[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 108 (Tuesday, August 4, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H7008-H7011]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REQUIRING OSHA TO RECOGNIZE THAT ELECTRONIC FORMS AND PAPER COPIES
PROVIDE THE SAME LEVEL OF ACCESS TO INFORMATION
Mr. BALLENGER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the
bill (H.R. 4037) to require the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration to recognize that electronic forms of providing Material
Safety Data Sheets provide the same level of access to information as
paper copies and to improve the presentation of safety and emergency
information on such Data Sheets, as amended.
The Clerk read as follows:
H.R. 4037
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. ELECTRONIC ACCESS.
In the administration and enforcement of the regulation on
Hazard Communication, published at 29 C.F.R. Sec. 1910.1200,
the Secretary shall provide that an employer complies with
the requirement of maintaining and making readily accessible
to employees material safety data sheets (MSDS) for each
hazardous chemical if such employer makes the MSDS available
through electronic access, so long as--
[[Page H7009]]
(1) the electronic system for retrieving MSDS's is
reasonably and readily available to employees in their work
areas throughout their work shifts and to representatives of
the employees upon reasonable request;
(2) the electronic system is capable of providing a paper
copy of a retrieved MSDS without unreasonable delay;
(3) employees are adequately trained in the use of the
electronic system for retrieving MSDS's; and
(4) the electronic system provides a means of retrieving
information contained in MSDS's in case of a temporary power
or equipment failure or other emergency.
SEC. 2. DISPLAY OF SAFETY INFORMATION.
(a) General Rule.--Under the regulation on Hazard
Communication, published at 29 C.F.R. Sec. 1910.1200, each
chemical manufacturer, importer, or distributor shall
prominently display worker safety information described in
subsection (b) by either--
(1) attaching to the first page of each material safety
data sheet a container label (or facsimile thereof) which
includes, at a minimum, the information described in
subsection (b); or
(2) attaching to the first page of each material safety
data sheet the information described in subsection (b).
(b) Information.--The information required by subsection
(a) shall include--
(1) the manufacturer's, importer's, or distributor's name,
address, and emergency telephone number (including the hours
of operation);
(2) the identity of the chemical, using the trade name or
chemical name and potentially hazardous ingredients of the
chemical;
(3) appropriate hazard warnings, with immediate hazards
listed first;
(4) instructions for safe handling and precautionary
measures to avoid injury from hazards; and
(5) first aid instructions in case of contact or exposure
which require immediate treatment before medical treatment is
available.
Information required under paragraph (5) should be targeted
to the technical level of the audience and information
required by this subsection shall be presented with the least
technical language appropriate.
(c) Effective Date.--The requirements of subsection (a)
shall apply to material safety data sheets for new or
reformulated chemicals beginning 18 months after the date of
the enactment of this Act and shall apply to all other
material safety data sheets beginning 36 months after such
date.
SEC. 3. STUDY.
Not later that 90 days after the date of the enactment of
this Act, the Secretary of Labor shall initiate a study that
assesses and measures the comprehensibility of hazard
warnings to industrial workers. Upon completion of the study,
the Secretary shall prepare a report and make it available to
chemical manufacturers and importers which prepare material
safety data sheets.
SEC. 4. REPORT ON AGREEMENT.
The Secretary of Labor shall report to the House Committee
on Education and the Workforce and the Senate Labor Committee
upon United States entry into any international agreement
regarding the format or contents of material safety data
sheets or labeling of hazardous chemicals with
recommendations for changes to the requirements of this Act.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from
North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) and the gentleman from Indiana (Mr.
Roemer) each will control 20 minutes.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr.
Ballenger).
Mr. BALLENGER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may
consume.
First let me acknowledge and commend the two sponsors of H.R. 4037,
the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Granger) and the gentleman from Indiana
(Mr. Roemer). I appreciate the work that both of them and their staffs
have done in making this a bipartisan bill and in working with everyone
involved so that we can bring this bill to the House floor today.
OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard is one of OSHA's most important
but also most troublesome regulations. A lot of complaints that we hear
about, about the paperwork burden and the nit-picky paperwork
violations from OSHA are because of the Hazard Communication Standard.
The idea of the standard is a good one, to make sure that employers and
employees know what chemicals they are working with and how to safely
handle them. But the implementation of this standard has long been a
source of complaint, and OSHA has not been exactly quick to fix the
problems.
