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«« Back to the FACOSH Page    Federal Advisory Council on Occupational Safety and Health U.S. Department of Labor + + + + + Federal Advisory Committe for Occupational Safety and Health + + + + + Thursday September 28, 2006 + + + + + Arlington, VA + + + + + The committee convened at 10:00 a.m. in room 2537-G on the 25th floor of 1100 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia, Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke, Jr., Chairman, presiding. Present: EDWIN G. FOULKE, JR. Chair W. COREY THOMPSON Vice-Chair FRANK DENNY Designee of R. Allen Pittman CURTIS BOWLING MILLY RODRIGUEZ DONALD BATHURST THOMAS GALASSI DIANE M. BRAYDEN Secretary SHELBY HALLMARK RICHARD WILLIAMS KEITH NELSON ROBERT LEE MARTIN VICKERS MEADOWS JOSE GONZALES Also Present: JIM MEREDITH SUEY HOWE JENNIFER SILK DAVID MARCINIAK CATHY OLIVER LAURA SEEMAN Attending: RANDY ERWIN BRIAN ROGERS BILL TUMBLIN W. CZAPLA MICHAEL THOMAS DAN GLUCKSMAN MARVIN GREENE JOAN FLYNN MARIA A. JONES SAMARA MOORE TONY PIERPOINT ALFRED POPE SANDY GUCHES LOUIS ROWE ART KAMINSKI ELLEN BYERRUM BARBARA QUINN SEAN CUSSON MELISSA TERLEY VENETA CHATMON ALICE JACOBSOHN BURL KELLER LaVEETA MOTEN WILLIAM BASS MIKKI HOLMES DAVID MARCINIAK STEPHEN WALLACE JIM STEVENS LEWIS LIGONE LITA ARNOLD JONATHAN MADDEN OWEN GREULICH STEPHEN ECK I-N-D-E-X     Call to Order      Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. 5 Introduction of FACOSH Members 9 Introduction of Attendees 11 Council Organization and Procedures      Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. 20 Election of FACOSH Vice Chair 21 Approval of April 12, 2005      Council Minutes 22 Program Updates      GAO Audit on Federal Workplace           Safety & Health                Diane Brayden 23      SHARE Initiative           Edwin G. Foulke, Jr./ Shelby Hallmark 32             i)   Progress to date              ii)   Proposed extension             (Question/Answer regarding SHARE)             iii)   Agency Recognition Program        Federal Agency Recordkeeping Change           Diane Brayden 64      Federal Agency Training Week           Diane Brayden 83      Pandemic Flu           Suey Howe/Jennifer Silk 94      Motor Vehicle Safety           Larry Liberatore 121 New Business 129      Facility Systems Safety   Program Updates (Continued)        Cooperative Programs           Cathy Oliver/Laura Seeman 150 Additional New Business 177 Adjourn   P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G (10:09 a.m.) SECRETARY FOULKE: Good morning. My name is Ed Foulke. I am Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Administration. I want to say, first of all, thank you to each and every member of the FACOSH Committee for being here today and agreeing to serve. I know that you probably have other things that you could be doing and probably have other duties that are always pressing, but we deeply appreciate you agreeing to take time out of your busy schedules to participate in this committee. And this is a very important committee in that what we do here in our -- as part of -- is helping to make sure that federal employees have a safe and healthy workplace. Hopefully, what we do will allow additional things, changes and best practices or whatever that will allow to reduce injuries, illnesses and fatalities in the government. And that's really an important thing when you think about it -- the opportunity to try to help allow -- to do something that will actually help allow employees and workers to go home each and every night back to their families safe and sound. So it is an important charge, and I just want to say thank you very much for agreeing to serve on this committee. Also, I'd like to recognize that the this is Labor Heritage Month, and in recognition of that, AFGE Local 12 has provided coffee and donuts and food for this meeting, so we deeply appreciate that, too. The notice of today's meeting was published in the September 8, 2006 Federal Register. A copy of that notice is included in each of the members' packets along with a copy of the accompanying OSHA trade news release. The agenda which is in on the second page is included. That outlines the topics to be discussed at today's proceedings, and copies are also available for the other attendees in the audience. And I'd like to thank all the attendees that are here today for showing interest in this important area, too. Also in your meeting materials is documents relating to a program topic which we will be discussing today as well as a booklet that we have been asked to provide to you on emergency preparedness for individuals with disabilities, and I think that's this right here (indicating) here at the front of the desk. Before we move on to the next item on the agenda, I'm going to ask is Keith Pendergrass here? There is back in the back there. Keith works here at MSHA, and I must admit you all have a nicer view than I have at down at 200 Constitution Avenue. Keith is going to go over the emergency evacuation and shelter in place here at the facility. MR. PENDERGRASS: Good morning, everyone. I am Keith Pendergrass. I'm with the Facilities and Property Management branch here. Welcome to 1100 Wilson Boulevard and to my Safety and Health. I'm going to give you first of all the two most important things, where to eat and the bathrooms. They're next door, and you need a code to get into them, and the code's are posted on the walls. As far as eating food, we have a cafeteria down on the mall, and we have a couple of little eateries down on the lower mall. And if you want to go to some place like Chipotle's, we have that across the street. Blimpie's is across the street. And McDonald's is just around the corner by the subway. Now for emergency evacuations, if we should happen to have an incident, there will be an alarmed sounded, an audible alarm, and they will tell you to evacuate the building. The evacuation routes are both stairwells. One is located just back here (indicating). When you go out, just turn to the right, and you'll see a sign saying Exit. Take the steps all the way down, and it will let you out right here on this side of the building. Once you get outside, just cross the street to Rosslyn Plaza, which if you look out the window, you can see it. The second set of stairwells are right over here next to Strayer, and they're to the left. Once you get passed the elevator lobby, just turn to the left, and you'll see this exit for the stairwell. Take that down, and that will take you to the same spot as this set of stairwells. And then just proceed over to Rosslyn Plaza, check in with whoever is over there, and let them know that you're here. If you have a list of all the attendees, let them know that everybody is present, of ir anybody is missing or if anybody is still in the building. As far as emergency holding rooms, the emergency holding areas are within MSHA suites, and you actually will need a card key. But in case of an emergency, there is someone who sits near both doors. Just knock on the door, they'll let you in. There are two rooms, one on each side of the building, and they're right as you go through the glass doors. As far as shelter in place for this floor, we have one large library that's also located in MSHA space. If we have a shelter posture 2, that's where you would go to. In case there is a shelter in place, posture 1, everybody will remain here. We just keep the windows closed, and somebody will be up to give you further directions and see if you need anything. That is basically it as far as the evacuations. Usually, if it's a fire, they'll evacuate the floor above and floor below. So if you hear an alarm and it goes off on this floor, then it is for this floor. If you do not hear it on this floor, then it's not for this floor, and it's probably for the floors above us. In that case, everybody just stays put. And I think that's it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll let you know. Thank you. SECRETARY FOULKE: Okay. Thank you, Keith. I appreciate it. I think what we'll do first is to kind of start off by introducing each of the members of the Council, and then also what we'll do, I'd like to have the other attendees here to introduce themselves, too. When we get to that point. I think there's a wireless mic so we can record this, we have a -- what I'd like to do is everyone, if you would, please state your name, your official title, the organization you represent, and for the Council members here, indicate whether you are a member or you are a designated alternate. My name is, like I said, Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. I am Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, and I am also, under the FACOSH charter, designated the Council Chair. MS. BRAYDEN: I'm Diane Brayden. I'm the Director of OSHA's Office of Federal Agency Programs. MR. HALLMARK: Shelby Hallmark. I'm the Director of the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs, and I guess I'm sort of the ex officio member of the committee. SECRETARY FOULKE: Why don't we go this way? MR. THOMPSON: Corey Thompson. I'm the National Safety and Health Specialist for the American Postal Workers Union, and I am a member. MR. WILLIAMS: Rich Williams, Chief Health and Medical Officer, NASA, and I'm a member. MR. NELSON: Keith Nelson, Assistant Secretary for Administration at HUD, and I'm a member. MR. MARTIN: Robert Martin, Assistant to the President, Organizing Director of Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, and I'm a member of the Council. MS. MEADOWS: Vickers Meadows. I'm the Chief Administrative Officer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and I'm a member. MR. GONZALES: Jose Gonzales, Supervisor, Immigration Enforcement Agent, and I'm a member. SECRETARY FOULKE: Thank you. MR. DENNY: My name is Frank Denny. I'm the Acting Director for Occupational Safety and Health for Department of Veterans Affairs here for Mr. Pittman who is a member. I am not. MR. BOWLING: I'm Curtis Bowling. I'm the Director for Environmental Radiance and Safety, Department of Defense. I am a member. MS. RODRIGUEZ: I'm Milly Rodriguez. I'm the Health and Safety Specialist of the American Federation of Government Employees, and I'm a member. MR. BATHURST: I'm Don Bathurst. I'm the Chief Administrative Officer for the Department of Homeland Security, and I'm a member. MR. GALASSI: Tom Galassi, Deputy Director, Directorate of Enforcement Programs, not a member. SECRETARY FOULKE: All right. Why don't we go ahead and start in the back there, and just, you know, if you would just tell us your name and your organization. MS. WALKER: Hi. I'm Michelle Walker. I am Team Leader in OSHA's Office of Federal Agency Programs. MS. MILLS: Laura Mills. Again, OSHA Office of Federal Agency Programs. MR. LeGAINIER: Louis LeGainier, Office of Federal Agency Programs. I'm an Industrialist Hygienist. MS. HOLMES: Mikki Holmes, Office of Federal Agency Programs. MR. WALLACE: Steven Wallace, EHSD Program Manager, Treasury. MR. VAND: I'm Richard Vand, Director of Employee Safety and Health with MSHA. MR. STEVENS: Jim Stevens, Safety Director, Department of Agriculture. MS. ARNOLD: I'm Lita Arnold with the Transportation Security Administration. MR. GREULICH: Owen Greulich, Pressure and Energenics System Safety Manager, NASA. MR. ROHT: Louis Roht, Deputy, Safety and Health, National Park Service. MR. MEREDITH: Jim Meredith, Safety and Occupational Health Manager, Department of the Interior. MS. GUCHES: Sandy Guches, Chief of Safety and Occupational Health for Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior. MS. CHATMON: Vaneta Chatmon, Program Specialist, OSHA Office of Communications. MR. CHOPLA: David Chopla with Plexus Scientific and the Department of Defense Volunteer Protection Program Center of Excellence. MR. ROGERS: I'm Brian Rogers. I'm also with Plexus Scientific in the DoD VPP CX. MR. TUMBLIN: Bill Tumblin, Director of ESO Programs for Concurrent Technologies Corporation and the Voluntary Protection Program Center of Excellence for DoD. MR. MADDEN: Jonathan Madden, Associate Counsel, Seafarers International Union. MR. DICKERSON: Marvin Dickerson, Disaster Safety Officer for FEMA Occupational Safety and Health. MR. PIERPOINT: Tony Pierpoint, Department of Homeland Security. MS. BYERRUM: Ellen Byerrum, Reporter with BNA. MS. TURLEY: Melissa Turley. I'm a reporter with Federal Human Resources Week. MR. KELLER: Burl Keller, Supervisory Safety Specialist wit GSA National Capital Region. MR. MARCINIAK: Dave Marciniak, Safety and Health Manager for GSA. MR. POLK: Alfred Polk with GSA. MR. COSSEN: Sean Cossen, Government Affairs Coordinator of the VPP Participants Association. MS. QUINN: Barb Quinn, Contract Support for FAA Headquarters EI Services Group. MR. BASS: Bill Bass, Safety and Occupational Health Manager for the Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Department of the Interior, and home of the Superbowl champs. MS. MOTEN: LaVeeta Moten with Department of Interior Office of Surface Mining. I'm Program Analyst/Collateral Duty Safety Officer. MR. ALDRICH: Robert Aldrich, Office of the Solicitor, Department of Labor. MR. ECK: Steven Eck, Safety and Occupational Health Manager for the Department of Justice. MR. THOMAS: Michael Thomas, Federal Aviation Administration, Office of Environment, Energy and Employee Safety Policy. MR. KAMINSKY: Art Kaminsky, Assistant for Safety, Health and Fire, designated alternate for DoD. MR. GLUCKMAN: Last but not last, Dan Glucksman, International Safety Equipment Association. SECRETARY FOULKE: Great. Thank you all very much, and I appreciate you being here for the meeting. It was interesting -- I'll just kind of give you a little bit of background on myself. Let's see, tomorrow I guess I'll have been the Assistant Secretary for six whole months, so I'm still kind of learning where everything is. But I've been involved with Safety and Health for about 25 years from a legal perspective. And in the first Bush administration, two years in the Clinton