OSHAon the move Lois Ember discloses that the agency, under the strong leadership of Eula Bingham, is being shaken from its stance of complacency into areas of greater scientific uncertainty and political and legal unrest
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a six-year-old agency tucked away in the Dept. of Labor, was created by the Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to protect the American worker from the hazards of the workplace. This act received nearly unanimous congressionalapproval-the bill had the backing of labor’s traditional allies in Congress-and the strong support of Nixon White House strategists already looking ahead to the 1972 election. OSHA’s immunity to criticism, however, came to an end with President Nixon’s signing of the bill into law in the Spring of 1971. It is fair to say that the agency is as unpopular in some quarters today as it was politically heralded in 1970. Industry and labor both assail and battle it; Congress and the General Accounting Office (GAO) criticize it: and the Office of Management and Budget starves it of funds. The agency is indeed beset, botheredand beleaguered.
A litany of horror tales Almost every businessman or labor leader has his own favorite OSHA horror tale. The litany of charges against the agency forms a catalog of contemporary folklore. Industry cites the arbitrariness of trifling but burdensome general and safety reg-
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ulations. Congressman George Hansen (R, “the legacy of human suffering that has been a byproduct of our industrial process Idaho), chairman of the American Conis one which no just society can tolerate.” servative Union’s STOP OSHA campaign, And she has sallied forth to do battle claims that OSHA has stifled American against the more serious health hazards industrial creativity and ingenuity. in high-risk industries such as construction Labor cites the lack of health standards, and the National Institute for Occupational and petrochemicals without, however, overlooking serious safety problems. Safety and Health (NIOSH), also created For the moment, OSHA’s critics are under the 1970 act, has the studies to placated. They are giving Bingham the support this contention. NIOSH has listed time to make the changes that will redisome 1600-2000 substances as suspect rect her beleaguered agency. carcinogens. OSHA to date has set health standards for 16 of these substances plus Refocusing the goals one for coke oven emissions. GAO estiCarrying out the theme of her immedimates that, at this rate, OSHA will take a ate predecessor, Morton Corn, Bingham century to write standards for the rehas pledged to go after major occupamaining substances without regard for any tional health hazards. In this effort she carcinogens that may crop up in the fuclaims the support of both President ture. Carter and Labor Secretary Marshall. After assuming the office of labor Bingham has promised to “stretch the secretary, Ray Marshall took a long look resources” of OSHA to promulgate more at the allegations. He found that both inhealth standards. She has promised to use dustry and labor had valid complaints, and he pledged to go after major health and the emergency temporary standard (ETS) to control unregulated toxic materials or safety problems-“the whales, not minto strengthen standards that are inadenows.” There are indeed enough whales quate. And, in her short time in office, she to harpoon. has exercised this option twice to bring Fresh breeze from Cinclnnatl benzene and dibromochloropropane (DBCP) under regulation. Last winter, President Carter whisked In testimony before congressional Eula Bingham away from the University of committees, Bingham frequently cites Cincinnati and swept her into Washington NIOSH’s conservative estimate of apto become OSHA’s fourth assistant secretary. Bingham is a highly esteemed proximately 100 000 deaths each year toxicologist who sincerely believes that from occupation-related diseases. With
the limited resources of her agency1400 compliance officers to police the 5 million worksites of more than 65 million workers-Bingham has decided to eschew what she terms “nitpicking, Mickey Mouse” regulations. At a May press conference, Bingham and Marshall unveiled the agency’s new policies that include: e Stepped-up inspections of such high-risk industries and businesses as construction, manufacturing, transportation, petrochemicals, dry cleaners and auto repair shops, while substantially reducing inspections of small businesses performing nonhazardous work. The development of generic health standards to cover broad categories of potentially dangerous substances. Examples are the proposed carcinogen policy and a labeling and identification standard now under development. The elimination of a significant number of consensus safety standards that are unnecessary or outdated, and the simplification of regulations that are “needlessly detailed, complicated or unclear.’ ’ The expansion of state consultative services to small businesses and the development of worker educational programs and materials to serve as self-help guidelines. Bingham and Marshall called this a “common sense” approach to regulation. The first concrete step taken was the reduction in recordkeeping and paperwork for small businesses. In July, OSHA published proposed regulations that would exempt employers with 10 or fewer workers from all recordkeeping requirements unless they were selected to participate in the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual survey and, in general, would reduce and simplify the recordkeeping system for occupational illnesses and injuries for those businesses still required to keep records.
