OSHA Awards Susan Harwood Grants to 55 Nonprofits

“Outreach and education are at the heart of our compliance assistance efforts for employers and employees,” said OSHA Administrator Edwin Foulke Jr. “The Harwood grants will help OSHA expand its educational resources to protect working men and women.”

Some of the grant recipients include the American Red Cross, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and the Fresno Foundation at California State University. A complete list of recipients is posted at http://www.osha.gov/dcsp/ote/sharwood.html.

The Susan Harwood Grants support workplace safety programs and the development of training materials to educate employees in high-hazard industries, those with limited English proficiency, those who are hard-to-reach and those in industries with high fatality rates, as well as small business employers.

The grants support training programs to educate employees on targeted topics such as construction hazards; general industry hazards; and other safety and health topic areas including pandemic flu and driver safety.

The training grants are named in honor of the late Susan Harwood, a former director of the Office of Risk Assessment in OSHA’s health standards directorate, who died in 1996. During her 17-year tenure with the agency, Harwood helped develop OSHA standards to protect employees exposed to bloodborne pathogens, cotton dust, benzene, formaldehyde, asbestos and lead in construction.

The Bush administration has tried to cut funding for the Susan Harwood grants from the OSHA budget for the past several years, but Congress has continued to reinstate the money.