December 26, 2005
Adversary turned ally | Maine businesses partner with OSHA to create safety programs aimed at preventing on-the-job accidents
By Douglas Rooks
"OSHA is coming" is still a phrase likely to put fear into a plant manager's heart. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created by Congress in 1971 to reduce the number and severity of workplace injuries. Since then, the agency has expanded to oversee compliance with federal health and safety regulations ˆ through announced and unannounced workplace inspections ˆ and to investigate on-the-job fatalities or serious injuries.
While OSHA's role in creating safer workplaces is now broadly accepted, its focus on compliance and enforcement after an accident still draws criticism, particularly from business leaders. Initially, businesses resented the intrusion into private workplaces. More recently, they have expressed concerns that inspectors focus on the minutiae of regulation, levying fines and unnecessarily increasing the cost of doing business. In response to those critics, Congress adopted in 2002 a plan to get the agency into safety education and accident prevention ˆ not just enforcement ˆ through voluntary alliances between OSHA, state agencies, businesses and labor groups.
Those alliances have taken root in Maine, and last month the 10th such partnership, involving two Maine labor union locals and a contractor group, was signed to promote safer working conditions for electricians and apprentices. Other Maine alliances have involved health care workers and hospitals, highway construction sites, and private businesses like Marden's and Key Construction.
In Maine, those alliances are handled by Bill Coffin, who has become OSHA's first compliance assistant specialist after spending 18 years on its enforcement staff. That change, from potential adversary to partner, is the essence of the program, he says. "I'm no longer involved in enforcement and compliance at all," he says. "All my effort is helping people understand what they're supposed to do, and help them create plans to reduce deaths and injuries in the workplace."
Alliances are voluntary efforts, undertaken at the request of those companies, agencies and unions that think they would benefit from consultation, or those that would like to achieve a better safety record than the law requires. By improving workplace safety, those partnerships can help businesses and government agencies lower their workers' compensation and health insurance costs, improve employee morale and gain public credit for being a responsible employer. But inviting OSHA in ˆ even in a visit that won't lead to fines or citations ˆ often requires businesses to change their perspective on the agency to that of more than just an enforcer. The partnerships also open up the possibility of workplace changes that may not directly increase output and, in the case of older manufacturing facilities, can involve extensive overhauls for which there is no ready source of investment.
Still, companies who have formed alliances say the leap is not as scary as it seems. Surplus and salvage retailer Marden's became the first private Maine business to enter into an alliance earlier this year after Bill Coffin, who knows the Lewiston store manager, suggested the idea. Although Nancy Harding, safety director for the company, says she was confident the company provided a safe working environment, the initial inspections were still an eye-opener. The company undertook minor upgrades to electrical systems after the inspections, and is planning another more-extensive overhaul that will be completed soon.
Although costs should be minimal because Marden's is able to make the necessary changes in-house, Harding says the inspections have refocused attention to safety in stores and warehouses, and reinforced her belief that well-run businesses do not have anything to fear from OSHA. She believes more Maine businesses should take advantage of the opportunity. "Instead of coming in with a hammer, OSHA is saying, 'Let us help you out,'" Harding says.
Speeding cars, needle sticks and high voltage
One of the first, significant Maine alliances was a project begun in 2004 to improve safety in roadway construction sites involving OSHA with the US. Department of Labor, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, the Federal Highway Administration and the Maine Department of Transportation. The motivation was simple, Coffin says: Highway construction zones in Maine were hazardous places. In 2002 alone, there were 750 vehicle crashes, resulting in 350 injuries and seven deaths from work site accidents.
All parties to the work-zone hazards wanted to improve matters, says Coffin, and the group went to work on a plan to prevent accidents. One change addressed haphazardly applied safety standards, including inadequate warning signs for motorists or varying distances between those signs and the start of a work zone. Equally important was a commitment to increased training, says Coffin ˆ an emphasis on "people, not barrels" in making a work site safe. By providing better instruction for the flaggers and crews, the alliance has helped to sharply reduce accidents, Coffin says. Since the alliance began more than a year ago, there has been only one work-zone fatality.
