Also known as the Williams-Steiger Act, intended “to assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) established three permanent federal agencies: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to set and enforce standards, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to conduct research on workplace hazards, and the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) to adjudicate enforcement challenges.
Factory inspection laws passed in a handful states in the last quarter of the nineteenth century provided the historical roots of OSHA. The first of these, enacted in Massachusetts in 1871, mandated the use of guards on machine belts, gears, and shafts; required the construction of adequate fire exits; and provided for public inspectors.
A broader but still limited commitment to workplace standards developed later during the passage of New Deal legislation including the National Recovery Act (1933) and the National Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). The need for workplace standards became clear because the patchwork of local inspection laws and state-based workers’ compensation programs established in the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, when reform-minded individuals attempted to address problems in society, had provided uneven and often inadequate protection. The Social Security Act of 1935 allowed the federal Public Health Service to underwrite state-based industrial health programs; the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936 enabled the Department of Labor to set standards for federal contract workers; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 empowered the Department to bar minors from “dangerous occupations.”
The eventual OSHA reflects the turmoil of the 1960s.
Willard Wirtz, the secretary of labor in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, compared American casualties in Vietnam and in the workplace and, in remarks before a 1968 Congressional hearing, claimed that three out of four new entrants into the labor force would suffer work-related injuries at some point in their lives. President Johnson himself would describe the increased rate and seriousness of these “casualties” as “the shame of a modern industrial nation”: at the time he spoke, in 1968, the annual number of deaths on the job had increased to 14,000, with another 2.2 million injured or made ill. The administration’s own proposal, soon introduced as legislation, faced considerable opposition in Congress and from business, and it never reached a vote. Organized labor, on the other hand, would later oppose the Nixon administration’s initial proposal. The bill that President Richard Nixon signed into law on December 29, 1970, functioned as a compromise of sorts between Senator Harrison Williams’s (D-New Jersey) proposal (almost identical to the earlier Johnson plan) and Representative William Steiger’s (R-New Jersey) more conservative plan.
OSHA published its first standards, which included permissible exposure limits (PELs) for more than 400 toxins, in 1971. This list included the asbestos PEL still in effect, for example, as well as the benzene PEL that the Supreme Court voided in 1980. The 1978 PEL for cotton dust that all but eliminated cases of “brown lung” remains one of OSHA’s most important achievements. The 1978 and 1995 standards for lead, the 1991 standards for blood-borne pathogens, and the ergonomics standards issued in 2000 despite Congressional opposition—and repealed in 2001—are other well-known examples.
Other milestones include the defeat of the proposed OSHA Improvements Act in 1980, introduced by Senator Richard Schweiker (R-Pennsylvania), which would have restricted OSHA’s inspection powers; the $1.4 million fine imposed on Union Carbide in 1986 for “egregious violations” at its plant in Institute, West Virginia, the first application of the “instance-by-instance” rule; IMC Fertilizer’s $11.3 million fine in 1991, the largest ever imposed; and the Maine Top 2000 program initiated in 1993, a successful example of OSHA’s current emphasis on compliance assistance in high-risk industries.
OSHA assumed the transfer of workplace regulation to the states over time and provided for partial funding of state agencies that met federal guidelines. OSHA approved the first three state plans soon after Congress passed the act and issued its first “final approvals,” which relinquished federal enforcement powers, in 1984. However, three decades after the act became law, only 24 comprehensive state plans exist. The California state legislature ended the largest state plan, CalOSHA, in 1987.
Since 1971, the number of workplace fatalities has decreased 60 percent, and the rate of injuries and illnesses has fallen 40 percent. OSHA has few inspectors, and the penalties for individual violations remain small. Fewer than 4,000 inspectors cover almost six million eligible establishments and, despite the previous cumulative penalties, until 1990 the maximum fine for a serious violation was just $1,000, after which it increased to $7,000. On the other hand, empirical evidence exists that OSHA’s current focus on high-risk occupations and workplaces, its emphasis on compliance assistance and other forms of partnership, and its judicious use of VPPs or “voluntary protection programs”—which promote effective worksite-based safety and health—have proven successful.
