April 26, 2007 – Two Congressional hearings (one featuring SKAPP’s David Michaels as a witness) and a front page New York Times article have focused attention on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s lack of action on several important workplace hazards.
Over the past several years, OSHA has delayed or halted work on important standards for worker protection and focused largely on voluntary programs. The one major health standard it has issued – on hexavalent chromium – was required by a court order. Unions and occupational health experts have been urging OSHA to issue standards on silica, beryllium, confined space at construction sites, ergonomics, construction noise, and other hazards for years without success.
The Case of Artificial Butter Flavoring
The case of artificial butter flavoring is a prime example of OSHA’s failure to respond to a serious workplace hazard. The hearing “Have OSHA Standards Kept up with Workplace Hazards?”, held by the House Committee on Education and Labor Subcommittee on Workforce Protections on April 24th, included testimony from Eric Peoples, a former employee of a microwave popcorn plant who now suffers from the debilitating lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans.
A cluster of bronchiolitis obliterans cases among workers at a popcorn plant was reported to OSHA in 2000, and in 2002 the National Institute of Safety and Health (NIOSH) published articles in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and the New England Journal of Medicine reporting that high concentrations of artificial butter flavoring had been observed in air samples from the popcorn plant, and that preliminary animal studies suggested severe damage to airway epithelium after inhalation exposure to high air concentrations of a butter flavoring used in that factory. The investigators recommended engineering controls to reduce employees’ exposure to the butter flavoring.
In the years following NIOSH’s initial report, additional research has strengthened the link between occupational exposure to artificial butter flavoring – in particular, the chemical diacetyl – and severe lung disease, and found that it’s also a problem in a range of facilities where butter flavoring is manufactured, mixed, or added to products. In July of 2006, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters petitioned OSHA to issue an emergency temporary standard to protect workers from diacetyl and to begin the process of protecting workers from other hazardous flavoring chemicals. A group of 42 top scientists and occupational health experts sent a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao in strong support of the unions’ petition.
On April 25th, apparently in recognition of the attention that the butter flavoring issue has attracted, OSHA announced that it was launching a National Emphasis Program focusing on the microwave popcorn industry that “will provide direction on inspection targeting and procedures, methods of controlling the hazard and compliance assistance.” This action, as well as being overdue, is also inadequate. OSHA should include other industries (including flavoring and snack foods) where cases of obstructive lung disease have emerged and should issue an actual limit for diacetyl exposure.
In his April 25th New York Times article on OSHA (“OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry”), reporter Stephen Labaton emphasized the case of artificial butter flavoring as an example of the agency’s failure to act on a serious health hazard. Much of the material he presented comes from a case study on flavoring workers’ lung disease (also called “popcorn workers lung”) posted on this website.
A Look at the Numbers
Some of the defenders of OSHA’s new shift in emphasis from regulation to voluntary programs point to the continued drop in workplace injury rates as evidence that the agency’s approach is working. Critics have noted, though, that much of recent reduction could be attributed to changes in reporting rules – and that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, which OSHA relies on to make claims about the state of workplace injuries and illnesses, dramatically underestimate the burden and therefore also the costs of work-related conditions.
David Michaels, director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP), addressed this issue in his testimony for the April 26th hearing “Is OSHA Working for Working People?” held by the Subcommittee on Employment & Workplace Safety of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions. A sophisticated analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data by two University of Illinois scientists, just published online by the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, attributes 83% of the decline in workplace injuries and illnesses between 1992 and 2003 to changes in OSHA record-keeping rules. Lee Friedman, one of the study’s authors, gives a summary of the findings and some recommendations at the public health blog The Pump Handle.
Even without the recordkeeping change, BLS statistics don’t capture the full toll of workplace injuries and illnesses. NIOSH-funded researchers at Michigan State University compared BLS statistics to data from workers’ compensation and other systems and found that the BLS numbers include only about one-third of all work-related injuries and illnesses. (An earlier study by a different group of researchers estimated the BLS missed between 33% and 69% of all injuries.)
The way the BLS system is structured also makes it hard to collect accurate data on occupational illness. Most occupational illnesses that are caused by toxic exposures are never recorded as work-related, either because they occurred after the worker left the employment where the exposure occurred or because the link with occupational exposure was never made.
