Tobacco Documents Online

214 (EJ3 WILL OSHA BAR THE DOOR To WORKPLACE SMOKING? Though most employers already have smoking policies, recent reports on the dangers of secondhand smoke have put enormous pressure on OSHA to snuff out workplace smoking. By Gregg LaBar• . ;. ou get the impression that if OSHA offiaals had their way, ey would rather not devote Yth their liauted resources to a controver- sial societal issue such as smokeng. They don't have much of a choice, how- ever, geven the environment of legisla- tion, lawsuits, and employer and em- ployee concerns about the adverse health effects of smoking. 'Doing nothing about workplace smoking is still one of our options, but it's not a very viable one,' admits Charles Adkins, OSHA's director of health standards programs. ' We will have to do something, but it's certainly not going to be quick or easy.' Adk'uu said OSHA is considering two standards-setting approaches designed to protect nonsmokers from exposure to passive tobacco smoke at work: The agency will either develop a smoking- speafichealth standard, or it will try to address workplace smoking as part of a broad-based generic rulemaking on in- door air quality (IAQ). An official an- nouncement could come as earl y as this month in response to a lawsuit by Ac- tion on Smoking and Health (ASH), a Washington,D.C, antismoking group. An OSHA spokesman said the re- view of options has been very careful because smoking is a highly emotional issue and because if OSHA tackles smoking on its own, presumably there will be no action on IAQ. He said the at- traction of developing a smoking-only standard is that, despite all of the ac- companying emotion and politics, it could still be completed faster (in three to five years) than an IAQ rule (which would take five to eight years). At press time, it appeared the agency was leaning toward the more inclusive IAQ approach-a decision that would please labor unions and tobacco manufao- tunss but infuriate publichealth activists. Employers, at least 85 percent of whom al- luly 1993/Occupational Harards 27