Safety--forklift or pedestrian--shouldn't hurt

If you’ve been following my recent blogs about the General Accounting Office’s critique of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program, you might have come away thinking there are forces at work seeking to end the VPP. Perish the thought. Revae Moran, acting director of the GAO, told me the program still has much to offer and is worth fixing. In fact, the only thing that needs fixing is adherence to the existing program’s standards.

“When a fatality occurs OSHA needs to go back and check to make sure the safety and health systems in place at the worksite didn’t contribute to the fatality,” she explained. “Those checks didn’t always happen.”

The most important aspect of enforcement is to realize that things always happen, even to the best of companies.  A company might have been an active VPP participant until a change in ownership changed that commitment. If all of a sudden a company in the program is silent, that should be an alarm bell to OSHA.

“Fatalities can be anomalies, they just happen,” Ms. Moran acknowledged. “What we were concerned about is that there’s a process OSHA is supposed to go through to make sure these weren’t systemic problems.”

The reason I’ve spent so much time on this is not only that I hope OSHA salvages the VPP program, but I’m hoping that there will be more participants. The best of these companies not only help themselves, but they reach out to others to improve their safety and health. Moran told me that long-time union members at some companies had been trying to clean up their own acts, but it wasn’t until the VPP came along that they could get things fixed.

OSHA’s Communications Officer, Richard De Angelis, told me the agency will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of its VPP and Alliance Programs to determine how it should best allocate its resources among cooperative programs, enforcement and the agency’s other activities. It will review and address problems including: 

–program management and oversight policies and procedures;

–documentation policy for actions taken in response to fatalities and serious injuries at VPP sites;  

–goals and performance measures for the VPP; and

–internal OSHA controls that ensure consistent compliance with VPP policies by the agency’s regional offices.

It will be a shame if OSHA over-reacts to the GAO report and resorts to a hammer instead of a handshake to improve occupational safety adherence. Well-being shouldn’t have to be beaten into anyone.

Tom Andel
tandel4315@aol.com