H.R. 4037 addresses two of the problems that have been the source of
these complaints for years. Under the Hazard Communication Standard,
each chemical product must have a Material Safety Data Sheet, or better
known as an MSDS that is written by the producer or importer of the
chemical, and which must contain a variety of information about the
chemical involved and the potential hazards it may present. Those
Material Safety Data Sheets, or MSDS, are then forwarded down through
the chain of commerce all the way to the retailer or user of the
product. Each employer who uses or sells any products containing
chemicals for which there have been any studies showing potential
health or safety hazards must maintain these Material Safety Data
Sheets in his or her workplace. OSHA estimates that there are over
650,000 chemical products covered by the Hazard Communication Standard.
Others have estimated that there are Material Safety Data Sheets in
circulation for over a million different products. Your typical small
business can easily have a couple of thousand of these MSDS Data Sheets
on hand. And an MSDS Data Sheet can easily be 10 or more pages long. It
is little wonder that failure to have all of the required MSDS Data
Sheets on hand has been one of the most frequently cited of all OSHA's
regulations.
The first part of H.R. 4037 makes clear that an employer's obligation
to have these Safety Data Sheets readily accessible may be met by
electronic access to the MSDS Data Sheets.
{time} 1030
The advantage of using the electronic system to access these sheets
are overwhelming, particularly for small employers. For a couple of
hundred dollars a year, a small businessman can subscribe to an
electronic service that maintains all of the MSDS sheets through which
he can instantly call up the desired information. Instead of going
through piles of paper and filing cabinets and looseleaf folders, the
employee can simply type in the name of the product and access the
information.
OSHA does not prohibit electronic systems from accessing material,
the safety data sheets, but the regulation and OSHA's enforcement
policy suggests that employers should maintain copies of MSDS sheets,
whether or not they are also in the electronic system. As a result,
many employers simply maintain paper copies, despite the fact that the
electronic system would be more useful and effective.
H.R. 4037 makes it clear that electronic access systems, whether
maintained in-house or by third parties, are permitted, so long as four
conditions are met: First, the electronic system is reasonably and
readily available to employees and upon request to union
representatives of the employees; second, the electronic system can
produce paper copies of the MSDS, if requested, without unreasonable
delay; third, employees are adequately trained in the use of the
electronic system; and, fourth, the electronic system provides a means
of retrieving information contained in the MSDS in case of temporary
power or equipment failure. Thus, for example, an employer whose
electronic system used as an Internet connection could receive
information contained in the MSDS via telephone in the event of
computer or power failure until the Internet connection is restored.
A second complaint about the hazard communications standard has been
the fact that the MSDS sheets are not easily used by most employees or
employers, both because of the amount of information they include and
because they are often written in technical language. Suppliers of
these MSDS point out that the sheets are used for a variety of
purposes, including emergency response personnel and health care
providers, so more detailed and technical information in the Material
Safety Data Sheet is important.
H.R. 4037 attempts to strike a balance between these two concerns. It
does not require change in either the format of the MSDS or in the type
of information provided by this MSDS. Instead, it requires that summary
emergency information with the information most useful to the employee
be attached to the front of the MSDS. That information is the same as
is often provided in the product label.
So the bill provides that either the label or the text of the label
should be attached to the front of the Material Safety Data Sheet. But
the label or the text of the label must include certain basic
information about chemicals, including emergency contacts.
Finally, concerns were raised about the effect of H.R. 4037 on
efforts under
[[Page H7010]]
way to reach an international agreement on a standardized form for
presenting information on chemicals. Now, I appreciate that concern,
and as we continue the move into the global marketplace, it makes sense
to standardize as much as possible the presentation of hazard
information.
On the other hand, we do not know at this point when the
international effort will conclude or what it might provide. So H.R.
4037 requires that the Secretary of Labor, if an international
agreement is reached, recommend to this committee and to the Senate
Labor Committee any changes in the law necessary to make it consistent
with international agreement.
Mr. Speaker, H.R. 4037 is a simple but important step towards
improving this OSHA regulation.
Again I want to thank the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer) and the
gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Granger) for their efforts to move this
bill, and I urge my colleagues to support this bill.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. ROEMER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
(Mr. ROEMER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. ROEMER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of this
common sense legislation. First of all, I, too, want to applaud the
gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) and the gentlewoman from
Texas (Ms. Granger) for their work and their cooperation and their
bipartisanship on this very common sense bill.
