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nytimes.com
Barry Meier and Danielle Ivory
OSHA
has also put off enforcement of an Obama-era standard for another
respiratory hazard — silica, a mineral linked to a disabling lung
disease as well as cancer — and it has delayed action on a rule that
would require employers to electronically report workplace injuries so
that they can be posted for the public.
The
moves come as the Trump administration offers other hints of a
significant relaxation in the government’s approach to occupational
safety.
A
successor to Mr. Michaels at OSHA has yet to be named. Mr. Trump’s
proposed budget eliminates at least two other strategies designed to
promote worker safety, including the Chemical Safety Board, which
investigates chemical plant accidents, and an OSHA grant program that
provides training in industries with high injury or fatality rates and
workers who do not speak English well.
During
the early months of the Trump administration, a former lobbyist for an
industry group that has opposed the beryllium, silica and record-keeping
rules served on the transition team at the Department of Labor, which
oversees OSHA. That official, Geoffrey Burr, who has since moved to the
Department of Transportation as chief of staff, had been a lobbyist for
the Associated Builders and Contractors, which represents nonunion
construction companies.
A
spokesperson for the Transportation Department declined to make Mr.
Burr available for an interview but said that the former lobbyist had
been in regular contact with officials while at the Department of Labor
“to ensure he was in compliance with all ethics rules.” The Associated
Builders and Contractors did not respond to questions about Mr. Burr.
Asked
about the Trump administration’s approach to occupational safety, a
spokesman for the White House said, “The President and his
administration care very much about worker safety, but believe the Obama
administration’s approach was counterproductive, and we think we can do
better.” He added that decisions to repeal and reduce specific OSHA
regulations had not been made.
OSHA did not respond to questions about specific regulations.
Business
groups that have fought OSHA actions have welcomed the apparent new
direction and others believe it heralds a different approach by the
Trump administration.
“The
agency, under Obama, changed into something that was more explicitly
allied with unions and critics of business,” said Walter Olson, a senior
fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “That’s likely
to change.”
Some
workplace experts and advocates say the Obama administration’s decision
to wait until the 11th hour to finalize some major rules made them
vulnerable.
“Because
they did it so late in the game, they left the rules open to change,”
said Dr. Lee S. Newman, a pulmonary expert at the University of
Colorado, who helped uncover worker deaths caused by beryllium.
Experts
like Dr. Newman also fear that a widespread regulatory rollback is
beginning, and possible changes to the beryllium rule are particularly
frustrating to them because it had taken so long to get the new
standards in place.
It
has been known for decades that exposure at even very low doses to
beryllium — a strong, lightweight metal used to make computers, aircraft
parts and nuclear bombs — can cause chronic beryllium disease, a
disabling and potentially fatal lung ailment, in a small percentage of
workers with a genetic susceptibility to it.
The Obama-era standard resulted from negotiations between the biggest American producer of beryllium, Materion Corporation, and the United Steelworkers union.
At
one time, Materion, which was once known as Brush Wellman, played down
beryllium’s risks and fought efforts to lower federal exposure standards
because of fears that doing so would undercut its defense of lawsuits
brought by sick or dying workers, court filings showed.
When OSHA proposed its final rule in August 2015, Materion applauded it,
calling it a demonstration of how “industry and labor can collaborate
to better protect workers” and saying it could be a guide for how the
agency could develop future standards.
But
in April, less than three months into the Trump administration, OSHA
sent proposed changes to the White House for review. Agency officials
declined to discuss the proposal. But safety advocates and an industry
lawyer involved in meetings with OSHA about the new rule said that it
was made clear to them that OSHA intended to lessen the rule’s effect on
maritime and construction companies — or perhaps even exempt them.
“I
had the feeling that the administration has already decided what it
wants to do,” said Peg Seminario, the director for safety and health for
the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Maritime
and construction companies were not included in the original proposed
rule in 2015, but the agency soon expanded the standard to include them
because of data showing the potential dangers of coal slag, a gritty,
glass-like material containing trace levels of beryllium that is used to
sandblast ships, tanks and other structures before painting, according
to Mr. Michaels, the former OSHA administrator who is now at the George
Washington University School of Public Health.
