Workers Memorial Day thoughts

The following post is from Ross Eisenbrey. It can be found at Working Econmics, the Economic Policy Institute blog.

How many times have you heard business lobbyists and spokesmen say: “Regulations are killing jobs”? Or how about, “Excessive regulations are driving manufacturers overseas”?

Well think about what’s been happening in Bangladesh, where so many US clothing retailers and garment makers, from Wal-Mart to L.L.Bean, have gone to escape livable wages and regulation. That lack of regulations is killing workers, not in ones and twos, as happens here in the United States several times every day, but hundreds at a time.Factory fires as devastating as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of a century ago have now been followed by a building collapse that has so far claimed 300 lives, the workers crushed, bleeding to death or suffocating.

Several stories I’ve read report that only one business (a bank) heeded the warnings of police that the eight-story factory building was so unsafe that it had to be evacuated. The other businesses shrugged off the warnings and ordered more than 2,000 people to work in mortal danger.

Are businesses more responsible here than in Bangladesh or China, where mining disasters in recent years have killed hundreds of workers at a time? If so, it’s in part because U.S. regulation and tort litigation have made them so. Even with this regulation, small businessmen still send workers into unguarded, narrow and deep dirt trenches to lay pipe. And workers are killed in trench collapses every year, month after month, even though every contractor in America knows it’s unsafe and illegal. Businesses still send young men and boys to die in grain silos, even though they know it’s unsafe and illegal to “walk the grain” to loosen it when it gets caught up. The workers die by suffocation, they get ground up by augers, and they suffer as they die. But it still happens year after year, because the people in charge cut corners and just don’t care enough to make sure that the people working for them are safe.

If you think we can rely on businesses to self-regulate, think again. West Fertilizer, the small business that blew up and killed fourteen people in Texas last week, declared itself safe and estimated the chance of a catastrophic explosion at zero. They needed someone with authority and the power to change behavior to look over their shoulder, to look out for the workers and first responders who were most at risk, and to look out for the school children whose schools were within the blast radius. But no agency had or exercised that authority.

As a society, we need to pay more attention to the safety and health of our workers. Nearly5,000 workers were killed on the job in the United States in 2011, and an estimated 50,000 or more died from illness or disease they contracted from on-the-job hazards such asbreathing chlorine fumes or periacetic acid and exposure to silica dust, asbestos, berylliumand hundreds of other hazardous substances. The cost of these illnesses and deaths is about $250 billion—more than the cost of all cancers. Inadequate regulation kills workers, and it costs our economy plenty.

Workers Memorial Day is Sunday, April 28, and I hope you’ll take a moment to think about the tragedies in Bangladesh and Texas. Take a moment to think about what kind of a country you want and which problem you think is more serious, that regulations kill jobs or that unregulated work kills workers.

Three Years after Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Has the U.S. Improved Safety Standards for Oil Drilling?

The debates over our country’s regulatory system that have been happening in Washington often take place in the form broad generalities. This is how we come to hear complaints about the number of pages of new regulations with no look at the quality of or the need for that content. It’s how we hear of calls for more and more analyses to calculate not only direct costs, but potential indirect costs of new rules in the future without a meaningful consideration of the benefits those rules give to society. It is far easier, after all, to drum up anger and opposition to “red tape” when the debate takes place in the abstract.

And then, in tragedies like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which happened three years ago on April 20, 2010, and the recent explosion in West, Texas, we see the consequences when proper regulations and safeguards are not in place and existing standards are unenforced.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 workers and poured 170 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the worst oil spill in U.S. history, reminds us of the vital importance of maintaining a system of regulations and safeguards that forces corporations to behave responsibly. As the consequences of this crisis are likely to be felt for years to come, it is crucial that we learn the right lessons and take the necessary steps to ensure the same mistakes aren’t made twice.

The impacts on those living in the Gulf region, including the wildlife, have been profound. Not only have the fishing, boating, and tourism industries taken a huge hit in the three years following the British Petroleum (BP) spill, but the region’s ecosystem has been severely damaged. The spill killed thousands of birds, hundreds of endangered sea turtles, and scores of dolphins. Thousands of miles of coastline are still contaminated with oil.

A rational response to what President Obama called the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced” entails taking steps to avoid similar tragedies in the future. To do this requires answering some simple questions: How did this happen, what could have been done to prevent it, and have we made progress in making oil and gas drilling safer?

