OSHA's Inception and Coverage

The legislative road to creating an organization for worksite safety was long. Local, state, and federal governments slowly realized the need for worker safety laws. Legislation in various states including the following:

• 1877: Massachusetts passed the first U.S. factory inspection laws.
• 1893: Congress passed the Safety Appliance Act of 1893, the first U.S. legislation to protect workers. (This law only applied to the railway industry.)
• 1910: Congress created the United States Bureau of Mines after several mine explosions and collapses.
• 1913: Congress created the U.S. Department of Labor, which provided reports about industrial diseases and accidents.

These laws and programs reflect that machinery was a main cause of worker death and injury in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the mid-20th century, however, workers and the public faced a new hazard: chemicals.

As awareness of the effects of chemicals on the environment began to grow, labor unions argued that the public's concern for the effects of chemicals on the environment should extend to concern for worker health: Workers, after all, were the first to come into contact with these chemicals. Labor unions argued that exposure levels to chemicals were much higher for workers than for the environment's plants and animals, and longstanding effects of these chemicals were often unknown.

After years of legislative efforts, the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act was finally passed in 1970, which took both chemical hazards and the hazards of machinery into account.

To learn more about HAZWOPER visit our HAZWOPER 40 Hour Online Training web page.