STATEMENT OF

**FRANK A. WHITE**

**SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT**

**ORC WORLDWIDE**

**BEFORE THE**

**SUBCOMMITTEE ON WORKFORCE PROTECTIONS**

**COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE**

# U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

# April 23, 2008

On behalf of ORC Worldwide, I would like to thank the Subcommittee for
this opportunity to discuss how to make sure that serious risks to
worker safety and health get addressed on a corporate-wide basis. We
appreciate being able to share ORC member company experience in this
area.

ORC Worldwide is an international management and human resources
consulting firm whose Washington, DC office has for 36 years provided
specialized occupational safety and health consulting services to
businesses and other organizations. Currently, more than 140 leading
global corporations in more than 20 industry sectors are members of
ORC's Occupational Safety and Health Groups. The focus of these groups
is to help ORC members achieve safety and health excellence by promoting
effective occupational safety and health programs, benchmarking and
sharing best practices in areas such as management systems and
performance metrics, and creating new strategies and tools to improve
safety and health performance. ORC is also a key industry voice on
national and global safety and health policy issues. The activities of
ORC's Occupational Safety and Health Groups are based on the premise
that providing safe and healthful working conditions is the mutual
concern of employers, workers and government agencies and that
cooperation and collaboration among these key stakeholders is essential
to finding solutions to safety and health issues.

How can a company make sure that a safety or health risk that is known
to exist at one of its location does not go unnoticed or ignored at
another location? At the very least, if there is an OSHA citation or a
worker suffers an injury or even a near-miss incident at one company
establishment, what steps does the business need to take to assure that
no worker is endangered by a similar risk at some other company
facility? I will do my best today to offer Mr. Torres and his family
hope that there are real, practical answers to these questions and that
there are effective approaches that companies can and do use to prevent
the kind of tragic loss they have suffered.

But let me comment briefly before going further that OSHA clearly has an
important role to play in ensuring safety and health risks are addressed
on a corporate-wide basis. It was during my years at OSHA in the
mid-1980s that the egregious penalty policy was

developed and implemented in order to enhance OSHA's enforcement arsenal
in the case of flagrant multiple serious safety and health infractions.
It is entirely appropriate for OSHA to impose the strongest possible
sanctions when a company acts in intentional or reckless disregard of
the requirements of well-established OSHA standards addressing serious
risks to workers, especially in cases of multiple identical or similar
citations across a corporation's facilities. Any company that receives
citations for serious violations of an OSHA standard, particularly
high-gravity serious violations, in one or more facilities, simply must
establish the necessary processes and systems to require other locations
with similar operations to determine the existence of like violations,
and to correct any potentially serious violations that are found.

Unfortunately, we know from our experience that even companies that work
diligently to comply with OSHA standards will not necessarily have an
effective process for assuring that findings of non-compliance in one
facility will be made known across the organization and addressed at
other facilities. There are several important prerequisites to having an
effective corporate-wide approach to finding and fixing similar hazards
at multiple locations.

**Top Leadership Commitment to Full Compliance**

It will not come as a surprise that the indispensable foundation for
effective action is the establishment of a clear and authoritative
policy from a corporation's senior leadership, preferably the CEO,
stating explicitly that the corporation as a whole will insist on full
compliance with all worker safety and health standards and requirements.
Without such a policy, and without senior leadership actively engaged in
monitoring compliance progress consistent with the policy, it will be
extremely difficult to sustain the effort necessary to attain full
corporate-wide compliance.

**Implementation of an Occupational Health and Safety Management
System**

But even a clearly articulated policy of full compliance from company
leadership, while essential, is by itself insufficient to assure that
the necessary actions are taken to actually attain and sustain
corporate-wide compliance. Companies that consistently achieve superior
safety and health performance, and that seek continual performance
improvement, rely on a management system that includes several key
elements. Probably the most up-to-date, complete and accessible
description of an effective health and safety management system (OHSMS)
is the 2005 ANSI Z10 American National Standard for Occupational Health
and Safety Management Systems. It is important to understand that the
fundamental goal of a comprehensive OHSMS is the elimination of injuries
and illnesses *through a continuous process of identifying, assessing
and reducing risks*. While most corporate management systems include
compliance with safety and health standards in their scope, the focus of
the system is more broadly on the reduction of *all* risks, not just
those covered by OSHA standards.

