The Department of Labor yesterday announced strategic changes to the structure of its Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s regional operations designed to direct its resources effectively and make the agency more resilient.
The changes include the creation of a new OSHA regional office in Birmingham, AL, overseeing agency operations in the state, and those in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee as well as the Florida Panhandle. The Birmingham Region will address the area’s growing worker population and the hazardous work done by people employed in food processing, construction, heavy manufacturing and chemical processing.
OSHA is also planning to merge Regions 9 and 10 into a new San Francisco Region to improve operations and reduce operating costs.
As part of the changes, the agency will also rename its regions to associate them by geography, rather than its current practice of assigning numbers to regions. As such, the area OSHA calls Region 4 will be renamed the Atlanta Region with jurisdiction over Florida, excluding the Panhandle; Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The current Region 6 will be renamed the Dallas Region and have jurisdiction over workplace safety issues in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
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