In other cases, the alliance process begins with a concerned health and safety director at a private company. Clark Phinney was named employee health and workers' compensation coordinator for Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston in 2002 with explicit instructions to make the medical center a leader in promoting a safe workplace. While hospitals may appear to be protected spaces, they in fact involve all the most common workplace hazards, along with some that are unique to health care facilities, Phinney says. "Whether it's needle sticks for direct care workers, back strains and sprains for support staff, ergonomics in the finance office, we run the gamut," Phinney says.
CMMC is self-insured for workers' compensation, which provided another incentive to reduce the number of workplace injuries. After reading about the new OSHA program and receiving encouragement from CMMC management, he created the alliance in April.
When Phinney helped draw up the first comprehensive safety plan, he was pleased that the basic policies and procedures seemed to be in place already. Where the hospital needed to do more was in making sure its 2,800 employees at the Lewiston campus were able to follow written procedures in doing their jobs. "When half your staff has been there forever, and half are almost new, there can be a gap between what's written and what's done," Phinney says.
Since then, through those reviews and new training, Phinney says CMMC has made "a lot of progress." That progress has created tangible benefits for the hospital, too. CMMC's rating for worker's comp was 1.01 for 2003, under the so-called modification rating used by industry rating agency NCCI, which is about average for hospitals. Since then, the safety rating has been reduced to .91 (above average) for 2004 and to .79 this year. That's resulted in a budget savings of $800,000 on worker's compensation rates that's available for patient care or other investments, Phinney says.
CMMC is planning to expand the new safety program beyond its Lewiston campus to its affiliate hospitals in Rumford and Bridgton and several long-term care facilities as well. The ultimate goal is not just to complete the planning and training called for in the OSHA alliance, but to achieve certification under its Voluntary Protection Plan ˆ a kind of seal of approval that shows significantly higher performance than required under OSHA regulations. A VPP rating ˆ which would be the first for a hospital in New England ˆ would exempt CMMC from routine OSHA inspections for three years.
Sometimes, it's workers themselves that seek out an OSHA alliance. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers recently signed an alliance that involves IBEW Locals in central and in southern Maine, and the Maine/New Hampshire Division, Boston Chapter, of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA), whose members hire licensed electricians.
Although there hasn't been a fatality among electricians in recent memory, according to Wayne Rancourt, business manager for IBEW Local 1253 in Augusta, there have been serious injuries at several job sites in Maine. "This is an inherently dangerous business," Rancourt says, "so it's one where there can't be too much attention to safety."
For IBEW workers, Rancourt says, one of the alliance's key benefits is having "a direct connection to OSHA." There doesn't have to be anonymous complaints or phone calls to the agency," he says. "We know who to call, and we know they will listen."
On the safety bandwagon
OSHA's emphasis on education and assistance is welcome, but it doesn't supercede or replace other programs with the same aim, according to David Wacker, director of workplace safety and health and the SafetyWorks program for the Maine Department of Labor. The program's website emphasizes that "We're Not OSHA," and Wacker says there's a reason for that assurance. "As a government agency, we're naturally the object of some skepticism among business owners," he says. "We don't do any enforcement for OSHA. We're strictly here to advise and educate."
SafetyWorks visits, on average, 800 workplaces all over Maine, training about 11,000 workers a year in safety techniques. Despite continuing employer concerns about allowing any government inspectors into the workplace, Wacker is satisfied with the response from businesses to the program which, like the OSHA alliances, is voluntary.
Because SafetyWorks' inspection results are confidential, business owners can feel assured that inviting in the state doesn't mean that OSHA citations will result, he says. In 30 years, Wacker added, there have been only two direct referrals to OSHA because a Maine business refused to take corrective action. One was DeCoster Egg Farms in the 1970s, and the other a lead abatement firm that has since closed its doors.
