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News Release USDL: 96-241
Thursday, June 20, 1996 Contact: Frank Kane (202) 219-8151

As part of its reinventing government efforts, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) today issued a final rule removing 645 pages of duplicative regulations for the construction and shipyard industries.

In March 1995, President Clinton directed federal agencies to undertake a line-by-line review of their rules and regulations to determine if they were still needed or if they should be revised or revoked. OSHA identified five rulemaking projects that together would eliminate at least 1,049 pages from the approximately 3,000 pages in the OSHA sections of the CFR.

Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Joseph A. Dear said, "The page reduction is part of a larger reinvention effort to rid our rules of outdated and unncessary requirements, confusing provisions and difficult-to-understand-standards."

Most of the changes being made in the final rule issued today involve eliminating duplicate health standards from the shipyard and construction parts of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and replacing them with cross references to the identical text in the general industry part.

In the rule, OSHA also is moving two standards currently in subpart C and subpart G of the general industry standards (part 1910) to subpart Z of those standards in order to place virtually all OSHA health standards in one subpart and one volume of the CFR. The two standards are access to employee exposure and medical records and ionizing radiation.

OSHA's commercial diving standard, currently in both the general industry and construction standards, will be placed in the general industry part only. Industry representatives had asked for a single location.

OSHA also is removing some fire protection standards from the safety and health regulations that had been inadvertently identified as applicable to construction work.

The new final rule does not make any substantive changes to the requirements of the OSHA standards. It will become effective June 30, 1996 and is published in the June 20, 1996 Federal Register.

As part of its customer service efforts and to assist employers and employees in the construction industry who prefer a single source, OSHA will publish a comprehensive user-friendly document specifically for the construction industry. It will include all construction standards and other materials such as compliance guidelines, recordkeeping and reporting requirements, inspection, citation and penalty information, the top most frequently cited standards, and a directory for OSHA field offices, state plans, and consultation offices.