government in Georgia would have as much concern as the people in Pennsylvania. I think that the States could and should enforce their laws, their responsibilities.

I don't know, I just heard about an industry in my own community that is supposed to use a lot of glue, and a neighbor lady says that, you know, we feel like we are glue sniffers. I don't know-well, how is OSHA going to go about protecting those people across-the-street? Mr. DANIELS. Very simply, that is why OSHA came into being. Mr. LANDGREBE. We do have our national Department of HEW, and it seems to me they certainly have enough power to deal with the situation you talk about. But it is the responsibility of the State of Georgia. Why would Georgia take a situation like this unless they didn't know it, and if they didn't know it they should make their laws-well, if this thing is as bad as you say it is, certainly there is no State in America that can't deal with it if they want to.

Mr. DANIELS. Are you doubting my word? That is testimony given before this committee before this law was enacted, and that is the reason why OSHA came into being, which is because of the failure of the States and because of the failure of employers to enact proper rules and regulations or laws to protect the life and health of the workingman. This is what brought the Federal Government into the picture. Mr. LANDGREBE, Mr. Daniels, you and I have a philosophical difference here, and I am sure we will never resolve it. I just feel the States have responsibilities and they have power, and several States can do these things and they can do them as well as we can do them and a lot cheaper. When we run out of borrowing power and can't borrow and provide these hundreds of millions of dollars any longer, that is when the day of reckoning will come to America.

Mr. DANIELS. For your information, Mr. Landgrebe, I checked it with the Labor Department to see if I am correct. This law does provide for the States to enact their own health and safety laws. About 25 States have decided to do exactly that. Now, you do realize, of course, this law, OSHA, provides that the States must adopt provisions that are at least as effective as the Federal legislation. They can adopt laws that might be even stronger, but they must have laws equally as effective as the Federal law. But only 25 States have come forward to adopt their own laws.

So, 50 percent have not taken any action along that line. So, it is not that the Federal Government wants to intrude upon the States, but the States have an opportunity to legislate and all the Federal Government is doing is showing them the way.

Mr. LANDGREBE. I disagree.

Mr. DANIELS. Thank you very much for your testimony.

Our next witness is the Honorable J. Kenneth Robinson, U.S. Representative of the Seventh District of Virginia. Is Mr. Robinson present?

Is the Honorable Robin Beard, U.S. Representative from the Sixth District of Tennessee present?

STATEMENT OF HON. ROBIN BEARD, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TENNESSEE

Mr. BEARD. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I know we have a quorum call, would you like me to start my statement?

Mr. DANIELS. Well, we can continue it until the 5-minute bell rings.

Mr. Escн. I would move his statement be considered as read and entered into the record at this point and go from that point on, and he can submit his testimony. I think we have your testimony don't we? Mr. DANIELS. Well, perhaps Mr. Beard would like to make some oral comment as well.

Mr. BEARD. I would, as a matter of fact; I would. I don't know if you plan on continuing the hearing later this afternoon. I am at the disposal of the committee. I will be glad to start now and continue.

Mr. DANIELS. This room, I understand, will be occupied this afternoon, and we will not be able to give you the full opportunity to express all of your views so I am wondering if you would care to return at the next date of the hearing, which will be sometime next month. This committee plans to conduct oversight hearings throughout the rest of this term of Congress. There will be at least 2 days set aside each month for that purpose.

Mr. BEARD. What I would like, with your permission, Mr. Chairman, is to insert my testimony for the record and also that my comments are not that original or as different from what has been said by the various witnesses that have appeared before me. My whole attitude at this time is that OSHA was set up for a particular purpose, to take care of particular problems, and I feel that in some areas it has been successful. I think what we have found and what many of the members of the subcommittee and the committee have found and Members of Congress is that there is a fear, and there is a misunderstanding between the businessmen of this country and the guidelines and the directions that were to be established by this legislation, to where we are not working together-the businessman, the State government and the Federal Government are not working together.

Mr. DANIELS. What do you find, Mr. Beard, is the most repeated complaint?

Mr. BEARD. I think the fear of consultation or rather the fear of investigation or examination without consultation is one of the primary fears. In my testimony, it goes into more detail.

Mr. DANIELS. Is there any objection to Congressman Beard's statement being incorporated in the record?

Hearing none, it is so ordered.

[Statement of Robin Beard follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. ROBIN BEARD, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TENNESSEE

I welcome this opportunity to testimony before your Select Subcommittee on Labor regarding the obvious failings of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. I believe that we should make a concerted effort to reform the existing OSHA law.