Federal and state workplace safety programs also parallel efforts to improve safety through reform of the state's workers' compensation, once perhaps the most expensive and delay-ridden in the country. As part of a reform package developed in 1992, the Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Co., better known by its acronym, MEMIC, was created as a state-chartered, but privately owned and managed, mutual insurer. It achieved much of its early success through safety inspections of workplaces that, for the first time in years, showed employers how they could reduce accidents and injuries.
Workers' comp rates have fallen 30% since then, from among the highest in the country to below average. But Mike Bourque, vice president of corporate marketing and communications for MEMIC, says that progress is still insufficient. Earlier this month, for example, the Bureau of Insurance approved a 1.2% increase in the state's workers' compensation rates, and Maine still reports a higher rate of on-the-job injuries than other states.
And while Bourque welcomed the increased awareness of workplace safety created by insurers, state and federal programs, he notes some significant differences in the various approaches. State and federal government programs stress compliance with regulations; insurance inspectors are more interested in lost work time and the cost of various injuries.
For example, a claim for a back injury averages $20,000, says Bourque, which at a small business can drive up rates quickly. "If you're looking at a restaurant and you find three or four knife cuts, that's a problem that requires attention, but the two back injuries suffered from improper lifting may be more serious," he says.
But Coffin at OSHA likes the fact that the results of his safety alliances are both measurable and, potentially, open to all employers. The alliance program is supposed to last two or three years ˆ it has one Maine "graduate" already, Key Construction, which signed on for a single job site in Waterville ˆ and uses a checklist both for training and compliance activities. While there are 10 active alliances in Maine now, Coffin figures he could set up another 10 right away, with others coming on-line after initial planning and consultation has been completed.
In that effort, Coffin hopes the existing alliances will show other employers or workers' groups in Maine that the potential benefits can make the costs and effort worthwhile. He hopes to work with the Maine Healthcare Association ˆ which is exploring an alliance that could involve all of its members, including most of the nursing homes in Maine. Similarly, he says, the alliance with CMMC may set a health care standard for hospitals in Maine.
The more alliances he can form, Coffin figures, the further he can move the agency away from its image as a business adversary. Likewise, Coffin says that even though OSHA inspections do serve as a deterrent for employers tolerating unsafe conditions, the agency recognizes that it can't be everywhere at once. "If we can increase awareness of health and safety before we ever inspect a workplace," he says, "we all come out ahead."
While OSHA's role in creating safer workplaces is now broadly accepted, its focus on compliance and enforcement after an accident still draws criticism, particularly from business leaders. Initially, businesses resented the intrusion into private workplaces. More recently, they have expressed concerns that inspectors focus on the minutiae of regulation, levying fines and unnecessarily increasing the cost of doing business. In response to those critics, Congress adopted in 2002 a plan to get the agency into safety education and accident prevention ˆ not just enforcement ˆ through voluntary alliances between OSHA, state agencies, businesses and labor groups.
Those alliances have taken root in Maine, and last month the 10th such partnership, involving two Maine labor union locals and a contractor group, was signed to promote safer working conditions for electricians and apprentices. Other Maine alliances have involved health care workers and hospitals, highway construction sites, and private businesses like Marden's and Key Construction.
In Maine, those alliances are handled by Bill Coffin, who has become OSHA's first compliance assistant specialist after spending 18 years on its enforcement staff. That change, from potential adversary to partner, is the essence of the program, he says. "I'm no longer involved in enforcement and compliance at all," he says. "All my effort is helping people understand what they're supposed to do, and help them create plans to reduce deaths and injuries in the workplace."
Alliances are voluntary efforts, undertaken at the request of those companies, agencies and unions that think they would benefit from consultation, or those that would like to achieve a better safety record than the law requires. By improving workplace safety, those partnerships can help businesses and government agencies lower their workers' compensation and health insurance costs, improve employee morale and gain public credit for being a responsible employer. But inviting OSHA in ˆ even in a visit that won't lead to fines or citations ˆ often requires businesses to change their perspective on the agency to that of more than just an enforcer. The partnerships also open up the possibility of workplace changes that may not directly increase output and, in the case of older manufacturing facilities, can involve extensive overhauls for which there is no ready source of investment.