The genesis of the shift The refocusing of OSHA’s efforts from safety to the more problematic health issues did not originate with Bingham. Her predecessor, Morton Corn, vowed to beef up the agency’s health programs by hiring and/or training more health compliance officers, and by developing generic health standards. Corn is recognized by all factionslabor, industry and Congress-as a competent and knowledgeable health professional who made a very serious attempt to improve OSHA’s performance in health matters. But, as one union spokesman observed, he was so wrapped up in OMB red tape during his one-year stewardship that he was able to promulgate only one standard-the generic coke oven emissions standard-although a cancer policy was being finely honed during his tenure. As a matter of fact, the basic idea for
a general carcinogen policy, which OSHA published in October in the Federal Register, superceded even Corn’s reign. According to AFL-ClO’s Sheldon Samuels, the union’s Industrial Union Dept. suggested the idea to Marshall Miller, the acting assistant secretary before Corn. Miller commissioned OSHA’s first review of the carcinogen problem and brought in Anson Keller from EPA to develop a policy for OSHA.
Substances, headed by John Froines, and the Offices of Carcinogen Standards and Carcinogen Identification & Classification, both presently without direct leadership. In a wise move, Bingham requested that NIOSH’s Joseph Wagoner, a noted epidemiologist and head of that agency’s division of field studies and clinical investigations, be detailed to OSHA as special assistant for occupational carcinogenesis. Even an interagency coordination effort announced by Bingham in August, and widely heralded in the press, was foreshadowed by an earlier attempt at interagency cooperation. In the interval between Corn’s resignation and Bingham’s confirmation, Bert Concklin, acting assistant secretary for OSHA, approached NIOSH, EPA, FDA and the Dept. of Agriculture with a proposal to coordinate efforts to control toxic substances. In March, one month after Concklin announced OSHA’s initial foray into interagency cooperation, Bingham was confirmed as assistant secretary. And, in an effort to fulfill one of Carter’s campaign promises-to reduce waste and duplication in the federal government-Bingham and the heads of three other agencies began to plan together to “streamline . regulatory processes and maximize . . . resources.”
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Bingham and Marshall commitment to the worker Recognizing that he could not achieve the health goals under the organization plan he inherited, Corn set reorganization as one of his major goals. Near the end of his stewardship, Corn announced a major revised agency structure that split the health standards program from the safety standards program, and established four additional directorates, an office of field coordination, and returned the agency to the use of one deputy assistant secretary. Because the agency had been through several other major reorganizations, and because she has no real quarrel with it, Bingham decided to implement Corn’s reorganization plan. She appointed Basil J. Whiting as deputy assistant secretary, responsible for the day-to-day management of the agency, and Donald MacKenzie as field coordinator. Grover Wrenn became director of the Health Standards Program. Under Wrenn are the Office of Toxic
New cooperative ventures At the height of the summer doldrums in Washington, Bingham, EPA administrator Douglas Costle, FDA commissioner Donald Kennedy and Consumer Product Safety Commission chairman S. John Byington announced a joint program to tackle the problem of regulating hazardous chemicals and toxic substances. In a joint statement, issued on August 2, the four agency chiefs announced a sevenpoint program to examine the common requirements of the various statutes to unearth possibilities for consolidated programs. In October, an interagency agreement was reached. This cooperative effort is possible because each of the four agencies regulates chemicals and toxic substances. They all gather and store vast amounts of datamost of which are not readily retrievable and, therefore, of little value. They all do health-risk assessments as a basis for standards and guidelines development. And they all have enforcement staffs to ensure compliance with regulations. The field offices, 40 in all, developed work plans that incorporated, where possible, the sharing of resources-laboratories and other facilities, libraries and vehicles and compliance and enforcement activities. The agencies will develop common or compatible testing procedures, R&D policies, regulations and enforcement and compliance procedures, whenever possible. These plans will be coordinated by a liaison officer designated for each agency. Volume 11, Number 13, December 1977
