Orlando — OSHA chief Doug Parker covered a wide range of topical safety and health issues in a talk Tuesday afternoon to a surprisingly sparse audience in a large ballroom at this year’s National Safety Congress & Expo.

Parker’s main theme was not regulatory, but emphasizing the need for safety to be a core value with both organizations and individual workers. He says the need for deeply valuing safety was brought home to him talking the families of workers killed on the job. He was told of one man who predicted how he would die and in fact was killed as he pictured. The families of lost loved ones experience pain, anguish, perhaps anger, often confusion about the surrounding circumstances and what actions OSHA will take, and many families commit to making a difference to ensure their suffering is not experienced by others.

To help those families, OSHA recently named its first family liaison officer to serve as an advocate for the family seeking answers, ensuring that they do not feel neglected or abandoned, and to explain how the OSHA fatality investigation process works, explained Parker.

To make safety a core value in organizations and within individuals, Parker says safety and health management systems are key, along with leadership that “gets it” in terms of elevating safety and health with action steps. He also said values include empowering workers to participate in safety and health programs and problem-solving – expecting employees to report hazards and speak up when they see something that poses or could pose a risk.

Parker has headed OSHA for about three years and says he is in a good position to see what works and doesn’t work in terms of safety and health attitudes and practices. Three common errors: 1) adopting the righteous language of safety and health but refusing to admit to safety problems or gaps; 2) competing interests are allowed to sacrifice safety and health resources, staffing and funding; and 3) slick corporate image-making regarding safety and health that is disconnected from realities on the ground – there is a refusal to implement safety and health programs on the frontlines.

Parker also touched on these issues

• OSHA is committed to modernizing its Voluntary Protection Program (VPP), make it less labor intensive, recognize beginning and interim steps to VPP full certification, and in general broaden the number of VPP participants and the popularity of safety and health management systems.
• The number of federal and state OSHA inspectors is 1,800-1,900 – the size of the city of San Diego’s police force. This means OSHA must be a force-multiplier, using VPP, alliances with professional associations and business groups, and other stakeholders to advocate the critical need to make safety a core value.
• OSHA is developing more tools for small businesses – operations with a dozen employees, say, or businesses that consist of a driver in his or her cab. “We want to give them the building blocks of a basic safety and health management system,” Parker explained.
• Enforcement, violations, penalties and negative PR have not been effective in reducing the number of annual workplace fatalities, which has plateaued at approximately 5,000 deaths every year. “OSHA, businesses, stakeholders all need to take risks and try new efforts to reduce the fatality rate,” Parker said.
• “We cannot tolerate employers that ignore safety and health,” said Parker, speaking not only of his agency but the need for businesses to hold their contractors, partners and industry accountable.
• In his three years on the job, Parker has been surprised by the number of companies that simply don’t care about worker health and safety, even some large, well-known companies. Another surprise is the disconnect he sees between what senior leaders sometime say lauding the need for safety and health and the lack of commitment to the same on the frontlines.
• Workplace violence is very much on OSHA’s radar. A standard is in the works specifically to protect healthcare workers, and inspectors are using the general duty clause with retail and convenience stores ignoring workplace violence and experiencing incidents.
• Updating the lockout-tagout standard has been on the standards agenda for some time and OSHA is committed to modernizing the LOTO rule.
• Worker well-being and mental health is also on OSHA’s radar. No standards are contemplated, but OSHA wants to deliver more resources to help workplaces reduce stress, mental health disorders, and suicides.
• OSHA has no plans to regulate the deployment of artificial intelligence.