OSHA was designed to protect the American worker, to provide every working man and woman with a safe, healthy atmosphere in which to perform his or her daily task. This end, I feel, is one which few, if any, individuals can take issue with. The framers of the act were determined to do away with excessively noisy, oppressively hot, and dangerous factories and mills, be they large or small, be they in the industrial heartland of the Northeast or Midwest, or in the still largely rural South.

Despite these noble aims, Mr. Chairman, OSHA has turned out to be a bureaucratic nightmare, typified by gross abuses of power by unresponsive, irresponsible. often-untrained Federal officials, who have harassed and abused many small businessmen in the name of Occupational Safety and Health. The cost of OSHA has been staggering: $260 million in tax money has been spent on implementing the original act. $5.6 billion worth of losses to businessmen have resulted from OSHA "inspections" and from trying to comply with the OSHA regulations.

Further, Mr. Chairman, perhaps the greatest harm done by OSHA has been to the very people it was designed to protect-the workers of America.

In literally hundreds of cases, involving thousands of workers, small businessmen have simply closed up shop, finding themselves unable to comply with the often unrealistic demands of OSHA.

In "citing" businessmen for real or imagined violations of the OSHA law, few Labor Department inspectors take any cost factors, which are traditionally used in business sense, they would surely recognize the unreasonableness of many of their demands.

Let me give you an example from my own home District in Tennessee. A new foundry was opened not too long ago down there by a man whose family has been in the foundry business in Ohio for generations. He is an intelligent, thoughtful and careful businessman. Like many others, he recognizes the benefits which accrue to him from his providing safe working conditions for his employees. Thus, his aim was to have the best, the newest and the safest factory possible. After his plant had been in operation for a while, the OSHA inspectors arrived. One process used in the factory was producing about 10% more dust, I believe, than OSHA thought was safe for the workers in that area, another created too much noise. The casting company was cited and fined about $150.00. This is fine. OSHA has done its job. The only problem is that the required abatement is costing this single small business in excess of half-a-million dollars. Now, this is a good, solid little company; though this expense will severely hurt this company, it won't force it to close, at least not this time. But, Mr. Chairman, what of the small marginal plants in other little towns? What of the small factory that is the only source of employment for, say a hundred residents of a rural county? What if they can't possibly afford to comply at this time with OSHA regulations? What if the harassed and hassled small businessman says "to heck with it," closes up and goes fishing-for good? What good has OSHA done? No good, Mr. Chairman, no good at all! So strict are the brueaucratic regulations, so unbending are the bureaucratic regulations here in Washington and out in the field, that they would sooner see a business shut down than allow minor violations to continue. Now, I realize that this is an extreme type of case, but I am also aware of the extremes OSHA's bureaucrats sometimes go to implement this law. I have dedicated myself to trying to end the "adversary" relationship, which presently exists between the small businessman and OSHA. OSHA is, in too many instances, to too many businessmen, a threat, something to be feared, and loathed, another example of the unresponsive government in Washington. What I feel OSHA should be is a tool to help forge a tri-partite partnership among business, labor, and government, working toward a single end-employee safety-in a realistic fashion.

I want to see an end to the harassment, and to the nit-picking inspections. I want to stop hearing of absurdities such as in the case of the small businessman who was cited for and fined because his fire extinguishers were not at "eye level." Whose eye level, Mr. Chairman? Yours? Mine? The OSHA inspector's? Or, how about the case of the plant in Oregon which was cited because the rungs on its ladders were not the prescribed length apart? They were fourteen inches apart: OSHA said they must be twelve. It is incredible to me that hundreds of thousands of hard-working tax payers' dollars go to finance government employees who have nothing to do but measure the space between the rungs of a ladder, or who decide that electrical switches must be coded in a certain way, or who pontificate the fact that there must be coat hooks in toilet stalls, forgetting the fact that most employees in a plant or factory work in their shirtsleeves. I could go on and on giving examples such as these, recognizing the fact that many of my colleagues will reply that there are excesses in everything. While this is, of course, true, I feel that this is one area where we can stop these excesses by providing badly needed reform of the existing OSHA law.

Mr. Chairman, OSHA regulations constitute an unindexed pile of paper, seventeen feet high! Yet, OSHA expects the small businessman to know what applies to him, what to correct and how, on and on. The time has come to put a stop to this. Now, I don't expect anyone from the Labor Department to come up here and admit OSHA's failings, and to discuss its good and bad points, saying "this is wrong" or "that is unworkable." The burden is on us, Mr. Chairman, we in the Congress must act, or somewhere along the line-OSHA is going to be repealed. I, for one, would like to see it work, and it is not working now.

I do not believe that equipment should have to be replaced, often at the cost of thousands of dollars to the small businessman, if it does not constitute a serious violation, if it does not pose a potentially serious danger to the workers. I feel the OSHA law should contain a "grandfather clause," exempting such equipment.

