practices in safety, health and environmental training, ANSI Z490.1)
• OSHA should create an enforceable mandate for employers to conduct universal worker education on hazard recognition and control as one component of a new OSHA Program Standard. OSHA should use the previously proposed Program Standard as the starting document, which included requirements for management leadership and employee participation, hazard assessment, hazard prevention and control, employee training, and assessment of program effectiveness. Much of the proposed standard is summarized in the document at www.state.nj.us/health/eoh/peoshweb/shguide.pdf .
6. OSHA should create a special emphasis program to enforce existing training requirements in OSHA Standards. Employer failure to comply with training requirements should be classified as serious violations since they can lead to employee death or serious physical harm. Descriptions of training that employers are required to provide are found in more than 100 occupational safety and health standards. These descriptions range from very detailed to very general and can be found in Training Requirements in OSHA Standards and Training Guidelines, OSHA Publication 2254, 1998,www.osha.gov/Publications/osha2254.pdf. This document needs to be updated for changes in the past ten years.


7. Other Federal Agencies with worker health and safety programs [including NIOSH and MSHA] need to participate and fund new initiatives in worker education and training to complement this new direction for OSHA.
8. OSHA should place emphasis, in its policies and standards development regarding training, on refresher OSH training to keep workers periodically and consistently better informed of workplace hazards. On-the-job OSH training should be provided when a worker is assigned to new tasks or when new technologies are introduced in the workplace.

C. Immigrant Workers
Due to their precarious economic, and sometimes legal, situation, immigrant workers are particularly vulnerable to hazardous workplace conditions. Special efforts are needed by federal and state safety agencies in order to ensure that immigrant workers, especially those with limited English, are protected adequately from workplace hazards.

Policy Recommendations:

1. That OSHA develop and implement coordinated enforcement pilot projects targeting specific industries where high percentages of immigrants work. These efforts would include the involvement of the enforcement arms of the Wage and Hour Division and state Workers’ Compensation programs, building on models in states like California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
2. That OSHA increase the number of staff who can serve as qualified interpreters and who are fluent in the most common languages spoken by Limited English Proficiency (LEP) workers.
3. That, upon entering the workplace to conduct an inspection, the Compliance Safety and Health Officer (CSHO) distribute written material (such as a business card or brochure) in the languages spoken in the workplace that informs workers that OSHA is conducting an investigation and provides information to workers about their rights and role during this process, including whistleblower protections found under section 11c of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). The written material should also inform workers of their right to speak with the CSHO in a confidential setting, including at a location other than the workplace, in accordance with Section 6, Chapter II, Inspection Procedures, Article (4)e.
4. That OSHA, upon initiating an inspection, post notices of inspection and workers’ rights throughout the facility in languages spoken by the workforce.
5. That OSHA require employers to post citation notices in the languages spoken by their employees.
6. That OSHA implement a policy prohibiting supervisors from interpreting for employees with limited English proficiency during an inspection.
7. That OSHA recognize that foreign-born workers with limited English proficiency are especially vulnerable to company retaliation when reporting conditions, and that OSHA make efforts to communicate whistleblower protections to employees and employers.
8. That OSHA establish a policy ensuring that workers' immigration status shall remain confidential.
9. That OSHA ensure appropriate communication between workers with limited English proficiency and employers, by citing 1910.1200, the Hazard Communication Standard, as well as other training standards, when workers do not receive health and safety training in a language they can understand or when signage has not been posted in a language they can read.
10. That OSHA rescind its directive found in Chapter 3 Section VII of the Field Operations Manual that instructs CSHOs to request that employees provide an identification card during the course of a workplace inspection, as this may impede the employee’s willingness to participate in the interview and to speak freely.
11. That OSHA conduct targeted outreach to immigrant communities in order to communicate that all workers are protected by Administration regulations regardless of immigration status. This outreach should utilize video sharing and social networking websites as well as recognizable public figures from distinct immigrant communities.
12. That OSHA develop effective and long term relationships with community groups, who can serve as a liaison to workers and family members so that they may communicate with OSHA in a confidential and safe setting, as well as in their own language.
13. That OSHA implement a policy granting community organizations the authority to file complaints in order to ensure that immigrant workers and family members can fully participate in the investigation process.
14. That OSHA establish a committee, composed of OSHA staff as well as labor and community representatives, to supervise the implementation of the Immigrant Worker plan and establish progress benchmarks.


