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We set out to compile a list of rules and policies that could be implemented by state and local governments to provide better protections for U.S. workers. This manual includes more than two dozen such ideas, organized into thematic chapters: Chapter 1: Empowering Workers, with proposals designed to strengthen workers' individual and collective power to demand changes in their workplaces; Chapter 2: Making Sure Crime Doesn't Pay, with ideas for strong enforcement of workplace health and safety rules that will punish bad actors and deter similar behavior; Chapter 3: Strengthening Institutions, with recommendations intended to bolster government agencies' efforts to protect workers. The manual is drafted in clear and concise language and it presents each recommendation as a direct solution to an enduring problem in the workplace. The authors also helpfully provide examples when the recommendations are based on successfully implemented programs. Our hope is that this manual will be a starting point for discussion among our allies, especially groups that are new to the health-and-safety arena.

This report identifies 13 essential regulatory actions that agencies are working on right now to address critical public health concerns. All of these actions can and should be completed before President Obama leaves office.The report examines each of the regulatory actions individually, describing (1) why the regulatory actions are needed for protecting people and the environment, (2) the ongoing delays that have blocked their progress to this point, (3) what the final rules should say, and (4) the remaining steps that need to be taken to complete the rules. This examination will make clear that all of the rules will deliver important protections for public health, safety, and the environment and that completing the rules will be a relatively easy lift for the Obama Administration, provided that it brings to bear the necessary political will.

Over the next four years, the nation will face a daunting to-do list of public health, safety, and environmental challenges. If progress is to be made on these challenges, the Executive Branch must take the lead.President Barack Obama has broad authority over the Executive Branch’s various regulatory agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Existing statutes authorize these agencies and the White House itself to address the greatest public, health, and safety challenges. So if progress is to be made, President Obama will need to unleash this potential by making full use of his authority to manage agency activities by issuing Executive Orders. He can use these orders to direct the agencies to focus on high priority regulatory initiatives and to streamline the processes by which they carry out their statutory missions.This white paper recommends seven Executive Orders for the second term of the Obama Administration, all of which are directed at addressing critical public health, safety, and environmental challenges. Each Order directs government agencies to take specific steps to create meaningful new safeguards for people and the environment. Adopting and successfully carrying out these recommendations would help to cement President Obama’s legacy as a strong defender of public health, safety, and the environment.

Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act more than 40 years ago. A transformative law at the time it was passed, the OSH Act has not proved nimble enough to address the evolving challenges faced by U.S. workers. In this paper, we discuss how changes to the OSH Act and its implementing regulations and policies could better empower workers to ensure that all workers have safe and healthy workplaces. We focus on workers and their power to influence the policies that keep them safe and healthy on the job. Numerous issues affect workers’ health and safety, from workers’ compensation reform to health care policies to wage and hour problems, but we focus here on health and safety regulation by federal agencies.Worker empowerment: We propose strenghtening education and training requirements as the first step toward empowering workers. To ensure that new knowledge and training can be put to use, we propose establishing a private right-of-action to enforce the OSH Act, much like the "citizen suit" provisions of environmental laws.Enforcement: We urge Congress to amend the OSH Act to increase criminal fines and jail time for employers who violate the statute and its impelementing regulations. Civil enforcement could be enhanced through use of administrative compliance orders, the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine, the Alternative Fines Act, and inflation-adjusted penalties. We also encourage OSHA to revamp its procedures for investigating fatalities and involving workers and their representatives in enforcement proceedings.Administrative issues: Recognizing OSHA's need for additional resources, we suggest that Congress and the agency explore whether certain programs (e.g., the Voluntary Protection Program) should be funded through user fees. We also discuss OSHA's role in overseeing state-plan programs. We urge Congress to abolish the split-enforcement model that relies on the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission to adjudicate cases. Finally, we discuss reforms to the rulemaking process that would speed the development of new safety and health standards.

Tucked in a corner of the Old Executive Office Building, an obscure group of some three dozen economists exerts extraordinary power over federal rules intended to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. Known officially as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), this unit reports to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but operates as a free-ranging squad that pulls an astounding number of draft regulatory actions — some 6,194 over the ten-year period covered in this report — into a dragnet that operates behind closed doors. No policy that might distress influential industries, from oil production to coal mining to petrochemical manufacturing, goes into effect without OIRA’s approval.This white paper is the first comprehensive effort to unpack the dynamics of OIRA’s daily work, specifically with regard to the only information that is readily available to the public about its internal review process: records of its meetings with lobbyists. These records are perhaps the only accessible accounting of OIRA’s influence, and they demonstrate that OIRA has persistently ignored the unequivocal mandates of three presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — by refusing to disclose the differences between regulatory drafts as they enter review and the final versions that emerge at the end of that process. This study reveals that OIRA routinely substitutes its judgment for that of the agencies, second-guessing agency efforts to implement specific mandates assigned to them by Congress in statutes such as the Clean Air Act, the Food Quality Protection Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. In so doing, OIRA systematically undermines the clear congressional intent that such decisions be made by specified agencies’ neutral experts in the law, science, engineering, and economics applicable to a given industry.

In the last several years, dramatic failures of the nation’s food safety system have sickened or killed tens of thousands of Americans, and caused billions of dollars of damages for producers and distributors of everything from fresh vegetables to granola bars and hamburger meat. In each case, the outbreak of food-borne illness triggered what can only be described as a frantic scramble by health officials to discover its source. Inevitably, the wrong lead is followed or a recall is too late or too narrow to prevent further illnesses, and the government has to defend itself against withering criticism. Americans expect more from the experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and their counterparts at the Department of Agriculture, but the simple truth is that they are ill-equipped to deliver. The food safety system typifies the debilitated state of the entire regulatory system that Americans rely upon to protect their health, safety, and environment. The five “protector agencies” - FDA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - all grapple with hefty responsibilities to protect the American public from constantly evolving hazards.The agencies have done an adequate job of eliminating or managing the basic hazards of modern industrial society. Every new car has seatbelts and passive restraints, the use of lead in gasoline and residential paint has been eliminated, and air quality has improved in many areas. Unfortunately, this progress has been marred by a series of high-profile failures. OSHA has failed to prevent musculoskeletal injuries, the leading cause of workplace illness; billions of consumer products enter the country from foreign manufacturing sites that are never inspected by product safety specialists; and the EPA is just beginning to map out a strategy for combating climate change, a threat that could eliminate 40 percent of species and lead to the relocation of hundreds of millions of people by the turn of the century. The agencies’ inability to act swiftly and decisively in the last several decades is largely the result of four problems: Severe shortfalls in funding, outdated authorizing statutes, political interference, and an aging, demoralized civil service. Regulatory dysfunction begins with funding gaps that defeat agency efforts to fulfill the statutory mandates assigned by Congress. These shortfalls, which push the agencies into a state of constant default on their most important missions, are compounded by congressional neglect of its oversight and reauthorization responsibilities. With two exceptions - the Consumer Product Safety Commission Improvement Act and the FDA Amendments Act of 2007 - Congress has made no effort to renew and update the statutes in at least two decades. Compounding these problems, the protector agencies operate under the watchful eye of White House political staff who frequently and freely substitute their own judgments for those of agency staff, offering a back door for special interests disappointed in decisionmaking by agency experts to exert inappropriate influence, most often behind closed doors. The solutions to these problems - statutory amendments, an improved budget process, decentralized decisionmaking, and civil service reforms - are not simple fixes. But the alternative is a regulatory system that reverts to a purely reactionary mode, leaving public health, safety, and environmental protection to the whims of the marketplace.