The Future of NIOSH

A View from Inside

November 2004

American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3840 1 Cincinnati, Ohio

THE FUTURE OF NIOSH

A VIEW FROM INSIDE
Summary The Birth of NIOSH: The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) was created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 as a parallel agency to OSHA. The intent of Congress was that NIOSH conduct research, investigate workplace illness and injury, educate workers and management, and support the development of science-based regulation. In the language of the OSH Act, employees should over a working lifetime remain free of material impairment. Implicit in the OSH Act was the premise that the employment relationship imposes powerful barriers to the identification and elimination of hazards. This was the public health model of prevention. Trends: Since 1980 successive Administrations have been replacing this public health model with a federal business model of prevention. In such a model, NIOSH is to serve customers in a commercial health marketplace. Recent Congressional disparagement of ergonomics and a recent Executive Order prohibiting a standard for preventing musculoskeletal injuries are examples of this transformation. Since 1980, NIOSH budget growth has been negative in real dollars; if it had grown as much as have the budgets of other CDC centers, the NIOSH budget today would be more than double. During the mid-1990's, after a failed Congressional attempt to eliminate NIOSH and after Administration "streamlining" efforts, NIOSH was targeted for outsourcing of mission-direct and mission-support work and for downsizing by attrition. New research funds were increasingly diverted to extramural activity. NIOSH division and branch level discretionary funds have declined and in a few years will hit zero in some cases. Access to worker populations for research and hazard evaluation has been curtailed. CDC Futures Initiative: A proposed re-organization at CDC emphasizing customer-centric and health marketing approaches promises to further diminish the independent role of NIOSH as a public health agency for workers health and safety. NIOSH will be placed one level lower in the HHS/CDC administrative structure as part of the Futures Initiative. NIOSH activity and information will be forced into increasing conformity with that of other CDC health products. What Workplace Health and Safety Needs: Four priority goals for preserving and affirming the NIOSH mandate are as follows. 1. 2. Keep NIOSH at its current administrative and reporting status within CDC. Restore NIOSH internal funding to 1980 levels (in current dollars) so that important and necessary hazard evaluation, surveillance and industry-wide research may be conducted. Stop A-76 outsourcing studies and rote consolidations of business functions at NIOSH. Disclose the costs to taxpayers for A-76 and business consolidation studies, money that could be directed towards public health programs, emergency response, maintaining staff levels, and other CDC-mission-related areas.

3. 4.

***********
2

Origin of the NIOSH Mission and Its Political History The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) was created in the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970 during the Nixon administration as a parallel agency in support of but separate from OSHA. The intent of Congress was that NIOSH conduct research, investigate workplace illness and injury, educate workers and management, and support the development of science-based regulation. Implicit in the enabling legislation was the fundamental premise that workplaces do not become free of hazards by the simple action of free markets, and that the employment relationship imposes powerful barriers to the identification of hazards and the development and enforcement of appropriate employer policies. In the remarkable language of the OSH Act, employees doing a particular job over a working lifetime should remain free of material impairment. This was the public health model of prevention. It came about through an unprecedented alliance of labor and environmentalists led by Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union leader Tony Mazzocchi. Framers of the OSH Act recognized that workers have limited control over the work environment and often do not know exactly what knowledge to seek, demands to make, or influence to solicit. Today, the Bush administration is continuing a quest that originated prior to the Reagan administration, that of replacing the public health model with a business model of prevention; NIOSH is to serve customers who will buy the fruits of its labors. Instead of creating knowledge leading to new standards, reduced hazardous exposures, improved workplace design, and training, NIOSH will research return-to-work procedures, health promotion, obesity, behavior modification and other areas that corporate employers feel are important. The recent Congressional disparagement of the field of ergonomics and a Bush Executive Order prohibiting a standard to prevent musculoskeletal injuries are examples of this transformation away from science-based workplace research and prevention. The fact that NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluations (HHE) have been under-funded for years is another example of the shift in priorities. HHEs were explicitly identified in the law as an essential tool for investigating current and new hazards. While many HHE requests represent OSHA compliance failures (workers complaining of health effects when told their exposures are within allowable limits) rather than fundamental research issues, the 400 requests to NIOSH each year arrive with virtually no marketing whatsoever to the vast majority of workers. Corporate and small business interests in the United States have a long history of suspicion of and opposition to efforts to expand job safety and health protections for workers. The greatest animosity has been directed toward OSHA as a regulatory agency, but many corporations and small businesses do not distinguish NIOSH from OSHA. There are employers, however, who welcome NIOSH help in the course of struggling with work-related health issues even though they are OSHA-compliant, and many companies and trade associations

