A recent blog post by labor lawyer Steven Wodka highlights a concerning change in how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires chemical companies to classify cancer-causing chemicals that is likely to pose significant problems for OSHA’s ability to enforce how employers warn workers of the dangers associated with the chemicals they work with.

In OSHA’s 2012 revision to the 1994 Hazard Communication (HazCom) rule, the previous requirement that chemical companies consider chemicals that have been categorized as proven or potential carcinogens by either the National Toxicology Program(NTP) or the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or regulated as a carcinogen on an OSHA list of toxic and hazardous chemicals, has been replaced by an approach consistent with the United Nations Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals(GHS).