From the Grassroots
A Budgetary Benefit to
Worker Health
BY DANIEL CHUTE
After reading the Leadership Perspective
column in the May 2011 Synergist, “A
Budgetary Threat to Worker Health” by
Steven Lacey, PhD, CIH, CSP, I was
moved to write a response. Based on the
information Dr. Lacey provided, and my
perspective from more than 30 years of
professional industrial hygiene practice
and as a NIOSH ERC program graduate
and a present-day business owner, I have
reached the opposite conclusion—that is,
cancellation of the NIOSH ERC programs
would provide the greatest benefit to the
occupational safety and health profession in 40 years. Here’s why.
NIOSH doesn’t protect worker health;
employers do. While NIOSH has conducted many excellent studies and evaluation reports over the years, NIOSH
researchers must acknowledge that they
get educated every time they walk
through a plant gate, and probably have
to watch a 30-minute orientation safety
video before they are escorted on a tour.
Evaluation services are available commercially, often with the same contractors hired by NIOSH, at lower total cost
and with a faster and more focused turnaround time. Only employers can act on
recommendations, buy equipment, hire
people and modify manufacturing or
production processes. Privatizing this activity would get the necessary recommendations into decision makers’ hands
much more quickly, with potential for
beneficial reductions in exposure time.
The NIOSH ERCs were formed as a type
of short-term stimulus package to train
occupational safety and health professionals on passage of the Occupational
Safety and Health Act in 1970. My pro-
fessors (in the 1970s) were grizzled veterans of the insurance and petrochemical
industries. Through decades of hands-on
industrial experience before OSHA, these
pioneers would routinely drive 30,000
miles a year and spend weeks at industrial
sites implementing effective loss control
programs and reducing Experience Modification rates, recommending practical industrial hygiene exposure reduction and
safety engineering techniques. We learned
skills sought by industry, and we worked
in those industries.
Today’s academic environment is different. Is it possible that 40 years of
government funding, grants and studies
has produced two generations following
a comfortable but isolated university-centered career path where college students never leave campus and enter
“dirty and demanding” industry? If so,
this off-course trajectory could harm the
value of our profession. If our training
programs can’t stand on their own with
sustainable market demand after 40
years, we should try something we are
good at without taking any more of the
public’s money.
Other professions and degree programs
survive, thrive and have demand ex-
ceeding capacity without dedicated
funding from the federal government.
In addition, privately endowed scholar-
ships and apprentice programs may be
established for petroleum engineers,
MBAs, law schools, computer sciences,
nurses and aviation mechanics, among
others. Maybe we aren’t effectively sell-
ing our “cool factor” and pumping up
demand. Am I the only industrial hy-
gienist who thinks we should have a hit
TV series like CSI or NCIS where buff
CIHs and CSPs wearing mirrored safety
shades solve complex illness and injury
mysteries?
Daniel O. Chute, CIH, CSP, is president of Atrium
Environmental Health and Safety Services, LLC in
Reston, Va. He can be reached at (703) 689-9482
ext. 104 or dchute@atriumehs.com.
Further discussion of this topic will be directed to
the Synergist blog at www.aiha.org/SynergistBlog.