administration, I was the Chairman of the OSHA Review Commission, so I have a little familiarity with the federal government and workplace safety involving federal employees. You know, it was interesting. Last week I was in China. I had the opportunity -- had the honor to get invited to come speak at the Chinese Third International Safety and Health Expo. And they're just kind of changing, kind of moving into the safety and health area, but they are very much interested in what they're trying to do. And I met with the government officials from what the call SAWS, which is the State Administration for Work Safety, and this is the organization, I guess, as close as you can get to as a counterpart for OSHA in China. But they are very much interested in workplace safety and health for all their employees and including -- I talked a little bit since I knew I was having this meeting this week -- I asked them a little bit about their open involvement with their government employees, and they said they do take that very seriously and have been trying to work on it. It's interesting to see the comparison, though. I mean they have such a much longer history of civilization than we do. But, you know, OSHA's been in effect now for 35 years. We're celebrating our 35th anniversary this year. And, you know, in talking to the Chinese safety government officials, they're very much interested in finding out what we are doing in workplace safety and health, because they really want to learn from us, and I think this will give us an opportunity, working on this committee, maybe to provide them assistance and information that they can use in making their government employees safe. As a matter of fact, they are talking about coming over and doing an educational tour in '07 bringing some of a lot of their governmental officials within their of with them to look and see what we're doing in all areas of safety and health. So it was a very interesting dichotomy there that even though they had a very old culture, safety and health is kind of new to them, where safety and health, to a certain degree, is new to us in that we've only been doing it really, from the federal perspective, from a federal law and a coordinated law, for 35 years. But I think we have made great strides with respect to workplace safety and health. In 1971, when we were instituted or when we started, there were a little over 14,000 workplace fatalities countrywide. This past year in '05, we had 5,700 approximately fatalities. Now obviously that's a significant reduction, but it's even more significant when you recognize that, in fact, between '71 and now, the number of people in the workforce has more than doubled. But I think you would agree with me that even though we have reduced the number of fatalities, just having one fatality is one fatality too many. And we're going to work very hard to continue to try to reduce that with the ultimate goal of getting to zero fatalities in this country. And we've also had significant reduction in that 35 year period -- we've reduced injuries by 60 percent, and we've reduced illnesses by 40 percent I believe. But once again, the idea is still that we have a lot of people that are getting injured on the job and contracting occupational illnesses because of their work. And so whatever we can do here today to help reduce those numbers is a good thing and a very important thing. So I'll say again, I appreciate and I want to thank you again for your participation in the organization. I guess at this time, I'm going to spend a little bit and kind of do some more housekeeping stuff, I guess, is the best way to describe it, about the Council's organization and procedures and how it's organized and how it functions. In your packet, we have the FACOSH Articles of Incorporation, which addresses all these areas. The Council is a 16-member body comprised of an equal number of management representatives of federal departments and agencies and labor representatives appointed by the Secretary of Labor. This Council represents all new members appointed by the Secretary on June 6, 2006 for terms of one, two and three years. These staggered terms are meant to reestablish the continuality of the Council since the terms of the Council members all expired simultaneously about last year. As your membership expires, the succeeding members will be appointed to a three-year term so that one-third of the membership will expire annually. The purpose of FACOSH is to advise the Secretary on matters relating to occupational safety and health of federal employees. As I mentioned earlier, I, as the Secretary designee chairs the Council and will call and preside at all of our meetings. If for any reason, I am unable to attend a meeting, the Vice Chair will act in my absence. The Vice Chair is to be elected under the Articles of Incorporation by the members to serve on an annual calendar year basis. This position will rotate between agency and labor members. The office was last held by a management on the last council, so only labor representatives are now eligible to serve in this capacity. In a few moments, I will take a formal vote to elect a Vice Chair. Because of the unique relationship between OSHA and OWCP, I've also invited Shelby to participate, and as he noted, he is the ex officio member of the Council, as he has done on preceding councils. And you did a really good job, I understand, but, you know, so -- MR. HALLMARK: Thank you, sir. SECRETARY FOULKE: We are required to hold at least two meetings each calendar year including the annual meeting. And I am very much committed to this. I know in the past, we've had some problems on a lot of the advisory committees on meeting, so I am very much committed in making sure that the committees meet and that we meet at least the minimum number that we're required. To convene a meeting we must have a quorum of at least six members or alternates with a minimum of three management and three labor representatives. Alternates must be designated by the member, in writing, to me as Chairperson, which we have previously requested from each member. The parliamentary procedures as outlined in the Robert's Rules of Order will be followed at all meetings of the Council. Resolutions require a majority vote by members or alternates in attendance. Is there any question on the make-up of the Council or how it will function by any of the members? (No verbal response.) SECRETARY FOULKE: At this time then, we will elect a Vice Chair, and I would like to enter a motion to nominate W. Corey Thompson, Jr. as the FACOSH Vice Chair. Mr. Thompson represents the American Postal Workers Union AFL-CIO and has been an active member of the Council in the past previously serving a three-year term. Because of his dedication and commitment and proven leadership in the safety and health field, the Secretary has appointed Mr. Thompson to serve a second three-year term on the Council. Mr. Thompson has expressed a willingness to serve in this capacity, and I appreciate you're willing to do that. Are there any other nominees for the position of Vice Chair? Hearing none, I would ask for a vote to say all in favor of Mr. Corey Thompson to serve as FACOSH Vice Chair, please signify it by saying aye. (Chorus of ayes.) SECRETARY FOULKE: All opposed, nay? (No response.) SECRETARY FOULKE: The ayes have it. Congratulations. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Let the record show that W. Corey Thompson has been elected by the membership to serve as Vice Chair of the Council for the calendar year 2007. If you will turn to the Minutes. All right, the draft minutes of the April 12, 2005 FACOSH commission were previously emailed to you, and one modification was requested. An updated copy of the minutes is included in your packet. Based on a staff review of the official transcript, I attest that these minutes accurately reflect the discussion of the Council at its April 12, 2005 meeting. Therefore, I will entertain a motion that these minutes be accepted as written and incorporating any other changes. First of all let me ask you, are there any changes to the April 12, 2005 minutes by any Council members? Hearing none, then I will entertain a motion from someone to accept the minutes as written. MR. WILLIAMS: So moved. SECRETARY FOULKE: Mr. Williams, okay. Thank you. Is there a second? MR. GONZALES: Second that. SECRETARY FOULKE: Seconded. All in favor of approving the minutes of April 12, 2005, please signify by saying aye. (Chorus of ayes.) SECRETARY FOULKE: All opposed, nay. (No response.) SECRETARY FOULKE: The ayes have it. The minutes of April 12, 2005 have been approved. With respect to program updates, we have seven program matters to discuss today, and the first report we're going to discuss is the GAO Audit on Federal Workplace Safety and Health. In April of 2006, the Government Accounting Office, GAO, published a final report on how OSHA can improve its oversight of federal agency safety and health programs. I have asked Diane to talk to you about the GAO findings, their recommendations, the OSHA Statement of Executive Action and Response to their report, and anything else you want to talk about on that. So I'm going to turn it over to you. MS. BRAYDEN: Thank you, Ed. I think many of you are aware that the GAO did a rather extensive audit of the state of worker safety and health in the federal sector. The audit was done because federal Workers' Compensation costs exceeded $1.5 billion dollars in 2004 with approximately 148,000 new claims filed that year. The audit was initiated due to concerns both for the safety of federal workers and for the costs associated with the unsafe workplaces. This audit, I believe, took place over a period of about 18 months, and in the course of the audit, GAO surveyed 57 agencies and found that most reported having at least some activity in each of the six components generally associated with good safety programs. These components include management commitment, employee involvement, education and training, identification of hazards, correction of identified hazards, and medical management including a return to work program for injured workers. GAO also found that agencies faced implementation challenges in the areas of data management, accountability and safety resources. In the findings of the report, they stated that many agencies do not have automated systems to track employee training, and several agencies did not hold their managers accountable for maintaining effective safety programs. Many agencies also admitted that due to limited resources, they often depend on safety officers with limited professional safety experience. The bulk of the report addressed OSHA's oversight of the safety and health programs and policies in the government. The report alleged that OSHA's oversight was less effective than it could be due to not using enforcement and Compliance Assistance resources in a strategic manner. There were four basic findings that they came out with. First, that OSHA did not conduct a large number of inspections of federal worksites and did not have a national strategy for targeting worksites with high injury and illness rates for inspection. The second finding was that OSHA did not track disputed violations to resolution or refer unresolved disputes to the President. Thirdly, it stated that reports on the status of safety and health that are due to the President each year were overdue. And lastly, it reported that OSHA's Compliance Assistance programs designed to help agencies comply with its regulations and improved safety were not being fully utilized. In summary, the GAO stated that OSHA faces a number of challenges in monitoring federal agency safety programs and, over time, has adapted its methods to try to make the most of its resources. However, OSHA's oversight could be further strengthened if it took a more strategic approach says the GAO. It recommended that the Secretary of Labor should direct OSHA to take certain actions. First, OSHA should develop a targeted inspection program for federal worksites based on the new worker injury and illness data federal agencies are required to collect. They suggested that be done by requiring the agencies to report summaries or relevant portions of that data in their annual reports or by obtaining the data from the agencies through period selected surveys. The second recommendation was that OSHA should track violations disputed by federal agencies to their resolution and ensure that the unresolved disputes are reported to the President. The third recommendation was that OSHA should conduct evaluations for the largest and most hazardous federal agencies as required and to use evaluations, inspection data and annual reports submitted by federal agencies to assess the effectiveness of their safety programs and to include that assessment of each agency's worker safety program and recommendations for improvement in Department of Labor's report to the President. OSHA responded to that report in the following way: We found that several of the weaknesses that were identified in the report had been recognized by OSHA prior to the initiation of the GAO survey and plans for initiating new approaches to enhance OSHA's effectiveness were in various stages of development. Additionally, in some cases, there seemed to be some confusion in the survey results which led to misleading findings. So OSHA responded to the three recommendations for executive action in the following ways: The first recommendation had been to develop a targeted inspection program. OSHA's Office of Federal Agency Programs has been struggling for some time to develop a targeted inspection program directed toward the most dangerous workplaces. We fully recognize the need to do so. The problem is that sources of data for injuries and for workplace employment have been and remain incompatible. This makes the determination of injury rates for individual worksites impossible. Recognizing that there is a serious need for a national targeting program, we