With its current staff, Henshaw said, OSHA can visit about 2 percent of the nation's workplaces each year. Given those limits, he said, it has made sense to strengthen the agency's relationships with businesses, encouraging voluntary compliance.
To do so, OSHA has created a new kind of voluntary program, intended to foster "trusting, cooperative relationships" between the government and groups of industries and professional societies, according to an agency fact sheet. These new alliances, as they are known, depart from a central tradition throughout the agency's history: They are allowed to exclude labor unions. Of the 57 national alliances OSHA has formed, with groups ranging from air conditioning contractors to shipyard owners, just one -- intended to promote safe work habits in road construction zones -- includes a union representative.
Agency officials say that more than 500 other, older voluntary projects run by OSHA still involve unions. As for the new alliances, one OSHA administrator, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that some employers might be too uncomfortable to participate if unions were there.
In November 2002, OSHA announced an alliance with 13 airlines and the National Safety Council to find better ways to prevent workers who handle baggage from being injured. The OSHA alliance excluded airline unions, which had asked to take part.
"It is simply illogical and insulting," Sonny Hall, president of the AFL-CIO's transportation trades department, said at the time, "when the powers that be in this administration's OSHA sat down to form a private-sector group to reduce injuries to airline workers that they chose to exclude, of all people, airline workers."
Fewer and Narrower Rules
At the same time, Henshaw was carrying out Chao's orders. Echoing his superiors at the Labor Department and in the White House, Henshaw said the Clinton administration had left too much unfinished regulatory work at the agency. OSHA, Henshaw repeatedly said, needed to convert its agenda from a "wish list" to a "to-do list."
The data analyzed by The Post show that Clinton left behind 44 incomplete rules at OSHA, just four more than when Bush's father had moved out of the White House eight years earlier. "I don't recall things being added just because somebody asked for them," said Katzen, who had been the top official for regulations in the Clinton White House.
Henshaw's housecleaning produced dramatic effects. By the end of Bush's first year in office, OSHA had eliminated 18 of the 44 rules. By the end of 2003, six more, including the tuberculosis protections, were gone.
"Every one of the items on there had some merit. Nobody is disputing that," Henshaw said of the proposals he removed. "But there is only so much you can do."
Many of the cases involved complex arguments pitting the interests of workers against those of their employers.
In August 2001, the same month Henshaw was confirmed, the agency stopped efforts to regulate chemicals used in making semiconductors and suspected of causing miscarriages in workers. The agency's written explanation at the time consisted of one sentence: "OSHA is withdrawing this entry from the agenda at this time due to resource constraints and other priorities."
A month after the semiconductor decision, OSHA eliminated a proposal, dating to the Reagan administration, that would have updated lists of the amounts of industrial chemicals to which workers could be exposed. The new administration said it made more sense to regulate each substance one at a time, a slower process.
That December, the agency killed a proposal on indoor air quality intended to prevent restaurant and other workers from exposure to tobacco smoke or other pollutants. State and local standards, OSHA said, had solved the problem.
Some of the canceled rules will make it more difficult for Bush's critics to pursue regulations in the future. After Congress and Bush killed the ergonomics rules, OSHA eliminated a proposal to compel employers to break out ergonomic injuries when they report on worker injuries in general.
Henshaw said at the time that such records would not help to reduce such injuries. Seminario of the AFL-CIO said that, without such records, advocates of ergonomic protections have less ability to document that federal safeguards are needed.
With his focus largely on coaching employers to follow existing rules, Henshaw said, "writing another standard is not going to help with that." Still, he said, the agency has continued to write new rules when they are needed.
At OSHA, The Post's analysis found, the rules the agency has proposed are narrower than most of those it has eliminated. Thirteen of the 24 proposals it has canceled since Bush took office fall into a category the government classifies as "economically significant," meaning they would cost or save the economy at least $100 million. None of the 16 standards OSHA has proposed during that time falls in that group.
Graham said it does not make sense for OSHA to overreach. From his days as a Harvard professor, Graham said, he knew of research suggesting that neither the health nor safety standards created over OSHA's history had a clear track record of being effective. Besides, he said, OSHA's procedures have always made it uncommonly sluggish in churning out big rules.
