Political Quotes

“I rise in support of all the commonsense reforms to the OSHA enforcement process. Mr. Speaker, I serve as chairman of the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform and Oversight of the House Committee on Small Business. Believe me, I hear regularly from small businesses about the horror stories with OSHA enforcement. The Department of Labor and OSHA suggest their first mission is to provide compliance assistance and not play ``gotcha'' with businesses they oversee. OSHA needs to educate our businessmen and women about what they should be doing before they show up and slap them with a fine. In a system where our agencies promulgate over 4,000 rules a year, we cannot expect small businesses to know how to comply unless we help them. In 1996, Congress passed the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act requiring agencies to develop small business policies to reduce or waive civil penalties for first-time violators. We want our regulators to help businesses come into compliance. I have been reviewing enforcement statistics as a result of some of the hearings I have held. The Department of Labor had 143,000 enforcement actions against businesses last year, 45 percent of them against small businesses. I have also looked at the numbers in OSHA. It had 24,000 enforcement actions, half of which were against small businesses. We need to restore fairness to the OSHA adjudication system.”