Still, companies who have formed alliances say the leap is not as scary as it seems. Surplus and salvage retailer Marden's became the first private Maine business to enter into an alliance earlier this year after Bill Coffin, who knows the Lewiston store manager, suggested the idea. Although Nancy Harding, safety director for the company, says she was confident the company provided a safe working environment, the initial inspections were still an eye-opener. The company undertook minor upgrades to electrical systems after the inspections, and is planning another more-extensive overhaul that will be completed soon.
Although costs should be minimal because Marden's is able to make the necessary changes in-house, Harding says the inspections have refocused attention to safety in stores and warehouses, and reinforced her belief that well-run businesses do not have anything to fear from OSHA. She believes more Maine businesses should take advantage of the opportunity. "Instead of coming in with a hammer, OSHA is saying, 'Let us help you out,'" Harding says.
Speeding cars, needle sticks and high voltage
One of the first, significant Maine alliances was a project begun in 2004 to improve safety in roadway construction sites involving OSHA with the US. Department of Labor, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, the Federal Highway Administration and the Maine Department of Transportation. The motivation was simple, Coffin says: Highway construction zones in Maine were hazardous places. In 2002 alone, there were 750 vehicle crashes, resulting in 350 injuries and seven deaths from work site accidents.
All parties to the work-zone hazards wanted to improve matters, says Coffin, and the group went to work on a plan to prevent accidents. One change addressed haphazardly applied safety standards, including inadequate warning signs for motorists or varying distances between those signs and the start of a work zone. Equally important was a commitment to increased training, says Coffin ˆ an emphasis on "people, not barrels" in making a work site safe. By providing better instruction for the flaggers and crews, the alliance has helped to sharply reduce accidents, Coffin says. Since the alliance began more than a year ago, there has been only one work-zone fatality.
In other cases, the alliance process begins with a concerned health and safety director at a private company. Clark Phinney was named employee health and workers' compensation coordinator for Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston in 2002 with explicit instructions to make the medical center a leader in promoting a safe workplace. While hospitals may appear to be protected spaces, they in fact involve all the most common workplace hazards, along with some that are unique to health care facilities, Phinney says. "Whether it's needle sticks for direct care workers, back strains and sprains for support staff, ergonomics in the finance office, we run the gamut," Phinney says.
CMMC is self-insured for workers' compensation, which provided another incentive to reduce the number of workplace injuries. After reading about the new OSHA program and receiving encouragement from CMMC management, he created the alliance in April.
When Phinney helped draw up the first comprehensive safety plan, he was pleased that the basic policies and procedures seemed to be in place already. Where the hospital needed to do more was in making sure its 2,800 employees at the Lewiston campus were able to follow written procedures in doing their jobs. "When half your staff has been there forever, and half are almost new, there can be a gap between what's written and what's done," Phinney says.
Since then, through those reviews and new training, Phinney says CMMC has made "a lot of progress." That progress has created tangible benefits for the hospital, too. CMMC's rating for worker's comp was 1.01 for 2003, under the so-called modification rating used by industry rating agency NCCI, which is about average for hospitals. Since then, the safety rating has been reduced to .91 (above average) for 2004 and to .79 this year. That's resulted in a budget savings of $800,000 on worker's compensation rates that's available for patient care or other investments, Phinney says.
CMMC is planning to expand the new safety program beyond its Lewiston campus to its affiliate hospitals in Rumford and Bridgton and several long-term care facilities as well. The ultimate goal is not just to complete the planning and training called for in the OSHA alliance, but to achieve certification under its Voluntary Protection Plan ˆ a kind of seal of approval that shows significantly higher performance than required under OSHA regulations. A VPP rating ˆ which would be the first for a hospital in New England ˆ would exempt CMMC from routine OSHA inspections for three years.
Sometimes, it's workers themselves that seek out an OSHA alliance. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers recently signed an alliance that involves IBEW Locals in central and in southern Maine, and the Maine/New Hampshire Division, Boston Chapter, of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA), whose members hire licensed electricians.
