House Education and Labor Committee Holds Hearing on Nevada OSHA

On October 29, the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing on "Nevada's Workplace Health and Safety Enforcement Program: OSHA's Findings and Recommendations." The Committee was highly critical of Nevada's State OSHA and the deficiencies cited in federal OSHA's review of their program (available here). The review was conducted after public attention was drawn to a number of fatalities over an 18-month period between 2006 and 2008. Mr. Jordan Barab, Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA and Acting Assistant Secretary, testified that the review conducted of Nevada is only the first. OSHA plans to conduct simultaneous reviews of all the rest of the states that have State Plans, complete recommendations for improvement, and set deadlines for those recommendations to be put in place. OSHA plans to start conducting these reviews soon, and has set April 2010 as the target for release of these reviews. Barab also testified that, since all State Plans are required to "at least as effective" as Federal OSHA in protecting worker health and safety, federal OSHA will be reviewing the statistical benchmarks it uses to determine if a State Plan has met this burden. AGC will continue to monitor these developments.