Polls and Questions

The last poll closed with a curious, although not totally surprising, result. I think most people in OSHA believe that we, as an agency, fair better under a Democratic administration than we do under a Republican administration (please, that's not a political statement, it's just an opinion of the perception of a difference). The top two vote getters were Scannell and Henshaw, both appointed under Republican administrations, which is to me the curious part. What's not surprising, however, is that they were both safety and health professional first, administrators second. Do you suppose the current administration knows this? By the way, the new poll will be up soon.

Here are a couple of questions someone left after my last post that I want to answer:

"What exactly is the evaluation system for CSHOs nowadays? Does a CSHO get dinged at review time if their citations are constantly contested by employers? Or SOL tells them their citations are no good? Or vacated by the Commission?"

There are several answers to each question. Like so much in OSHA, there's the way it is supposed to be and the way it is, and the way is isn't necessarily the same from office to office or region to region.

Does a CSHO get dinged at review time if their citations are constantly contested by employers? We're not supposed to, and in my AO we don't. The reason we're not supposed to get dinged is because some of us do mostly complex inspections, which are more likely to be contested. But there are also companies out there that as a matter of policy always contest OSHA citations, so to get dinged for that isn't right. Again, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Does a CSHO get dinged if SOL tells them their citations are no good? We're not supposed to, and in my AO we don't. I think this one will depend on each regional SOL office. There are RSOLs where the attorneys won't take any case to court, no matter what, and I'm guessing that in those regions the ADs mostly wouldn't hold a CSHO responsible for an RSOL weakness.

Does a CSHO get dinged if citations are vacated by the Commission? Again, we're not supposed to, and in my AO we don't. My guess is that doesn't happen, and for two reasons;

First, very few cases actually make it to the Commission. More cases make it to an ALJ, but even those cases aren't the norm.

Second, the cases may not be heard for a year or more from the date inspection is finished, which means the CSHO is in a totally different evaluation period.