Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Chair, I want to thank the gentleman from Connecticut for yielding and for his untiring leadership on workplace safety issues.

I rise in support of H.R. 1309, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Healthcare and Social Service Workers Act.

Healthcare facilities are where we should be going to get well, but too often, hardworking, highly skilled employees of these facilities are regularly beaten, kicked, punched, and sometimes killed while performing their jobs. Healthcare and social service workers are four times as likely to suffer serious workplace violence injuries compared to workers in other sectors. Many can never return to work after the assault.

The Government Accountability Office has found the dangers to such workers has gotten worse over the past decade. From 2008 to 2017, workplace violence incidence rates have more than doubled at private hospitals and home healthcare services with the highest rates of violence found in psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals.

Most acts of workplace violence in healthcare facilities are foreseeable, and they are preventable by implementing workplace violence prevention plans. Although OSHA and the Joint Commission for hospital accreditations have issued authoritative guidance, voluntary efforts alone are not enough to ensure the safety of these workers.

Currently, OSHA has no standard for requiring healthcare and social service employers to implement workplace violence prevention programs, and it takes the agency from 7 to 20 years to issue a new standard. The new beryllium standard, for example, which has just been finalized, has been under consideration for about 17 years. And that timeframe is not unusual.

Instead of waiting for years or even decades for OSHA to act, H.R. 1309 would first direct OSHA to issue an interim standard within 1 year and a final standard within 42 months, requiring healthcare and social service employers to implement a workplace violence prevention plan. And further, it protects workers from retaliation for reporting assaults to their employers or government authorities.

Furthermore, since public employees in 24 states lack any OSHA protections, this legislation requires public hospitals and skilled nursing facilities receiving Medicare funds to comply with the workplace violence standards in this bill.

Healthcare and social service workers play a critical role in healthcare for our families and our communities. At the very least, we must do whatever we can to ensure that these workers will come home uninjured at the end of the workday.

Madam Chair, I thank Chairman Pallone for his cooperation in moving this bill to the floor. I also want to thank Mr. Courtney and Representative Alma Adams, chair of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, for their leadership in advancing this legislation.

I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1309.

Ms. FOXX of North Carolina. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Chair, yesterday the Department of Labor issued its fall 2019 regulatory agenda. The department announced plans to initiate a Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act panel for the prevention of workplace violence in healthcare and social assistance in January. This is a very positive and important development.

Unfortunately, H.R. 1309 encourages and allows OSHA to skip this important step of gathering feedback and advice from small businesses, all to satisfy the arbitrary 1-year deadline for issuing an interim final standard. Shortchanging the views of small businesses at the expense of a rushed, sweeping, and overly proscriptive standard is not an appropriate trade-off.

Additionally, the legislative text and scope of H.R. 1309 are so proscriptive that OSHA wouldn't be able to deviate from the mandates in the bill even if the recommendation from the small business panel are contrary to that of H.R. 1309.

The Trump administration is moving forward with the rule-making process. Rather than pass H.R. 1309, we should be allowing OSHA to do its work on a comprehensive standard, including soliciting necessary input from small businesses.

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