"Training and education are the cornerstones of workplace safety and health," said OSHA Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke Jr. "These grants create new opportunities to reach non-English-speaking employees and others in high-hazard jobs and help them return home safe at the end of the work day."
OSHA awarded $6.9 million in Targeted Topic Training Grants, which support training to educate employees on construction hazards, general-industry hazards and other safety and health topic areas, such as disaster response and recovery, working with hexavalent chromium and workplace emergency planning.
Approximately $3.3 million was used to fund renewal grants for recipients of last year's Institutional Competency Building Grants, which were used to help nonprofit organizations expand their safety and health training and education to assist employees on an ongoing basis.
The Susan Harwood Grants support the development of training materials and the provision of safety programs to educate Hispanic and other limited-English-proficient employees, hard-to-reach employees, employers in small businesses and employees in high-hazard industries and industries with high fatality rates.
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 workers exposed to bloodborne pathogens, cotton dust, benzene, formaldehyde, asbestos and lead in construction.
The Bush administration in its last two budget proposals has nixed the training grants, but Congress reinstated them both times.