D. Ergonomics
Musculoskeletal disorders account for a substantial portion of the burden of occupational injuries and illnesses in the United States. Current law and regulations have failed to provide workers with adequate protection from these hazards. One group that is particularly exposed to ergonomic injuries is health care workers who experience the constant physical stresses of handling patients.

Policy Recommendations:

1) Congress should pass the Safe Patient Handling Act, HR 2381 and S 1788, in order to prevent musculoskeletal injuries among health care workers.
2) These bills should be amended to require joint labor-management Safe Patient Handling-ergonomics committees, with the requirement that direct care workers constitute half the members.
3) In the absence of congressional legislation, OSHA should begin work on the adoption of a standard for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders in the health care industry.
4) Federal OSHA should return the MSD column to the OSHA 300 log in order to obtain accurate data on the extent of the problem.
5) State legislatures should pursue state laws regarding safe patient handling, in the absence of federal action.
6) OSHA should promulgate a Health and Safety Program Standard that includes a component requiring employers to conduct job hazard analyses including ergonomic hazards.
7) OSHA should use its authority under the General Duty clause to cite employers for failure to protect workers' health and safety in cases in which employees are exposed to ergonomic hazards and in which proven methods for reducing these hazards are not employed.
8) OSHA should institute a requirement in their VPP (Voluntary Protection) program that participating companies implement comprehensive ergonomics programs.


E. Family Rights
Family members of victims of workplace tragedies lack basic rights to information and involvement in OSHA investigations. In many cases, victims and their families have information about the context of workplace accidents which could be useful to investigators. Ensuring the active involvement of family members not only is a matter of fairness, but would increase the likelihood of a successful investigation.
Policy Recommendations
1. A federal liaison office should be established to provide family members with information about the accident investigation(s) process, role of other state or federal agencies, workers’ compensation and other matters related to their loved one’s death.
2. Family members should have full “party status” in legal proceedings involving OSHA, MSHA, or whatever state or federal agency is conducting the workplace-fatality investigation.
3. Family members should be given the right to designate a representative to act on their behalf in all matters related to the investigation and any follow-up legal actions related to the investigation.
4. Family members should be notified of all meetings, phone calls, hearings or other communications involving the accident investigation team and the employer, and be given the opportunity to participate in these events.
5. Family members should be given the opportunity to recommend names of individuals to be interviewed by the accident investigation team and to submit questions to the investigators for response by the interviewees. Family members should be given access to all transcripts of interviews, affidavits, or written statements made by witnesses and others interviewed for the investigation.
6. Family members should have the right to be kept informed routinely (no less than once every 14 days) by federal and state officials (e.g., OSHA, OSHA State-Plans, MSHA) on the progress of the incident investigation, including an estimate of when the investigation will be completed.
7. Family members should have the right to conduct an independent investigation of the work-related fatality or serious injury, including the right to visit the scene of the accident before it is released by the investigation team back to the employer’s control.
8. OSHA and MSHA should assure that all physical evidence related to the accident investigation is preserved and secured in a tamper-resistant environment. Family members should have the right to view all physical evidence.
9. Family members should have access to all documents gathered and produced as part of the accident investigation, including records prepared by first responders, and state and federal officials.
10. Information mentioning the deceased family-member’s name and condition should not be redacted from documents provided to family members. All fees related to the production of documents should be waived for family members.
11. Family members should be compensated for the time and expenses incurred because of a work-related fatality or serious injury. In cases where the deceased or seriously injured worker has no spouse or dependent children, a parent of the worker should be compensated for funeral cost, travel and medical expenses, and lost wages.

