Who Do You Want at OSHA?

December 9th, 2004 by Hal

John L. Henshaw has resigned from his post at OSHA. The official announcement gives him credit for making our workplaces significantly safer over his tenure. That's true in total, but the situation is about the same for those of us in construction. In spite of all the efforts during the last 10 years, there is no change in worker death rates — about 1,200 workers die each year and many thousands are seriously injured.

I think the VPP (Voluntary Protection Plan) efforts will pay off. The program offers real incentives to firms who take the extra effort to qualify for the plan. Unfortunately, not enough firms will go after the VPP. Incremental improvement while desirable will not produce the results we need. It's time to come at this differently. In my mind there's no reason not to make the level of safety improvements MT Hojgaard, Denmark, accomplished when they adopted lean construction. They cut injury rates by about 60% in one year.

I want the new OSHA leader to make a commitment to cut injury rates by over 50% in the next two years. What do you want?

Read Safety Everyday's construction safety in the news sideblog.

NSC’s Safety Congress & Expo

OSHA Expands VPP with Construction

OSHA Fines Concrete Contractor $870,000

Preventing Construction Fatalities — Kudos to OSHA

John L. Henshaw Defends OSHA

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One Response to “Who Do You Want at OSHA?”

Sven Bertelsen Says:
December 10th, 2004 at 12:29 pm
Hal,

I think they cut the rate by 50% only, but I am still not aware of any other single effort in construction having given anything nearly as good.

An interesting point is that it is through implementing lean project managemnt only they obtained the result. Their non-lean projects (where they act as subs and are managed by other, non lean firms)have still the old and much higher accident rate. From this I conclude that there has been no influence of safety campaigns, weather conditions or similar as we are looking at the same comany and same two year plus period.

Sven

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