have attempted to develop such a program which is presently undergoing departmental review. This program would be based on injury rates at the departmental level or independent agency level, because we do have rates at that level. We simply do not have rates at the individual worksite level. This process would be a short-term fix to carry us over until we find a way to access site-specific injury and employment data making it possible to accurately identify and address the workplaces that are posing the greatest degree of risk to workers. The second gap noted by GAO, which was the failure to track appealed violations, was largely due to misunderstandings. All notices of violation that are issued to federal agencies are tracked in the same tracking system as are the citations that are issued to private sector employers. Therefore, if the data is entered properly into that system, all notices are tracked as to status through appeal and to closure. However, the appeal process for the federal sector does differ from the contest process for the private sector, which apparently led to some errors in data entry. Nevertheless, we did note that we could improve our internal tracking of appealed cases within the Office of Federal Agency Programs, which is the point at which the appealed cases go for OSHA-level resolution. So we have developed an internal tracking system so that as we receive a case on appeal, we will enter the case into that system so we have a very condensed, consolidated database to follow so we will know what we have that we need to be addressing. So we did make improvements there. The third recommendation by GAO was to conduct annual federal agency evaluations. Due to staffing limitations, OSHA has not conducted full scope field evaluations of agencies during the past several years. We will be looking at the possibility of re-instituting agency-level onsite reviews at some time in the future. However, for the moment, we are enhancing our use of other tools at our disposal to address this issue. In this regard, we have been working diligently to increase the staff in the Office of Federal Agency Programs and are pleased with the progress we have made during the past year. In fiscal 2006, we brought one certified safety professional and two highly skilled Program Analysts. My staff that is present here has already introduced themselves, but Mikki Holmes in the red there and Laura Mills are the two new Program Analysts that we have on our staff, and they have really hit the road running and are doing a great job for us at this time. With this new challenge on Board, we plan to apply a significantly higher level of analysis to the annual reports and where serious deficiencies are identified, they will be addressed and noted in the report to the President as was recommended by GAO. Very shortly, the request for agency annual reports will be sent to the DASHOs of each department and independent agency. You will find the information requested this year considerably more extensive than what was asked for in the past. In addition to requesting the more specific data, including some OSHA 300 summary results, if they are available, we are also asking for agency feedback on certain issues of interest or concern to allow us to begin developing meaningful and practical methods of addressing more fully some of the gaps identified by the GAO. For instance, we will be asking about the manner in which the agency has implemented the new OSHA 300 record-keeping and how that system is managed. Is it an electronic system? What all can the system do? Would you be interested in a common system for all federal agencies for the accumulation of the OSHA 300-type data. We are also asking for information about the agencies' use of volunteers and how the injuries experienced by that subset of employees is being managed at this time. You will be pleased to learn that the annual reports to the President are current at this time. In an effort to maintain the state of timeliness of the annual reports to the President that we have worked so hard to achieve, the annual report request that goes out to the agencies will be asking for your reports to be due by January 1st, which is the regulatory deadline from 29 CFR 1960.71(a)(1). Unless we follow the mandate in the Regulation, OFAP will not be able to conduct the analyses we have committed to while still compiling the report and getting it to the President by our deadline as prescribed in 1960.71(b). In summary, OSHA has been working diligently to use the insight provided in the GAO report to reinforce our support to the federal agencies and to assure the federal employees the most safe and healthful working environment possible. In this regard, you can expect to be asked that more comprehensive and detailed information be provided in your annual reports. Meanwhile, we will be working toward an efficient and effective means of gathering establishment-specific information to be used as a tool in focusing our enforcement and evaluation efforts. SECRETARY FOULKE: Thank you. Does anybody have any -- do any of the members have any questions about the GAO report or OSHA's response to that or anything we're doing on that? (No verbal response.) SECRETARY FOULKE: On thing I know we are trying to look to do more federal worksite inspections, and one of the things that I've instituted among our regional administrators is going to be a flash report which will indicate -- give me pretty much, at least on a monthly basis, the number of federal site inspections that we are doing. And I do have the goal of basically trying to make sure that an appropriate number, at least, of inspections of federal worksites are conducted by our OSHA investigators. So, hopefully, you're going to see a little bit more activity in this area and that that will also be helpful to you. The second report is dealing with the SHARE Initiative, which is the Safety, Health and Return to Employment Initiative, and it goes by SHARE. I think we got a little PowerPoint presentation there. Shelby's going to help me. We've actually done this a couple of times. As you can see, the SHARE Initiative is a federal executive branch initiative which was announced by Presidential Memo back in January 9, 2004. It was intended to go through this fiscal year, and we have requested -- both Shelby and myself have made presentations to the Secretary to recommend to the President that the SHARE Initiative be extended for an additional three years, because, as the results that you'll see, I think, are very impressive and demonstrate the worthwhileness of the program or the initiative. As you see, the emphasis is on the Return to Employment programs and it ran through this fiscal year, and it basically establishes four goals, two of which are under OSHA's purview and two are under OWCP's review. The four goals are one, to reduce the total case rates by at least three percent per year; to reduce the lost-time case rates by at least three percent per year. The third goal was to improve the timely filing of injury and illness notices by at least five percent per year, and the fourth goal was to reduce the rates of lost productive days due to injuries and illnesses by at least one percent per year. And the SHARE goals are basically aligned with the President's Management Agenda goals on human capital, and also aligns with the Department of Labor Strategic Goals; one, to foster a quality of workplaces that are safe, healthy and fair and to minimize the impact on work-related injuries. And it aligns with OSHA's mission to promote and assure workplace safety and health and to reduce workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses. Under SHARE, the Department of Labor's role is first to lead the initiative, also to provide assistance to all federal agencies, then to also measure the performance of each department and agency against their goal, and then to report annually to the President. And going now to basically seeing where we've been tracking the goals here, the first goal, as I mentioned, the number one goal is dealing with total case rates. And as you can see, the baseline for Fiscal Year '03 was about 4.25. In '04, our goal was basically about 4, and we did not meet our goal in '04 for the entire federal government. On '05, we basically reached our goal. We were slightly above it, but just basically we were very close to reaching it. And then '06, we actually have, through the third quarter, and based on the initial numbers that begin for the fourth-quarter -- as you can see through the first three quarters of fiscal '06, we are on track to actually meet our goals by a fairly significant amount considering that we hadn't met the goals the last two times. With respect to goal number one, here it is by some, but not all, of the agencies that we have on. And this is for Fiscal Year '06. As you can see, goal versus actual. And you can see, for the most part, almost all the agencies, all the departments within the government, have met their goals. I think you can see why. One of the reasons we've actually kind of -- actually are going to meet our goal and actually exceed our goal in case rates is the dramatic increase that the Department of Homeland Security has done. They've done a yeoman's job on addressing their issues, and I think they realize that -- they went trough a lot of growing pains, and I think we were pretty excited about the reduction there. But you can see where we are, and we're going to keep focusing on all the agencies to continue to reduce it government wide. Our goal number two on lost time case rates, once again, we did not -- we had a baseline of about almost 1.75 in '04. In '05, once again, we did not make our goals. But as you can see for Fiscal Year '06 through the third quarter, and looking at the data we have on fourth quarter, it looks like we will meet our goal federal government wide less the postal service for Fiscal Year '06. Once again, with respect to goal number two dealing with lost time case rates, these are the major agencies for '06 goal versus actual. And once again, you can see we've done a good job of reducing our lost time case rates, but we obviously still have some work to be done. So. MR. HALLMARK: Okay. As Ed said, the third and fourth goals are monitored by OWCP since they focus more on the what happens if injuries do occur side. And it's important -- and I've spoken to this group several times about SHARE -- it's important to keep the two issues linked, because obviously we want to stop injuries, and that's the whole point of the safety program, but injuries will always occur, and it's important that we take care of the individuals and make them whole when they do occur. The goal number three is particularly apt in that regard, but that's focused on timeliness of submission of claims. One of the reasons why my organization really wanted to have this goal included in the Presidential Initiative is to address one of the issues that GAO talked about -- could in fact agencies be inclined t meet the goal by not filing the claims, in effect by fudging the numbers, if you will. This goal focuses on the fact that when a claim, when an injury occurs, you must get the injury notice in quickly and that, I hope and I believe, contrary to anything that GAO may have suggested, has resulted in a tremendous improvement in this whole area. Agencies have gotten their act together, and the data show it. About ten years ago, OWCP started talking with the agencies about the problem of getting claims in timely. At that time, the national average across all the agencies was in the 30 percent range, 30, 35 percent. And that's within 14 days. In our day and time, a completely abysmal product. We started talking about that. The agencies started looking at their processes. Many agencies have done a lot of work on this and have reorganized different ways to try to get it done. And once the Initiative has kicked in, you'll see that we've made tremendous progress, and I'm really very pleased about this. We can go to the next slide, Michelle. This breaks it out by the individual agencies, and I would just note here that, again, Homeland Security deserves a tremendous amount of credit for the very substantial improvement there that they've made against the goal in 2006. I believe Homeland Security went to use of the Department's SHIM system, which allows for an electronic submission of claims. And that is a big help in getting these claims in quickly. It's not the only answer, because obviously somebody's got to get that electronic transmission going. But obviously it does help, and several agencies that have gone electronic have improved. The Labor Department uses, of course, it's own SHIM system and continues to be the leader on that particular measure. The lost production day goal is a little bit -- this is my favorite goal, actually. Since I made it up, I like it. But I think the reason why I really like it is because both the safety side of the house can accomplish this goal by avoiding injuries happening in the first place, so you don't lose days if the injury doesn't happen, and the FICA case management side of the house can address it by making that process work well and getting the return to work process going so that people are made whole and get back to work quickly. So it's a really nice metric that shows the integration of those two sides of the house, which don't always talk with each other as much as we'd like. It's also a very difficult goal, because unlike safety, which can address major areas across the board in broad management approach, case management is an individual person-by-person activity, and it really takes hard work and intensive focus. That's why this is, I think, the most difficult goal, and it's one that's clearly been difficult for us in the last three years under SHARE. The first two years, we didn't make it at all. I think in '04 a big part of that shortfall was the startup of TSA and the difficulties that agency had in trying to get baggage moved