SAN ANTONIO — After spending the past year increasing the number of inspectors, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s top priorities are rolling out heat illness standards, addressing workplace violence and infectious diseases faced by healthcare workers, and targeting companies that repeatedly violate safety rules . the agency’s top official said.
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Doug Parker spoke Wednesday at Safety 2023, the American Society of Safety Professionals’ annual conference, and later attended a press conference where he talked about an agency that has added more than 600 employees since January 2022.
Overall, the agency added 1
81 certified health and safety inspectors, bringing the total to 931, according to OSHA data Wednesday.“The No. 1 priority has been building our team because we had real atrophy in the previous administration, and we had reached staffing levels where we had the lowest number of inspectors in OSHA’s 50-year history,” Parker said, adding that the hiring has since “plateaued”.
Employers can expect better enforcement strategies from OSHA in the future, including the recently announced expansion of the Serious Violator Program — once limited to high-risk industries but now open to all workplaces as “a targeted approach that addresses situations where the penalty calculated … is inadequate” , he said.
While no official timeline has been set, the agency has also spent the past year working on standards for violence, infectious disease and heat illness. Mr Parker said he expects to see updates in the coming months.
Meanwhile, targeted enforcement strategies have also been created since 2021 to zero in on compliance for heat illness, fall protection and digging risks. — all among a laundry list of agency priorities.
Fairness — ensuring the needs of minorities, including undocumented workers — is also a focus of the agency, Parker said.
He spoke about OSHA forums with vulnerable workers affected by poor health and safety management.
“There was an undocumented worker who spilled hot water on his leg (and was told to) stay at work,” he said. “He pushed through the pain and he worked. He eventually got gangrene from an infection and had an amputation. And because this worker couldn’t speak out, felt like he couldn’t speak out because he was threatened, because he was undocumented, because he was taken advantage of.”
In addition to offering spaces for workers to speak out, the agency also provides immigration protections to those involved in investigations, he said.
The issue of mental health and stress in the workplace is also being highlighted, as OSHA recently launched online tools for employers, he said.
“People’s awareness, people’s stress, is the presence that they bring to work,” he said. “Everything plays a factor in having an effective health and safety (program). And so this is something that we all have to work together on.”
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