A few of the key elements of an effective management system that are
particularly applicable to the corporate-wide abatement of hazards
covered by OSHA requirements are:

-   ***Establish clear responsibility, authority and accountability
    through all levels of the corporation*.** From the CEO to the shop
    floor, all management levels and line employees must be assigned and
    understand their roles in the management system for finding and
    fixing hazardous conditions. In addition, each level of the business
    must have the authority and the resources to get the job done, and
    each must be held accountable for achieving results.

-   ***Encourage employee participation and reporting of unsafe
    conditions.*** No safety and health management system can function
    effectively without employee participation in key aspects of the
    system's development and implementation. Line employees are a
    company's most knowledgeable resources about hazardous conditions
    and they must be encouraged to report such conditions with full
    confidence that management will take prompt corrective action.

-   ***Perform regular safety inspections and audits**.* Part of the
    responsibility of management in each company facility is to perform
    periodic systematic reviews of the each workplace to identify,
    evaluate and ultimately control risks, including potential OSHA
    violations.

-   ***Perform root cause investigations of significant incidents
    (near-misses as well as injuries and illnesses).*** Most large
    employers and other businesses that have employed safety and health
    professionals at the corporate and/or the facility levels, perform
    investigations of incidents involving serious injuries. However, it
    is also important to investigate, where resources permit, near-miss
    incidents, particularly those where serious injury could have
    occurred. The nature of those investigations should go beyond
    looking at the "unsafe act or behavior" of the worker involved, and
    should examine more closely the "root causes" of the incident. It is
    ORC's experience that, in general, there are usually more
    fundamental systemic, cultural, workplace design or other reasons
    for such incidents that need to be addressed beyond the worker
    behavior.

-   ***Establish metrics that go beyond OSHA-recordable injuries and
    illnesses.*** In order for a management system to be most effective
    as a tool for the prevention of injuries and illnesses, companies
    should establish metrics for tracking leading indicators of the
    company's success in identifying and reducing risks and exposures,
    rather than collecting only the traditional "lagging" measures of
    how many injuries or illnesses occurred. So, for example, company
    leadership should want to know how much time it is taking to correct
    potential serious OSHA violations once they are found, or whether
    the company is successfully reducing the numbers of occurrences of
    certain kinds of risks or exposures, e.g., machine guarding.

**Integration of Special Procedures for Corporate-Wide Compliance**.

While the above elements constitute some of the basics of an effective
OHSMS, even ANSI Z10 and other management system guidelines do not
explicitly address the issue of how to assure that risks (including
potential OSHA violations) discovered at one company location are
necessarily dealt with at other locations. To be perfectly candid, that
has proven to be a challenge for some companies that have otherwise
effective programs. Companies that have recognized this particular
aspect of managing risks have enhanced their management systems with
special measures designed to assure such multi-site awareness and
response. Examples of these measures include:

-   A requirement for each workplace in a corporation to report
    significant incidents, risks or potential violations to a
    centralized corporate function or team.

-   A preliminary review of those reported events at the corporate level
    to assess whether there might be a significant potential likelihood
    of occurrence in other locations of the company.

-   A notification or "alert" to locations with the potential for
    similar issues, describing the issue.

-   Assigning responsibility and accountability to the other locations
    for evaluating the issues, determining appropriate action and
    providing feedback to the corporate function or team.

-   Follow-up (much like for an audit) at the corporate level to assure
    closure of any potential violations found at other locations.

