Nearly four decades after the passage of the Occupational Safety & Health Act, it is difficult to find anyone who will argue that it has delivered on its promise to provide safe and healthful working conditions. Dr. Michael Silverstein, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and a former Director of Policy for the OSHA (1993 – 1995), spent several months talking with people with experienced in worker health and safety to gather ideas about what we can do to protect workers better.
Dr. Silverstein summarized what he learned in a draft paper, and The Pump Handle hosted an online discussion of it in January 2007 (here, here, and here). This feedback helped Dr. Silverstein revise the paper, and it has now been published in the American Journal of Public Health: “Getting Home Safe and Sound: Occupational Safety Health Administration at 38” (PDF).
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February 13, 2008 at 5:39 pm
JON
THIS IS GOOD TO KNOW
August 18, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Jay Rohman
The opening paragraphs of this paper I believe underscore the ignorance of well meaning people. The mission of OSHA is but one small part of the success of safety. OSHA attempts to make sure that employers give their employee a fighting chance. But it comes down to this. Employees also play a more important role in staying safe. I don’t care how many laws you write or how many inspectors you have in the workplace, it is the employee that will make the decision whether they will wear the PPE or they will do the work in a safe manner. Also, it needs to be noted that since the implementation of OSHA, workplace injuries and deaths have gone down. To say that they are ineffective is to say that our traffic laws are ineffective because people are still dying on the roadways.
May 11, 2009 at 6:56 am
osha training
nice information,
Thanks for sharing nice information. i didn’t know anything about osha papers.