in airports that weren't designed for that kind of activity. '05 looked a lot better but still short and, again, as Ed indicated, in Fiscal Year '06 through three quarters, and we bleive this is sufficient margin to carry us through in the fourth quarter as well, we are finally meeting the goal. So that means cumulatively all four goals for SHARE look as if they're going to be met,. and that's a tremendous accomplishment and one for which the folks in this room deserve credit. Just breaking this out a little bit on lost production days by agency. We have a couple that are struggling. DHS is still struggling on this and that, I think, largely goes to the fact that at TSA and a number of the law enforcement entities, it's very difficult to find return to work and make that process happen. It's not impossible, and we're certainly working with DHS, and they've been working with us. But that's a challenge. Justice has the same problem. Bureau of Prisons is the major contributor to their shortfall. Again, a difficulty in finding places for people to go back to work. But most of the agencies are making significant improvements. I'd like to specifically cite the Defense Department, which has really done well in this area and has a very effective program. So that's sort of the rack up of the data and, Ed, if you want to talk about these issues. SECRETARY FOULKE: Why don't you go ahead. MR. HALLMARK: What can DOL -- DOL obviously, as Ed indicated, is the entity asked by the President to monitor and lead the SHARE initiative, and we in OWCP spend a lot of time and effort as we can in our management structure to help on this. First of all, obviously to capture the data that's used to track these accomplishments against the metrics. And in my view, that's job number one, because if you don't know where you are, you can't make improvements. And I think at this time of the year, when we're all sitting down trying to figure out whether we met our GPRA goals and our performance goals for our personal evaluations, metrics become very important. They also can become anxiety producing, but they are the reason why people get better. Because you look at those numbers, and you have a clear understanding of where you're reality is and you need to get better. So we've done that. We've put it up on our Web site. We apologize that our Web site was out of commission for the last several weeks due to some serious security breaches, but it's back up now. Knock on something. And we really encourage everyone to use that data. Obviously, we also do a lot of outreach. OWCP and I know OSHA as well have addressed inter-agency meetings that we convene, FEB meetings around the country where agencies are getting together, joint management union meetings where we can to try to get this word out. Because SHARE and all of these goals are things that I think everybody on both sides of the LMR fence can sign up to and work hard to accomplish. And that is, I think, very important as well, and we feel strongly about that. We do in OWCP, and I know OSHA does as well, workshops on how best to train your folks to address these issues, especially in the difficult FICA area for us. We try to get out and respond to requests from agencies to get these training courses in so that their injury comp folks can be up to speed, and we're continuing working with them on that here through our national office folks and our regional staff. Newsletters, training, technical assistance, all of those things are available. Ed, I don't know if you want to or Diane wants to expound on the OSHA side of that. SECRETARY FOULKE: I think we can move on. MR. HALLMARK: The next slide talks about the future. The President's Initiative for 2004 through 2006 is over on Saturday. We believe that the progress that was shown in 2006 especially makes it clear that it's appropriate to continue this effort. We have made really good strides, but if you look at the base numbers, they're still not acceptable. We still have a very large number of injuries in the federal workplace, and the lost production days number, which is how many days actually get lost because of workplace injury and illness, per 100 FTD is about 52 right now. That means if you figure we have about 2 million employees covered by this Initiative, that's roughly 1 million lost days every year. One million lost days, I would submit, is way too many, and in our view, that suggests that we need to get this project extended and get those targets out in front of us again so that we can, in fact, make further progress. Ed, do you want to speak to that? SECRETARY FOULKE: Yes. Well, we are definitely going to be -- the Secretary -- like I said earlier, the Secretary had requested -- had made the recommendation to the President to extend the initiative through FY '09 basically maintaining all the 2003 baseline goals. Also, as I indicated, the Secretary has forwarded it to the White House for their consideration. Hopefully, they're going to -- we've been pushing very hard. We sent that up a week ago or two, two weeks ago, I believe to the White House and trying to see if we can get it finalized in the White House and approved for the start on October 1st of this year. MR. HALLMARK: As Ed said, we're really trying to get this signed off and out to the agencies quickly. Those of you who were around in 2004 know that the Initiative started in January which made it rather difficult to charge ahead in Fiscal Year 2004 since most of it was -- or a lot if it was already behind us, so we want to avoid that. We want to make sure that people know that we're moving ahead and that this is, in fact, going to be a continuing undertaking. I suspect most people felt like that was probably going to happen, and I certainly hope that the President agrees that it's appropriate. The only things that we're really doing in terms of changes the goals is we're making a couple of adjustments in goal three and four, primarily aimed at avoiding sort of inappropriate results. In goal three, we're putting sort of a cap on the top, and I'm responding, in part, to my own Assistant Secretary for Administration, who is unhappy that if he has to keep making a 5 percent improvement of 98 percent, he's going to have to go crazy. So we've said 95 percent is an acceptable cap, and I think that's a reasonable outcome. But we're also saying that the 5 percent increase every year is not enough for those agencies that are still down in the 30's and 40's. We're proposing to set a minimum of 50 percent in 2007, so that, in effect 50, percent timeliness is really not that hard, and anything less than that is, in my view, completely unacceptable. And then we would move that minimum up each year. For most agencies, that's not going to come into play, because you're already in the 70, 80, 90 percent range now, and that's fine. But there are a few agencies that haven't really focused on this issue, and we'd like to send that signal that getting half of them in in two weeks is really not that hard. With regard to goal four, lost production days; again, a lot agencies that had very low injury rates are going to have a very difficult time continually reducing those injury rates, especially the small agencies that only have a few employees. So we're proposing to set a sort of a base level of performance of 15 lost days as being a, you know, you don't need to get better than 15 lost days and continually improve from a level that's really quite good. So those are the changes. They're really just tweaks to the metric as opposed to anything fundamental. And that's what's on the table now for the President to consider. SECRETARY FOULKE: I don't know if any of the Council members have any questions about the SHARE initiative. As you can see from the data, clearly it has been successful. It is working and doing what was envisioned that it would do when it was implemented. Once again, as I mentioned before, we want to try to continue to move forward on reducing our injuries and illnesses as best we can. And one thing I will say from an OSHA standpoint, is that, of course, we do have a lot of tools and resources that we can help provide to agencies and departments within the government. I really sincerely want to do that. I'm probably going to be sending out a letter to, or maybe the Secretary will, offering assistance to the departments and agencies within the government, whatever OSHA can do to provide that. If you have the opportunity to look on our OSHA Web site, I believe its one of the best Web sites in the government in providing a lot of practical information. We get a lot of complements from the private sector on this. But we want to try to assist and provide whatever resources we can to the agencies to further help them, first of all, achieve their goals, which is important. But the more we can do in just overall reducing injuries and illness even if we didn't have goals, we'd want to provide assistance in that. I don't know if anyone has any questions about that. Yes. MR. BOWLING: I just have a comment. I would lie to work with Shelby on the Web site on the way defense is rolled up in goals three and four. The Army, Navy and Air Force are now rolled up in the DoD total, and I just think it would be a better presentation if we do that showing DoD as all of DoD, including the services. So I'll work with you on that. MR. HALLMARK: Certainly a reasonable notion, and I guess we've never done it just because history, but I think you're -- MR. BOWLING: Right. MR. HALLMARK: -- I certainly approve of the notion right off the top. MR. BOWLING: Thank you. SECRETARY FOULKE: I would agree with that, because they got guns. MR. HALLMARK: Well, yes, they do have -- they have persuasion. MS. BRAYDEN: I believe one of the reasons that sometimes we don't report that all rolled out together is because you're so huge that the number becomes very large and so by breaking it down, we can fit you on the chart with everyone else. But we can certainly take a look at that. MR. BOWLING: Okay. MR. HALLMARK: Well, I take it you're suggesting the summary would be in addition to the breakouts of the -- MR. BOWLING: Whatever works. I'm open for discussion. We appreciate just having the conversation. MR. HALLMARK: Sure. MR. BOWLING: Thank you. SECRETARY FOULKE: Yes. And I would note, too, one of the things that OSHA provides to -- that we're trying to do more on with the federal agencies is our Compliance Assistance programs. We have some partnerships, I know, with the Army, and I think with some of the other departments and also our Voluntary Protection Program, the VPP, which basically is a recognition -- is a program where we recognize basically the best of the best. I know we have three naval facilities, shipyards that are in the VPP, and based on the calculations for '05, they have determined that the fact that -- they believe that because of the fact that they were in VPP, that they saved approximately $2 million dollars last year in Workers' Comp cost, which is a tremendous amount. I know Secretary Rumsfeld has been very interested in moving into this area for the whole Department, not only from a standpoint for money, but also I understood it was an issue of readiness that really piqued his interest in trying to find out what would be the best -- how to get into programs that are going to help reduce injuries and illnesses and, clearly, fatalities. And so I would recommend to you -- and I'm hoping we're going to provide -- like I say, again, we're here to provide assistance. These programs, this Compliance Assistance programs can be extremely helpful and beneficial and, like I say, reduce injuries and illnesses but also at the same time save your agency a fairly significant amount of Workers' Comp. We're just talking three facilities saving $2 million dollars in Workers' Comp costs. That's a tremendous amount of money. So if you don't know about the VPP or our partnerships in there, then we'd like to talk to you about each. And I think that's something we're going to try to do this coming year, really make a conscientious effort to sit down with every department, every agency in government and talk a little bit about what compliance assistance, what additional things we can do for you so. Any other questions? Yes. MR. NELSON: If you have them, we'd be interested in seeing any of other agency's statistics on '06 through three quarters that weren't listed here on the slides. MS. BRAYDEN: If you access the OSHA Web site, we do have raw number within the OSHA Web site. And then we also link to the ESA Web site, which gives the rates and the goals and who's meeting what goals. And you have access to all the data there. SECRETARY FOULKE: Okay. MR. WILLIAMS: Yes. Just one comment, question. The comment -- we at NASA have embraced the VPP -- SECRETARY FOULKE: I'm sorry. You're right. You have. Yes. MR. WILLIAMS: We've got -- several of our centers participate with that program. We've found it very useful, and thank you for that program. The second thing is kind of a narrow question. You may have eluded to the answer, but could you shed just a little light on the challenges within the Department of Homeland Security and why those data are so markedly different. TSA and bag handling, is that the main reason or? MR. HALLMARK: That's a big one, and obviously that's one we've been focusing. It's not the only issue, because you have Border Patrol and other kinds of -- a lot of law enforcement, and recently in the news, Air Marshals. There's a lot of people who are at risk in high-risk kind of situations. The baggage handling, however, is particularly difficult. It brought 60,000 employees in a very short period working in 400 airports that didn't have any kind of real provision for them. And lifting 75, 100 pound bags and twisting and turning is really a prescription for back injuries, and so that, I think, is the major cause for the spike in 2004. I don't know if you wanted to -- MR. BATHURST: Yes, there's a couple of things with that. A, as said, we've threw a lot of these -- one