Although the execution of an effective approach to a uniform
corporate-wide approach to multi-establishment compliance requires a
significant and focused effort, the basic principles of leadership
commitment, a systems approach, effective organizational communication
and vigilant follow-up are the keys to success.

## Challenges and Opportunities for OSHA

Let me turn for a moment to how OSHA can contribute to assuring that
corporations with multiple facilities take effective action across the
corporation to maintain compliance. In my view, from an enforcement
perspective, OSHA faces a few longstanding institutional impediments to
adopting a more corporate-wide orientation, among the most significant
of which are:

-   The entire enforcement regime of the Occupational Safety and Health
    Act of 1970 is based on the inspection of individual
    "establishments" rather than corporate entities. As a result, OSHA's
    inspection targeting strategy has been based on the safety and
    health experience at individual workplaces and the constitutional
    underpinnings of OSHA's inspection authority have been affirmed on
    that basis. That is not to say that OSHA could not refocus its
    efforts, where policy considerations warrant it, to a broader, more
    corporate-wide approach. In fact, OSHA has done so on a limited
    basis, in its use of corporate-wide settlements, its application of
    the repeat violation policy, and even to a limited extent in the
    Enhanced Enforcement Program (which has been recently been
    modified).

-   Perhaps bigger practical impediments to an expanded corporate-wide
    enforcement policy are the ways in which safety and health data are
    collected and maintained at both the governmental and company
    levels. Again, reflecting the establishment-based orientation of the
    OSH Act, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and OSHA do not
    systematically collect or maintain either injury and illness data
    or, in OSHA's case, citation history on a company-wide basis. And of
    course, OSHA collects data only from a limited number of workplaces
    nationwide, so it would rarely have in its data base a complete or
    even representative set of data from any multi-establishment
    corporation. And while many large multi-facility companies do
    collect and often analyze some injury and illness data at the
    corporate level, it is often a limited subset of the data from all
    of its facilities.

-   There is also the bureaucratic version of the "silo" issue faced by
    many organizations, including corporations -- each OSHA Area Office
    and each OSHA Region and each State Plan State has its own
    priorities, goals and targets in terms of inspections of the unique
    mix of establishments in these "mini-jurisdictions." If OSHA is to
    address more fully and strategically violations by a single company
    at multiple sites throughout the nation, the agency would need to
    institute some special program (akin to a National Emphasis Program)
    that encourages or requires coordination and the exchange and
    analysis of information, followed by action.

Despite these issues, there would appear to be solid reasons for OSHA to
consider additional ways to examine a company's compliance on a
corporate-wide basis under limited circumstances. Most fundamentally,
OSHA is always looking for ways to leverage its scarce resources in
order to maximize its impact -- such a focused corporate-wide approach
may be one way to further that objective. By the same token, any new or
enhanced program to focus more heavily on corporate-wide compliance
would have to balance the additional resources required against the
potential impact of the program.

One possible approach OSHA could take would be to establish certain
"triggers" whereby if an Area or Regional Office has experienced a
citation history of a designated "high" magnitude at the establishment
or establishments of a corporation known to have national operations,
this history could be brought to the attention of the National Office
and other potentially affected Regions for an evaluation of the
company's compliance experience nationally. If the analysis finds
similar compliance histories in other company locations, OSHA could
establish a series of steps ranging potentially from notification of the
company's senior management of these findings and requesting a corporate
review, to more intensive enforcement efforts at other company
locations.

Finally, on a more general note, ORC would strongly encourage OSHA to
search for new ways to promote and advocate the value of safety and
health management systems as a critical tool to reducing risk and
achieving full compliance. In the long term, nothing will have a more
significant impact on the reduction of risks, injuries and illnesses, as
well as improved compliance, than the widespread adoption of such
systems - OSHA can play a critical role in this effort.

ORC looks forward to working with the Subcommittee as it continues to
evaluate the issues raised in this hearing and other approaches to
reducing injuries and illnesses in the workplace.