The Safety Challenge

ew federal agencies are as fervently judged by various constituents as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Depending on which side of the employer-worker fence you're on, OSHA's workplace safety standards are either too strict or too lenient. Enforcement is too tough or too lax. At times, finding the right combination of regulation, enforcement and consultation to please both sides--and their supporters in Congress--has seemed an unattainable goal. But that hasn't stopped OSHA from trying.

The tiny agency of 2,200 employees and a $350 million budget has the daunting duty of protecting 100 million people at more than 6.5 million work sites across the country. If required to inspect every work site, agency officials often say, staff at OSHA's 67 area offices could do so only about once every 80 years.

It's hard to say precisely how much improvement in workplace safety and health can be attributed to OSHA actions vs. other factors such as safer technologies, but few dispute that OSHA has had a positive effect during its 28-year existence. The work-related fatality rate has been cut in half; trenching and excavation deaths have dropped 35 percent; and brown lung disease, caused by excessive inhalation of cotton dust, has been virtually eliminated in the textile industry.

Still, each year about 6,000 Americans die from work-related injuries, more than 6 million get hurt and about 500,000 experience job-related illnesses, according to OSHA. Trying to leverage limited resources to reduce these numbers has been at the center of OSHA's partnership-focused reinvention activities and, more recently, of the agency's quest for results-oriented management.

Management Basics

OSHA is an agency built on the backs of idealists who believe every American has the right to a safe work environment. For years, writing safety and health standards and fining employers who violated them took precedence over basic management tasks. Knowing the precise cost of activities such as inspections or writing of standards seemed less important than developing regulations, responding to worker complaints and conducting surprise inspections to keep employers on their toes. As a result, like most agencies, OSHA today finds itself in the early stages of implementing many of the new congressionally mandated management controls.

For example, as of late last year, OSHA did not yet have a cost accounting system that could provide detailed information about program activity costs. In addition, while the agency has a new information technology planning process, officials admit they're just starting to conduct life-cycle evaluations of IT systems, which comprise the bulk of OSHA's capital assets. Also, the agency has not created a workforce planning mechanism to make sure today's skill base can be adapted to meet tomorrow's challenges.

That said, OSHA has won high marks on the strategic planning front from the General Accounting Office, the Labor Department inspector general and even Republican congressional staffers, who often are highly critical of the agency. "To their credit, a lot of OSHA's strategic plan is focused on results," says a Republican congressional staffer. The plan is "results-oriented, measurable and realistic," agrees an IG auditor, who says his office urged Labor Department officials to draw from OSHA's experiences as a 1993 Government Performance and Results Act pilot as they developed plans for other agencies and the department as a whole. IG auditors also praise the open process OSHA used to develop the plan. "Involvement of stakeholders was exceptional," notes one auditor. "They left no stone unturned."

Critical Concerns

That's not to say everyone is pleased with the plan, however. A number of agency officials and outside observers are concerned about the use of injury and illness rates--measures of the amount of lost work time caused by occupational injuries and illnesses--and fatality rates to show progress toward strategic goals. OSHA's plan pledges to reduce rates by varying degrees in certain industries and occupations.

The problem with such targets, critics say, is that external factors such as business cycles and the development of safer technologies affect injury and illness rates every bit as much as OSHA does. In critics' view, it doesn't make sense to hold OSHA accountable for results that are largely out of its control. These fears led some of the 25 states that operate their own safety and health programs with OSHA grants to decide against adopting the federal strategic plan as their own. Just as OSHA does, state programs now must submit five-year strategic plans and annual performance plans to receive funding.

"A concern of ours was having measures and goals that are within reach of staff," says Steve Cant, federal-state operations manager for Washington state's Industrial Safety and Health Act Services Division, who also heads an association that represents state programs. Rather than illness and injury rates, Washington is measuring things such as the num-
ber of consultation visits to work sites known to have safety and health problems, Cant says.

Another problem with tracking injury rates is that they don't tell the whole story of a given work site's safety and health conditions, notes an OSHA area director, adding that the agency also should look at the severity of cases behind the rates. A company posting high rates of certain injuries may actually be one of the safest employers in town if it reports cases at their earliest stages to increase the chances that interventions will prevent long-term injuries, he says. "Plain rates can't capture this nuance."

OSHA officials acknowledge the potential problems with using rates and say they will work to remedy the situation as the agency gains experience developing and using performance measures. The revised strategic plan released last September says that OSHA "will attempt to isolate and quantify" the effect of external factors on injury and illness rates as it moves forward.

Developing Data

OSHA now faces considerable challenges in developing data to track progress toward the promised results, especially in the health area. Work-related asbestos exposures, for example, may not trigger illness until 20 years after a person has left the job in which he or she was exposed. Such a long time gap makes it virtually impossible to measure the annual impact of OSHA interventions on occurrence of a disease. Despite their praise of OSHA's planning efforts, even IG auditors question the agency's ability to get certain critical data. "How do you measure an illness?" says an IG auditor. "I'm not sure it can be done."

