Dave Johnson

Last week the Politico Playbook daily newsletter noted the coming retirement of Rep. George Miller (D-CA) by saying the 40-year veteran of Congress was one of the last of the Democratic “Watergate babies”… “part of a post-Vietnam 70s generation filled with moral certitude.”

News item: Sen. Chuck Grassley has joined 42 other senators in requesting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to stop unlawful regulations on small family farms. “OSHA is overstepping its bounds here,” Grassley said.

More than 70% of major U.S. employers engage in some form of electronic monitoring of workers, tracking their email, Internet use and whereabouts with GPS devices, according to William Staples, a University of Kansas sociologist who has released the second edition of his book, “Everyday Surveillance.”

On one side we have the Europeans. On the other, the United States. The different approaches the two are taking to provide aid to Bangladesh factory workers says a good bit about the cultural differences involved.

It’s long been a beef with safety and health pros that senior leaders, with the rare exception, just don’t get safety. Business bosses don’t study it in business school, and since safety is a cost center and not a profit generator, leadership spends little time studying safety issues. Health issues, with their more delayed consequences and debatable connection to worker lifestyle issues (smoking, obesity, alcohol and drug abuse) are even further off the executive radar screen.

In this case, it does much more than merely hurt. “This case” refers to last Thursday’s (October 24, 2013) rather extraordinary admission by OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels that hundreds of OSHA’s permissible exposures limits (PELs) are far out of date, basically useless, and in fact dangerous.

In a press tele-conference last week, OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels once again took the opportunity to promote the much-ballyhooed and controversial Injury and Illness Prevention Plan (I2P2). “Certainly, we encourage employers to adopt and embrace I2P2,” he said. “In the VPP (Voluntary Protection Program) thousand of companies have adopted the principles of I2P2. So we know it works."