The Obama administration has been methodically reinvigorating federal agencies that turned down the lights and laid off staff during the downturn. It appears the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is next in line for steroid shots.
A Department of Labor official recently testified before Congress on a series of recommendations that could significantly boost the number of cases brought by the agency against employers.
According to a Society for Human Resource Management article on the hearing, chief among the recommendations he supported called for extending the statute of limitations from 30 days to 180 days to give workers more time to lodge complaints with the feds about unsafe working conditions.
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David Michaels, assistant secretary for occupational safety and health at the DOL, went before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in support of a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. She thinks it's high time to take another look at the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which, she said at the hearing, hasn't been updated since its controversial passage in 1970.
Murray's objective is to offer workplace safety and health whistleblowers the same sorts of protections that other whistleblowers have. The SHRM article said that she and Michaels agreed at the hearing that OSHA's protections lag behind all others. Among whistleblower statutes that have been updated to allow 180 days for a complaints to be filed are the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
Additionally, according to the SHRM article, Michaels told the panel that various state workplace safety/health plans "have adopted significantly longer periods than those imposed by the act."
Murray's bill offers four updates to the law:
- Extending the statute of limitations for complaints from 30 to 180 days;
- authorizing OSHA to order immediate reinstatement of improperly terminated workers;
- reducing the burden of proof on the whistleblower to show that he or she was terminated or reprimanded for blowing the whistle;
- and two provisions that would create new processes for resolving complaints that were either dismissed by OSHA or where the resolution didn't happen in a timely manner.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