The bottom line, Mr. Speaker, for me is we need to work in a
bipartisan, common sense way to prevent the 6,000 people that are
killed in the workplace every year and the 70,000 workers that are hurt
in the workplace every year. There are things we can do, working across
the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, to use common sense, and in this
case technology, to prevent those deaths and those injuries.
This bill, I think, goes a long way toward providing that common
sense and that usage of technology by updating these MSDSs. We now can
encourage our small businesses and big businesses to use the CD-ROMs.
Instead of merely using what they have used over the decades and
through years and years of paperwork, the Material Safety Data Sheets,
that have all kinds of complexities and paperwork and sheets of data
that are faxed from one employer to another and back and forth, and you
cannot even read them once they are faxed back and forth, we want to
bring OSHA into the new century and the next century and use the kind
of technology, Internet services, fax-on-demand, electronic services,
and, yes, CD-ROMs, to make sure we try to use technology to prevent the
6,000 people that are killed every year and the 70,000 people that are
injured in the workplace. So this uses technology, and it uses it in a
very, very fair, common sense and efficient manner.
Secondly, we want to use the common sense with that technology to
prevent these injuries and deaths. Too often in these sheets of paper
we do not use common sense and things read ``avoid ocular contact.''
Avoid ocular contact? Why can we not just say ``keep out of the eyes.''
That is the kind of common sense language that I think we all need to
use, whether we are speaking on the House floor or whether we are
trying to prevent injury and death in the workplace.
So this bill goes a long way towards using that common sense, toward
permitting the use of technology and the Internet and CD-ROMs, and
toward working with a diverse group of people and interest groups in
this town and throughout the country.
We have worked with the AFL-CIO, we have worked with the Department
of Labor, we have worked with the Chemical Manufacturers Association
and the Small Business Coalition for MSDS reform led by the NFIB. All
of these groups have worked with the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms.
Granger) and the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) to put
together this bipartisan legislation and try to move this country
forward toward protecting our workers with technology and common sense.
So I strongly applaud this bipartisan work, this good work product,
this use of technology, this use of better English language to help our
workers understand the dangers of the workplace.
Finally, I want to conclude by saying, Mr. Speaker, that this is the
third bill this year where we have passed incremental changes to OSHA
that try to do things to ensure better morale, better productivity and
a safer workplace.
We passed H.R. 2877, which prohibited OSHA from setting quotas for
citations and fines. We should not have quotas for citations and fines.
This committee worked together to prohibit that practice.
We passed 2864, which allows state OSHA agencies to consult with
businesses to improve their safety programs. This kind of consultation
and proactive way, rather than just doing penalties, will also improve
the way OSHA tries to protect the workers with common sense and
technology and proactive ways of working with our businesses, rather
than just simply going in and fining them.
In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I want to say I am very proud to have
worked with the Republicans and Democrats to get this legislation up
before the body today. I am very proud to have worked in a bipartisan
way to pass two previous pieces of legislation that reflect the same
kind of things in this bill, the common sense and the use of
technology, and also very proud to do some things in this body that
reach out to States like Indiana and North Carolina, that reach out to
States like Texas and California and New York, to do what we all want
to do, increase productivity, keep this economy rolling along, and,
yes, protect the worker in the workplace. That is what this common
sense legislation will achieve.
I thank again the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Granger) and the
gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger), to the staff on my side
of the Committee on Education and the Workplace, and to my staff member
Ryan Dvorak for his hard work.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. BALLENGER. Mr. Speaker, I yield three minutes to the gentlewoman
from Texas (Ms. Granger).
(Ms. GRANGER asked and was given permission to revise and extend her
remarks.)
Ms. GRANGER. Mr. Speaker, many times on many occasions we come to
this floor in the hope of solving a crisis. Today we come in the hope
of preventing one. H.R. 4037 is a simple bill with a simple premise, to
protect the safety and security of America's workers.
Let me give you an example of how this bill will make a difference in
the lives of working people everywhere. Under current law, when a
chemical is spilled in the workplace, the workers have to plow through
a Material Safety Data Sheet to find instructions on how to clean up
the spill and minimize danger. Unfortunately, these forms are, as the
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer) said, generally written in legal
terms, not common sense terms, that can straightforwardly protect the
safety of our workers.
Our bill ensures that at the beginning of each MSDS form there will
be an emergency overview that lays out in layman's terms what needs to
be done in the case of a chemical spill in the workplace.