Although there hasn't been a fatality among electricians in recent memory, according to Wayne Rancourt, business manager for IBEW Local 1253 in Augusta, there have been serious injuries at several job sites in Maine. "This is an inherently dangerous business," Rancourt says, "so it's one where there can't be too much attention to safety."
For IBEW workers, Rancourt says, one of the alliance's key benefits is having "a direct connection to OSHA." There doesn't have to be anonymous complaints or phone calls to the agency," he says. "We know who to call, and we know they will listen."
On the safety bandwagon
OSHA's emphasis on education and assistance is welcome, but it doesn't supercede or replace other programs with the same aim, according to David Wacker, director of workplace safety and health and the SafetyWorks program for the Maine Department of Labor. The program's website emphasizes that "We're Not OSHA," and Wacker says there's a reason for that assurance. "As a government agency, we're naturally the object of some skepticism among business owners," he says. "We don't do any enforcement for OSHA. We're strictly here to advise and educate."
SafetyWorks visits, on average, 800 workplaces all over Maine, training about 11,000 workers a year in safety techniques. Despite continuing employer concerns about allowing any government inspectors into the workplace, Wacker is satisfied with the response from businesses to the program which, like the OSHA alliances, is voluntary.
Because SafetyWorks' inspection results are confidential, business owners can feel assured that inviting in the state doesn't mean that OSHA citations will result, he says. In 30 years, Wacker added, there have been only two direct referrals to OSHA because a Maine business refused to take corrective action. One was DeCoster Egg Farms in the 1970s, and the other a lead abatement firm that has since closed its doors.
Federal and state workplace safety programs also parallel efforts to improve safety through reform of the state's workers' compensation, once perhaps the most expensive and delay-ridden in the country. As part of a reform package developed in 1992, the Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Co., better known by its acronym, MEMIC, was created as a state-chartered, but privately owned and managed, mutual insurer. It achieved much of its early success through safety inspections of workplaces that, for the first time in years, showed employers how they could reduce accidents and injuries.
Workers' comp rates have fallen 30% since then, from among the highest in the country to below average. But Mike Bourque, vice president of corporate marketing and communications for MEMIC, says that progress is still insufficient. Earlier this month, for example, the Bureau of Insurance approved a 1.2% increase in the state's workers' compensation rates, and Maine still reports a higher rate of on-the-job injuries than other states.
And while Bourque welcomed the increased awareness of workplace safety created by insurers, state and federal programs, he notes some significant differences in the various approaches. State and federal government programs stress compliance with regulations; insurance inspectors are more interested in lost work time and the cost of various injuries.
For example, a claim for a back injury averages $20,000, says Bourque, which at a small business can drive up rates quickly. "If you're looking at a restaurant and you find three or four knife cuts, that's a problem that requires attention, but the two back injuries suffered from improper lifting may be more serious," he says.
But Coffin at OSHA likes the fact that the results of his safety alliances are both measurable and, potentially, open to all employers. The alliance program is supposed to last two or three years ˆ it has one Maine "graduate" already, Key Construction, which signed on for a single job site in Waterville ˆ and uses a checklist both for training and compliance activities. While there are 10 active alliances in Maine now, Coffin figures he could set up another 10 right away, with others coming on-line after initial planning and consultation has been completed.
In that effort, Coffin hopes the existing alliances will show other employers or workers' groups in Maine that the potential benefits can make the costs and effort worthwhile. He hopes to work with the Maine Healthcare Association ˆ which is exploring an alliance that could involve all of its members, including most of the nursing homes in Maine. Similarly, he says, the alliance with CMMC may set a health care standard for hospitals in Maine.
The more alliances he can form, Coffin figures, the further he can move the agency away from its image as a business adversary. Likewise, Coffin says that even though OSHA inspections do serve as a deterrent for employers tolerating unsafe conditions, the agency recognizes that it can't be everywhere at once. "If we can increase awareness of health and safety before we ever inspect a workplace," he says, "we all come out ahead."
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