Union demands safety upgrade

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/apr/09/union-demands-safety-upgrade/

Construction Worker Deaths on the Strip:
Union demands safety upgrade
Ironworkers leader wants state OSHA to direct contractors to install decking that could prevent falls

By Alexandra Berzon

Wed, Apr 9, 2008 (2 a.m.)

The Las Vegas Ironworkers Union is asking Nevada safety regulators to require contractors to provide netting or temporary flooring of the kind that could have saved two workers who fell to their deaths last year on the Strip.

Chuck Lenhart, Las Vegas-based business agent for Local 433, sent a letter to the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Friday demanding the agency require the temporary flooring or netting. The request asks the state to ignore a 2002 federal OSHA interpretation — known as a “compliance directive” — that allows contractors to avoid the safety measures.

“Our union has strongly opposed this compliance directive on numerous occasions and demanded that OSHA rescind it,” Lenhart said in the letter to Tom Czehowski, chief administrative officer of the state OSHA.

“OSHA was warned on several occasions that this specific compliance directive would result in serious injuries and death to ironworkers throughout the country,” the letter said, citing stories in the Las Vegas Sun that detailed the causes of the two men’s deaths and those of seven other construction workers on the Strip.

The directive at issue was written by federal OSHA as instruction to that agency’s investigators. States that operate their own workplace safety departments do not have to follow the federal interpretation.

The federal directive tells OSHA officers to cease enforcement of a long-standing regulation that requires employers to place decking or netting at least two floors — and no more than 30 feet — below employees, provided the workers are required to use safety harnesses.

FULL story at link.