Health and safety activist Jordan Barab assumed duties on April 13 as acting head of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He will lead the agency until a permanent director is chosen and then will become OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary on a permanent basis.

Barab ran the AFSCME union’s health and safety program for 16 years. From 2003 to 2007, he was publisher of Confined Space, a workplace safety blog through which he routinely clashed with OSHA and the Bush Administration on policy issues.

“This appointment is a clear sign that Hilda Solis and the Obama Administration are going to reverse years of deteriorating attention to workplace safety and health at OSHA,” said Laborers International Union General President Terence M. O’Sullivan. “OSHA lost its focus during the Bush years, but Barab’s commitment to protecting workers is well established.”

Barab wrote in 2007: “…there are still far too many health and safety professionals that don’t understand that to a very great extent, who lives and who dies in the workplace is determined by politics – both power relationships in the workplace, and traditional politics that determines who controls our government. What that means is that organizing unions and electing politicians who will fight against unlimited corporate control over our regulatory agencies, our workplaces and the environment are of vital importance to protecting the health and safety of American workers.”

(The AFL-CIO and the Laborers Health and Safety Fund of North America contributed).