Today's Highlights
ASSE Offers Blueprint for OSHA Reform
ASSE's OSHA Reform Blueprint urges the agency to emphasize risk management, sharpen its focus on productive policies, and fill legislative and regulatory gaps that limit its ability to best protect workers. “ASSE is proposing innovative approaches to improve how occupational safety and health is practiced and regulated in the U.S.,” says ASSE President Tom Cecich, CSP, CIH.
In the blueprint, ASSE calls on OSHA to shift its main focus from solely managing compliance to more effectively reducing workplace risks, a change that would bring America’s regulatory practices in line with global trends. The blueprint also addresses OSHA’s recordkeeping system and the need to better recognize employers that champion safe workplaces; the need to focus more resources on the primary causes of workplace fatalities and serious injuries; providing federal-level protections to all state and municipal workers in states exempt from OSHA; advancing the prevention of hazardous occupational chemical exposures, including assessing the use of control banding; and increasing third-party audits to extend the reach of OSHA’s limited resources.
“These proposals are grounded in what ASSE members have learned on the front lines of protecting workers,” Cecich explains. “This blueprint can be the start of a deep and important conversation about creating a new OSHA that works more effectively for workers and employers.”
The document was developed by an ad hoc working group convened by ASSE's Board of Directors, and it incorporates positions and input from members of ASSE's Government Affairs Committee and Council on Professional Affairs, as well as from experts in specialized areas.