Senate panel OKs Obama OSHA nominee

“Our nation’s labor and health systems face critical challenges, and public servants of their caliber are assets to the American people,” panel chair Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said after the Nov. 18 vote on Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee.

As an Energy Department official in the Clinton administration, Michaels, now a top professor of public health at George Washington University in D.C., “was chief architect” of the program that aids the former nuclear weapon complex workers who have become seriously ill due to radiation or beryllium exposure at sites such as Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Hanford, Wash., a GWU-provided biography says.

The Steelworkers represent many of those present and former workers, who criticized the program’s administration during the anti-worker Bush government for being too restrictive, for putting too much of the burden of proof on sick workers and their families and for taking years to pay benefits. In some cases, the worker died, first.

“Since its enactment in 2000, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program provided more than $4.5 billion in benefits to sick workers and their families. He (Michaels) also oversaw promulgation of two major public rules: Chronic Beryllium Disease Prevention, and Nuclear Safety Management,” the bio adds.

Before joining the Clinton Energy Department, Michaels “conducted epidemiologic studies on typographers, commercial pressmen, construction workers, bus drivers and paper workers,” and set up an epidemiology unit, run by Montefiore Hospital, at New York City’s Riker’s Island prison.

No date has been set for a Senate vote on Michaels. Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy administrator and a longtime union safety and health specialist, is currently running the agency.

This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.