The immediate causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill are well known. A piece of equipment that was meant to prevent blowouts on the oil rig failed. This resulted in a gas explosion, which is thought to have killed the workers and known to have caused oil to gush out of the well.

But this isn’t the whole story. Much like the Great Recession of 2008, the BP oil spill has its origins in a wave of deregulation that began in the 1990s, allowing those in the oil and gas industry much greater leeway in regulating themselves and determining their own safety standards.

Much like the innovations in the financial sector that were claimed to be good for everybody, yet too complex for federal regulators to understand, advancements in technology during the boom in deepwater oil exploration allowed the oil industry to basically write its own rules. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) told The Wall Street Journal, “The industry convinced nearly everyone in government that what they were doing was so sophisticated that it was both totally safe and impossible for government to understand, much less regulate. Government was romanced. And it succumbed to the romance.” As a result, the risks of deepwater drilling were not properly assessed and safety protocols were not adequately developed. More than 10 years before the spill, standards on testing the equipment that failed on the Deepwater Horizon rig were relaxed at the behest of the oil and gas industry, saving companies around $25 million a year.

The broad arguments against regulations are always the same. When the discussion leaves the ideological realm and addresses concrete examples, however, like seatbelts in cars, limiting the amount of lead in children’s toys, or safety standards to prevent oil spills, the public response is very different. People tend to like rules that make life safer for their families and loved ones. The disastrous consequences of inadequate regulation, the failure to establish public protections, and a lack of enforcement of standards already on the books—factors that produce tragedies like the BP oil spill—underscore the shallowness of attacks against sensible safeguards.

Since the disaster, some steps have been taken to address the failure of regulators to do their part in preventing this disaster. Recently, the Interior Department issued rules that help protect workers on offshore drilling sites, giving workers the power to halt risky or dangerous work without fear of retaliation from their employers. While these efforts at improving the safety of offshore drilling are important, much more needs to be done before deepwater drilling is safe for workers and the environment. Congress should act to raise the liability cap and financial responsibility requirements for offshore facilities. Lawmakers could also restructure federal oversight programs to be funded not by taxpayers but fees paid by the oil industry.

The story of the Deepwater Horizon spill underscores the need for a strong regulatory system that protects the American public from reckless behavior and preventable disasters. It should cause us to be suspicious when an industry resists rules that will improve safety on the grounds that they are too costly.

Industry will continue to oppose restrictions on its behavior. It is up to us to make sure they behave responsibly.

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At a Whale

The following post is from Jennifer Taub. It can be found at The ParetoCommons.

Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird came to mind Friday while watching bankers and regulators testify before the Senator Levin-lead bipartisan subcommittee hearing on “JPMorgan Chase Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses.”

I was prepared to take notes and tweet (no pun intended), having carefully reviewed the subcommittee’s 301-page report released the night before.  That report provided many new details regarding the  JP Morgan Chase 2012 tempest-in-a-teapot-turned-$6.2 billion trading loss. A regulator from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) who testified in the afternoon admitted finding new information in its pages that he thought they still needed to “digest.”

In the spirit of the Stevens’ poem, there are at least thirteen things I learned from the report and hearing:

1. They Saw it Coming: A potential $6.3 billion loss within the synthetic credit portfolio (SCP) at the Chief Investment Office (CIO) was predicted through the banks own comprehensive risk measure. However, market risk executive Peter Weiland dismissed the prediction as “garbage.”
2. Building up Risk: The portfolio did not reduce risk, but added risk: The SCP trades violated internal risk limits, yet more risk was added. The OCC saw the risk breach reports but did not act.
3. Not a Rogue Trader or Rogue Desk– CEO Jamie Dimon Knew: According to Ina Drew, the head of the CIO, who “resigned” last year, Dimon was aware of the CIO trading. In addition the report also details he was informed of the risk limit breaches.
4. The Cover Up:  The bank CIO unit changed its pricing practices to make losses on portfolio positions look smaller. This phantom pricing continued even after the story of the whale broke and even after it was clear another part of the bank priced the same positions like the CIO had in the past — at the midpoint between the bid/ask spread.
5. The Potential Fraud: Levin said that the bank agreed that “books were cooked.” The bank arguably made false statements to the public, policymakers and regulators about many things. Levin focused on the statements made by CFO Braunstein in April of 2012.
6. Gambling with Federally-Insured Deposits, Not Hedging Positions: The bank could not point to specific assets it was hedging, and appeared to be engaging in proprietary trading, using insured deposits to do so.
7. Positions Not Transparent: The bank claimed to investors in April of 2012, that it had disclosed trading positions to regulators when it had not.Levin called this and other statements made by CFO Braunstein an attempt to “calm the seas.”
8. Minimized Losses to Regulators: The bank may have told regulators losses were just $580 billion at a time when they had grown to $1.2 billion.
9. Regulator in the Dark: Scott Waterhouse, the lead OCC examiner for the bank said he did not find out about the London Whale risky trades until the Wall Street Journal broke the story in April of 2012. He said the whale “did not surface to our attention” until that time.
10. Yet Bright Red Flags: The OCC failed to investigate the trading activity even after learning of the multiple risk limit breaches. In addition when the bank applied a new value at risk (VaR) model and the VaR dropped by 50% using that model, the OCC did not inquire as to why. Did not look at the portfolio. Levin called this a “pretty bright red flag.”
11.  The Bully: CEO Jamie Dimon apparently yelled at bank examiners and called them “stupid” if he did not like their recommendations. Dimon apparently also instructed the bank to withhold daily profit & loss reports from the OCC regarding the whale trades. When Doug Braunstein the former CEO revealed that he had resumed providing reports to the OCC, Dimon raised his voice and said it was up to him whether reports resumed. Dimon previously had told OCC “you don’t need that level of information.”
12. Penny wise, pound foolish: The bank did not want to pay to automate the new VaR model, so an employee regularly worked late into the night manually entering data into a spreadsheet (and making errors) for the $350 billion portfolio. OCC did not know about this manual process.
13. The Volcker Rule: Comptroller Curry did not provide a date by which he though the Volcker Rule would be implemented, however, he did indicate that the London Whale experience with the CIO would affect the rulemaking. Curry who was sworn-in last April just days before the news broke seemed to imply that this so-called “portfolio” hedging that JP Morgan Chase claimed to have engaged in would be banned under the rule, as many argue the Dodd-Frank statute already prohibits.

When the hearing adjourned after six hours, a mental escape was welcome. I turned to Stevens’ poem, in particular the third stanza:

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds./It was a small part of the pantomime.

The blackbird connection? Bruno Iksil, the former JP Morgan Chase trader dubbed “The London Whale” never appeared at the hearing. Residing in France, outside the reach of the Senate’s subpoena authority, Iksil himself was not in the building. Indeed, if one took a close look, even his trading was a really small part of the investigation, the hearing, and its broader implications.

This is a point made by Josh Rosner, co-author with Gretchen Morgensen of Reckless Endangerment.  On Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture blog, Rosner contends that internal control problems at the bank “appear to be pervasive.” The whale problem may just be the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. He also notes that the whale loss itself is less than related litigation expenses — the bank has already paid out more than $8.5 billion in settlements since 2009 related to matters covered in the Levin report.

The hearing also raises again the question of whether banks are still “too big to fail.” Ina Drew did not help the camp that argues the status quo is fine. She headed up the CIO, earning $14 million in 2011 alone, but claimed that she was unaware they were 1,000% over their risk limit. And, when Levin asked her how big the hedge was and she said she not know the answer, she defended this by pointing out, that the bank had a $2.2 trillion balance sheet, implying it was either too trivial or perhaps impossible to track.

Senator Levin also attempted to create a larger frame for the hearing. In his opening remarks, he asserted that:

The Whale trades exposed problems that reach far beyond one London trading desk or one Wall Street office tower. The American people have already suffered one devastating economic assault, rooted largely in Wall Street excess. They cannot afford another. When Wall Street plays with fire, American families get burned. The task of federal regulators and this Congress is to take away the matches. The Whale trades demonstrated that this task is far from complete.

And, also incomplete is accountability. One can hope that the next time a banker is cross-examined about  arguably materially misleading statements, it is in a court of law, not a Senate hearing room, and one can hope that the prosecutor has carefully reviewed at least thirteen ways of looking at a white collar crime. But I won’t hold my breath. The statute of limitations will probably run before that happens. “The river is moving/The blackbird must be flying.”

