Fending off criticism from the ironworkers union, OSHA Administrator Edwin Foulke, Jr. talked about the bottom line, making a business case for safety at ASSE’s Safety 2008 Professional Development Conference and Exposition held last month in Las Vegas.

“In every speech, I talk about the bottom line of employee safety,” he said. “More than anything else, all we care about is that at the end of the day, workers go home safe and sound to their loved ones. If they do that, the financial bottom line will take care of itself.”

While in Vegas Foulke made time to meet with the local ironworkers union, which urged him to rescind a federal directive interpreting the agency’s standards for safety flooring, which allows builders to avoid providing the flooring under certain conditions. At least two of 11 workers who have died in the past 18 months on the Las Vegas Strip were ironworkers whose falls, according to the union, could have been broken if decking or netting had been in place.

“We are outraged by news that Mr. Foulke would come to Las Vegas to pontificate about fatalities and workplace safety matters when he has refused to rescind OSHA compliance directives that have been at the center of controversy in Las Vegas,” said Joe Standley, president of the Western District Council of Ironworkers.

Federal safety laws enforced locally by Nevada OSHA have long required that employers provide safety netting or temporary flooring to catch workers who fall. Those rules remained official law even after new erection standards were adopted in 2001.But in 2002, OSHA issued an interpretation to no longer enforce the requirement for netting or flooring if employers required workers to wear safety harnesses, which are attached to cables that workers tie off from above.

OSHA says the two forms of protection are redundant and unnecessary. But officials at the union insist that the decision by OSHA undermines safety and say ironworker death rates have risen since word spread that contractors didn’t have to provide safety floors.

“We were shocked and disappointed that OSHA would issue compliance directives that removed safety provisions for the steel erection industry that is considered a high hazard industry,” Standley said.

Nevada OSHA is now requiring contractors to provide decking or netting beneath employees, effective Aug. 1. Foulke also met with ASSE’s Safety Professionals and the Latino Workforce (SPALW) group. In a plenary session, Foulke said that the rate of injury and fatalities for Hispanic workers is going down, but the number of injuries continues to rise.

In 2006, the work-related injury death rate for Hispanic workers was 5.0 per 100,000, compared with rates of 4.0 for all workers, 4.0 for non-Hispanic white workers, and 3.7 for non-Hispanic black workers.

Two main concerns facing safety, health and environmental professionals who work with the Hispanic workforce are 1) the ability to effectively communicate with each other due to differences in language and literacy levels, and 2) many times cultural difference lead to misinterpretation of directions and intent.

NIOSH notes that inadequate knowledge and control of recognized safety hazards and inadequate training and supervision of workers, often exacerbated by different languages and literacy levels of workers, contributed to higher numbers of worker-related injury deaths among Hispanic workers.

Addressing ASSE’S safety professionals, Foulke said, “Safety and health will be one of the main business drivers in the future. You have to be frank about these things. We have to get you to the C room. It is so important, and will be even more so in future, that the safety and health professional is involved.

“You can’t put a price tag on somebody’s life,” said Foulke, a self-described country lawyer from South Carolina who has completed more than 200 OSHA fatality investigations.

He told the safety professionals that their jobs will be “enlarged” in the future, to encompass “wellness” issues.

The future workforce — with its obesity problem – will be injured quicker, more frequently and have pre-existing conditions that safety and health professionals will have to deal with, warned Foulke.

“To me safety and health is a moral responsibility. Many companies are getting it now, and you’ve got to start looking into wellness, to make the country safer and companies stronger,” he said. “One injury, one illness, one fatality can ruin a company.”

The National Fire Protection Association also held its annual convention in Las Vegas in June, and it’s president told members, the organization must be more than a source of technical solutions to safety problems; it has to do more to develop and implement strategies for change.

“We must be more aggressive at forging coalitions to bring about change and we must not fear risking controversy to ful-fill our mission,” said James M. Shannon, president and CEO of NFPA in his opening remarks to attendees of the World Safety Conference and Exposition.

“We have learned that when NFPA provides the leadership in our areas of expertise, our members and our constituents can be a powerful influence for change.”

Perhaps the best recent example is NFPA’s coordination of the Fire Safe Cigarette campaign. When NFPA decided less than three years ago to take on the responsibility for a nationwide state-by-state campaign, only two states had adopted the fire safe cigarette legislation.

“Today, 35 states have enacted legislation, and at the rate we are going, we should achieve our goal of a national fire safe cigarette standard within a couple of years,” said Shannon.

This change offers the potential for saving hundreds of lives every year when fully implemented and hundreds of millions of dollars in property saved from being lost in fires.

Shannon said NFPA is trying something similar with residential sprinklers. “We have already taken the lead and changed NFPA 1 and 101 to require sprinklers in one- and two-family dwellings.”

NFPA will be at the ICC code hearings later this year to urge the inclusion of residential sprinklers in the International Residential Code.

He said NFPA has supported residential sprinklers for years, especially through the work we have done with the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition but now believes this is the time to move this issue to the next level of action.

Shannon said he sometimes hears people say, “We have the fire problem under control. They talk about the fact that in the United States the fire death rate has been cut in half in the last few decades. They measure the declining number of calls to which fire departments respond. Or they cite statistics that show that there are fewer accidents in the workplace. They treat these statistics as if they are just part of the natural evolution of society and not the result of decades of hard work by technical experts, the enforcement community, first responders, safety advocates and many others.

“But we know that, even with all of those advances, avoidable tragedies still occur with alarming frequency. Lives are lost needlessly and the hopes and dreams of so many families are destroyed forever. Preventing those tragedies is the reason that NFPA exists, and that purpose is what brings us to this meeting today.”

Just a few months ago, on Feb. 7, an explosion tore through the Imperial Sugar Company outside of Savannah, GA. The explosion killed 13 workers and inflicted serious burns on 10 others. The catastrophic explosion that cratered the refinery was believed to have been caused by sugar dust. This was not that unusual an event. Combustible dust has long been a major safety concern and a particular concern of NFPA.

The Standard, NFPA 654, addresses the hazards of combustible dusts and the potential for dust explosions, and NFPA 61deals directly with protecting facilities processing agricultural dusts like sugar. Unfortunately OSHA regulations do not require these standards to be used by manufacturers and food producers to protect workers.

Over the last quarter century there have been almost 300 dust explosions that have killed over 120 and injured hundreds of others.

“I have seen how devastating these disasters can be right in my own community,” said Shannon. “In my hometown of Lawrence, MA, a major employer, Malden Mills, was obliterated and several employees seriously injured when a dust explosion started a huge fire in December of 1995.

“These accidents are avoidable. We know how to prevent them, but the standards that we know could have prevented those explosions were never made mandatory.

“It is our job not just to come up with the right technical solutions to serious safety problems but to do everything we can to ensure that the solutions are implemented,” added Shannon. FSM