February 13, 2004—President George W. Bush recently acted to increase workplace safety and health for federal employees through the new Safety, Health and Return-to-Employment (SHARE) initiative.
In a January 9, 2004 memo, President Bush directed all executive branch departments and agencies to participate in SHARE to reduce Federal workplace injuries and the cost they incur. The memo noted that when measured by workers’ compensation losses, Federal workplace injuries cost more than $2 billion and 2 million lost production days annually, not to mention the pain and suffering by workers and their families.
American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) President James “Skipper” Kendrick commended the program and urged the administration to utilize the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) withdrawn “Injury Illness and Prevention Standard” to assure long-term success.
“SHARE arms the many federally employed safety, health and environmental practitioners, including ASSE members, with the authority of your office in fulfilling their long-standing commitment to helping make sure that federal workers go home safe and healthy from their jobs each day,” Kendrick wrote in his letter to the President. “SHARE also puts into place a larger framework for working towards safer and healthier workplaces that leading private sector corporations already employ. As those corporations have long understood, this improved focus of commitment at the highest executive level will mean fewer injuries and less illness for federal workers, leading to greater productivity and lower costs to the federal government.”
Kendrick recommended the administration utilize a comprehensive program proposed by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in its Injury Illness and Prevention Standard. This standard would have required employers to establish workplace safety and health management programs but was withdrawn from OSHA’s regulatory agenda in August 2002.
“A major concern is that when program measurement, as SHARE currently calls for, is based solely on what our thousands of members recognize as ‘trailing’ indicators—lower workplace injury and illness case rates, lower lost-time injury and illness case rates, timely reporting and fewer lost days—success can too easily be compromised by short cuts and compromises to achieve paper instead of real gains,” Kendrick said. “Trailing indicators certainly measure results but do not adequately show managers where a program does and does not work. They only show whether an outcome was good or bad.
ASSE encourages the Bush Administration to turn to the Injury Illness and Prevention Standard as a resource to enhance SHARE and help it establish a more comprehensive program, completely integrated into the organization, with both trailing and leading indicators.
For more information check ASSE’s web site at http://www.asse.org.