are enthusiastic and contributing partners in NIOSH programs. During the mid1990's, after a failed Congressional attempt to eliminate NIOSH and after Administration "streamlining" efforts, NIOSH was targeted for "re-invention" through the outsourcing of mission-direct and mission-support work and through downsizing by attrition. Several offices of the Bureau of Mines (an agency separate from NIOSH) were permanently closed. (Only two former Bureau of Mines offices remain to conduct mining research and training; they are now part of NIOSH.) Disregard for the NIOSH mission among factions in past Congresses can be seen by following the money, that is, by examining the budgetary history of NIOSH. This is not easily accomplished because detailed budget history is not available. CDC/NIOSH management has not provided this historical information when officially requested by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE Local 3840) during the past 4 years. However, some important insights may be gained from what data is available. Table 1 shows that the 2000 NIOSH budget ($215M), in real dollars, was actually less than the 1980 budget ($249M). If the NIOSH budget had grown between 1980 and 2000 at the same rate as the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) budget, the 2000 budget would have been $426 million, not the $215 million that it was. The same trend is apparent when comparing the NIOSH budget to the overall budgets of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and CDC.

Table 1 NIOSH Budget Attributes (in year 2000 dollars)

millions ($) FY 2000 budget FY 1980 budget (in year 2000 dollars) FY 2000 budget if growth since 1980 same as NIH FY 2000 budget if growth since 1980 same as NIEHS FY 2000 budget if growth since 1980 same as CDC (excluding HIV/immun.) FY 2000 budget if growth since 1980 same as CDC (total)
source: Performance Highlights of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 1995-1999, March 31, 2000 (prepared as required by GPRA legislation).

215 249 418 426 563 828

Although in recent years HHS/CDC is increasingly refusing to fill full-time staff position vacancies due to retirement and other attrition, thus reducing full-time equivalents (FTEs), the NIOSH (civilian) workforce has remained relatively constant or has increased (1978: n=913; 1993: n=918; 2004: n=1264). These numbers are difficult to interpret because of new and pre-existing occupational research and service entities and functions that have been added to NIOSH in these years, such as mine safety research and radiation workers research and compensation. These staff numbers also include and reflect increasing use of

short-term fellows and term and temporary employees, rather than permanent employees, to meet staffing needs. There are other ways to diminish an agency aside from eliminating permanent employees and these are being done. The declining real-dollar budget combined with increasing personnel costs (in part because work force skills have increased over time) have caused the divisional discretionary budgets of NIOSH to plummet. If this trend continues, the discretionary budgets of many NIOSH branches will actually become zero in coming years. Another reason for the now long-standing downward slide of internal program funding is the increasing proportion of the NIOSH budget that goes to extramural research through the NIOSH National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA). research. In the early years of NIOSH, divisional management could map out an innovative and aggressive public health research agenda. This is not possible with todays funding, moreover, NIOSH management must now spend much time administering external NORA projects and responding to non-mission related demands from the upper reaches of CDC and HHS.

Downsizing and Outsourcing Government Weakens the NIOSH Mission Since 1980 under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the goal of re-inventing government has sought to accomplish what the opponents of OSHA and NIOSH couldnt get outright, through down-sizing, consolidation, outsourcing, and decreased funding of basic and applied research and service. In addition, there is now at HHS/CDC a new programmatic focus on individual behavior and health promotion in the workplace. Unless funding and staffing levels are increased, this new focus will further restrict the range and depth of essential core occupational safety and health efforts at NIOSH. Business consolidation is a current major CDC focus. One consolidation would combine all agency graphic design functions performed by visual information specialists to one generic CDC center. Subject matter knowledge and working relationships with scientists that these specialists have developed that are specific to workers health and safety, pediatric vaccinations, chronic disease or HIV prevention, could be denigrated or lost if this were to happen. Seventeen staff position FTEs NIOSH-wide are included in this mandated consolidation. Travel, with functions involving portions of 50 FTEs in Cincinnati and around 200 FTEs NIOSH-wide, budget, procurement and finance will also be consolidated. If NIOSH scientists were to lose local control and oversight of the complex travel arrangements that often must be made in order to conduct sensitive investigations and to do other work, the mission of NIOSH could be compromised.

