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#11: Crab asthma.
90 Plays7 years ago
Podcast series host Jill James catches up with Mark, who’s got 36 years of professional industrial hygiene experience, with never a dull moment.While Mark was orienting his undergraduate studies for a career in environmental science, a chance encounter with a federal OSHA inspector opened his eyes to possibilities involving occupational safety and health.You’ll learn how Mark’s blue-collar upbringing influenced his perspectives on occupational safety, and how a 7-year adventure in Alaska working as one of about 15 industrial hygienists in the entire state, solidified his professional interest (along with some measure of local celebrity) by offering the truly unique experience of working with under-served Native American communities.Mark’s story will take you all over the country—and back—and from the public sector to private consulting. You’ll visit the frontlines of asbestos abatement, HAZWOPER training, OSHA public hearings on workplace violence, and meetings with the National Academy of Science.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Accidental Safety Pro' Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. Episode number 11. My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Mark, who is a consulting industrial hygienist who recently left private sector employment and is working out of Columbia, Maryland.
Transition to Consulting in Industrial Hygiene
00:00:30
Speaker
Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you, Jill. Glad to be here. So Mark, leaving private sector for consulting, that's kind of a big deal. How many years had you been in private sector?
00:00:40
Speaker
I started working in 1980, 1981, so just finished 36 years. Wow. And it's pretty exciting to do sort of work on my own and hoping for the best. So 36 years in the role of industrial hygiene. Right, right. And then that, you know, like many of us, you know, I've often been a generalist, so you know, done safety work and environmental work, part of all that, but I sort of like
00:01:06
Speaker
to keep my grounding as an industrial hygienist. Right.
Discovering a Career in Occupational Safety
00:01:10
Speaker
So Mark, the centerpiece of this podcast is asking how people accidentally came into the health and safety practice. And going back a number of years for you, what did that look like back then? I mean, OSHA had been around for a little, you said 1986. So coming up, oh, 1981. So just a little over a decade.
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I was an undergrad in the mid to late 70s and in graduate school a little bit. And I grew up in a blue collar family in Akron, Ohio. So most of my relatives worked in the rubber shops. And I didn't do that sort of work, but had a sense of what that kind of work was like. But I was at the University of Akron State University, first of my family to go to college. And this was a number of years after Earth Day. So I was really planning to have an environmental
00:02:01
Speaker
a career in being an environmental scientist and work on air and water pollution and those sorts of issues. And near the end of my undergraduate time, I actually ran into a guy who worked for federal OSHA. He was a factor for federal OSHA. And he described his work as environmental work inside factories. And that just that just opened up this whole world that I really hadn't known about in terms of occupational safety and health
00:02:27
Speaker
as a possibility to me and sort of led me in that direction. And it was the perfect thing for him to say because it led me to this marvelous career the last 30 plus years. Wow, how interesting because before in your head, you were just thinking about, like you said, you were thinking about celebrating Earth Day. So you're really thinking about the things that were more impacting the environment in our outside world, not necessarily what was happening to people inside the places where they live, where they work.
00:02:54
Speaker
Right, right. And my family were, as I said, my family were blue collar workers. My father and mother had worked in the rubber shops and my dad was, ended up being a mechanic. My uncles all worked in the rubber shops. So, you know, and I had a little bit of awareness of some of the health issues and safety issues, but the idea that this could be something I would focus my scientific interest on and I could use
00:03:18
Speaker
as work was something that never
Connecting with Workers and Union Experience
00:03:20
Speaker
crossed my mind. But it's interesting, when you look back on it historically, occupational safety and health was a part of Earth Day.
00:03:28
Speaker
and a part of a lot of the environmental discussions back in the late 60s and up until the time OSHA was passed. So folks back then, a lot of those folks who did environmental work saw occupational health as a part of their work. Yeah, very interesting. And so having had the blue collar background that you did with your family, as did I,
00:03:52
Speaker
I often, well, I think it's probably the first thing I often think about is where those roots are whenever whenever I'm applying my safety background is thinking about you know, what would have my what how would have this impacted my family or the factory where my dad worked? Is that a lens that you've looked through throughout your career?
00:04:13
Speaker
It has been, and you know, and I think the, I think especially of several of my uncles who worked in the rubber shops and some of who ended up with work related asthma and some related, some with asbestosis over the years back from, they started work back in the, in the forties or fifties.
