February 14, 2003—Under President Bush’s Fiscal Year 2004 budget for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency will receive an increase of $7.2 million for compliance assistance and outreach, including more than $2.2 million earmarked for outreach to Spanish and other non-English-speaking workers. Other new areas of compliance assistance include special outreach to the small business community and expansion of OSHA’s voluntary and partnership programs.
This is the first time OSHA’s budget will include additional funding for multilingual outreach. The new money will allow OSHA to expand its outreach to Spanish-speaking workers, whose fatality rates rose 11 percent in 2000 and 9 percent in 2001. Existing outreach efforts include a variety of Spanish-language programs, services, and collaborative efforts at both national and local levels.
Enforcement remains a high priority for OSHA, with an increase of $4.2 million for enforcement activities that will continue to target the workplaces and industries with the highest rates of injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. OSHA has scheduled 37,700 inspections of workplaces this year, and is planning on the same number in FY 2004. The agency also looks to fund a health hazard survey to investigate chemicals associated with respiratory disease in the workplace.
Under the President’s proposed budget, OSHA will also receive an additional $2 million for support of state plan partners; $2 million for evaluation projects; and $750,000 each for expanded health targeting and emergency preparedness programs. The President’s total budget for OSHA in FY 2004 is $450 million, which is an increase of $13 million, or about three percent over the budget request for FY 2003.
See also, “White House budget includes more funding for homeland security, energy, workplace safety” on FMLink.
