By Lisa Mascaro (contact)

Thu, Sep 18, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Washington — The Bush administration’s Labor Department is proposing a new process for establishing workplace health rules that critics warned Wednesday could threaten worker safety by delaying new regulations for years.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, chairwoman of the House committee on workplace safety, said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been crafting the new rule-making process in secret and rushing to get it approved without adequate public input.

“While it should have been working full speed ahead to issue protective standards, it has instead been busy with this secret rule,” said Woolsey, a California Democrat.

The Labor Department began working on the changes this summer as a way to bring more transparency and responsiveness to the process for making new rules governing worker exposure to toxic substances.

Under the proposal, the department would require greater notification that new rules were being proposed, and it would be required to respond more fully to public input.

But workplace advocates questioned why the administration was rushing the changes through before the end of the year, saying they would tie the hands of the next administration.

Peg Seminario, health and safety director at the AFL-CIO, testified before Woolsey’s committee that the changes being suggested “would add years of delay to an already glacial process and result in unnecessary death and disease for workers.”

Democrats on the committee have long criticized OSHA for failing to adequately regulate and enforce workplace safety, especially for its oversight of the construction industry after the many construction deaths on the Strip and crane accidents in New York.

The changes discussed Wednesday revolve around worker exposure to toxins, some of which are common in local workplaces. For example, silica is often found in the construction industry, and certain exposure levels can lead to respiratory disease.

But Randel Johnson, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, testified that the change was a simple, overdue internal measure. He said if the agency were really operating in secret, as critics contend, it would not have sought public review.

“This is a tempest in a teapot,” Johnson said. “I’m not sure it’s more than that.”

Sun staff writer Alexandra Berzon contributed to this report.