00:04:29
Speaker
So, you know, working to improve conditions in workplaces like that really was just really exciting and really felt good to do this sort of work. And when I go out to work sites often, it would, especially early on when I was, you know, you're, when you're younger and you go out to adjust your work sites with
00:04:46
Speaker
much older workers just you can be intimidated because you know they've been around a long time and you're brand new right but I would look at these I would look at a lot of these guys and think oh yeah this could be my father these could be my uncle's and you know and I you know felt comfortable talking to them so it made it easier to do this work yeah it also gave me some pushback because I remember my
00:05:07
Speaker
You know, my uncles would and my father would sometimes come home and talk about the work study people who were in there and they, you know, they were causing trouble and they were reviled by most of the workers that, you know, the relatives I knew. And so I remember one of my earliest sampling.
00:05:22
Speaker
I was in a sampling in a warehouse for carbon oxide with Drager tubes and you know you you're pulling a Drager tubes and you're waiting and and I realized at one point none of these guys in the warehouse knew why I was there no one had told him why I was there and I had this shutter that went up my spine at that oh my god they probably think I'm works they probably think I'm time study they probably hate me
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, so I was like, I need to let you know, I need to make sure people know why I'm there when I'm doing my work. And so, you know, that's something I've always tried to do is make sure either the employer or whoever has brought me in, or that I'm able to tell people why I'm doing the work.
00:05:58
Speaker
you know, you both get feedback from people and insight that you might not have gotten otherwise, but also gives them a positive sense of why I'm there as opposed to time study. That's so that's so true. That often was part of my work when I was an investigator with OSHA, you go into a factory and you know, the expectation of the of the investigator, the governor, a governor government rather, was that you're wearing a hardhat with a government logo on it.
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah. And immediately that makes people fearful depending on where they're working and what they're doing. And so when I got into facilities, most of the time I would ask if there was company personal protective equipment
Expanding Experience in Alaska
00:06:40
Speaker
that I could wear so that I wasn't standing out.
00:06:43
Speaker
And a lot of these kind of factories are like have color coding, like a certain color means a certain rank, if you will, right in a facility. And so I'm like, don't give me whatever is like the top one, because I don't want to, I don't want to scare people. And I don't want this government logo on me, because that also scares people.
00:07:00
Speaker
And then, you know, always really careful when I interviewed employees to explain what my purpose was and that my purpose was to ensure their health and safety. And it wasn't to find fault with what they were doing when I was asking them questions like, tell me how this machine works, you know? Right. And that was part of what I found too was, especially as I was younger, it was easier to be able to ask, explain this process to me. Or I think this is what I'm seeing is that how this really happens.
00:07:29
Speaker
And a lot of mostly workers are really happy to tell you about their work and how things work and what they think could be done to make it better if they feel like that you're at least a trusted source or they don't think you're going to do harm. Right, exactly. So you got your start, you realize you could do your work in industry. What was that first job? What did you pursue?
00:07:54
Speaker
Well, it was interesting. The first job I had been going to school in Akron, Ohio, and my wife and I had moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I was looking after graduate school. So I was looking for work there. And I actually applied for and got a job as in the health and safety department of an industrial union, a labor union. And so again, my blue collar family had all been union members. And I knew what unions were in general,
Overcoming Public Speaking Fears
00:08:20
Speaker
but I hadn't worked with
00:08:24
Speaker
as a union member. But the idea that I could work for union doing health and safety and using science just was even better because it was like, wow, I can be working to help my, you know, again, people like my relatives and my father and my mother doing this work. And I hadn't realized unions actually hired staff. And so it was really fun to do this.
00:08:48
Speaker
And actually the other part, the position was actually funded by a federal OSHA grant under an old program that they called the New Directions Program to encourage organizations to build capacity. So it also gave me a link then into some OSHA kind of directly into OSHA issues. So it was a marvelous first job. The organization was the Allied Industrial Workers Union that was based out of Milwaukee. They were a small industrial union that represented workers mostly in the Midwest.
