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Archived News Release--Caution:
information may be out of date.
For more information call: (202) 219-6091
Addresses 12th Annual Voluntary Protection Participants Association
Conference
Programs undertaken by the "New OSHA" (Occupational Safety and Health
Administration) demonstrate that business, labor, and government can achieve
common ground to successfully improve worker safety and health in America,
according to Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health
Joseph A. Dear.
Dear will be a principal speaker Tuesday before the 12th Annual National
VPPPA (Voluntary Protection Programs Participants Association) Conference at
the Hilton in Walt Disney Village in Orlando, Fla. More than 1,400 business,
labor and government professionals -- in addition to hourly workers and plant
managers -- are attending the conference.
Last year President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary of Labor
Robert B. Reich developed a three-pronged strategy for a new OSHA. The three
foundations are:
- 1) Give employers a choice -- between partnership with OSHA and
workers to provide improved workplace safety and health, or traditional
enforcement.
- 2) Use common sense regulations and enforcement: Identify clear
priorities, focus on key rules, eliminate or reform out-of-date and confusing
standards, and work with businesses and employees to develop new and revised
rules.
- 3) Focus on results - not red tape.
The New OSHA has been successful in carrying out this strategy, Dear
will tell the conference.
For example, programs to give employers a choice of partnership with
OSHA and workers to improve safety and health are now underway throughout the
nation. "We'll have such programs in 27 states by the end of this month,"
according to Dear.
"If the national results are anything like what we've had in Wisconsin,
we've got a very big success on our hands," Dear will tell the conference. In
Wisconsin OSHA offered such a choice to the 200 manufacturing companies with
100 or more employees and the highest injury and illness rates based on
workers' compensation data. Eighty percent of the original Wisconsin companies
participating in the program reduced their injury and illness rates in the
first year. The average drop for all 200 companies was about 30 percent. One
hundred companies improved their performance so much they fell off the list
entirely.
OSHA's Voluntary Protection Programs, which recognize excellence in
workplace safety and management, have been more than doubled in numbers in the
last three years. Injury rates at VPP companies are 45 percent below their
injury averages. Those numbers translate into more profitable, competitive
businesses, and include those attending the conference.
OSHA also is successfully using collaboration to develop its priorities
for targeting serious safety and health hazards and in developing rules.
The agency used a Priority Planning Process to establish its list of
priorities. "Instead of being petitioned by interest groups or directed by
Congress, as happened all too often in the past, we used Federal Register
notices and public meetings and asked businesses, workers and others what our
priorities should be," according to Dear. "More than 125 safety and health
hazards were brought to our attention. Each was evaluated, and in December we
announced OSHA's 18 national priorities."
Other initiatives of the New OSHA include:
- Using negotiated, or consensus, rulemaking involving labor,
management and government to develop a proposal for a safety standard for
workers engaged in steel erection.
- A new program for handling worker health and safety complaints that
will dramatically reduce the time needed to handle those complaints and cut
unnecessary inspections. Many of the complaints now will be handled by phone
and faxes.
- Focused inspections in the construction industry that target the
leading causes of death.
One of the highest priorities for OSHA in the coming months will be a
national safety and health program standard, calling on employers to establish
programs in the workplace that would identify and abate hazards and involve
workers in those efforts.
"Safety and health programs have been proven to be effective in abating
existing on-the-job hazards and preventing new ones," Dear will report. "Tens
of thousands of companies have already implemented such programs, cutting
injuries and illnesses, and cutting costs. In Oregon and Washington, a study
found that for every dollar spent on such a program, most employers save
between four and six dollars."
Dear will stress that although partnership works, it must be in tandem
with "common-sense, but credible enforcement. Serious violators will face
consequences. Reinvention does not mean putting on kid gloves. We've upped the
ante for those employers who fail to care for their workers' safety and
health."
Archived News Release--Caution:
information may be out of date.
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