of the unintended affects of the establishment of the department was we actually put a lot of hazardous types of occupations together, and the baggage issue, and the TSA screeners, both on passenger lines and in the baggage screening lines, they trend consistent with private sector work. Again, it's the lifting, twisting, turning type of injuries, and we're working, you know, both on the design of the equipment and, you know, how we can move that stuff long, but those are longer term solutions. Plus getting people back to work is a bit of a challenge because of the type of work and the rotations of -- you can't just put someone on an x-ray machine all the time, because you've got to give them a break from that or you're going to end up with other problems. The other thing is with '03 base. It's a little bit of a challenge for us because we came into existence in '03, and it's very hard to match exactly a lot of our components into the base, especially when we were established, a lot of the legacy organization actually got split into multiple organization, so the numbers don't exactly tie to what our current organization is. So probably in aggregate, it's a little bit better, but when we try to break it down internally, it's a little bit harder to track that data. And then, of course, on the law enforcement side, we've got most of the law enforcement activities in the federal government, and I would say some of the most active law enforcement. And my tours on the border, amazing as to how many arrests, apprehensions, gun battles, scuffles, vehicle accidents really in very, very inhospitable environments. You know, we're very happy with the focus we have both on our vehicle work, law enforcement work, our aviation programs, but we can always improve, and we're certainly trying to redouble our efforts. MR. HALLMARK: The fact that the injury rate has gone down is tremendous and obviously, as Ed said, is one of the reasons why we're meeting the goal -- if it's not the primary one. We appreciate that. MR. BATHURST: That's one of the reasons we didn't meet the goal as a government, you know, force, so we try to bring it back. SECRETARY FOULKE: My wife's bag is the one that's marked forklift only. MR. BOWLING: I'd just like to give another commercial for VPP, and I thank you for the kind words on what the Department of Defense is trying to do. We have five installations that have reached the start status and, as you say, we've seen, you know, increases in the number of accidents, in injuries, reduced Workers' Compensation cost, improved the safety culture. And I think we've recognized that as a real key to where we want to go with our safety program in the future. And I want to thank OSHA and their support in helping us do that. At the introductions, you heard three gentlemen introduce themselves as a DoD VPP Center of Excellence, and that's a group that has stood up to help us move forward on VPP in a broader scale in the Department of Defense. We looked at 43 sites in FY '06. We did the GAP analysis and the action plans to kind of get them ready to become part of the VPP program. That included the Pentagon, which I think is a great undertaking. The Pentagon is a huge office building that has all sorts of activities, not only from office space, but it has package handling; it's a heliport; it's got law enforcement; it's got a whole bunch of functions that you normally don't see in an office building plus it's huge. So we think that's going to be, as the corporate headquarters, kind of the keystone of what we want to do in the safety program. In '07, we're probably going to do another 40 sites to get them started. And as I said, I think we're looking -- this is really the way we're going to change the safety culture in the Department of Defense and really do the right thing for the people who work in our installations and office buildings. SECRETARY FOULKE: And I would note for those who are not familiar with the VPP program, in the private sector, the companies, the facilities that are in VPP, their lost time injury rates are 50 percent below the industry average as a total average, so clearly the proof is in the pudding, and it's there. And I would say, to kind of put a plug for OSHA, we actually have had three sites, three of our area offices are in VPP, so we are walking the walk, I guess, is the best way to say it. As a matter of fact, last night at midnight, I signed our fourth one, the Chicago office, a big area office, is going to be in the VPP, so. The results are actually just tremendous and, like I say, we're here. We have the people here to help you get into that and provide you the assistance, to show you how we can help you get your facilities across the country into the program, so we're happy to do that. Anything else about the SHARE Initiative? Yes, Corey. MR. WILLIAMS: Let me just add, of course, the postal service is very big into partnerships and VPP. I think we have 80 facilities with 78 of them getting star. But from a union perspective, let me just give you a little idea, because I know you all deal with that, is it's been fantastic. We've seen incredible reductions in injuries and injuries that we have seen, we've seen a reduction in lost time. So it's a win/win. And I definitely would say to anybody that has an idea of doing this that I would be happy to talk to you about it from the labor perspective or how you might approach those things. So we've been very happy in coordination with our ergonomics program. We've seen even greater reductions, so it helps your numbers. SECRETARY FOULKE: And we appreciate that. I mean the post office has been really one of the leading forces on VPP in the federal government, and I think they're committed to getting something like 34,000 facilities in the VPP. Probably won't do that this year -- MR. WILLIAMS: Next year. SECRETARY FOULKE: -- but the following year, they should be close to it, but anyway. MR. HALLMARK: Just as a footnote to this, the total claims we expect to have for this fiscal year will be less than 140,000, which is still a lot, but it's the lowest number since 1973 or thereabouts. So that suggests to me that these programs are working, that SHARE is helping, and this is the second year in a row we'll have like an eight or nine percent reduction, and that's really good news. MS. RODRIGUEZ: A question for Shelby on follow-up with agencies, that you might, you know, qualify as poor performers. What happens? I mean certainly the numbers will show you that, but what kind of follow-up is there from your office or even from OSHA's end? MR. HALLMARK: Well, we have tried to work directly with agencies where we see there are significant problems on lost days and on timeliness. Timeliness is rather difficult, because it's kind of spread. Right now it's now kind of moved to the smaller agencies where it's, you know, we run into people who just, you know, have system problems and other things. I'm open to somebody, you know, to request or suggestions about how to address that, and anybody here from the State Department, we're always looking for improvement on State's results on that score. As far as lost production days are concerned, as I've said, it's a very intricate and difficult goal. And I think it's frustrating, especially in light of the reduction in the total number of injuries that the lost days isn't going down in a sort of lock step. It is going down, but it's not as dramatic. And that really gets to this sort of one person at a time process that is involved in getting people back to work. And, as I said, we provide help. We've talked with TSA, and I believe there's a pilot operation going on about coordinating their efforts with safety people and nurses with our nurse process to try to get the best results. Hard there when you have, you know, these job duties that are really extensive and bump up against somebody who has a surgically repaired back and just can't do these physical activities. So, you know, that breaks you down to a sort of agency by agency, workplace by workplace, person by person effort. And certainly one of the things that I would say today is agencies that think they would like to hear from us, that would like to hear some of the best practices and suggestions about how to do these rather difficult lost -- return to work activities, just give me a call, or, you know, my folks. My number is 202-693-0031, and we'll get you to somebody who can help. SECRETARY FOULKE: Yes? MR. ROWE: Are you taking questions from the participants? SECRETARY FOULKE: Sure. Unless you get out of hand and then -- MR. ROWE: Have Michelle drag me off. SECRETARY FOULKE: That's right. MR. ROWE: My name's Louis Rowe, National Park Service, and we only have about 25,000 employees, so we're relatively small. But we have 390 sites geographically located all over the nation, and most of our sites are smaller sites where they're not SES. The superintendent might be a GS-12. And as much as possible, we're shoving the SHARE goals, and we think SHARE is great, and we're putting those goals right down into those performance appraisals for those individuals as well as key staff at those parks. We would love to see the goal language correlate with what the OSHA 300 summary now says, because that superintendent and staff can pull up anytime during the year information out of our electronic system, which is OSHA 300 now. So we don't see recordables, and don't see DART on the SHARE goals. What we see are lost time cases, and we see total incidents. But for my people that are very technically competent, they say you know there's a difference in the way those are calculated. We say, yes, yes, just ignore that. But for those that are less sophisticated, they say, well, I'm being graded on one thing, but I'm looking at something else at my own site, so what does this mean to me. So it would be good to have DART and recordables in the language on the SHARE goals in the future so that as we put those down to those sites, that superintendent, that division chief can look at that and say, yes, that's what we're looking at folks, pull it up for our division, this is where we're at, got to work harder at it. SECRETARY FOULKE: Okay. That's a good suggestion. MR. ROWE: The second thing that we would comment on is that the annual report that will be due January 1st is going to require us to put data together that's -- with an annual year now, a calendar year that closes on December 31st, because we're not longer doing the old record-keeping system. We're now on a calendar year OSHA 300 record-keeping system, and my last OWCP data dump where I correlate my data against OWCP doesn't come in for about a month, month and a half. So I won't have all my data to give you a good report until somewhere around the middle of February. And when we used to have that fiscal year report, that was fine to hit a January mark, but now that we're on a calendar for the OSHA 300 system, that's going to be very difficult for me to give you good data as I still have things coming in from OWCP. MS. BRAYDEN: Okay. In response to that, your annual report is a fiscal year report. It is not a calendar year report. Now we understand that your OSHA 300 data is recorded as an annual year, so when we go out and we ask, we know that we cannot get good OSHA 300 data from all of the departments. What we're going to try to do is find out what we can get and what impediments you have to providing that kind of information to us. It is very important that we get that information at some point in some way, but we have to find out how we can actually accomplish that, and what works for you, what kind of systems you have in place that you can use to get us that data. And with that feedback, then we can develop systems and processes within our office to work with you to get the data that we need so that we can manipulate it and use it in a positive way. MR. ROWE: Well, we're fully on board with you. We want to do everything that we can to make our own programs better. I just wanted to make sure you know that a big piece of that report we won't have until 40 days after you've asked for this report to be due, so just to keep that in mind. MS. BRAYDEN: Okay. MR. ROWE: Thank you very much. SECRETARY FOULKE: Yes. MR. DENNY: Just a cautionary note. I know that everybody's talking about this data and cost, but if you push it down too far, then your lower level managers have a tendency to concentrate on the final data numbers rather than improving the program, and the manipulation of the data becomes the driver as opposed to the outcome, which is why we're, within the VA, are tending to use the data at a national level, perhaps even at an administrative level. But insofar as holding our managers at the facility level accountable, we're looking at performance measures that are in the process area rather than the outcome area. SECRETARY FOULKE: Yes. I know that's something that OSHA's always been concerned about in the private sector about incentives and goals and everything else like that -- are the numbers being somehow skewed or not everything being reported or whatever, because clearly we want to have accurate data, and we want to have -- the intent of the system -- the intent of the initiative is clearly to help reduce injuries and illnesses in the government. So I understand where you're coming from on that, too. Any other questions or any other comments? Okay. Thank you. I think the Secretary has said that she wants to establish a program to formally recognize some of the more notable performance accomplishments of the agencies and meeting the SHARE Initiative goals. And I know OSHA and ESA and OWCP are working together to explore ways to develop such a program, and we're going to keep you apprised as we work through that development process. The next report that we have is dealing with federal agency record-keeping changes. I know we have two more reports that we want to try to get finished before we break for lunch, so our next report is going to be on the federal agency