00:09:18
Speaker
and mostly at small plants, auto parts, but a whole range of other workplaces from grain elevators to metal plating operations. So it gave me this real interesting chance to see a lot of medium to small facilities of a lot of different types. So it wasn't like I only looked at foundries. I'm thinking of some of the places we went to, foundries.
00:09:46
Speaker
And it gave me a chance to see a whole lot of types of work sites that were small and medium instead of, you know, had I, you know, you've gotten a job at a large corporate employer that had one major focus like the auto industry, then you see a
Insights from Occupational Medicine Clinic
00:10:00
Speaker
much narrower range of work sites.
00:10:02
Speaker
Right. Yeah, it's absolutely an advantage to be able to see so many places of employment where people are doing their work. When you were doing that work, was it primarily industrial hygiene or was safety starting to kind of sneak into that as well?
00:10:17
Speaker
I ended up being a generalist. There were actually two of us in the health and safety program. The union had about 120,000 members and represented workers at probably about two or three hundred work sites. So we would do sort of basic health and safety work, industrial hygiene work occasionally, some sampling.
00:10:38
Speaker
the warehouse sampling that I mentioned I had actually done through the union where we offered as a union that we would do this as a service for free for an employer who was where we had concerns about carbon monoxide and the employer was willing to let us come in.
00:10:51
Speaker
And do that testing and didn't cost him anything. They didn't have to hire an outside consultant. So, and we had good relationships with that employer so that they would be willing to work with us based on the results. So there was that there, there would be safety issues that would come in that, you know, I felt completely on experience to work on.
00:11:09
Speaker
But the director of our program, who was the other staff person, was a wonderful man named Milan Racik. And he had been a long time OSHA industrial hygienist, had been the first industrial hygienist in Wisconsin, and had done health and safety work since the mid 60s. And so he had this almost 20 years of experience by the time I came to work for him. And so he became this really incredible mentor, because he had this huge broad experience having worked with OSHA.
00:11:39
Speaker
And
Consulting and Diverse Sector Impact
00:11:40
Speaker
as you know, because your work with OSHA, how broad that experience gets to be. It absolutely, absolutely is. You know, I guess actually I wanted to mention you brought up a point that I'm wondering if some of our listeners might not know. You had mentioned that you're able to do industrial hygiene monitoring for these places of employment where there was union representation, you're able to do it free for the employer.
00:12:03
Speaker
And so as, you know, as many of us are going about doing our work, and we're thinking, you know, like, how do I have access to resources? And where can I go? Because all of us, many of us safety professionals, safety and health professionals don't have a budget. And so you're trying to figure out creative ways to get what you need. And so I think that's a really good tip to remind people where they have union representation that they could ask their union if they have someone like you who would be able to help them.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, not as many workplaces or unionized as they were when I started back in 1981, but most major unions have health and safety staff at their internationals. Some large local unions will even have
00:12:51
Speaker
health and safety of staff that may be fuller part-time and available and available to help and lots of of unions have trained members who are trained in safety and health and and you may be surprised how much training some of the folks get the united auto workers united steel workers union
00:13:08
Speaker
and other unions actually have these extensive internal training programs to train members who are on health and safety committees and members to be advocates for health and safety and help resolve issues.
Career Expansion in DC and Safety Programs
00:13:20
Speaker
And it's an incredibly powerful way to take care of health and safety issues where you have good relationships between the employer and the union and the members. And you can really come up with some really wonderful solutions to problems sort of internally without having
00:13:37
Speaker
without having to bring in either outside consultants, but without OSHA being part of that. Right, right. Smart, smart. So I know, Mark, that your career took you on a journey all the way to Alaska. And I'm interested to have you tell that story. Was that after this job, Mom, that you were just talking about?
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, I worked for a couple years for the industry workers union and that was funded primarily by this OSHA new directions grant and then that grant funding ended it was it was meant to help develop capacity the funding ended. Unfortunately, at the time the funding ended the result.
00:14:14
Speaker
big recession going on in midwest and the union i was working for had lost almost half its membership and so i was i was laid off because it just wasn't funding to they were trying to hold it together so i ended up finding a applying for a job in anchorage alaska working for a community non-profit called the alaska health project and it was a it was an organization that did occupational environmental health work for the state of alaska as a community resource
00:14:43
Speaker
nonprofit. And there are organizations like that around the country, there are now about 20 of them, and they're generally called Committees on Occupational Safety and Health, but they have various names. And they're nonprofit, community-based organizations, often
Curating Historic Safety Films
00:15:00
Speaker
that work with organized labor, but can work with employers and others.
