Improving Workplace Hazard Communication

摘要

Workers in many modern industrial settings have long faced a multitude of chemical threats to their health and safety―some of them obvious, many more barely perceptible. As early as 1972, a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health survey found that "approximately 25 million U.S. workers, or one in four, [were] po- tentially exposed to one or more of the nearly 8,000 hazards." Stunningly, for 90 percent of the chemicals present in surveyed workplaces, "neither the employer nor the employee knew the identity of the chemicals in the trade-name products." When workers became ill from chemical exposures, such ignorance hampered diagnosis and treatment. According to an article in the journal of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, a worker who got sick often could say little more than "I work with the 203 stock" to his or her doctor.