Out-sourcing of government work is occurring in this Administration by means of the A-76 circular and the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act whereby hundreds of NIOSH jobs are being studied for contracting-out to private vendors. These costly studies disrupt work and demoralize the affected employees. Targeted at NIOSH are Office Automation Assistants (to remain government jobs), Library Services, and Printing Services (lost to contractors). This A-76 competitive bidding process primarily targets job series traditionally and currently staffed by women and minorities. Because promoting diversity is not a performance criterion for the bidding process, the NIOSH Diversity program is directly undermined by these studies. A-76 bidders need only satisfy minimal technical proficiency requirements and can compete on costs unburdened by wage scales or benefits of comparable government work. NIOSH Library staff are confident that they surpass private contractors in service and performance but dont believe they can compete on cost. The loss of NIOSH staff in Library Services may hamper NIOSH research. In the end, AFGE believes that the A76/FAIR Act inventory studies both degrade the NIOSH mission and go against the interests of staff and NIOSH partners in conducting occupational safety and health research. We hope that our on-going studies will show that NIOSH staff does the work most effectively. This has been the outcome in many other federal agencies (see Appendix). Another management agenda that diverts time and energy is the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) process. In this procedure, activities judged to be under-performing (which are also often under-funded) are specifically targeted for funding cuts, producing the predictable outcome of further decline.

Reorganizing CDC: a Coup de Grace for the Original NIOSH Mandate For several years HHS/CDC has been trying to diminish the independent role of NIOSH within CDC. Directives required that when used, the NIOSH logo must be smaller than and be accompanied by the CDC logo. In what has become to many NIOSH staff a pointed perhaps unintended metaphor for the devaluation of NIOSH in the view of CDC and HHS, a new sign on the NIOSH Alice Hamilton Laboratory building in Cincinnati under massive CDC letters, spells out NIOSH in letters so small they are unreadable from more than a few paces. (see

photo) Looking at most CDC publications and program materials, one would hardly know that there are occupational health or safety issues, or that NIOSH exists. In reality, NIOSH is the largest center in CDC, employing about 21% of workers outside of CDC central administration, which is appropriate given that people spend about one third of their adult waking lives working. Occupational health and safety is not a special interest, as the current Administration would have us believe. The next largest centers are NCID infectious diseases, 16%, NCHSTP HIV, STD, TB, 15%, and NCCDPHP chronic diseases, health promotion, 13% (Table 2).

Table 2

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

CDC/CIO (alphabetical order) Total Workforce in March 20001 n 339 166 688 328 493 824 878 106 1153 296 203 % 6.2 3.0 12.6 6.0 9.0 15.1 16.0 1.9 21.1 5.4 3.7 Futures Initiative staff n 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 2

ATSDR EPO NCCDPHP NCEH NCHS NCHSTP NCID NCIPC NIOSH NIP PHPPO NCBDDD

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Epidemiology Program Office National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion National Center for Environmental Health National Center for Health Statistics National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention National Center for Infectious Diseases National Center for Injury Prevention and Control National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health National Immunization Program Public Health Practice Program Office National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities

CDC HRMO/ITAB 03/31/00

The slight of occupational issues manifested within CDC is about to get worse as apparent in the proposed CDC Futures Initiative, a strategic plan for CDC reorganization. Table 2 shows how many staff from various Centers participated in the Futures team discussions. NIOSH, the largest center, had one representative on a team of 23. The 3 next largest centers each had two representatives on the Futures team (NCID, NCHSTP, NCCDPHP). There was no AFGE-designated union participant (a possible unfair labor practice). Reading the draft plan, one would almost conclude that worker health and safety issues no longer exist. Under the Futures Initiative, NIOSH will be placed one level lower in the HHS/CDC administrative structure. The Initiative emphasizes the importance of becoming customer-centric. Unfortunately NIOSH has been unable to adequately respond to hundreds of HHE requests from its customers in recent years due to staff and budgetary restraints, even though HHEs are a key method of surveillance for identifying new problems needing investigation. Although NIOSH has the legal right of entry to private workplaces in pursuit of information needed for health and safety research, this tool has been virtually abandoned over the past 20 years in the face of Administration hostility. Gaining access to worker populations is demanding more and more of researchers time yielding less and less success. In essence, NIOSH is being intentionally isolated from its customers. Even so, it was NIOSH customers in the labor and medical health and safety communities at the urging of NIOSH staff and union activists and others - that saved NIOSH during the attacks of the 1990s. The CDC Futures Initiative is concerned about efficiency and discusses design options, agency-wide goal setting, cross-cutting functions, capacity building, and health marketing solutions. But the Initiative declines to address mission deflation, under-funding, mismanagement and intimidation, not to mention the privatizing and contracting-out of core functions so that, in the case of NIOSH, occupational health and safety research will be performed by the lowest bidder. The currently required review of all research protocols by research cops in the Administrations Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would have been a good topic for discussion in the Futures Initiative; this is a continuing significant source of delay and inefficiency created by the opponents of big government.