record-keeping changes, and Diane's going to give an update on the status of the changes on the injury and illness record-keeping requirements that took place for federal agencies effective on January 1st of '05. MS. BRAYDEN: Now as you all know, the federal government did adopt a new method of recording injuries and illnesses experienced by our employees that became effective January 1st of 2005, so we're now well into our second year under this new system. This new system is nearly identical to the system used in the private sector. There are a few nuances that are different because of special things that apply to the federal sector. During the past year, a great deal of training and guidance has been provided to assist agencies in their transition. I addition to the many speaking engagements we have participated in, information is posted on the Office of Federal Agency Programs Web page. We hope to update that page in the near future to expand the Frequently Asked Questions regarding the record-keeping and also to create so me special links designed to funnel the federal agencies more directly to the guidance that will be most useful to them. On that page, you will also find a link to a video that was produced by the Veterans Administration with OSHA and post office participation. This has been distributed to the DASHOs and the Safety and Health Councils as well as to the OSHA area offices. At this point in time, most of you should be far enough into the change to maybe not need that basic information anymore, but for anyone who feels that they need go back and get a grasp on what the differences are and what actually happened there, you might want to go back and access that video. It is available on the Web site and can be very useful in guiding you through what the change is, why it came about and what the basic differences are. Although the federal and private industry record-keeping regulations are nearly identical, one of the differences has to do with the recording of injuries and illnesses experienced by volunteers. In the private sector, you don't have a lot of volunteers in your workforce. The people who are working for profit-making entities typically are getting a salary. That's part of the deal. With the federal sector it's quite different. We have hundreds of thousands of volunteers that work with us regularly. They work in all different kinds of capacities. Some work even full-time without compensation. Some work in office environments, but others work in the field where they have as much exposure to hazards and injuries and illnesses as our paid employees do. So it's very important for us to make sure that we are tracking the injuries and illnesses that are experienced by this section of employees, and they are employees in the federal sector as defined in Part 1960. MR. HALLMARK: They're also eligible for FICA. MS. BRAYDEN: Right. They're eligible for compensation which is also probably different than what is in the private sector. In the 1904 regulations as they apply to the private sector, it specifically states in the preamble that their volunteers will not be included in the record-keeping. In the federal sector, we do need to include them in the record-keeping because in the definition of employee, volunteers are included under all aspect of 29 CFR 1960, the safety and health programs, and record-keeping is a component of that regulation. So we do need to keep track of the injuries and illnesses to volunteers. Now we are still kind of feeling our way through this, and we are anxious to get feedback from you about how you think that can best be implemented. If there is some way that you think we should be specially tracking them separate from the others or making a notation when the injury or illness is being experienced by a volunteer. This kind of information is important to us, and so this is some of the information that we're asking for in the request for the annual reports from the agencies. We want to hear back from you what kind of experiences do you have: What do you have for volunteers in your workforce; what kind of work do they do; do you have an idea of what the injury/illness experience is with this group of people. We have made some initial inquiries of a couple of the departments to find out what it is they're doing. We are trying to get a sense of what's going on out there, how is this being managed at this point in time. One of the departments that we reached out to was the Department of the Interior, who has a high level of interest in this topic. Jim Meredith is here from the Department of Interior. He has asked to address the Council on this issue. Jim is the SMIS Manager at DOL. Jim, would you like to speak? MR. MEREDITH: Good morning. I'm here on behalf of Kathleen Wheeler, the Interior designated safety and health official, and I appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak with you a few minutes today. I did want to talk to you about this issue, which is very important to the Interior Department, regarding the accounting for and including of work hours specifically for volunteers and the calculation of agency injury and illness rates. I do have a statement here which I don't know if you have that in your packet or not, but I'd like to read it into the record for you. (Reading) The Department of the Interior is the nation's principle conservation agency. Our mission is to protect America's treasures for future generations, provide access to our nations natural and cultural heritage, offer recreation opportunities, honor our trust responsibilities to American Indians and Alaska Natives, and our responsibilities to island communities, conduct scientific research, provide wise stewardship of energy and mineral resources, foster sound use of land and water resources, and conserve and protect fish and wildlife. The work that we do affects the lives and experiences of hundreds of millions of people annually, including visitors, land owners, farmers, ranchers, employers, communities and other stakeholders. Interior is a large decentralized agency with over 70,000 employees located in approximately 2400 operating locations located across the United States, Puerto Rico, U.S. territories and freely associated states. Each year the Department attracts some 200,000 volunteers that help care for and are sharing in the stewardship of our public lands and natural resources. They contribute their time and talents to a wide array of volunteer duties including assisting staff with scientific experiments, data collection and clerical assignments. They also serve in many areas of resource management and recreation. We estimate the dollar value of the hours contributed by volunteers in 2005 to be at nearly $162 million dollars, but their value goes much further than that. The volunteer workforce has proven to be an important adjunct to the federal workforce assisting with hundreds of programs and projects. They bring fresh energy and enthusiasm, new ideas and skills that energize us all. Retirees and older volunteers find an outlet for their knowledge and their expertise. Younger volunteers gain job experience. Volunteers come away with a deeper understanding of the breadth and complexity of the Department's mission, and the Department is reminded of the depth of the public support for public lands and our missions. DOI agencies take many precautions to protect volunteers. We include training, personal protective equipment and placement into positions where they are physically and mentally prepared to succeed. Even so, upon occasion, a volunteer is injured while working for Interior. Official volunteers are directly supervised by government employees and are covered under FICA. These volunteer injuries are included in the OWCP injury and illness case totals reported to BLS, and injuries and illnesses are logged at the installation OSHA 300 logs as required by 29 CFR 1904. While Interior agencies with active volunteer programs do compile records of volunteer hours, the Department of Labor does not currently collate or include the work exposure of volunteers when publishing injury and illness rates for federal agencies and for the Safety, Health and Return to Employment, SHARE, Initiative. Since volunteer hours are a significant portion of some agencies overall work exposure, including volunteer accident cases without including volunteer exposure hours results in inaccurate and, we believe, higher injury rates with the implication that the agency's safety experience is worse than it actually is. For example, this is an example of our exposure. In 2005 we had just short of 9 million volunteer work hours, and that amounted to about 6-1/2 percent of our combined volunteer and employee work exposure. The National Park Service, it's an even more significant portion in their case, about 5.2 million hours, and that amounted to about 12.7 percent of their combined work exposure. So you can see from our standpoint, this has a significant impact on our programs and on any rates that might be reported. While this correspondence represents only the viewpoint of the Department of the Interior, other federal agencies, particularly those with resource management responsibilities similar to the Interior such as the U.S. Forest Service, are facing the same issue. We also understand that other agencies like VA and FEMA have very, very large volunteer exposure. The Department of the Interior requests that the FACOSH ask that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics take this issue into consideration. The Department is prepared to take part in any effort to more accurately quantify injury and illness rates and looks forward to the resolution of this problem (end reading). And that is the statement that I have. I'd be happy to take any additional questions. I also have, like I said, Louis Rowe, from the National Park Service and Sandy Guches from the Bureau of Land Management, both agencies which have very large volunteer programs. SECRETARY FOULKE: Are there any questions from the Committee members? MR. DENNY: I noticed in your presentation that you used the term hours worked for calculating your volunteers. Is that true? MR. MEREDITH: We collect on an annual basis -- unfortunately, that's the best we have at the moment -- on an annual basis, we calculate -- we do collect hours, and we -- MR. DENNY: So you calculate the number of volunteers by the number of hours worked? MR. MEREDITH: That's correct. MR. ROWE: We calculate both ways. We know the number of volunteers and the number of hours that volunteers work. MR. DENNY: Because that would be a little bit different than the -- would that be different than the way you are calculating for your employee injury and illnesses since many times federal agencies use FTE as a mechanism and go through OPM to do the calculations? MR. MEREDITH: We are fortunate. Our electronic database allows us to capture employee work hours through our payroll system so that we do know -- based on payroll, we know how many hours. So within the Department, we do our injury and illness calculations based on hours of work exposure. MR. DENNY: How do you report that to OSHA? MR. MEREDITH: Well, we track what -- you know, like I said, that's what we have, and I think in our previous annual reports, that's the information that we -- that's how we have reported it. MR. DENNY: You report is as a calculation under hours? MR. MEREDITH: Yes. MS. BRAYDEN: As far as the SHARE program works, because we don't have accurate employment data for volunteers, when we get the OWCP injury and illness data, we subtract out the injuries and illnesses that were experienced by volunteers, so that data is based only on paid employees. And the reason for that is the employment data issue. MR. MEREDITH: Okay. SECRETARY FOULKE: Anything -- MR. DENNY: Just to continue on. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to figure out how this is going to -- do you calculate them out separately insofar as whenever you report volunteers versus employees or do you mix them? MR. MEREDITH: To be honest with you, I don't really have an answer for that. To the best of my knowledge -- I mean we would like to report them. Obviously, we feel that because -- in a general rule, we don't want to put volunteers perhaps in some of the more hazardous environments that we may perhaps have some of our full-time employees in. You know, if we included those, it does, you know, from an accounting standpoint, it makes our organization rates look better. But again, that's not what it's really all about. MR. GALASSI: Jim, as you well know, from a safety and health perspective, the OSHA record-keeping system, one of its big purposes is so that the site safety and health person has that information so that they can use it a as a form of hazard identification. And I think you just said that -- is there an effort to make sure volunteers are not in the more hazardous types of activities? Are there hazard assessments they do to ensure that they're lowered hazard jobs or things of that nature? Because it is a very important tool to identify where the hazards are and what actions to take. MR. MEREDITH: I think that's a case of the journal. I may defer that question back to Sandy or Louis who are more directly -- MS. GUCHES: Sandy Guches with BLM. At least for our Bureau, we have a volunteer manual that states specifically what volunteers can and cannot do, and they are not allowed to do things like fight wild land fire or do hazardous materials and hazardous waste kinds of activities. And there's, you know, a list of those things. And we train our managers and supervisors and volunteer coordinators accordingly. And Bureau of Land Management has been heavily involved in risk management in the last few years, and risk assessments are completed for these kinds of jobs. And so we do train our employees and our volunteers exactly the same way, but our volunteers do not do hazardous duty in accordance with our policy. And even the OPM definition of hazardous duty, they are not part