At a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) decried "top-down mandates" that stifle economic growth.
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00:00Thank you. Ms. Miller from Illinois.
00:04Thank you, Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
00:08Just to set the record straight, Republicans support common-sense policies that reduce regulations while keeping our workplace environment safe.
00:19Our mission is to protect workers not just from hazards, but also from the crushing weight of Washington's failed bureaucratic overreach.
00:29Time and again, we've seen top-down mandates that negatively impact job creation and workers across the country.
00:36Employers are job creators and should be seen as active partners in creating safe work environments.
00:43Yet, Democrats continue to treat employers as greedy money-grabbers who don't care about the well-being of their employees.
00:52For instance, the Biden administration's OSHA issued a rushed proposal on heat injury and illness prevention that had the potential to wreak havoc on businesses and communities across the country.
01:07Republicans, on the other hand, understand that government red tape can hinder a business and its employees rather than create a positive work environment.
01:16The bottom line is that the Biden-Harris OSHA-drafted regulations based on party politics for cheap votes were not keeping workers safer.
01:26Republicans are here to fix the problem.
01:28So, my question is for Ms. Watson.
01:31Your written testimony says that Biden's OSHA took the form of a, quote, strict disciplinarian, citing the expansion of the severe violator enforcement program and instance-by-instance citation policy.
01:46Can you please discuss what those policies were and how they were expanded under President Biden?
01:53Yes.
01:54Good morning.
01:55Thank you for the question.
01:56The instance-by-instance policy used to focus on willful violations.
02:00And what that meant is if there was a willful violation, that's something where an employer had been acting badly, basically, repeatedly.
02:10So that would lend itself to repeated violations that would end up putting them on the willful scope.
02:16And so those citations, they could be cited for every instance of a violation of that standard.
02:22The problem is that with the expansion, it's focused on the instance-by-instance now also includes record keeping.
02:30So let's say, for example, an employer doesn't fill in their 300 logs, the OSHA logs that they're supposed to complete.
02:37And maybe they don't check a box and maybe they miss that box every single time they fill out that form.
02:43Each one of those failures to check that box is a violation.
02:47And so that is an instance-by-instance.
02:50It's a paperwork issue.
02:51It's not a safety issue.
02:53Another example that I used in my testimony is let's take the OSHA's proposed heat rule.
02:58You have employees.
02:59You have maybe eight, ten employees on a job site who run out of water, but no one tells their manager.
03:06Nobody tells their supervisor.
03:07So the employer doesn't know about that.
03:09And then let's say that an OSHA inspector comes out and finds that they ran out of water.
03:15So the employer could be cited ten times for failing to provide water for their employees on that job site, even though the employer didn't know about it.
03:24And let's say that that water wasn't suitably cool.
03:27And so that could be another element of another instance-by-instance violation.
03:32And while those failure to provide water is a safety issue, if the employer didn't know about it and nobody told the employer that they were out of water, then obviously that's a problem.
03:42And the employee should have been able to tell the employer.
03:45The fact is that-and they can litigate that, certainly.
03:47They have that ability to go and do that.
03:50But in that instance, in that situation, they could be subject to up to 20.
03:56If you have ten employees, for each time that they violated those requirements, it's per employee.
04:02And that is problematic.
04:04I think the record-keeping is really problematic because it's a paperwork thing.
04:08The paperwork violations do nothing to help and improve safety.
04:12Well, I guess that's an example of the crushing weight of Washington's bureaucratic overreach.
04:18Mr. Parson, the Biden administration released its proposed heat standard in July of 2024.
04:24But this rule was just a mandate designed to appease climate change activists.
04:29The proposed rule fails to account for the vastly differing climates in different parts of the country.
04:35And so how would this proposed rule negatively impact your business?
04:41Yeah, we talked about that a little bit earlier.
04:43I think definitely more administrative need and more costly goods to produce.
04:50This is going to make everything more expensive.
04:52Our safety of our teams is our number one priority.
04:56And that's true for all businesses that I've been a part of, anyway.
04:59And so if you set that as kind of the baseline, we're going to try to do whatever we can to keep our employees safe and productive and willfully employed.
05:08And so trying to figure out how to craft that is priority number one for us.