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Should this cooperative effort be successful, the four agencies will be better able to anticipate potential problems, and eliminate the “toxic substance of the week” syndrome currently plaguing all industrialized societies. NIOSH/OSHA, closer ties? OSHA can make cooperative arrangements with any federal agency, but by law the only agency it must form a Iiaison with is NIOSH, a non-regulatory research agency in the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare. However, the same GAO report that chided OSHA on its poor standards-setting record, also cited the lack of coordination between NIOSH and OSHA. The GAO report stated that neither agency has a reliable means for setting priorities, for determining which substances are hazardous and should be given priority in developing standards, and each has even set different priorities for the same substance. Bingham has addressed these criticisms and instituted remedies. First, Bingham has brought NIOSH’s Wagoner to OSHA as a special assistant. Wagoner not only brings his epidemiological expertise to the agency, a competence OSHA has lacked in the past, but he also acts as liaison with NIOSH’s research people in Cincinnati, and with the National Cancer Institute and the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Bingham, for her part, holds monthly meetings with NIOSH’s head, John Finklea, a practice instituted by Corn in 1976. At these meetings, Bingham airs problems, transmits information and establishes the priority needs of OSHA. Despite these monthly meetings, Corn, in his final state-of-the-agency message to then-Labor Secretary W. J. Usery, stated that the legally mandated dichotomous relationship between NlOSH in HEW and OSHA in Labor offered scant opportunity for efficient and effective coordination. Corn recommended that NlOSH be incorporated into OSHA so that “the research and data-gathering functions of NlOSH be responsive to the regulatory priorities conceived and agreed upon by NlOSH and OSHA.” When asked about OSHA’s relationship 1144
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with NIOSH, Bingham says, “I think we’ve made progress,” and cites the agencies close working relationship in developing a pesticide standard. When pushed, she’ll admit to not receiving a copy of NIOSH’s National Occupational Hazard Survey (NOHS), the results of which Finklea first released to the Senate Committee on Human Resources’ Subcommittee on Labor. Then with a sigh, she says, “I’m still skeptical; however, I’m trying to make it work.”
Some grim facts If protecting the health of the American worker is a prime goal, then better interagency coordination is imperative. The GAO estimates that medical and hospital costs for cancer victims average $3-5 billion annually, and cancer is only one of several diseases that can be contracted in the workplace. In setting health standards, OSHA needs the scientific facts from NIOSH, but in a form it can use to write legally defensible standards. NIOSH, for its part, has uncovered some pretty frightening facts. In the course of epidemiological studies over the last six years, NlOSH has gathered the names of 74 000 workers who stand a better than average chance of developing cancer. NIOSH didn’t inform the workers of the risk because, according to Finklea, the agency does not have the authority, the manpower or the funds. In the National Occupational Hazard Survey (NOHS), NlOSH estimated: that more than 7 million and possibly as many as 14-15 million workers are exposed to OSHA-regulated toxic substances in products sold under trade names whose ingredients are often unknown to employers or employees that about 3 10 000 workers are exposed to one or more trade-name substances that contain a cancer-causing chemical, but since only half of the trade-name products were identified, as many as 880 000 workers, or 1% of the current work force, may be exposed to an OSHA-regulated carcinogen that one in every four workers (nearly 22 million) may be exposed to an OSHA-regulated substance that can cause disease or death, and up to 40-50 million Americans may have been exposed to an OSHA-regulated carcinogen
or other toxic substance during their working lifetimes. The NOHS, taken between 1972-74, covered nearly 5000 plants with close to 1 million workers. The data, in tabular form, are just being released this month, and may already be out of date. Some substances listed may be more strictly controlled today and worker exposure may be lower. The data took so long to analyze because up to 70% of the substances found in the worksites were identified by trade name, rather than by chemical composition. NlOSH tallied 86 000 substances and contacted about 10 000 manufacturers seeking disclosure of the composition of these compounds. To date, NlOSH has received information on the ingredients of about 50 000 trade-name products. The director of NIOSH’s Hazard Surveillance Group, David Sundin, told €S&Tthat a trade-name index will be published-hopefully by October 1978. Finklea has also promised to send a list to OSHA and EPA of tradename products that contain OSHA-regulated carcinogens.
