Sheila Jackson Lee: “As senior member of the Committees on the Judiciary, on Homeland Security, and on the Budget, I rise in strong support…”

“As senior member of the Committees on the Judiciary, on Homeland Security, and on the Budget, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1195, the ``Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act,'' which would establish within one year an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (``OSHA'') interim workplace standard requiring health care and social service providers to implement workplace violence prevention plans, and which would establish a permanent OSHA standard within 42 months. Currently, there is no OSHA standard that requires employers to implement violence prevention plans that would help reduce workplace violence injuries among health care and social service workers. The lack of an enforceable standard means that OSHA, the federal agency created to protect workers' safety, has few meaningful tools to protect health care workers from the threat of workplace violence. The Government Accountability Office has estimated, conservatively, that it takes OSHA at least 7 years to issue a standard. Seven years; Our healthcare workers have worked too hard and sacrificed too much for them to wait a minimum of seven more years before measures are in place to secure their basic physical safety. H.R.…”