London Whale Incident Highlights Need For Sensible Safeguards

If we expect banks to learn their lesson from 2008’s financial crisis and the multi-billion-dollar public bailout, we will be waiting a long time. History has shown that corporations and banks, left to themselves, do not have the public interest at heart, which is why we need strong public protections.

Recent news in the financial world about the “London Whale” fiasco makes the case for the urgency of finalizing and implementing stronger financial protections such as those contained in the Dodd-Frank law.

A Senate subcommittee report has unearthed new information regarding the London Whale trading scandal last January, implicating JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and other top executives in the bank in fraudulent activity. The subcommittee found that not only had Dimon signed off on changes that altered the bank’s internal alarm system (more on this below), he also ordered his employees to deny financial regulators information they requested as the trades resulted in huge losses—around $6 billion.

As others have put it, JP Morgan essentially turned off the alarm system that would have prevented the level of speculation that took place at the firm’s London branch. This alarm system is called the Value at Risk (VaR) model, which analyzes historic data to estimate the potential risk of a given trade. When JP Morgan began sustaining heavy losses in January 2012, the firm changed its VaR model to one that made it seem like the trading was less risky than it really was. As a result, the normal alarm bells didn’t go off when the “London Whale”, a derivatives trader named Bruno Iksil, and his colleagues decided to double down on their losses as they misled investors and regulators about how risky their activities were.

This episode, and all of the other tales of reckless speculation over the past several years, demonstrates the importance of having a robust system of sensible safeguards in place so the public does not have to suffer through another financial meltdown. To this end, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the chairman of the subcommittee, has renewed calls to finalize the Volcker rule, which would ban the kind of high-risk trading JP Morgan was engaged in and protect consumers from having their savings gambled away by Wall Street.

A system of regulations that puts people first, not big banks or corporations, is essential to creating a stable economy that works for and benefits all Americans.

For additional resources, see our homepage.

Turning Off the Alarm System: JP Morgan Chase’s Regulatory Dodge

The following post is from Wallace Turbeville at Policy Shop, the weblog of Demos

Last night, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a searing 300-page report on JP Morgan Chase’s London Whale episode. The bank lost at least $6.2 billion through trading credit derivatives in a business unit tasked with reducing firm-wide risk, the Chief Investment Office. (The trading activity is called the “Synthetic Credit Portfolio” or “SCP.”) There is much to digest in the report. Hearings are to commence today. But, even at this early date, the veil has been lifted on the complex and cavalier approach that banks take when they put the American public at risk every day in the quest for profits and personal gain.

The bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, famously claimed that JP Morgan Chase featured the very best risk control systems in the industry. But the report makes it abundantly clear that these systems were manipulated to reduce the calculated risk of the CIO’s massive credit default swap positions.

The SCP had grown from $4 billion to $51 billion in 2011, and the CIO had made handsome profits from the position. But things started going bad in early 2012. Like a gambler with a problem, the CIO could not walk away from the table. By March, when the traders were finally ordered to “put their phones down,” the SCP was $157 billion in notional value and hemorrhaging losses. The deep irony is that the bank had used its vaunted risk management system to allow this to happen.

The manipulation came in several forms. But perhaps the most troubling involved the Value at Risk model, as anticipated in the space months ago. VaR is a methodology that looks to historic data to calculate how much a portfolio might lose under conditions that have occurred in the past. One weakness of this statistical model is that this approach ignores the possibility of an historically unprecedented set of circumstances. Another is that changes to the basic assumptions can yield very different results.

This is terribly important. Under the Basel accords, as implemented by U.S. regulators, VaR is used to value the assets held by banks to determine how much capital they are required to hold against the risks of their business. It is used to calculate the value of “Risk Weighted Assets” held in positions like the SCP. To the extent that it provides an inaccurate picture, the soundness of a bank is misstated.

As the losses became apparent in January 2012, JP Morgan Chase decided to change its VaR model to avoid the consequences. It rushed into place a new VaR model that reduced the calculated risk of the SCP so that the flashing red lights set off under the existing model would be turned off. The best practice is to run a new model side-by-side with the old one for several months to test for anomalies. Not so with the new VaR model. The need to reduce the calculated risk associated with the SCP appears to have been too urgent.

An even greater outrage then ensued. Instead of using the breathing room manufactured by changing the math to reduce the SCP, the London Whale and his colleagues doubled down on the bet, laying on more risk to try and retrieve their position. Remember that the SCP went from $51 billion to $157 billion in the first three months of 2012.