Workers right to know When it became publicly known that NlOSH had the names of workers who were likely to get cancer from previous occupational exposure, but who were not to be informed of this fact, the predictable congressional response followed-the Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Public Welfare held hearings. Testifying at these hearings, Finklea affirmed that, yes indeed, workers had a right to know, but that his agency had neither the legal mandate nor the financial wherewithal to inform these workers. During interviews, Finklea also stated that these workers also had a right to medical treatment, workmen’s compensation and job security. Finklea testified in May. In July, NlOSH and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released the document “The Right to Know.” In it the agencies state that “workers and the general public have a right to be informed about current and past exposures to toxic substances that pose actual or potential health risks.” NlOSH and CDC estimate that the costs to society of monitoring workers exposed to OSHA-regulated substances could be between $675 million and $2 billion annually. And for physical examinations for workers currently exposed to carcinogens, the annual costs could reach $230 million. Last September, the National Research Council (NRC) Assembly of Life Sciences’ Committee on Public Information in the Prevention of Occupational Cancer in its document “Informing Workers and Employers About Occupational Cancer,” reaffirmed the right of a worker to be informed about carcinogenic compounds present in his work environment. The NRC
suggested that this information be made avallable through OSHA's Occupational Cancer lnformatlon and Alert Program, which is being developed. The underlying principle in the NRC volume was that "occupational carcinogens constitute a group of environmental factors that, when identified, are subject to specific regulation and engineering controls, which offers the possibility of nearly total prevention of new cases." OSHA, also believing that prevention is the only cure, plans to place a greater emphasis on worker's right to know. The agency is developing a labeling and identification standard that would require that generic names of all chemicals in the workplace be made available to the worker; even trade-name products would have their ingredients revealed. The agency also plans to devote increased resources to public and worker education, to better inform these sectors about the chemicals found in the work environment. And this October, OSHA published, in the Federal Register, a proposal that would grant workers greater access to company health and safety logs on a continuous basis.
Under dispute: benzene The NOHS, which surveyed less than 1 million workers, found that nearly 50 000 full-time workers were exposed to benzene, 55 % of which worked at facilities that had no engineering controls or protective equipment. Furthermore, more than 75% of full-time and part-time workers exposed to benzene did not receive periodic blood tests, although benzene has long been known to be a toxin that adversely affects the blood-forming elements. NlOSH estimates that 2 million workers are now exposed to benzene, although the new benzene rules that
OSHA seeks to impose will affect only 150 000 workers. Late last year, NIOSH sent OSHA prellminary evidence that benzene was a human carcinogen; that It caused leukemia in workers exposed to it. In January of this year, Corn chose to issue voluntary benzene guidelines that presaged a coming change in the exlsting benzene standard of 10 ppm averaged over an 8-h period. Corn did not choose to go the emergency temporary standard (ETS) route because he didn't feel that lowering the standard from 10 ppm to 1 ppm (which the guidelines suggested) could be upheld in court. He didn't feel that this reduction would be viewed by the courts as an emergency situation that permitted the elimination of due process. His prescience has been borne out by recent legal events. In April, NIOSH sent OSHA evidence that workers at two Ohio plants of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., who used benzene as a solvent in the manufacture of a rubber-basedtransparent film, had a