Occupational Safety and Health Act
The Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act was enacted in 1970 to "assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women." The OSH Act created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at the federal level and provided that states could run their own safety and health programs as long as those programs were at least as effective as the federal program. It also created the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, to review the agency’s regulations, and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to research necessary areas of focus.
Cry Wolf Quotes
LPA is pleased to submit testimony in strong opposition to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA's) proposed ergonomics standard, and in particular, the work restriction protection provisions, which would effectively replace state workers' compensation laws for injured employees. As estimated by the Employment Policy Foundation, at $100 billion, the standard is likely the most costly in OSHA's history…
It could be read to require the Secretary to ban all occupations in which there remains some risk of injury, impaired health, or life expectancy…the present criteria could, if literally applied, close every business in this nation.
Centralized control could not take into account the wildly divergent conditions, hazards, processes, and environmental problems which may be peculiar to a given industry or given geographic area.
Exercising such authority, of course, would require an enormous federal policing force, perhaps in the thousands. Already, employers, in their long-standing voluntary programs to make their plants safer, scratch hard for qualified safety experts. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz blandly explained to Congressmen that getting people would be no drawback. He said he could staff his safety policing team with the hard-core unemployed. These presumably would then show up as federal ‘inspectors’ armed with power of life or death over your business.