When the time comes when it can be replaced at an economically reasonable cost. the law should then require the new equipment to comply strictly with the standards.

I feel that the financial impact of a proposed standard must be studied and published. I feel that this is realistic in that it is simply good business sense to assess what an often-major change is going to cost. It allows the small businessman an opportunity to look at his overall financial picture, and to plan for these new costs so far as securing the necessary financing to implement OSHA's orders. I believe that OSHA must consider these cost factors before it prescribes any standards. I do not feel that it is asking too much for the Federal government to study the cost of the new burden it is placing on the shoulders of the small businessman of this country. I do not feel that a standard which could conceivably cause a number of small businessmen to shut down is a practical one. In such cases, I feel the same end could be achieved by advising the businessman of the different means available to him to create a safe place for his employees to work in, rather than prescribing a single piece of equipment or set of procedures for them to follow.

I believe that the businessman should have advance notice of a forthcoming OSHA inspection, to allow him to have qualified management or consultive personnel present at the time of the inspection. Such notice, which, I feel, will not unreasonably hamper the purpose of OSHA, which—we must always rememberis to provide a safe place for people to work-would give the businessman the benefit of having the expertise of both his consultant as well as the OSHA inspector. This will allow the employer to know exactly what he must do in order to comply with the act.

We must not forget how complex and bewildering OSHA appears to the average small businessman, Mr. Chairman. In dealing with this intricate law, he needs all the help he can get, and I feel that ailowing him to know that the OSHA inspector is coming and allowing him to have a safety expert who can help him in complying with the dictates of OSHA will serve to do away with at least part of the "combative" aspects of OSHA. As long as we have this law, it must be a workable law.

In this vein. Mr. Chairman, I also believe that we must provide for on-site technical assistance by the Department of Labor, if it is requested by the em ployer. In many cases, the small businessman is aware that something is wrong. but he does not know exactly what he must do to abate the problem. If he could have the benefit of the Labor Department's engineering expertise, he would. I believe, feel that the government was working with him, rather than against him in this area. Unless IMMINENT danger existed. I do not feel that a citation should emanate from such a consultation visit. Our aim, I reiterate, must be to create a working relationship, a partnership, striving to make every plant, every factory, every mill in our great country a safe, healthy place in which to work. Another major change which I would like to see effected in the existing OSHA law would be to require a citation for a violation to be accompanied by a specific suggested course of action to be taken by the employer to correct the problem. This would be another instance of my "partnership" concept of OSHA. This would be of great help, particularly to the small businessman, who may not have access to a safety expert to help him in the complex engineering aspects of complying with OSHA. This will prevent the employer from being cited a second time be cause he failed to abate the dangerous or unhealthy condition in the proper fashion.

I want to see a small businessman able to sit down with someone from OSHA and discuss the problems in his plant. I want to see the OSHA inspector say "this furnace is dangerous. You're in violation of the law and it has to be corrected." And. I want to see help for this individual businessman who is trying to comply with the OSHA regulations.

I want to see government take a hard look at the costs involved to effect compliance with these standards, and to be reasonable about dictating them. I want to see consultation for the businessman, rather than harassment; assistance rather than adversity and co-operation rather than vindictiveness. This is the spirit of the original OSHA law, and it is in the same spirit that I have brought together a number of proposals, some of which I have discussed briefly here today. into an omnibus OSHA reform bill, which I will introduce next week. A number of my colleagues are joining this effort in an attempt to mold a workable framework for OSHA. We are taking the first steps. The burden then shifts to this Subcommittee, to your full Committee, and to the Congress. We must act now;

despite the other issues confronting us, OSHA reform must not be delayed any longer.

I would urge you to make the most of these series of hearings. I am not an engineer. I cannot discuss the complexities of the OSHA law from this standpoint, or from the standpoint of the small businessman. In the coming weeks, I hope you will call representatives of the small businessmen-the people who must live and work under OSHA and who must comply with it-to hear their problems, so we can help them solve these under the law. The burden is now on you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee. I ask you to act-before it is too late.

Mr. DANIELS. Congressman Symms.

Mr. SYMMS. I prefer to come back at a later meeting.

Mr. DANIELS. We will put you down as the first witness the next meeting.

Mr. Beard, do you desire to come back?

Mr. BEARD. Yes, I would like to be placed on the record to come back at the next hearing.

Mr. DANIELS. I will notify the staff to communicate with you.

The committee will stand in adjournment, and the date of the next hearing will be announced by the Chair at a future date.

[Whereupon, at 12:15 p.m., the subcommittee recessed, to reconvene at the call of the Chair.]