00:15:04
Speaker
to advance occupational environmental health work and so I came to Alaska in the summer of 1984 and came to work with this group thinking that and they were they were primarily grant funded so the grant I was going to work under had a had a one year
00:15:21
Speaker
timeframe to it, possibility of an extension on it. But I said, you know, I always wanted to visit Alaska and I thought, wow, moving to Alaska for a year and working would be really cool. Was your wife thinking the same thing? She was. She was actually a biologist naturalist and so we both had wanted to visit Alaska. So we drove up right around Solstice. The sun was never setting as we drove all the way across the country to Seattle and
00:15:46
Speaker
up to Vancouver and then took this ferry system up and then got off in Haynes, Alaska. You get up to Haynes and you think you're at the end of the world if you're not from there. And then it's 800 miles down the Outkan Highway to get to Anchorage. And so I remember driving into Anchorage at sort of near Solstice in the middle of the summer.
00:16:08
Speaker
And the sun not setting as it's midnight and we're driving into Anchorage and the beginning of the most amazing journey and both, both personally, but work-wise was really just quite remarkable. So one of the, it was probably the best thing I did as a young hygienist was to take that job and be willing to move to Alaska and see what happened. Yeah. And so what, what did happen was that, was there, was it a game changer for you and your career?
00:16:32
Speaker
It really was. First of all, I had really liked the industrial hygiene and occupational health and safety work, but I still had
Inspirations from Alice Hamilton
00:16:40
Speaker
this tug that I really thought about environmental work and going back to that and finishing graduate school and going back to work in environmental work. But the years of working in Alaska, I was up there for almost seven years.
00:16:53
Speaker
that really solidified that occupational health work was what I wanted to stay in and do and occasionally I get involved in environmental work which is always fun but but primarily my you know that that was the kind of change to sort of stay in this profession. So how long did the two of you stay in Alaska? We were in Alaska until the early 19 to 90 1991 and I ended up moving
00:17:17
Speaker
to Seattle to work with the University of Washington at their school of public health, occupational medicine clinic. So it was a big reason to leave, but I was, I'd actually big shift. Yeah, it was a really wonderful, that was another wonderful position. I've been really fortunate in my career to, to keep sort of finding a succession of really wonderful jobs and wonderful people to work with.
00:17:38
Speaker
I mean I had actually just bought a house and I had finally bought a house in Anchorage about 1990 and it was shortly after buying the house that the opportunity in Seattle opened up and then we decided to move there and that was also another sort of wonderful choice but Alaska was this for a young hygienist with a few years experience I moved there and one of the things I learned early on was there was like there were like 10 or 15 hygienists in the entire state
00:18:02
Speaker
No, it's a huge territory, but it was only half a million people. And to be working for this sort of nonprofit that provided community help, I remember an experience of being in Fairbanks for the first time and I had some free time and I looked
Career Reflections and Advice
00:18:20
Speaker
into Yellow Pages and
00:18:22
Speaker
went to the one safety supply store that existed in Fairbanks in 1984. And I went in, and I was looking around, and I introduced myself to the staff behind the counter. And when he found out I was an industrial hygienist, he jumped over the counter and came up to shake my hand. He wanted my card. He wanted to know how he could call me. Because he said, there's so few of you here. This is great to know somebody.
00:18:47
Speaker
And, and so that was a lot of the reaction was, was that I mean, people were, and, and so, you know, famous IH. Yeah, I had never had that reaction before. And, and it was also being, you know, fairly, you know, only having three years experience to have people, you know, really be basic. I remember, I remember I got a call from a worker in a remote village far in, in, at a school district in the far northern part of the state on the, on the Arctic Ocean.
00:19:13
Speaker
And he was asking me a question about calibrating a pump because he was going to do some, he needed to do air sampling for asbestos. And this was early on in the asbestos issues. And I remember my first thought was, well, I can't tell you how to calibrate the pump by long distance. And he said, well, he said, he said, I got trained and I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. He says, you can either help me or I'll just do whatever I think. Right. So I'd be, I'd rather have your help. So it was like, okay, I can, you know, I did my best to help him.
