OSHA: A Brief History
 to visit the OSHA Web site.
On December 29, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, also known as the Williams-Steiger Act in honor of Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. and Representative William A. Steiger, the two men who pressed for its passage.The Act established three permanent agencies:
- the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) within the Labor Department to set and enforce workplace safety and health standards;
- the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to conduct research on occupational safety and health; and
- he Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC), an independent agency to adjudicate enforcement actions challenged by employers.
The OSH Act charged OSHA with assuring safe and healthful conditions for workers. When the agency opened for business in April 1971, OSHA covered 56 million workers at 3.5 million workplaces. Today, it covers 105 million private-sector workers and employers at 6.9 million sites.
OSHA's enforcement strategy has evolved from initially targeting a few problem industries to zeroing in on high-hazard industries and more recently, pinpointing specific sites with high injury rates. Education and outreach have played important roles in dealing with virtually every safety or health issue.
Congress initially gave OSHA two years to put a base of standards in place. OSHA accomplished this by adopting widely recognized and accepted industry standards. Other standards were to be issued through notice and comment rulemaking.
There are two basic types of OSHA standard:
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Vertical standards affect just one industry or a small group of closely related industries
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Horizontal standards, also known as general industry standards, affect a broad swath of industries
OSHA published its first consensus standards on May 29, 1971. Some of those standards remain in effect today. Others have been updated or expanded through public rulemaking, dropped as unnecessary or overly specific, or amended to clarify their intent.
OSHA employed several enforcement strategies. Initially the agency emphasized voluntary compliance with inspections dedicated to catastrophic accidents and the most dangerous and unhealthful workplaces. Later, the agency adopted a "get tough" stance that evolved to a more targeted approach based on significant hazards. OSHA further refined its inspection targeting system in the late 1970s to focus 95 percent of health inspections on industries with the most serious problems. The agency also established special emphasis programs focused on foundries and grain elevators.
To encourage voluntary compliance and assist businesses, particularly small businesses, OSHA established free onsite consultation programs, delivered through state authorities, in 1975. The agency took its outreach efforts a step further in 1978 with its New Directions grants program. The program provided seed money to other organizations to develop and offer safety and health training to employers and employees.
In its third decade, OSHA re-examined its goals as part of the overall government reinvention process, looking for ways to leverage its resources and increase its impact in reducing workplace injuries, illnesses, and deaths.
Many standards published during the 1990s relied on a performance-oriented approach - setting specific goals for worker safety and health - but providing flexibility in how those goals were to be met. In 1994-95, OSHA promulgated two electrical safety-related work practices standards, one for general industry and one for the utility line clearance tree trimming industry. For TCIA and the tree care industry, it was the culmination of almost 12 years of effort: working with OSHA standards writers, developing model standard language in committees, testifying at hearings and providing written commentary for the public record.
The Agency continued to refine its inspection targeting system to focus on serious violators, proposing sizable penalties when inspectors found sites where safety and health problems were most serious. In 1990, Congress increased maximum penalties for OSHA violations from $1,000 to $7,000 for serious violations and from $10,000 to $70,000 for willful and repeat violations.
During the mid-1990s, OSHA began collecting data annually from about 80,000 employers in high-hazard industries to identify sites with high injury and illness rates. In 1999, the agency adopted the Site Specific Targeting Program, which for the first time directed inspections to individual workplaces with the worst safety and health records. |
