This column updates the May column, in which I reported on a whipsaw (a lose-lose situation) faced by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA’s core problem was the uncontrollably high cost of resources and time required to produce permissible exposure limits (PELs) which limited its ability to comply with international treaty agreements.

CAN WE AFFORD A REPEAT OF THE PAST?
Since the 1960s PELs have been the cornerstone of OSHA’s (and hence employers’) approach to addressing workers’ exposure to chemical hazards. This approach was simple: define/promulgate an inhalation, and occasionally a dermal, limit¹ of exposure, and then inspect and measure at employers’ sites for compliance.

It takes OSHA more than four years of technical and political work to set an exposure limit. Beyond laboratory and industrial staff effort, other hurdles in the rulemaking process include digestion of comments from small businesses and polarized, well-financed, pro- and antiregulatory stakeholders, and input from credible scientists.

OSHA’s industrial hygienists collected two million exposure samples from 1979 to 2007.² Most industrial hygienists believe these “safe” PEL levels are woefully out of step with current scientific evidence of adverse health effects. The cost of undertaking these measurements was enormous, but now is viewed as being of questionable value.

This, and other outcomes, has caused faith to be lost in the traditional substance-by-substance PEL approach because there doesn’t seem to be enough time, money, toxicity data, or political capital to do the job “right.”