Moreover, our bill allows these important forms to be kept through an
electronic communication systems, like a fax-on-demand system, Internet
service or CD-ROM. These will make them more convenient, more
accessible, and, the most important thing, they will make them more
effective for our workers.
I want to thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Chairman
Ballenger) for his hard work on this issue and for his willingness to
bring this bill to the floor. I would also like to thank the gentleman
from Indiana (Mr. Roemer), who cosponsored this legislation with me,
and, as the Congressman said, in particular, we would like to thank our
staff, in my case Lisa Helfman who worked on my staff and Ryan Dvorak
on the staff of the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer), for their hard
work in bringing this forward.
We often speak of issues in terms of right or left. This is an issue
that is truly right versus wrong. It is right to give our workers the
protections they need, since it is always the right time to do the
right thing.
[[Page H7011]]
I urge my colleagues to pass H.R. 4037 today.
Mr. GOODLING. Mr. Speaker, H.R. 4037 makes two simple but important
changes to OSHA's regulation on Hazard Communication.
First, H.R. 4037 clarifies the law with regard to the acceptable use
of electronic systems for maintaining ``material safety data sheets,''
which employers are required to maintain and make available to
employees by the Hazard Communication standard.
To anyone who has looked at the amount of information required of the
typical business by the Hazard Communication standard, it should be
evident that an electronic system of keeping that information is
preferable to a paper system. And yet OSHA continues to suggest a
preference for paper copies of material safety data sheets by putting
conditions on the use of electronic systems that it does not put on
paper copies.
By encouraging employers, especially small employers, to use
electronic systems for maintaining material safety data sheets, H.R.
4037 will make a real impact in reducing OSHA's paperwork burden on
employers.
Second, H.R. 4037 requires that summary and emergency information be
attached to the front page of the material safety data sheet. This is
to make the information more useful and useable for employers and
employees.
Mr Speaker, I want to commend the sponsors of H.R. 4037,
Representative Granger and Representative Roemer, for their work on
this bipartisan bill, as well as Subcommittee Chairman Ballenger. H.R.
4037 will help make one Federal regulation a little more sensible and
compliance a little easier. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4037.
Mr. ROEMER. Mr. Speaker, today, the House of Representatives will
pass H.R. 4037, a bill of which I am an original cosponsor. I would
like to thank my colleagues, Representative Kay Granger and
Representative Cass Ballenger, and all of the cosponsors, for their
bipartisan efforts to help create and pass this common sense OSHA
reform legislation.
Under current law, every business in the country must maintain
documentation about the chemicals they keep at a work site. These
documents are called Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS's) and while
originally intended to provide critical health and safety information
about dangerous chemicals, they have become cumbersome technical
documents that can be up to twenty pages long, and are the causes of
frequent paperwork violation citations.
H.R. 4037 has three main points. First, it would allow businesses the
choice to access the information contained on an MSDS through
electronic communications services, like a fax-on-demand system,
internet service, or a CD-ROM. This type of service eliminates an
enormous amount of regulatory paperwork, while actually increasing
access to the information. Current MSDS service companies can provide
instantaneous access to critical chemical information, expert technical
advice, and coordination with emergency responders. The current paper
system can do none of those.
Second, H.R. 4037 would require all MSDS to have an emergency
overview at the beginning of the document that lists emergency
contacts, hazard warnings, and first aid information. This emergency
overview would allow both employers and employees to have immediate
access to the most critical information on an MSDS. Currently, this
information can be buried near the end of the document, behind pages of
confusing technical information.
Finally, the bill instructs the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) to conduct a study on the technical level of
language used to write MSDS's. Presently, some documents still say
things like: ``Avoid ocular contact,'' instead of: ``Keep out of
eyes.'' OSHA would make the results of their study available to MSDS
writers to provide guidance and improve their quality.
To achieve this bipartisan piece of legislation, we have worked in
good faith with every interested party to address the concerns of the
AFL-CIO, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Department of
Labor, and the small business Coalition for Material Safety Data Sheet
Reform. Again, I thank my colleagues for their cooperation and hard
work on H.R. 4037. I look forward to working with the Senate to ensure
its eventual enactment into law.
Mr. ROEMER. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I
yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. BALLENGER. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dickey). The question is on the motion
offered by the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) that the
House suspend the rules and pass the bill, H.R. 4037, as amended.
The question was taken; and (two-thirds having voted in favor
thereof) the rules were suspended and the bill, as amended, was passed.
A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
____________________