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More money, increased focus on enforcement expected at OSHA

Date Posted: May 22 2009

WASHINGTON (PAI) – The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would get a 10% hike in its budget and staff, and a shift towards enforcement and away from ineffective GOP-pushed “voluntary compliance,” according to the detailed budget Democratic President Barack Obama sent to Congress on May 7.

The $51 million OSHA increase, to $568 million, was one of several notable pro-worker changes proposed in Obama’s spending plan for discretionary programs – those Congress can change – in the next fiscal year.

Obama also wants the number of federal OSHA inspections to climb from 38,600 this year to 40,900 in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, and the number of state inspections, which the feds help pay for, to rise from an estimated 50,000 this year to 57,650 next year. Federal OSHA enforcement money alone would rise 14.6%, to $227 million.

Other large budget hikes went to wage and hour enforcement, boosting DOL’s ability to go after violations of minimum wage and overtime laws, and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), which aids workers who lose their jobs to subsidized foreign imports. That would double, to $1.8 billion, as the program expands to cover more workers.

“The president’s budget launches new and innovative ways to promote economic recovery and the competitiveness of our nation’s workers,” Obama’s Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, said. “At the same time, the budget reflects our effort to invest in what works and cut or reduce programs that do not.”

The OSHA increase marks not just more money for job safety and health but also a shift in emphasis away from the GOP Bush regime’s combination of turning OSHA into a “consultative agency” for business and of going after only “the worst of the worst.” A Government Accountability Office probe of the latter emphasis showed it flopped.

Solis said her department would hire 1,000 new workers, two-thirds of them investigators, thus returning the number of such probers to where it was in 2001, before Bush took over. Of those, 160 new investigators will be in OSHA, while 200 will be in Wage and Hour. Its budget would increase by 18%, to $228 million.

“If we expect our workers to come to work, every day, we have to protect them,” Jordan Barab, acting OSHA administrator, told union nurses earlier in the week. Of his boss, Solis, Barab added that “She is assuming and hoping most employers want to do the right thing, but those who don’t will be targeted for strong enforcement action.”

Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), the program that gives extended jobless benefits, retraining money and even subsidies for health insurance coverage to workers who lose their jobs due to subsidized foreign imports, would double.

That hike will occur, the budget said, because Congress, in the stimulus law Obama pushed and lawmakers passed, expanded TAA to service-sector workers and to workers who lose their jobs because their firms lost business from now-laid-off workers whose own companies closed due to imports.

Those are workers like the deli servers whose deli closed because the nearby steel mill whose workers it served lost their jobs to imports. The service sector workers and the others will be eligible for TAA aid starting on May 18.

Other notable budget highlights include:

  • OSHA spending on “compliance assistance” would rise by $2 million, to $73 million. “State consultation grants,” another Bush favorite, would stay at $55 million.
  • The Wage and Hour Division is expected to aid 300,000 persons “through securing agreements with firms to pay back wages owed to their workers. In government contract compliance actions, about 35,000 persons will be aided through securing agreements to pay wages owed to workers,” the budget says.
  • The DOL office pushed by the Radical Right National Right to Work Committee and the Bush regime to investigate and harass unions, the Office of Labor-Management Standards, would be cut by $4 million, or 10%, to $41 million. A recent additional onerous provision, pushed through by Bush, that would have forced union officers and staffers to virtually disclose all their personal finances, was halted by Solis.
  • The National Labor Relations Board would get a slight increase, up $21 million to $283.4 million in both budget and staffing. The number of workers would rise by 48, to 1,285 – still far below levels during the Clinton administration.
  • The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which takes over traditional pension plans when the employers dump them — usually due to bankruptcy — and pays some benefits, plans to serve 692,484 retirees in the year starting Oct. 1, up from 665,850. It expects another 100 corporate pension plans, for a total of 4,050, to be dumped on its doorstep.