Again Time for Public Affirmation of the NIOSH Mission Seen in the perspective of the last 30 years, the impact of the Futures Initiative for NIOSH appears to be the logical next step in the dismemberment of a powerful public health agency for worker health and safety. Other public health activities may also be threatened. The Initiative is being rapidly implemented at the highest levels of the Bush administration by CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding who, in a September 2004 Washington Post article, stated that the reorganization will proceed with the stated goal of completion in October, 2004.

In fact, during October 2004, two top administrative positions (communications and chief of staff) have been removed from NIOSH to CDC, as have all printing functions; at this time, library services are on the operating table. The intended ultimate result in the case of NIOSH will be to have research findings and safety products filtered through a marketing scheme that acknowledges no inherent conflicts in employment relationships, that assumes a declining regulatory role of OSHAs general duty clause and specific standards, that puts employers in charge of policing themselves, and that places the burden of responsibility for health and safety back on workers. Thus NIOSH will be in sync with other centers in CDC, for example, blaming people for what they eat while minimizing research on the nutritional consequences of highly processed food, ignoring the role of marketing in determining eating behavior, and overlooking the corporate agenda in personal life-style choices. Since 9/11, NIOSH's public health mission has grown to encompass new frontiers in worker safety and health, including bioterror control technologies and respirator certification, and first responder protection. But NIOSH needs to do more - not less in many other traditional and non-traditional areas such as a) ergonomic- and stress-related consequences of lean production, b) indoor air quality, c) occupational hazard and health surveillance (the proposed National Exposure at Work Survey), and d) innumerable chemical applications including, for example, using volatile corrosion inhibitors in shrink-wrap operations. Whole new areas are demanding scrutiny: a) bioengineered materials (e.g., enzymes in the baking industry), b) advanced composites, c) nanotechnology in cosmetics, electronics and other industries, d) automated system hazards (robotic systems), e) underserved populations, e.g., migrant farmworkers who are moving into livestock and dairy farming, meat packing, poultry processing and construction, and f) wireless technologies (satellite phones, wireless computer networks, electronic barcodes, implanted computer chips, etc.). The CDC/NIOSH re-organization can and must be stopped and the original NIOSH mission defended. Only the NIOSH constituency of all working people, environmentalists and health care advocates has the potential to mobilize sufficient political influence to transform the CDC re-organization into a plan for positive change. Already a vigorous public debate has developed in defense of NIOSH and is making its way to the popular press, congressional hearings and budget committees. Let us seek to: 1. Keep NIOSH at its current administrative and reporting status within CDC. 2. Restore NIOSH internal funding to 1980 levels (in current dollars) so that important and necessary hazard evaluation, surveillance and industry-wide research may be conducted.

3. Stop A-76 outsourcing studies and rote consolidations of business functions at NIOSH. 4. Disclose the costs to taxpayers for A-76 and business consolidation studies, money that could be directed towards public health programs, emergency response, maintaining staff levels, and other CDC-mission-related areas.

Appendix
Examples of A-76 assessments in other agencies where the outcome favored government workers: Secretaries, Office Automation Assistants, Special/Staff/Program Assistants functions at DHHS, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA): 30 FTEs Freight Forwarding Services included the shipping, receiving and warehouse functions, invoice processing and small package express accounts; DHHS, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Information Technology Data Center Operations function that included but where not limited to backup services, computer facility management and maintenance services, monitor and maintain the Clinical Center mainframe computer, printing services (i.e. manuals, payrolls), IT support for NIH users, shipping services, hardware/software testing and installations, acceptance test services, providing technical expertise at technical committees, and maintaining procedural, technical, and software manuals; DHHS, NIH. Career and Organizational Development/Instructional Services; DHHS, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: 25 FTEs. Logistics services at the National Institute of Environmental Health Services (NIEHS) functions that included requisitioning, receiving, storage, picking and shipping and inventory control; DHHS, NIH. Animal Husbandry Services A76 Study: Animal Care Service functions at DHHS, CDC Laboratory Glassware and Associated Laundry Services A76 Study: Biosafety Level 1; 4 Laboratory Glassware and Associated Laundry Services; HHS, CDC, National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID)

***********

10

This statement was contributed to by a number of AFGE Local 3840 members and reviewed by the entire membership. AFGE Local 3840 representing bargaining unit employees of NIOSH - Cincinnati Operations President Jenise Brassell Vice President Donna Pfirman Chief Steward Barbara Jenkins 4676 Columbia Parkway Cincinnati, OH 45226 AFGE national website: www.afge.org

11