We Need Your Help – Message to ASSE Members from Jim Thornton, ASSE GAC Chair

Friday, March 12th

Dear Fellow Member -

My name is James Thornton, CIH, CSP and a Professional Member of ASSE. I am privileged to serve you as the current chair ASSE’s Government Affairs Committee, a position I have served in for the past year. I am writing you for two reasons.

One is to make sure you are aware of the work ASSE is doing on behalf of ASSE’s members, occupational safety and health and the profession. Please take a couple minutes to read below what Chris Patton told OSHA last week at OSHA Listens. His comments reflect the things you asked us to tell OSHA as well as the various issues we’ve been working to get across to OSHA for some years.

Second is to make sure you know how important your membership in ASSE means to these efforts. It’s no secret that the occupational safety and health world is facing maybe the biggest changes in regulation and legislation that we have seen since the OSH Act was signed into law in 1970. Some of those changes are long overdue. However, some will not make sense and may even make the work you do every day more difficult. I want to assure you that the Government Affairs Committee is engaged in the dialogue going on in Washington, DC, on those issues and is working hard to support the proposals that make workplaces safer and oppose the proposals that make them less safe.

A few of the things we are doing right now on your behalf –

• The Government Affairs Committee, ASSE government affairs staff and our Federal Representative in DC have already met three times with the Congressional staff now rewriting the Protecting America’s Workers Act that would make major modifications to the OSH Act. Those talks have been productive, and we believe the new bill will contain provisions for which we argued, along with some we maybe will not be able to support.

• We are carrying on the fight to provide federal safety and health coverage for this nation’s more than 8 million state and municipal workers now not covered in states without their own state plans. Our current efforts are focused at the federal level and in Florida, and I urge you to read about that in this GA Update, too.

• We are a leading voice in support of OSHA’s cooperative programs and are ready to defend them against expected lessening of support for VPP, the Alliance and other cooperative programs.

• We are continuing our work in helping make sure the voice of ASSE’s members and the safety and health profession is heard in OSHA’s rulemaking to harmonize the HazCom Standard with GHS and see that that whatever is done on combustible dust makes sense and that harmonizing the HazCom Standard with GHS moves ahead.

• We are engaged in the effort to establish a sensible standard to protect nurses and other workers in health care facilities from ergonomic risks.

• We are working closely with NIOSH to ensure that solid safety and health research programs are funded, that ASSE members are involved in issues like PtD, the NORA Research Councils, sustainability, and business of safety, and that the importance of safety is recognized at NIOSH.

If you were at Safety 2009 in San Antonio, you saw for the first time a Secretary of Labor come and talk to a safety and health professional society. You also saw the Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor praise safety professionals and ask for their input into whatever OSHA is doing. That reaching out to ASSE’s members by those who are making the regulatory decisions affecting us all comes from a lot of hard work by ASSE, ongoing conversations and relationship-building that we intend to continue to do. But we cannot do it without you.

Some of us are facing tough economic decisions when it comes time to decide whether to renew a professional membership like ASSE, and some employers are making it even tougher. But as you make that decision, I want you to consider how your membership supports the efforts of ASSE and the Government Affairs Committee in representing your interests before those now determining the regulatory environment in which you work. It’s not easy what we do. ASSE does not have a Political Action Committee and gives no money to candidates. Our only calling card in Washington, DC, is our effort to do the right thing for safety and the numbers of members who we can say are behind us. I hope when the decision comes to renew your membership that you will consider the responsibility we all share to do our best to make sure what is decided in Washington, DC, is the best for you, for your employers, but in the end, for your employees.

Sincerely,
James Thornton, CIH, CSP
Chair
ASSE Government Affairs Committee