Jordan Barab is one of America’s top voices for worker health and safety. After 15 years as AFSCME’s health and safety director, he went on to advise the AFL-CIO and Congress and then served eight years as the Obama administration’s number two official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency in charge of promoting worker safety and health. He’s also the author of Confined Space, an award-winning blog about workplace health and safety, labor, and politics. The Labor Press spoke with him by Zoom April 8.
DON McINTOSH: We’re almost three months in. What do we know so far about the Trump administration’s record on worker safety and health this time around?
JORDAN BARAB: Well, last week they pretty much wiped out the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Not only does NIOSH do research around health and safety issues that supports OSHA standards, but they also do an incredible amount of general health and safety research, which is very important, especially in areas where OSHA doesn’t have standards. (In the parlance of safety practitioners, an OSHA “standard” is a regulation requiring employers to do something to reduce a specific safety hazard, like have fall protection systems when workers work at heights.) They do a lot of education and a lot of technical work, for example, to protect mine workers. They’ve done technical work to protect people against heat; for example, how to measure heat’s impact on the human body. And they provide funding for health and safety professionals, for occupational physicians, experts, trainers, and researchers. So what they did to NIOSH is kind of catastrophic.
What about MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration?
Again, we’ve heard plans for some layoffs, although I don’t think we’ve seen anything definite yet. We’ve definitely heard about office closures around the country.
What about the federal hiring freeze and layoff of probationary employees? Did OSHA and MSHA suffer those as well?
OSHA has had such a low budget for the last several years that they’ve hired very few new people. So they barely had anybody on probation. They did get rid of some. All the cabinet departments were required to submit Reduction In Force plans to OMB (the White House Office of Management and Budget) in the middle of March. We haven’t yet seen what they’re planning for the entire Department of Labor or for OSHA or MSHA yet.
Most people have never heard of NIOSH. Now we’re looking at two-thirds of the staff being let go?
At least. The only parts remaining are the mandatory spending parts, which are programs for people exposed to radioactivity while building America’s nuclear bombs and for 9/11 victims. People that were exposed to toxic dust cleaning up the World Trade Center are now suffering from all kinds of cancers and lung diseases. But almost everything else is gone. They also got rid of John Howard, who was the head of NIOSH. Who’s going to be running those programs now nobody knows.
Any thoughts on David Keeling, Trump’s nominee for head of OSHA, or Wayne Palmer, the nominee to head MSHA?
They’re both the kind of nominees you would expect from any normal Republican administration. Especially Keeling: He’s a health and safety professional who has worked for UPS and Amazon, not great companies from the labor standpoint. The question is — not just for Keeling at OSHA but for the secretary of labor — how much they’re allowed to control their own agenda, and how much is going to be controlled by the White House.
Yeah, I was curious about that too: What did you think when you heard that Trump would be nominating Lori Chavez-DeRemer to be labor secretary?
That’s typical of what you’d expect from a Republican administration. She’s fairly moderate and has a fair amount of labor support, certainly from Sean O’Brien at the Teamsters. She’s taken some pretty good positions. But it looks like the rhetoric that’s coming out in press releases is orchestrated by the White House.
Looking back, what was your verdict on the Trump administration in his first term in terms of worker safety and health?
Well, it was bad. Enforcement went down, the number of inspectors dropped. They didn’t do any work on (developing new) standards. And that is all fairly typical for Republican administrations. Ever since the first George Bush, Republican presidents have not issued any OSHA standards aside from those mandated by the courts. Generally, enforcement will keep up, but the penalties will be lower, the budget will get hit. But we also had COVID during Trump’s first term and OSHA did a horrible job of protecting workers against COVID. Now we’re in a totally different world. We expect this administration to issue no standards. We expect them to continue enforcement, with lower penalties. We’re looking at with great concern whether they’re going to restructure or downsize the agency.
Speaking of, during the first term, at one point the Trump administration was proposing to cut the NIOSH budget by a third. What happened to that?
Well, Republicans in Congress proposed significant cuts to NIOSH and OSHA. Luckily, we still had the filibuster in the Senate, so they had to negotiate with the Democrats. Most cuts didn’t go through. On the other hand, they didn’t get any (budget) increase. OSHA hasn’t had a significant increase, nor NIOSH, since about 2010, which means with inflation, they’ve been getting effectively a cut every year.
I wonder whether this reduction in force isn’t a budget cut by other means. So like the first term, he says, please cut the NIOSH budget by a third and Congress says no. Well now he’s cutting the spending on staff by two-thirds. He didn’t get what he asked for so he’s just going to do it by other means.
Exactly. One might think that this is all illegal, because Congress appropriated this money, and the president is supposed to actually spend the money that Congress appropriates. Right now the president’s refusing to do that. So we’ll see what the courts say.
So looking back, how does the Biden four years stack up? Were there two or three significant changes that a Democratic administration was able to get done in those four years?
Well, unfortunately, the Biden administration issued no major standards, zero, during four years. I was kind of upset about that. I’ve written about that, and I’ve gotten a lot of pushback. My theory was that they were counting on two terms and decided to do a lot of preliminary work in the first term and finalize everything in the second term. Now, the people at OSHA are saying, “No, that wasn’t it. The problem is we were short of money. We couldn’t do everything we wanted to do. And plus, COVID dominated everything for the first year and a half.” All of that is true. But I find it hard to believe that if they had put their mind and whatever resources they had to it, they couldn’t have at least gotten a workplace violence standard out, or even an infectious disease standard.
What about heat exposure?
I admire the work they did on heat. Normally it takes OSHA seven to 10 to 20 years to issue a major standard. Within three years they got to the proposal stage which is pretty fast work. Had they had a second term, it’s not unlikely they could have gotten a heat standard out within another two years.
So their work on a rule to protect outdoor workers from heat could be taken up by the Trump administration if they want to.
It’s very unlikely. Some people say it’s possible that they could issue a very weak heat standard. I don’t even know if they could, because OSHA issued the proposal, so if they want to do drastic changes they’d have to go back to the drawing board. It would be difficult for OSHA to develop a whole new heat standard and get that issued in four years.
Can you demystify this process — what’s going wrong? Why does it take four or eight or sometimes 20 or 50 years to get a rule to protect workers in the workplace? That’s the job of the agency, right?
Well, there are a variety of reasons. Part of the reason is that Republican (administrations) don’t work on standards. So a standard might have been started during the end of the Clinton administration, and then the Bush administration did no work on it. Second, OSHA has a very small budget, and standards take a lot of money. You have to show that they’re economically and technologically feasible for every industry. You have to do a cost benefit analysis, risk assessments. And you’ve got a White House review after that, and then probably you’re going to be sued. Industry sues OSHA after every single standard it issues. So you have to make sure that your justification is able to stand up under court scrutiny. When you look at an OSHA standard when it’s issued in the Federal Register, the regulatory language itself is maybe 10 or 20 pages, but in the background, the economic justifications, the regulatory justifications, the summaries, all of that usually comes to about 1,000 pages. The third reason is because the law, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, has certain conditions under which OSHA is constrained to issue a standard. Congress has added more requirements onto that. For example, SBREFA, which is a small business review process, has been added onto that. And then over the last 50 years, the White House has issued all kinds of executive orders that increase the burdens on agencies for issuing standards. So you combine that with OSHA’s low budget and the fact that OSHA is always constantly under attack, it makes for a very, very long process.
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