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.

Today, OSHA held what we hope is the first of many efforts to reach out to the employer community to discuss key issues facing the agency. I was able to speak at the “OSHA Listens” event to offer manufacturers’ suggestions for how OSHA can assist employers to make workplaces safer. First, it’s important to realize that our workplaces have continued to become safer. Second, policymakers need to understand what efforts have helped contribute to these improvements. In pursuing an overly aggressive, enforcement-first agenda, the agency could allocate resources away from effective compliance assistance programs.

In my remarks I emphasized that OSHA is not the entity that actually makes workplace safer. Safety is achieved by employers and employees alike. Some people who gave presentations at today’s event argued that the best way to ensure that employees are involved in workplace safety is through union representation. However, safe workplaces are a right afforded to all workers, not just those covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

Today’s session afforded OSHA’s leadership a unique opportunity to hear directly from a wide array of stakeholders. While many express the opinion that safety is measured best by the number of OSHA citations and enforcement actions, we disagree. Safety is best measured by the absence of accidents, and to achieve that goal, OSHA should be a resource for employers and employees as much as it is an enforcement agency.

To read my prepared remarks, click here.

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.