There has been much discussion lately about what measures will be considered in a lame-duck session of Congress. While some of the legislation is needed, such as annual appropriation bills and an extension of the so-called Bush tax cuts, other bills would be much more controversial and could be harmful to our fragile economy.

For the past two years, there have been numerous calls for Congress to pass a slew of labor union priorities – often these bills have more to do about strengthening the union apparatchiks than helping the working folk. Three good examples:

• The Employee Free Choice Act
• The Paycheck Fairness Act
• The Protecting American Workers Act

Though all three of these bills have nice titles that make them sound like fair-minded pieces of legislation, all of them will increase the cost of doing business. When you do that, jobs disappear.

The National Association of Manufacturers has been urging Congress to avoid considering each of these bills during a lame-duck session. There has been bipartisan opposition to each of these job-killing proposals in both the House and Senate. To take them up during a session of Congress when, as it appears right now, many Members of Congress will have been voted out of office would not reflect well on the institution. Moreover, all three bills were bad ideas before the election and they’re even worse during a lame-duck session. Congress, don’t make the lame-duck more lame.

Today, the House Education and Labor Committee’s Workplace Protections Sub-Committee will hold a hearing to discuss proposed changes to the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067). Unfortunately, this legislation seeks to simply increase penalties on employers for OSHA violations and expand liability instead of promoting cooperative engagement between employers and OSHA. For OSHA to be successful, manufacturers need the agency to be a resource as much as it is an enforcement agency. This bill and subsequent changes that are likely to be considered overturn more than 15 years of cooperative efforts between OSHA and employers.

For several years we’ve seen continued improvement in workplace injury and illness rates. This improvement is largely the result of a new approach to OSHA that first came about during the Clinton administration. Instead of an approach of just levying higher penalties and issuing more citations, the agency began to proactively work with employers to ensure that they had the resources and information necessary to make workplaces safer.

The goal of any OSHA legislation should be to make workplace safer. This legislation will foster a more adversarial relationship between employers and will not assist employers (particularly smaller sized employers) in better understanding the complex framework of existing OSHA requirements.

The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics today released workplace safety statistics for 2008. (BLS release) The data highlight an important, positive development often overlooked by many policymakers – workplace injury and illness continue to significantly improve in both the private sector and more specifically in manufacturing. Overall in the private sector, we saw the most significant improvement with a 7.1 percent decrease in total recordable case rates; rates in manufacturing workplaces improved by 10.7 percent.

While no one factor completely explains this improvement, Members of Congress and Labor Department officials need to understand what’s working before they attempt to overhaul the current system. The leadership at the Labor Department has pledged a new emphasis on more aggressive enforcement and has questioned the effectiveness of non-punitive programs that assist employers to comply with existing standards.

In order to continue improving safety, policymakers should keep doing what works and that’s the cooperative approach that the OSHA has undertaken with employers. Proposals like the Protecting America’s Workers Act will create a more adversarial relationship while doing nothing to reinforce the successful work that’s already taken place.

UPDATE 3:23pm Labor Secretary Hilda Solis acknowledges the improvements, while continuing to stress the need for “strong enforcement.” Safety should be a top priority in every workplace and good injury data is essential, agreed, but we suspect any effort to validate recordkeeping will find the same improving trends among manufacturers.