Data
cited by the agency, Mr. Michaels said, found that air levels of
beryllium detected during sandblasting at shipyards exceeded the new
proposed OSHA limit.
Some
big shipbuilders supported the rule’s extension to their industry, and
said they were moving away from coal slag toward other abrasives like
glass and garnet.
“We
have a sophisticated work force and they understand some of these
dangers,” said Dru Branche, the environmental, health and safety
director for Newport News Shipbuilding, which is owned by Huntington
Ingalls Industries.
Before
the new beryllium rule was finalized during the final weeks of the
Obama administration, sellers of coal slag, many of them small
companies, had voiced opposition to it, arguing, among other things,
that OSHA’s position on the material’s dangers was misleading and that
other abrasives posed their own risks.
Since
President Trump’s inauguration, they have become far more aggressive,
spending at least $60,000 to lobby OSHA through an industry group called
the Abrasive Blasting Manufacturers Alliance, public records show, and
enlisting two former congressmen to fight for them. The group’s listed
address in Camp Hill, Pa., is also the headquarters of the country’s
largest vendor of coal slag, Harsco Corporation, a publicly traded
company.
Requests
for comment were referred by Harsco to a public relations agency,
Dezenhall Resources, which declined interview requests but issued a
statement. “There’s a growing consensus that the beryllium rule was
erroneously expanded to include the entire abrasive blasting industry
without any evidence to justify it,” it said.
Materion,
the big beryllium producer, has also objected to some parts of the
final rule and is in negotiations with OSHA about those issues. Groups
like the Associated Builders and Contractors have said in filings that
they were not given adequate opportunity to provide input on the rule, a
position that Mr. Michaels, the former OSHA head, rejected.
Several former workers sickened by the metal say they oppose any effort to roll back the Obama rule.
One
of them, Vishwanauth Jailall, worked for about six years at a facility
in Minnesota pouring molten metals including beryllium into casts for
airplane parts. By 2012, he was having such trouble breathing that he
went to see a doctor who told him that it was dangerous for him to go
back to work.
Today,
at 49, he needs help from family members to get dressed and is prone to
passing out. He wants a lung transplant, which, he said, is his best
hope.
The
government “shouldn’t weaken the standard; they should make it
stronger,” Mr. Jailall said. “I don’t want anyone else to get sick.”
The
process of enacting a new OSHA standard is often a long and arduous
one, regardless of which party holds power. And companies or others
frequently sue the agency, contending that it failed to follow
procedures when drafting a rule or is imposing costs on employers that
will yield little worker benefit.
The
long-running dispute over silica followed that trajectory. The mineral,
which is found in sand and rocks, can be released during activities
such as construction, sandblasting and fracking and is a known
respiratory hazard.
OSHA
first considered taking action on silica in the 1990s, but it was not
until 2013 that the agency issued a proposed final rule, saying that
reduced workplace exposures mandated by it would save some 700 lives
annually.
That standard was finalized last year, but industry groups including the Associated Builders and Contractors have filed a lawsuit to block it. The group said in a March letter to the Department of Labor that the rule was “infeasible and unworkable.”
A
month later, OSHA announced it was delaying the rule’s enforcement for
the construction industry until September to, among other things,
“conduct additional outreach to the regulated community.”
In
moving to eliminate the Chemical Safety Board, with an annual budget of
about $11 million, the Trump administration’s budget proposal said the
board was “largely duplicative” of efforts by other agencies, though the
budget documents did not elaborate.
In arguing for the board’s continued existence, its chairwoman, Vanessa Allen Sutherland, said last month
that it played an important and unmatched role. For example, after 13
firefighters died responding to an explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant
in 2013, the board determined that emergency workers nationwide were
ill-prepared for such accidents and created a training program.
