Despite the recent blistering GAO report that made explicit Labor Sec Elaine Chao's pathetic record of protecting corpo's at the expense of workers - the exact opposite of what the Labor Dept is charged by the Congress with doing - she's doing it again. The WaPo says that the trolls at the Bush/Chao Labor Dept are hastily re-writing a rule "making it tougher to regulate workers' on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins."
The agency did not disclose the proposal, as required, in public notices of regulatory plans that it filed in December and May. Instead, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao's intention to push for the rule first surfaced on July 7, when the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted on its Web site that it was reviewing the proposal, identified only by its nine-word title.
The text of the proposed rule has not been made public, but according to sources briefed on the change and to an early draft obtained by The Washington Post, it would call for reexamining the methods used to measure risks posed by workplace exposure to toxins. The change would address long-standing complaints from businesses that the government overestimates the risk posed by job exposure to chemicals.
The rule would also require the agency to take an extra step before setting new limits on chemicals in the workplace by allowing an additional round of challenges to agency risk assessments.
(emphasis added)
As if the corpo's didn't have ample opportunity now to make their case that poisons aren't poison if they're only poisoning workers.
BTW, WaPo reporter Carol Leonnig is one of the few with guts enough to point out that the rush to get this rule in force is in sharp contrast to Labor's leisurely, measured pace - a saunter, one might call it - the previous 7 years.
The department's speed in trying to make the regulatory change contrasts with its reluctance to alter workplace safety rules over the past 7 1/2 years. In that time, the department adopted only one major health rule for a chemical in the workplace, and it did so under a court order.
(emphasis added)
More or less what the GAO said about its lack of enforcement. The pretense that they moved so glacially slow because "they were uncertain until recently whether they wanted to follow through and pursue a regulation" isn't fooling anybody.
"It's an insult to America's workers for the Department of Labor to be spending its time in the last year of this administration allegedly fine-tuning the details of how to do these regulations when, other than the one ordered by a court, they have issued no major worker-health regulations," said Adam Finkel, a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey who is a former health standards director at Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "The reality is there's a great need to light a fire under this moribund agency to do something -- anything -- to protect workers."
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said: "The fact that the Department of Labor seems to be engaged in secret rulemaking makes me highly suspicious that some high-level political appointees are up to no good. This Congress will not stand for the gutting of health and safety protections as the Bush administration heads out the door."
Let's hope not because that is obviously precisely what the Bushies intend to do.
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