The transient nature of the construction industry presents another measurement problem. Keeping accurate and up-to-date information on construction-related injuries, illnesses and fatalities is extremely difficult because a work site here today will be gone as soon as the project is finished.

OSHA is well aware of these data gaps. Agency Administrator Charles Jeffress bluntly described the shortcoming at a November meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group of labor, industry and academic experts. "I have yet to have a set of indicators we can use to track progress" toward many of the agency's goals, he said. That day, he was expecting a report outlining possible tools. But he cautioned his audience that their efficacy was not yet proven and that it might take the agency several years to master the task.

Data Sources

Historically, OSHA monitored its performance by tracking numbers of inspections conducted, citations issued and penalties collected. The agency also relied on survey data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to study general safety and health trends. While all of that information is useful, none directly reflects the relationship between OSHA activities and safety and health outcomes. To get such data, OSHA launched a special data initiative in 1996 to get site-specific injury and illness numbers from 80,000 employers in high-risk industries such as manufacturing. The data was the foundation of OSHA's Cooperative Compliance Program, a key element of the agency's reinvention.

The compliance program was an enforcement method that targeted employers whose work sites experienced high injury and illness rates. Rather than merely inspecting, citing and fining selected employers, OSHA offered them a choice: to either allow OSHA to point out and help fix hazards or be put on a priority inspection list. Agency staff then followed up with participants to make sure changes had been made and to see how injury and illness rates had been affected.

Because of their high injury and illness rates, selected work sites were likely to be on a priority inspection list anyway, OSHA officials note. The new program offered these employers a chance to avoid citations, improve their safety and health records and, in the process, lower their workers' compensation insurance rates. It also created a data source for measuring the impact of OSHA interventions.

Before formally launching the program nationwide in November 1997, OSHA fine-tuned it based on experience with a pilot version conducted in Maine and extensive stakeholder input. For example, when employers complained that using total numbers of injuries and illnesses to select program participants disproportionately targeted large employers, the agency agreed to use the rates of injuries and illnesses instead.

Lingering Opposition

That wasn't good enough for some industry representatives. Last February, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and other groups representing employers won a court order to temporarily block the program's implementation until an appeals court can rule on its merits. In the business groups' view, the Cooperative Compliance Program didn't really offer employers a choice but rather coerced them into participating and therefore constituted a de facto regulation that hadn't gone through the public rule-making process. As Pat Cleary, NAM vice president of human resources policy, described it, the program represented "Soviet-style compliance."

Until the court makes its final decision, OSHA has been using the data initiative information to target work sites for inspection only, but officials were confident the program ultimately would survive the legal challenge and be fully operational again. A ruling was expected in early 1999.

The Cooperative Compliance Program aside, some people criticize OSHA for promising too much too soon. "The agency should have told Congress it would spend the first five years of GPRA implementation developing data to make meaningful measures," says a senior official, adding, "We're going to have to build a house before we put the roof on it." While that approach may seem logical, it's unlikely that the results-obsessed Congress would have accepted such a plan.

Even if OSHA can remedy its data problems, there remains a question of whether the agency will have a useful means of collecting and analyzing the information. OSHA's primary computer system, the Integrated Management Information System, was created to track numbers of inspections, citations and amounts of penalties issued. But the system has yet to be adapted to capture results-oriented information, a fact that concerns field managers. "If these goals represent what we'll be held accountable for, how will I get there?" asks one area director. "Where are my tools to capture all this information?"

Human Capital

OSHA managers point to human resource issues that are magnifying the difficulties in achieving results. Like their peers governmentwide, they complain about the cumbersome civil service disciplinary process that takes too long and demonizes managers to such a degree that they often choose to ignore problems or under-performing employees. "Sometimes it just isn't worth it," says an area director. Avoiding the issue creates other problems. As one former OSHA official notes, "When managers don't address unproductive workers, it's extremely damaging to the morale of other staff who do work hard." An agency that already has too few staff to fully meet its mission doesn't have room for under-performers, says another manager.

While reforming civil service procedures is out of OSHA's control, agency officials can take steps to improve matters, observers note. For starters, they should make a conscious effort to boost management training of supervisors, most of whom are industrial hygienists or safety engineers who moved up the ranks but still don't have the skills to be good managers, says the former official.

OSHA also should engage in a workforce planning process to make sure staff skills are meeting agency needs, former and current officials agree. Agency employees receive excellent short-term training on a variety of safety and health matters from the OSHA Training Institute in Des Plaines, Ill., a world-class facility by all accounts. But with rapidly changing technology creating new safety and health issues--for example, the rapid growth of repetitive motion injuries caused by automation--and with Congress demanding more stringent analyses to back up regulations, the agency needs a more structured long-term plan for acquiring the necessary skill base, OSHA officials say. Only with that type of planning will OSHA be able to meet its mission on a budget that's always likely to be tight, they add.

Time will tell whether OSHA can master its new management challenges. In the meantime, agency employees pledge to continue doing their best to meet the mission. "Our goal is to promote good safety and health," notes an area director. "If we can satisfy ourselves in doing that, then we can sleep at night. And if we're implementing the Occupational Safety and Health Act, then we're doing our job."

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