of that. The one thing that is important to know is that the volunteers, they often don't have a regular schedule of work. There might be, you know, 100 volunteers for this trail building or this trail cleaning, so it's really hard to use a calculation. It's important, I think, to use the hours that they're actually working for us because of the way that we utilize them -- campground host for a month in one place. They might more over to a forest service campground in another area. MR. ROWE: The Park Service has a multitude of sites, 390 sites now, and we have a full range of exposures for our employees. And we don't prohibit volunteers from doing many of the jobs in the parks, but we do match the volunteer age, skill, experience, physical condition, mental condition, situation awareness to the job. Now I'm not handing a pistol to a volunteer and saying you're working a border patrol park now, and you'll be stopping drugs coming across. But that same volunteer might be getting into a helicopter to do part of an animal study with three scientists, the helicopter crashes, we lose four people. So we try not to put volunteers in hazardous situations, but as soon as you get off the road in a park like Yosemite in the wintertime, you may be in a situation that's hazardous even though we have hundreds of thousands, or in this case literally millions, of visitors that do the same thing. So we assess the hazards, Tom, but we are not always able to say we can't expose every volunteer to every hazard, because there could be a moose right next to the superintendent's office that is in rutting season and gores a volunteer that's walking in to deliver the mail, and those kinds of things happen. But we do assessment as much as possible, and we try to match the volunteer to the job. SECRETARY FOULKE: Okay. Thank you. Any other comments. MR. HALLMARK: I had just a quick comment. I assume the way the SHARE system works is that FICA claims are identified as volunteer and that OSHA withdraws them from the counts, so that you're injury rate is only figured on your actual government FTE. Obviously, I applaud, and we talked a little bit earlier about the question of inappropriate incentives, and I applaud the notion of making sure that volunteer injuries are being tracked and that safety activities are being directed in their way. And I know that as the Director of OWCP, from time-to-time, I'm made aware of new groups of volunteers that are added by one agency or another. Recently the Commerce Department -- I don't know if there's from anybody from there now here -- added a very large component of volunteers, boaters, who are involved in documenting situations with respect to water levels and so on. They're out there no in a federal worksite, presumably not frequently managed, not supervised. So that's a challenge that agencies have to make sure that, in fact, there is a program, that somebody's paying attention to it, and that when injuries occur, somebody takes care of them. SECRETARY FOULKE: Did you have a question? MR. DICKERSON: More sort of a comment. Yes. My name is Marvin Dickerson with FEMA, and because this kind gentlemen evoked our agency name, I thought it was appropriate -- the fact the volunteer issue is a national issue. It is an issue where you surely don't want to defeat a person's volunteerism, but at the same time, obviously there has to be some standards or some guidelines established for that. In FEMA, we have an agency called VOLAG in which we try to filter people through but is indicative of Hurricane Katrina -- there's a disaster that I just come back from New Orleans -- actually worked down in Louisiana for the last year -- the number of volunteers are overwhelming. And so I'm thinking that maybe perhaps at this forum, it might be an excellent place to talk about maybe OSHA or some other agency chairing a national -- to spearhead a national effort to start making sure that volunteers who do volunteer for various agencies understand that there are certain prerequisites that are needed for them in terms of safety equipment and safety protocol when they get into a disaster or get to an area like the Department of Interior. Because when people really want to volunteer to do something, they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart or out of patriotism or whatever, and you certainly don't want to stymie that. But I found out -- or at least I've learned down in the New Orleans during the initial phases of Hurricane Katrina -- that people were streaming in in droves, and they were determined to want to add value to the process, but they were not prone to want to hear or listen to any kind of guidelines talking about the safety equipment that you may need or the safety way in which you need to address certain issues. And so there were some people who were turned back and some people who were filtered to VOLAG. But I think that the country probably needs to make sure that whenever an event occurs or a disaster where volunteers are headed to, that the country, if it's an incident of national significance or a major incident, that somewhere we need to have some vehicle to let the volunteers know that we really appreciate them participating; however, there are some very important things that they have to do before they get there, whether it's a hurricane or whether it's volunteering to go into the national parks. I don't think that we have the national capability to look at volunteers without stymieing their interest at the same time helping them to understand that they're volunteers and could also add to injury to themselves. And we surely, in my organization, we couldn't go out and address the volunteers, those that were not going through VOLAG, but yet they were adding value to the process. And I think volunteerism in this country, especially during the last couple of years with the hurricanes in Florida and then this Katrina thing, was up very high. But yet you find people wanting to make the John Wayne entrance, if you will, and they're not concerned about the need for understanding the safety issues that may be prevalent there. And so then when you start looking at the record-keeping issue, it becomes another problem because if you're not going to get them to adhere to the principles or the tenets of what constitutes being in an area and being safe, then surely, you know, you start looking at how does that impact your Workers' Comp or how does that affect your program overall. I think my suggestion basically is that maybe perhaps there should be a national effort to talk about volunteerism in general and set some established guidelines on what volunteerism is, especially if it's in an area where they'll put themselves in harms way. SECRETARY FOULKE: I would note on that issue, we actually had some frustration as an agency, because we had a number of grants that were given, emergency grants, training grants that were given specifically to help train workers in Louisiana and in the Gulf region. And the grants are written such that it talked about training of employees. And basically, as I understand it, we actually have gotten a legal opinion on this thing and said, no, employees are employees, they're not volunteers, and, therefore, they were precluded from technically receiving that training. As I understand it, basically what we did was we would hold training courses for employees, and if some other people happened to walk in, we weren't going to throw them out. But that just shows you right there, once again, we were limited on -- because there were a lot of volunteers that wanted to receive safety and health training and how to handle -- to recognize the hazards that they were going to be placed in. So it is a problem and something we probably need to do, have a serious look at how we can address the whole across the board issue. What type of training do you do with your volunteers when they come up? Do you do safety and health training for them or? MR. MEREDITH: I think to a large degree, we probably provide much of the -- similar training that we provide our regular employees. Again, I might defer if you guys have any additional comments, but I think we provide them with a general orientation that we would provide any new employee. We would include them in any of our ongoing safety and health training we provide employees ranging from some, you know, training specific to an activity that they might be involved in to perhaps even being involved in the regular employee toolbox meetings, safety meetings, any orientation and training that's provided for any special activities that they might be involved in, including, you know, activity hazard analyses and things of that nature. So to my knowledge, we provide them much of the same, if not the same training that we provide our regular employees. MS. BRAYDEN: This is all the type of information that we knew that we need, and we recognized that particularly FEMA would have some very different volunteer issues than say the Smithsonian or the IRS that may have people assisting with people doing their taxes. So the type of volunteerism out there is far reaching and very much varied. And so that's why in the annual request for the agency annual reports, we want this kind of feedback so that we can understand more fully what the challenges are for the various agencies out there, and then find a way to work through this issue and work through it with you, so. Thank you very much. MR. MEREDITH: We certainly appreciate that. Like I said, it's an integral and a growing part of our work accomplishment and mission accomplishment, and we're looking forward to providing you input in the annual report and also to working with you to help better address this issue. Thank you very much. SECRETARY FOULKE: Thank you. MS. BRAYDEN: Thank you. SECRETARY FOULKE: Do you have some other comments? MS. BRAYDEN: While we're still on the area of record-keeping, I did want to also speak a moment about the issue of OSHA 300 data collection. This is an issue that definitely needs to be addressed and was not initially taken on when the record-keeping requirements were changed. The GAO, as I have noted, has already strongly and appropriately recommended that this data be used to identify hazardous worksites and to assure that these most hazardous worksites receive the proper attention and assistance from OSHA necessary to protect their employees. The GAO had recommended that we either request this data through the medium of the agency annual report or through special periodic surveys. As has already been pointed out, it's difficult to get that data with the annual report because of the timeframes. The annual report is done on a fiscal year basis. The OSHA 300 data is collected on a calendar year basis. So there is a bit of a disconnect there. I'm not certain that that will be a very effective way of getting timely data unless we back off nine months before -- you know, if we get it a year late. The periodic survey suggestion might be workable if we can find a cost effective and efficient way to do that. Other ideas have been put forward about developing a database that could be made available to the various agencies whereby we could collect -- they could manage their OSHA 300 data concurrent with their OWCP claims filing. There a number of such systems out there now. The Department of Labor has the SHIMS system that does this sort of thing, and some of the other major departments have also developed electronic systems for their own departments where they enter their injury data, it is also funneled into a system to do the OSHA 300 record keeping. We've had a number of parties approach us on this. Some are private entities that would like to have a contract to develop such a system. Some are existing systems. And then we've also ben approached by various internal organization such as NIOSH and BLS who believe that with some of the software that they already have in place and which they are using to manage this type of data for the private sector, that perhaps we could use this -- we'd have to do some additional development -- but use this to collect the federal data as well where we could come up with data that is establishment specific, with establishment being under the definition of OSHA's establishment which is different than sometimes how agencies report to OWCP. And we can get their injuries and their employment data together, understand where that establishment is and then actually use that in a way like we do for the SST program for the private sector. So that's something we're looking at. And in the request for the annual report, we're going to be asking you there also, what do you think of this; would such a system work for your agencies; do you have an opinion about that. And then with your feedback, we can take that into consideration as we move forward to try to figure out how it is we can move forward to collect the data that we absolutely need to have. And that's about all I have on record-keeping unless someone has a comment on the OSHA 300 data collection issue. SECRETARY FOULKE: Okay. Thank you, Diane and Jim. I appreciate your presentations. I see it's noontime. I think since we've been meeting for two hours, it would probably be a good time to take a break for lunch. Would 1:15 be enough time for everybody to do what the need to do and eat also and whatever. Well, we'll just stand adjourned -- recessed until 1:15 and return to here. Thank you. (Whereupon, off the record for a lunch recess.) SECRETARY FOULKE: I'm going to reconvene the FACOSH committee meeting. Our next report is on federal agency training. As some of you may know, or maybe all of you will know, each year the OSHA Training Institute sets aside a week of training dedicated exclusively for training federal agency personnel, and I've asked Diane to kind of give us an update about the federal agency training week. MS. BRAYDEN: Thank you, Ed. As reported, the GAO audit, many agencies admitted that they depend on safety officers with limited professional experience