AMERICAN SOCIETY
OF SAFETY ENGINEERS
1800 East Oakton Street
Des Plaines, Illinois 60018-2187
847.699.2929
FAX 847.296.3769
www.asse.org
February 18, 2014
The Honorable Tim Walberg
Chairman
Subcommittee on Workforce Protections
House Committee on Education and the Workforce
Rayburn House Office Building 2181
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Chairman Walberg:
On behalf of its 35,000 member safety, health and environmental
(SH&E) professionals, the American Society of Safety Engineers
(ASSE) commends you and the Subcommittee on Workforce
Protections for undertaking a discussion about the appropriateness of
recent policy decisions made by the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) in its February 4, 2014, hearing “OSHA’s
Regulatory Agenda: Changing Long-Standing Policies Outside the
Public Rulemaking Process.” The discussion prompted by your
leadership in holding this hearing is important in helping achieve the
goal shared by every OSHA stakeholder that the agency appropriately
carry out its mission of encouraging employers to take effective
responsibility for protecting their workers from safety and health risks
on the job.
OSHA Policies and Cooperative Outreach
ASSE agrees that OSHA must follow the law in advancing new
policies. We also agree that OSHA must do all that it can to provide
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employers and workers with as much information as possible when a
new or changed policy is advanced. Often, the changes are legal in
nature and beyond the ability of many small and medium sized employers to
interpret and understand. Our members provide the employers with whom
they work the ability to meet any new OSHA policy or standard, but most
employers are not able to engage a safety and health professional. For those
employers especially, OSHA has developed significant capacity in its
cooperative programs to work with industry trade groups and individual
partners like ASSE to communicate to employers on a variety of issues.
These important relationships need to be used to communicate clearly any
new expectations on employers. We do not believe this has been adequately
done to date and encourage OSHA to do so.
Advancing the Rulemaking Process
The hearing was also beneficial in providing an opportunity to discuss the
limitations OSHA faces in its efforts to be an effective regulatory agency.
ASSE has never been an organization that believes a new standard is the
answer to a workplace risk. Our members typically approach workplace
safety by, as they say, “managing the risk, not the standard.” Yet, when a
standard can significantly advance workplace protections, does not unduly
burden employers, and is consistent with how our members already manage
the risks a standard seeks to address, we have supported new or revised
standards.
From that measured perspective, ASSE has no difficulty in telling the
Subcommittee that the time has long passed when Congress needed to give
OSHA the tools it needs to more reasonably advance its rules. For the most
part, the companies our members work with already protect workers at more
protective levels than those required by OSHA’s dated standards. The
inconsistency between the safety and health profession’s best practices and
OSHA’s standards in too many areas creates only repetitive and inconsistent
bureaucratic demands on employers and our members. Without the ability to
keep up with relevant standards, OSHA itself faces the threat of being
increasingly irrelevant in a world where companies more and more are
focused on international and voluntary consensus standards that respond more
readily to current industry practices. While many of our members are already
far more focused on these other drivers of occupational safety and health
practices, OSHA standards remain vitally important to help encourage
employers who do not understand the value of safety and health in today’s
marketplace. With dated standards, OSHA fails both them and the workers
for whom they are responsible.
Measures to ease the punishing process any OSHA rulemaking must endure to
advance to a final rule are a significant part of the Draft Occupational Safety and
Health Reform Bill that ASSE developed to provide a basis for compromise in
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Congress to bring the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 into the 21st
Century. Those measures include

Advancing risk-based a regulatory approaches. The proscriptive nature of
OSHA’s standards have only taken us so far in protecting workers. In having to
determine such extremely specific requirements that employers must follow to
meet a standard, OSHA has been given a task that takes far too difficult to
accomplish in a reasonably timely way. Risk-based standards that focus on
setting expectations and not necessarily the specific means for achieving those
expectations can better encourage employers, working with safety and health
professionals, to take full responsibility for developing better ways to meet a
standard.

Encouraging collaborative rulemaking. Our members appreciate the
effectiveness of collaboration in voluntary consensus standard-setting process.
We have proposed that the GAO study the effectiveness of the very similar
process of negotiated rulemaking, with the goal of implementing more
collaborative, less contentious ways to pursue OSHA rulemaking.

Enabling OSHA to update standards with voluntary consensus standards.
Now, OSHA must engage in the rulemaking process to keep pace with widely
accepted safety and health voluntary consensus standards that better reflect safety
and health professionals’ best understanding about how to protect workers. The
Based on an OSHA proposal, OSHA could better keep in step with accepted
industry practices, encourage consistent standards throughout industry, and make
more efficient the standard-setting process.
These measures do not exhaust the possible changes that can be made to encourage a
more reasonable but still measured process to help OSHA be more effective. With a
more reasonable rulemaking process, we would also hope that OSHA would be
encouraged to develop new policies through the rulemaking process. The difficulties of
the current process only encourage OSHA to avoid it when possible, no matter its
benefits in providing a platform to involve stakeholders.
Please Do One Thing
ASSE appreciates and is encouraged by your closing comments indicating a desire to
work with your minority colleagues in the Subcommittee to address the difficulties raised
at the hearing. As mentioned above, we encourage you to take a look at the measures we
have put forward in our Draft Occupational Safety and Health Reform Bill, which
contains ideas from both side of the political debate on occupational safety and health
that ASSE has supported over the years. We believe it can serve as a catalyst for
negotiation that can advance a variety of widely supported ideas to improve occupational
safety and health protections for this nation’s workers.
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From our various discussions on Capitol Hill in both Republican and Democratic offices,
with OSHA and with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH),
it is apparent to us that a real consensus has developed that bipartisan agreement can be
reached on allowing OSHA to update its Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs). As you
know, in previous Congresses, updating PELs was the best hope of your predecessor as
Chairman of the Subcommittee, Representative Charlie Norwood (R-GA). We urge you
to take up the fight he thoughtfully began and, if no other measure can be advanced in
occupational safety and health during this Congress, that you use your leadership to make
sure that this measure does.
As with many other OSHA standards, our members and the employers with whom they
work have long since used levels of protection far above OSHA’s PELs. The proposal
we included in our draft bill would require OSHA to adopt NIOSH relative exposure
limits (RELs), which, as you know, are widely accepted and respected. This is one
approach. We would be more than happy to support other measures that can fix this
fundamental fault in the nation’s ability to provide reasonable, relevant oversight of
workplace safety and health. Please, we urge you to do this one thing.
Conclusion
Again, thank you for this opportunity to comment. If there is anything that ASSE and our
members can do to help continue the discussion begun in this hearing, we encourage you
to reach out to us. Beyond the variety of views of how best OSHA should pursue its
mission, ASSE’s member safety and health professionals may be the stakeholders who
best understand the impact of OSHA’s decisions on both employers and workers. We
appreciate your having listened to them.
Sincerely,
Kathy A. Seabrook CSP, CMIOSH, EurOSHM
President
cc: The Honorable Joe Courtney
Ranking Member