The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970

In January 1968 President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for a job safety and health program, calling it shameful for a modern industrial nation that more than 14,000 workers were killed and 2.2 million injured at work each year. He cited weak standards, lagging research, poor enforcement and a patchwork of federal laws. The bill failed, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce leading the opposition.

President Richard Nixon then offered a bill that put a special safety and health board, not the Labor Department, in charge, and the Chamber and the National Association of Manufacturers backed it. Democrats, among them Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey and Representative James O'Hara of Michigan, pushed bills close to Johnson's. After the 1970 elections Senator Jacob Javits of New York proposed a compromise: the Secretary of Labor would set and enforce standards, and a separate commission would hear appeals from those who disagreed. The House passed a substitute from Representative William Steiger of Wisconsin, but in December the conference committee took the Senate bill almost unchanged, dropping only the Secretary's power to close a plant in imminent danger.

Nixon signed the act on 29 December 1970 at a ceremony at the Labor Department attended by AFL-CIO president George Meany and business leaders. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration came into being in the Department of Labor on 28 April 1971 and absorbed the Bureau of Labor Standards three days later. It adopted many privately developed standards in haste that year, and its early inspectors were attacked as nitpickers. About half the states eventually ran OSHA-approved plans of their own. According to the CDC, the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 was the model for the 1970 law.

Deaths at work had been falling for decades. National Safety Council data show deaths from unintentional work injuries dropping from 37 to 4 per 100,000 workers between 1933 and 1997. Death certificate data compiled by the CDC show the rate falling from 7.5 to 4.3 per 100,000 workers between 1980 and 1995.