five-times greater incidence of leukemia than would be expected in the normal population. NlOSH called the evidence conclusive; these workers were exposed only to benzene and not to a multitude of solvents, which is usually the case in a chemical manufacturing environment. Bingham acted and acted quickly. On April 29 she announced an ETS for benzene effective May 2 1. This was only the sixth ETS issued by OSHA; the earlier ones were for asbestos, organophosphate pesticides, 14 carcinogens, vinyl chloride and diving. The ETS, however, never became effective. A few days before it was to go into effect, a federal appeals court in New Orleans stayed the standard. Industrial groups led by the American Petroleum
Institute (API) petitloned the New Orleans court; they contended that the standard could not feasibly be obeyed. Earlier, the AFL-CIO petitioned the Washlngton, D.C., court: the union contended that the ETS was too lenient. The ETS would have lowered the permlsslble worker exposure level to 1 ppm averaged over an 8-h period, the lowest possible level achievable with today's technology and analytical expertise. It eliminated the present peak-exposure level of 50 ppm for any 15-min period, and lowered the ceiling level to 5 ppm averaged over a 15-min period. The ETS would have required monitoring of worksites; medical surveillance of workers; employee training to explain the dangers of benzene and the proper handling of the chemical; use of engineering controls, personal protective equipment and clothing; and recordkeeping. This standard would have been applicable to all facilities where benzene is present, except for retail gas stations or facilities where benzene is present in liquid mixtures at less than 1% by volume. The sites exempted under OSHA's standard might be regulated under an EPA standard, now under consideration. OSHA estimated that about 153 000 workers and 1200 worksites would have been affected by this ETS. OSHA estimated the cost of the ETS t t $40 million, and placed the cost of a permanent standard at a maximum of $500 million. Industry, led by the API, placed the cost in the billions of dollars.
A compression of time At the end of May, OSHA issued the proposed permanent benzene standard, essentially identical to the ETS, and held public hearings in July and August. The
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agency promulgated the permanent standard in November. The standard is expected to engender lawsuits. In the meantime, the EPA has listed benzene as a hazardous air pollutant, the first step in regulating the compound under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a ban on all household products containing benzene. According to various estimates, 11 billion pounds of benzene were produced in the U.S. in 1976; only ethylene topped benzene in domestic production. The EPA estimates that up to 260 mllllon pounds of benzene may have been emitted to the atmosphere from chemical manufacturing plants, petroleum refineries, gasoline storage facilities and automobiles. Nevertheless, many industrial facilities are meeting or are capable of meeting the 1 ppm exposure level; the only exception may be sites where benzene is transferred. What the oil and chemical companies object to are the worksite monitoring and worker medical surveillance requirements of the new standard. Curtis Smith, Shell Chemical’s representative to the Manufacturing Chemists Association has forecast shortages of trained health and engineering specialists, and of monitoring and respiratory equipment needed to comply with the standard. Bingham had vowed to use the ETS route often. With benzene and again with DBCP, she put her own head on the block, and forced OSHA into a frenzy of activity. Upon leaving office, Corn reported that standards promulgation took, on the average, 18-22 months, and the best effort could bring this time down to 14 months. By law an ETS must be replaced by a permanent standard in 6 months! This means that with every ETS issued, OSHA must divert personnel and other resources from normal agency activities to the fulltime effort of rulemaking. The mere compression of time puts massive pressures on Bingham and her agency. Can Bingham and the agency live with these pressures?
