worker protections

Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail's pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., 24 in the 1980's and 23 in the 1990's), but during the 2000's, OSHA only issued 10 final rules. Although some of these regulations only affected a fraction of all U.S. businesses because the hazards are industry-specific (e.g., servicing of rim wheels, grain…