Silica Rule Subject to Multi-Employer Policy, Official Says

JOURNAL: ISSUE 3 - 2016

Editor’s Note: The article below was reproduced with permission from Construction Labor Report, 62 CLR 523, (July 14, 2016). Copyright 2016 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033), www.bna.com. 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s multi-employer worksite policy would kick in to govern cases in which workers may be exposed to silica dust created by another employer, an agency official said June 28.

That situation could arise if an employer's workers are visiting a site where other employers have created a silica hazard.

“You're really looking at a responsibility for reasonable care there,” said David O'Connor, director of OSHA's office of chemical hazards (non-metals). “If you're sending employees onto a worksite where you know or should have known that an overexposure would occur, the expectation is that that employer is going to take reasonable steps to protect their employees.”

OSHA's multi-employer policy sets out four classes of employers: “creating” employers, which directly cause a hazard to exist; “exposing” employers, which employ workers such as sales staff who visit hazardous worksites; “controlling” employers, which have control over the worksite; and “correcting” employers, which may be engaged for the purpose of fixing a hazard.

In extreme cases, an employer could be expected to pull its employers off a worksite entirely, said O'Connor, who was speaking at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ annual convention in Atlanta.

Safeguards Against Retaliation

During the same presentation, Annette Iannucci, health scientist with OSHA's directorate of standards and guidance, said workers and other stakeholders played a key role in shaping the silica rule's medical surveillance requirements.

Under the rule, an employer can only be given a physician's recommendations about limiting a given worker's exposure to respirable silica if the worker gives written consent.

“We heard from a lot of workers, unions and doctors that many employees would not participate in medical surveillance if the employer was given medical-related information,” Iannucci said. “This is because many of them fear that the employers would retaliate or discriminate against them based on those findings.”

OSHA included the written consent provision “to encourage as many workers as possible to participate in medical surveillance,” Iannucci said.

Further, the agency expects the information gathered during medical surveillance to have the additional benefit of helping workers make important lifestyle decisions, such as quitting smoking if they discover they already have a lung disease, Iannucci said.

Snapshot 

• OSHA's multi-employer worksite policy would kick in to govern cases in which workers may be exposed to another employer’s silicadust.
•  Agency official says medical surveillance requirements were tweaked to protect against retaliation.