Chemicals: presumptive guilt Bingham’s likely answer would be, “We have no choice.” And she would probably go on to cite cancer’s grim facts: During the 75 years of U S . industrialization, deaths from cancer have climbed from 65 per 1000 in 1900 to 171.5 per 1000 in 1975. e Many of the environmental factors now believed to cause cancer are substances generated in workplaces regulated by OSHA. The cost of cancer in terms of care and treatment and lost productivity has been estimated as $1.8 billion/y for hospital care; $3-5 billion/y for treatment; and $12 billion/y in lost earning power and productivity. NlOSH has listed about 2000 sub1146
Environmental Science & Technology
stances found in the workplace as suspect carcinogens. OSHA regulates 17 of these. The numbers emphasize the futility of writing standards on a substance-bysubstance basis. Sometime in 1975, OSHA took its first look at the carcinogen problem. Anson Keller was hired from EPA to develop a cancer policy for the agency. Keller and coworkers developed a cancer policy during Corn’s stewardship. In January, a draft of the proposed rules to identify, classify and regulate carcinogens was released to the public and sent to the National Advisory Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NACOSH) for review.
The policy was polished up and with prodding from Bingham it made it through the bureaucratic maze in “relatively short time.” Bingham and Marshall announced the federal government’s first sweeping proposal for regulating cancer-causing agents in October. The policy’s intent is to streamline regulatory procedures, to make the standard-setting process more effective. The cancer policy is the framework for making decisions; its end-products are standards. The agency hopes that with this policy, the basic medical and scientific issues can finally be resolved so that fundamental policy issues can be established to classify and regulate compounds without having to rehash the same scientific questions with each new substance. With the adoption of this policy, substances brought before OSHA for rulemaking would be classified in one of four categories, depending on the conclusiveness of the scientific evidence.
Fill-in-the-blanks standards In addition to spelling out the scientific basis for defining and classifying substances, this policy sets out three standardizedformats for use in developing
standards for category I and category II substances. These include a model for the emergency temporary standard for category I carcinogens, another model for the permanent category I carcinogen standard, and still a third model for the permanent category II carcinogen standard. With this policy in force, subsequent individual rulemaking proceedings could simply concentrate on selecting the appropriate exposure limit and determining whether OSHA properly classified the substance. Hearings on this proposed policy are scheduled for March 1978. The policy is not expected to take effect for at least another year, and with the anticipated litigation, probably another two or three years is more realistic. In the meantime, Glover Wrenn told €S&Tthat OSHA is undertakingan internal review of NIOSH’s list of suspect carcinogens and is grouping them into the cancer policy’s four categories. On the basis of available evidence, it is felt that only about 100 of these 2000 substances will fall into category I, 300-400 into category I1 and the remainder in the last two categories. Should this policy survive the anticipated legal challenges-and chances are good that it will-the regulatory ramifications are great. Other agencies that also regulate carcinogens, the EPA and the FDA for example, could abandon the substance-by-substance regulatory approach and embrace this more sweeping, speedier approach. A small fS&T canvas of labor and business found that, in general, both sectors felt that the cancer policy was “a step in the right direction.” Anthony Mazzocchi, vice president of the Oil, Chemists and Atomic Workers International Union, said that “the policy addresses the problem directly and in a way that allows the agency to begin to deal with the enormous problems that must be dealt with.” He was concerned, however, with the policy’s lack of economic security for a worker removed from a job because of occupational illness. Sheldon Samuels, head of health, safety and environment for the AFL-ClO’s Industrial Union Dept., was generally in favor of the policy but he would like to see medical guidelines incorporated, and he would like to see provisions for substances that are not classified as carcinogens but are still highly toxic. Frederick Rarig, Rohm & Haas’ vice president for regulatory affairs, and James Hardwicke, president of Hardwicke Chemical Co., both agreed that the policy was generally good and workable. Both were more concerned about the effects of the Toxic Substance Control Act (TOSCA) on the chemical industry than they were about OSHA’s cancer policy, which, unlike TOSCA, they found “feasible and workable.” Rarig felt that TOSCA