as a result of their limited resources. IN addition, there is a very wide use of collateral safety officers to support the safety programs overseen by the few full-time professional safety officers on staff. There seems to be a well-recognized need to enhance the skills of the personnel in the field that can make a real difference in our safety and health programs on a day to day basis. OSHA makes a Web based collateral duty course for other federal agencies, course number 6000, available to federal employees from all agencies free of charge. The duration of this course is 23 contact hours broken up into one hour segments on a wide variety of topics, some of which address discrete types of hazards and others which provide foundation and administrative safety topics such as the OSHA Act and Standards and how to conduct inspections and write inspection reports. It is essential that the collateral duty personnel complete this course to provide them with at least a limited background to pursue their collateral duty safety and health duties. However, for the use of the collateral duty safety officers to be truly effective, additional training is needed. As you probably know, OSHA has been setting aside the one week each year at the OSHA Training Institute specifically for training federal employees who are involved in safety and health activities. In the past, this event was held in June and afforded federal employees an opportunity to take one 3-day course on a single topic. These courses were fairly in depth and provided a good background on the topic area that the student was studying. However, this format may not have been ideally suited to the collateral duty officers who need training over a wide variety of topics rather than a very in depth study of a single topic area. In an effort to assist the agencies in preparing the collateral staff to be effective in their roles as on-site safety and health monitors, OSHA is offering training week this year from Tuesday, November the 16th through Thursday, November the 18th with what we believe will be a new and improved format. We will now be offering a menu of half-day courses over the three days providing students an opportunity to select up to six seminars of interest from a wide variety of safety topics. That's six topics per person. The seminars will be provided on 12 topics covering general industry safety, construction safety and industrial hygiene areas. The courses or seminars that we offer will include respirators, emergency response, general construction, demolition, scaffolding, electrical safety, fall protection, ergonomics, fire protection, lockout-tagout, safety and health management and introduction to industrial hygiene. Four seminars will be offered concurrently during each half-day period, and each topic will be offered twice during the week making it easy for the students to schedule a combination of courses best suited to their individual needs. The announcement for this training week opportunity will be coming out hopefully within the next few days, and the courses are offered free of charge, and course registration will be completed online making it very convenient. Again, there is no cost for these courses. The agencies would pay travel costs, but we think that by providing a wide variety of topic areas that the agencies may find this training to be more cost effective, because the collateral duty officer will get training for six topics during the week rather than just one. Are there any questions about that? MR. NELSON: Any costs? MS. BRAYDEN: There's no tuition fee. Only travel costs would be covered by the agencies. VICE CHAIR THOMPSON: Are the courses geared towards introductory type courses, or are they geared towards those that may have some experience in the fields or? MS. BRAYDEN: It would be expected that the student would have had the basic collateral duty course so that they would have a basic foundation. These are condensed versions of the full scope, the full size OSHA courses that are usually -- they'd condense them down into shorter periods. SECRETARY FOULKE: Yes. You might want to say your name again just so it will be on the record. MR. ROWE: Louis Rowe, National Park Service. Thank you so much. That sounds like a brilliant concept, and we would love to take advantage of that. How about we take that out to the ten regional offices over a year? We'll even chip in funding. SECRETARY FOULKE: Did you get that on the record? MR. ROWE: We are all over the nation, and it's hard to bring everybody together in one place like that, but if we could do that in ten regions over the course of a year, that would be extremely valuable. Just a thought. SECRETARY FOULKE: That's a good thought. We'll see if we can work on that. Okay. MR. GALASSI: Interesting, Louis, as you say that, we, I guess, you know, following up on the GAO report and to start looking at our offering of training, we are starting to explore, and it's just very exploratory, what opportunities there are to expand on collateral training and that kind of model. And I understand some of the agencies such as the VA have some ongoing laudable training for collateral duty, and actually it's sponsored by AFDE that they put on once a year. They train about 250 to 300 of their employees. And we participate formally every year. And I don't know if there are other agencies that do something like that, but it certainly is an area that I think all agencies need to focus on. And OSHA will provide assistance, you know, where we can. MR. ROWE: We've been using distance learning technology, satellite broadcast uplinks, that type of stuff. We reached about 5500 people last year with safety classes that range from two to six hours in length. There are sometimes technical difficulties with making a class like that last too long, but we would love to take advantage of OSHA resources, broadcast those everywhere, and those are digital signals. They can also be turned into analog signals, so that anybody that has a receiver can receive that type of signal at distance type events and worksites all over the nation, including places like Joe's Bar in Montana which we once used as a training site and sent a signal into so that BLM and Forest Service and Park Service could get training in that remote site. But we would love to maybe talk about collaborating where we could share resources like that, get some expertise, and the broadcast those. And we also turn those into DVDs so that sites that cannot get access to the training can still have a DVD and use that part of safety committee training or collateral duty offline-type training. Difficulties in controlling who participates, in keeping track of who used it, but there might be ways that all of the agencies could make better use of some of your people. SECRETARY FOULKE: I like that. Yes, that's a good idea. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? All right. The next report is on pandemic flu, and I'm sure you're all aware that we have a new national effort involving OSHA and its federal and state partners involving pandemic flu. Working through the leadership of the White House, the federal agencies are prepared for effective, coordinated response to a possible flu pandemic. For nearly a year, OSHA has been examining workplace safety and health concerns related to that. Committees of OSHA employees have developed a group of guidance documents that focus on recognizing and combating the hazards of a pandemic in the workplace. These documents, which will be published very soon, will suggest changes in the workplace in the private sector and government that can reduce the spread of influenza. These guidance documents will also recommend procedures that employers can put in place to continue to operate during a pandemic. Naturally, protection of federal employees and continuing federal government services is of paramount importance. We have with us today, I think, probably the two top experts at the Department, Suey Howe, from the Department of Labor's Office of Assistant Secretary for Policy and Jennifer Silk who is the Deputy Director of OSHA's Director of Standards and Guidance to speak on this topic. So do you want to take it away. MS. HOWE: Thank you Assistant Secretary Foulke. My name is Suey Howe, and I'm the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor. The Policy Office in Labor has been coordinating the Department's involvement in a coordinated, planning and response to address pandemic flu. We're working closely with the Homeland Security Council. We're also working closely with colleagues at HHS, CDC, the VA, Department of Education, DHS, USDA, Commerce, Treasury, you name it. It is truly a coordinated and government-wide effort. My comments will be brief. They're going to focus on some contacts, providing some contacts and also emphasizing the importance of planning to ensure that federal employees are protected and that continuity of operations continues in the event of a pandemic. First, as background, it's important to understand the different types of flu that can be discussed. Seasonal flu is an annual event. People get flu shots. About 36,000 Americans die each year from the seasonal flu. Avian flus are also normal events. However the H5N1 variety of the avian flu is of great concern, because it's very lethal and causing death in poultry populations and wild bird populations around the world. It has infected humans who have close contact or direct contact with infected birds. So there's great concern could that avian flu, the H5N1 mutate to become easily transmissible between humans and lead toward a pandemic. A pandemic is, of course, a global disease outbreak. It's an influenza, in the case of flu, that would cause more severe disease and spread widely across the globe. The critical aspects of a pandemic flu are that it's a new virus, the population has little or no immunity to it, which is why it spreads. There are so many people who are susceptible to it. There is no vaccine, and it causes serious illness and death. And because it's easily spread person-to-person, it can span the globe, cross the country in a short period of time. Now this slide shows a comparison. We've had three pandemics in this century. Not all pandemics are of equal severity. It could be a mild or moderate pandemic. In here using moderate disease transmission modeling and looking at past pandemics, there's an estimation that 30 percent of the population would be affected. And if it was a mild to moderate pandemic, like 1957, the potential deaths in the United States would be 200,000. However, if it's a severe pandemic along the lines of the 1918 pandemic, you could approach 2 million deaths. Most of the federal planning efforts are focusing on the severe pandemic, because not only would it cause a significant amount of illness and death, but significant disruptions to our economy and to our lives. Next slide please. And this again is another slide focusing on the severe pandemic. The CDL estimates that 4.75 percent reduction in the U.S. GDP could result from such a severe pandemic. Implications for a severe pandemic, I'm sure many of you have read about or are hopefully incorporating in your planning as departments are preparing, is the fact there would be extensive absenteeism. Forty percent is the number that's given. That's anticipating not only those who are sick themselves, but are home caring for sick members of their family or staying home due to fear and are afraid to go to work. Essential services may be disrupted, in part because of the absenteeism in their own work places. The healthcare system could be overwhelmed exceeding its surge capacity. Banks, stores, restaurants would all have to alter their operations to make sure that they're not providing opportunity for the disease to spread across their workforce and with their customers. And transportation and food deliver and other essential services could be disrupted. Social distancing is an important strategy that's being discussed. School closures would be likely for certain durations. Large gatherings, community meetings and gatherings would also be discouraged, all in an effort to tamp down the virus, to reduce the number of people who become ill, and also as a means of making sure we can sustain our economy and protect individuals during a pandemic. As I hope you're all aware, in response to the potential threat of a pandemic, the President released on November 1st, 2005 the national strategy. It was a general overarching document, but an implementation plan was released on May 3rd. That got into greater detail with over 300 actions specifically tasked to federal agencies and departments. As we'll discuss later, 24 of those actions the Department of Labor has a direct role in, 19 of which are being headed by OSHA. Also within the pandemic implementation plan, it flushes out the strategy. It talks about the development of departmental plans, and it assigns responsibilities for carrying out the actions within it. It also communicates expectations for all stakeholders at the state and local government level and the private sector for families. Critical infrastructure is a very important part of the preparation as well. Again, I'm focusing here on department and agency planning. Approximately 67 departments and agencies should be well on their way to developing plans, Chapter 9 in the implementation plan and Appendix A provide guidance and details to aid in that planning. Department plans are supposed to focus on four key objectives: protecting employees during a pandemic, sustaining essential functions during times of significant absenteeism, supporting the overall federal response, and also communicating to stakeholders during a pandemic, and also communications to stakeholders in advance of a pandemic to help with preparations. Now key planning assumptions, again, I mentioned the 40 percent earlier. It is anticipated up to 40 percent of absenteeism during the two peak weeks of a pandemic, lower levels on the weeks on eithe