This is just the start of what will be a long process of unraveling how this happened. We need to understand how the management of JP Morgan Chase allowed the SCP to continue even after alarms were sounded. And the role of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is responsible for oversight of the safety and soundness of banks, must be clearly analyzed. The OCC has a well-earned reputation for regulatory capture, a problem that the relatively new Comptroller has vowed to address.

The losses were not high enough to threaten the existence of JP Morgan Chase. But the implications are immense. The debate over the implementation of financial reform will soon move into questions of bank risk management and the nuances of risk hedging and models designed to ferret out proprietary trading from the apparently benign activities of risk hedging, like the CIO was supposed to engage in. The long process of sorting through the exhaustive work done by the staff of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will have a huge impact on the outcome of these important next steps.

Two Years After Fukushima: Status of NRC Safety Reforms

The following post is from Ed Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists

Following the March 11, 2011, nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) set up a task force to identify the lessons the U.S. nuclear industry should learn from the accident to avoid something similar here. Two years later, where does that effort stand to make U.S. reactors safer?

There is no question that the NRC and the nuclear industry have taken steps to address some of the safety vulnerabilities revealed by the Fukushima disaster. But it is far from clear whether those steps will be sufficiently robust to prevent the next disaster.

The NRC Task Force developed a set of recommendations and divided them into three categories based on their level of urgency. Since then, the agency has begun to implement some of the more straightforward recommendations, such as requiring plant owners to install instrumentation to monitor the status of spent fuel pools during an accident, install reliable hardened containment vents, and reevaluate seismic and flooding risks.

But dealing with the bigger issues is taking longer, and so far the response by both the NRC and the industry has been inadequate.

After Fukushima, the task force recommended, among other things, that nuclear plants upgrade their emergency response plans to be able to keep reactor cores or spent fuel pools from melting down in the event of an extended loss of electrical power (called a station blackout) or other severe events. Soon afterward, the industry rolled out its own response plan, dubbed Diverse and Flexible Coping Strategies (FLEX), which calls for plant owners to buy additional emergency cooling equipment, including portable pumps and power supplies, and stockpile it at reactor sites and two regional distribution centers. The rationale for FLEX is that if enough equipment is scattered in enough different locations, there would be working equipment available in the event of an emergency, no matter what calamity befell the plant and its surroundings. The basic concept is “more pumps,” but not necessarily “better pumps.”

Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) expressed misgivings about the FLEX program. Nuclear plants around the country began to acquire hundreds of pieces of off-the-shelf equipment on a voluntary basis before the NRC formulated its own requirements for the equipment and the strategies to use it. UCS feared that the industry was creating a fait accompli that would make it difficult for the NRC to require a significantly different or more stringent approach.

Today, it is clear that UCS had good reason to be apprehensive. The NRC, with minor exceptions, endorsed the industry’s FLEX program as an acceptable way for plant owners to comply with the agency’s March 2012 order for plants to develop interim plans to cope with an extended station blackout. To its credit, the NRC required that licensees develop detailed procedures for implementing FLEX strategies. These plans, however, have deviated from the original task force recommendations in important ways.

For example, the task force recommended that nuclear plants be capable of withstanding a station blackout for eight hours without using portable FLEX-type equipment—an explicit recognition of the difficulties Fukushima workers had setting up and using such equipment. The task force also recommended that the portable equipment be capable of functioning for three days without off-site support, again an explicit recognition that there may be practical difficulties accessing a plant site after a major disaster. Regardless, the industry’s FLEX guidance, as approved by the NRC, does not have any set minimum timelines, leaving the possibility that it could be considerably more lax than the task force recommendations.

That would be counterproductive, especially since the task force recommendations on these two issues are not strong enough. Nuclear plants should be able to withstand a station blackout for 24 hours without using portable equipment and be able to function for seven days without off-site support.

Another issue is how the industry protects the FLEX equipment. The task force recommended that plant owners store the equipment well above the maximum predicted flood levels at each plant, recognizing that flood predictions are uncertain. But the FLEX program has no such requirement, ignoring one of the major lessons of Fukushima: Plant owners need to be prepared for the unexpected. The FLEX program’s “more pumps, not better pumps” strategy could result in plant owners having more unusable pumps during a crisis.