would “result in bureaucratic constipation.” Hardwicke commented that if OSHA had effectively addressed the health issues earlier, TOSCA would never have been necessary. The non-profit Health Research Group (Washington, D.C.) found OSHA’s sweeping approach to regulating carcinogens commendable. The Society of the Plastics Industry termed it a “quick fix.” Another generic standard OSHA plans to issue a generic standard for pesticides in the first quarter of 1978. The most recent dibromochloropropane (DBCP) episode, and earlier Kepone and leptophos disasters add a sense of urgency to the promulgation of comprehensive health regulations applicable to the 5000 U.S. pesticide formulators. When it became evident that DBCP caused sterility in humans and cancer in rats and mice, prompt action was needed. In another cooperative effort, OSHA, EPA and FDA moved against this soil fumigant. OSHA issued an ETS, its seventh, effective September 9; EPA suspended the use of DBCP on certain food crops and restricted its use on others; and the FDA announced its intention to test food crops for DBCP residues. OSHA’s ETS placed the worker exposure limit at 10 ppb averaged over an 8-h day with a peak limit at 50 ppb during any 15 min. period. Eye and skin contacts were prohibited. Initial employee monitoring (blood sampling) began October 9; quarterly monitoring was allowable thereafter i f exposure was below permissible level and monthly monitoring was required i f it was not. Also required by the EIS were medical surveillance, engineering controls, protective personnel equipment, and worker training and education. A permanent DBCP standard will be issued by March, and public hearings will be held this month. The March date should
be met easily; the agency produced the ETS in the recordbreaking time of 3 weeks! What of the future? Bingham expects that a generic standard for labeling and identifying substances will be proposed early next year, and a generic skin hazard standard by next summer. Rather than promulgating a separate generic standard for medical surveillance, as Corn proposed, the agency is now writing medical surveillance requirements into each new standard developed. By the time this article is published, a list of suspended consensus regulations, the so-called de minimis rules, will have been published, and permanent standards for benzene and cotton dust will be on the books. In the works for next year are standards for beryllium, nickel, chromates and acrylonitrile. Bingham promises to use the ETS route as often as needed; she vows to improve upon the rapproachement, already initiated, with small business, including the hiring of a special assistant for small business to replace Corn’s industry advisor; and she emphatically intends to continue to improve and expand worker educational programs. In the future, the agency’s focus will be on the individual worker and on small business. Corn states that he never worked so hard as he did that one year as assistant secretary, yet he readily admits that he wanted another year to bring to fruition some of his initiatives. He, better than anyone, understands the pressure Bingham is under and he says, “I have a great deal of empathy for anyone in this job.” Of Bingham’s performance to date, Corn says, “It is too early to be critical of her efforts; she needs a chance.” AFLCIO Samuel’s assessment was to the point: “Eula is not a radical, but she is making sure that the necessary ideas
reach development and implementation. ” The determination to take corrective action rapidly may be Bingham’s major contribution to date. While it is true that the policies that have emerged in the last nine months are not uniquely Bingham’s, and she emphasizes that her initiatives will not bear fruit for another six months at least, she, and she alone, will have to bear the brunt of criticism likely to flow from the implementation of these policies. It also should not be overlooked that she could have left these pclicies, the cancer policy especially, to languish in the rulemaking process, sidetracked off to NACOSH, for instance. She didn’t. Federal bureaucracies, normally colorless institutions, can easily assume the personality of strong leaders. Under Nixon, the State Department was Henry Kissinger; under Carter, the Energy Department is James Schlesinger and OSHA is Eula Bingham. Bingham is dedicated, strong-willed and respected by both labor and business. Being a woman and a health professional in a position traditionally held by a nonscientific male, Bingham has visibilityand the keen perception to use this visibility to the benefit of her agency. As OSHA moves to repair its tattered image, as it moves to refocus and strengthen its regulatory programs to combat the onslaught of occupational health hazards, it rapidly moves out of the realm of scientific certainty-witness the proposed cancer policy-and into the political and legal arenas. The pressure likely to emanate from these arenas will be borne by the assistant secretary. Eula Bingham genuinely believes that ”people in this country should expect, as a matter of right, a safe and healthy workplace.” Does she have the stamina to withstand the political and legal pressures that are certain to be applied? In her own words: “Just watch me!”
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