F. Toxic Chemicals
Our national system for regulating toxic chemical hazards in the workplace and the environment is broken. The Toxic Substances and Control Act is out of date and long overdue for an overhaul. OSHA's system for establishing workplace permissible exposure limits (PELs) on a one-by-one basis for chemicals has proven a failure. Fundamental reforms to this system are needed to protect workers and the community from the harmful effects of toxic chemicals.
Policy Recommendations
1) Given that workers are currently exposed to numerous toxic substances that cause chronic disease, cancer and reproductive harm, Federal OSHA should immediately adopt PELs for all chemicals for which another government agency has adopted an exposure limit after a public hearing, which exposure limit was based on quantitative risk assessment (QRA). Adoption should occur after appropriate mathematical adjustments accounting for how long workers are exposed (based on 40-year work life). The burden should be on industry to establish that the health-based PEL, based on the QRA, is not technically feasible or possible through the development of new technology or will eliminate the entire industry. Federal regulators should also adopt regulations that establish best available control technology and practices in order to reduce exposures to the lowest level possible to protect workers from individual or groups of toxic chemicals whether or not a PEL is adopted.
2) Congress should pass a comprehensive reform of the Toxic Substances and Control Act, including a “Just Transition” clause for workers. Where priority chemicals are identified for phase-out, the concepts of chemical substitution and toxic use reduction should be incorporated, avoiding “regrettable substitutions” and using various financial incentives.
3) NIOSH should be authorized and funded to carry out its mandate of assessing chemicals and making recommendations to OSHA. In particular it should review available quantitative risk assessments conducted by nationally or internationally recognized scientific organizations for individual chemicals and mixed use exposures, and forward recommendations for PELs to Federal OSHA.
4) NIOSH should develop an initiative to track the manufacture and use of toxic chemicals in commerce so that public health agencies can warn those potentially exposed to chemicals when new health hazard information becomes known.
5) Congress should consider legislation similar to Massachusetts's Toxic Use Reduction Act, which requires certain companies to prepare toxic use reduction plans.

G. Green Jobs/Safe Jobs
We applaud the new federal focus on "Green Jobs" and the great infusion of resources allocated to new public works and "Green Jobs" programs. But we fear that these programs could have the unintended consequence of exposing hundreds of thousands of inexperienced workers to a broad range of hazards. In the rush to get projects underway, safety and health considerations may be brushed aside. State and federal agencies should work to ensure that the agencies overseeing such projects take adequate account of the safety and health hazards involved and implement appropriate training and prevention programs.
Policy Recommendations

1) Any new stimulus funding for public works projects should include requirements for adequate health and safety training.
2) Employers should ensure that safety and health training for Green Jobs meets not only minimal OSHA standards but fully prepares workers to prevent job injuries and illnesses.
3) OSH requirements and certification issues need to be clarified for certain jobs in the new “Green Economy,” such as weatherization, solar panel installation, energy auditing, etc.


H. Farmworkers
Despite being one of the most vulnerable groups of workers in the country, farmworkers are too often forgotten in our nation's efforts to protect workers' safety. Few OSHA standards apply to agriculture and overlapping jurisdiction with the US Environmental Protection Agency often means that farmworkers' safety and health falls through the cracks.

Policy Recommendations

1. The federal government should ensure that adequate health care and medical services are provided for all farmworkers, migrants, and their family members.
2. The legal provisions that require farmworkers and migrant workers to be present in a U.S. jurisdiction in order to raise valid workers compensation claims and/or other claims based on worker protections under U.S. law should be eliminated. This “presence rule” prevents some migrant workers, already returned to their sending countries, from bringing otherwise valid claims against U.S. employers.
3. An alternative visa, separate from the employment visa programs, should be created for workers who need to re-enter the U.S. for jurisdictional requirements and/or court proceedings arising from a valid claim against a U.S. Employer.
4. Congress should pass comprehensive immigration reform and health care reform that includes the rights of farmworkers and migrants.