The NRC recently told Congress that it had considered and rejected a proposal that plant owners install “dedicated bunkers with independent power supplies and cooling systems.” UCS believes this approach, which France is instituting, deserves more serious consideration.

UCS’s concerns about FLEX were heightened recently when the NRC suggested it may be willing to consider the program not just as a short-term, stopgap measure but as an official, long-term strategy to address station blackout risks. The agency originally planned to develop a new rule on an expedited basis to require plants to cope with extended station blackouts. This is important because a rulemaking, unlike an agency order, provides more opportunity for public comment. But the agency recently decided to delay the station blackout rulemaking for two years, postponing the process that would allow the FLEX program’s problems to get a wider and more public review.

The industry has also argued against the NRC staff’s recommendation that Mark I and Mark II boiling-water reactors install filters on their containment vents, claiming that they can reduce the risk of radioactive releases during a severe accident by just using FLEX equipment and strategies. But given all the uncertainties about the reliability of FLEX, their proposal is not an adequate substitute for the installation of filters.

The NRC is delaying other critical post-Fukushima initiatives. For example, the agency immediately put the task force’s top recommendation to fundamentally revise how the NRC regulates severe accidents, on the back burner. Now the staff has asked for even more time to develop an approach. Likewise, the NRC also has delayed reviewing spent fuel safety risks, a vital addition to the public debate, and has postponed any decisions about expanding emergency planning zones for years.

The NRC’s task force identified important issues the NRC and U.S. nuclear industry must address to ensure that reactor safety lapses do not result in a nuclear disaster. And yes, there has been some progress two years after Fukushima. But the NRC has been tentative while the industry and Congress is pressuring it to slow down implementing safety reforms. As the NRC moves forward, it needs to be wary of considering half measures as progress if they fail to adequately address underlying problems. The health and safety of the 111 million Americans who live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant hang in the balance.

More American Workers Will Die as Silica Rule Delayed

The following post is from Randy Rabinowitz at The Fine Print, the Center for Effective Government blog.

Two years ago next week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a proposed standard to protect workers from silica dust.  1.7 million workers are exposed to silica on the job, mostly in construction, sandblasting, and mining. Silica has long been known to cause silicosis, a progressive, irreversible, but preventable lung disease that kills people.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reported that in 2007, 120 workers died from silicosis; 180-360 new cases of the disease are reported each year. Recent evidence shows that silica exposure also causes lung cancer. OSHA estimates that a lower allowable limit on silica in the workplace would prevent 60 deaths each year.

OSHA’s current exposure limit, based on a consensus standard from the 1960s, is woefully out of date. OSHA first set out to adjust the standard in 1974; its current effort to update the silica standard began in earnest in 1997 and stalled between 2004 and 2008. In 2009, the Obama administration’s team at OSHA reignited the effort to protect workers from silica exposure. By Feb. 14, 2011, they had forwarded a proposed standard to OIRA, together with a regulatory impact assessment of the illnesses the standard would prevent and the compliance costs to industry.

And there the proposal has languished for two years. OIRA is authorized to review economically significant standards like the silica rule for up to 120 days (four months)  to determine whether the benefits of rules exceed their costs (even though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that OSHA may not rely on cost-benefit analysis in deciding whether to protect worker health). In this case, OSHA has already found that the benefits of the silica rule clearly outweigh its costs, and had stricter silica rules been in effect during the two-year delay, 120 deaths could be avoided.

If OIRA disagrees with OSHA’s proposal to protect workers, it is supposed to return the rule to OSHA so the agency can fix it. But OIRA has not done that.  Instead, OIRA has held several meetings on the proposal, all but one with industry opponents of the rule. We don’t know what was discussed or why OIRA has blocked publication of the proposed rule. By holding up the standard, OIRA has put Americans in harm’s way and has prevented a public conversation about how to best protect workers from silica.

It’s time for OIRA to stop blocking the silica rule.  Sign this White House petition now to tell officials to put job safety standards in place to protect workers.

To sign the petition, follow these simple steps:

• If this is your first time signing a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website, click on the “Create an Account” button.
• After you create an account, you’ll get an e-mail from whitehouse.gov asking you to verify your account (this could take several seconds to arrive). Click on the verification link in that e-mail.
• After you click on the link, you’ll be able to sign the petition by clicking the green “Sign This Petition” button on the page.

Those who have signed a “We the People” petition before simply need to click the “Sign In” button to log in and sign the petition.