00:19:41
Speaker
and so yeah and so it was so like well welcome to alaska you know oh how fascinating and so i bet you put a lot of miles on whatever vehicle you had i did and and actually uh a lot of the miles ended up being we we when i first moved there one of the things that the director of the organization said is we want to do more work in rural alaska off the road system
00:20:07
Speaker
And the group had only been around for three years at that point, so they were fairly new. And I remember my director, Larry Weiss, he said, we also want to do more work with the Native community because the Native
00:20:20
Speaker
Native community is an underserved group here. They have occupational environmental health concerns and we should do what we can to help. And so my arrival kind of coincided with a lot of focus on asbestos issues. And so what had happened is, and there's a complex history of essentially the native populations in Alaska got ownership of one third of the state. And a lot of prior land that used to be federal land was turned over and was being turned over to the natives as their private property and to run their
00:20:49
Speaker
corporations to earn money and jobs for Native peoples. And so the issue, a lot of the buildings that had gotten turned over that were schools or other buildings that had been turned over in the feds were full of asbestos. So the Native populations were now asking questions and having to deal with asbestos rules that were, you know, a hero was coming up shortly after that for asbestos in schools. And so I remember early on after, right after a hero passed in 1986, going up to a
00:21:18
Speaker
Mountain village and training all their school maintenance workers and there was about 50 of those school maintenance workers many of whom were bilingual But some who only spoke the native language you pick And so I remember doing a class where every so often did ask me to stop and and and there were a couple old-timers Old maintenance workers and then there would be people would translate in you pick what I had just said and it was it was fascinating and
00:21:44
Speaker
And, um, but, you know, we, we did part of the training was, uh, was hands on. And if I had any doubts that people were understanding what I was talking about, when we did the hands on parts on glove bagging and controls and other things, they were, they were great. I mean, they, they, they got the idea and they were, and they were doing a good, they were demonstrated, demonstrated that they, that they really knew that they could do the work.
00:22:09
Speaker
So you're doing you're doing training. Had you been much of a public speaker before was this was some of this work some of your first like in front of an audience like how did that go for you when I was in high school I was one of those really shy kind of nerdy scientists and so
00:22:26
Speaker
Science students and so I hardly talked at all and so one of the things I knew when I got to college Was that there are two things I needed that I realized I needed to change one was my fear of public speaking I needed to not be terrified because I knew that would limit my my future
00:22:41
Speaker
The other one is I had this terrible fear of heights. And so the two things I did was I took up rock climbing and I did that. And that got over the fear of heights. The other thing I did is I joined organizations and I put myself in positions where I had to do public speaking, usually around environmental issues that I had an interest in. And then I got involved in, as I got into school longer, I got involved in some teaching. I got involved in some opportunity to do teaching. So I had to get up in front of a class.
00:23:11
Speaker
that's terrified and i would turn bright red and i'd stutter and i'd make all the mistakes you could make but after like a hundred times you know it got easier so it takes a hundred and so when i when i had my first hygiene job in in milwaukee and then the job in anchorage it got it was getting easier to do the public speaking because i had had you know i had been i'd been gaining this experience it still was you know still something that would give me butterflies ahead of time and
00:23:37
Speaker
And I would still turn red. And people are usually pretty kind about it. One of the things I recall was someone early on when I was trying to do public speaking said, most people are way more terrified that they're thinking, oh my god, I don't want to be up there. I'm glad he's up there. So he said, people are usually sympathetic because they don't want to be there. They're glad you're up there.
00:23:59
Speaker
That made it easier to think about doing this work. Yeah, that is true. That's a good tip. I challenged myself a number of years ago to never turn down any request for speaking. Yeah.
00:24:14
Speaker
because I really wanted to kind of hone that skill and get better at it and it's still a craft I'm working on and I love doing it and I don't necessarily have... I never had that really big fear but I still get butterflies, I still get nervous, I still get jittery and if I don't, those are the times that I usually don't do well.
00:24:37
Speaker
But yeah, there's yeah, there's specifics public speaking that I don't like doing and it's reading Anything that's not my own words out loud So when I made this promise to myself about I won't turn down any public speaking that included if I got asked to read something in church Yeah
00:24:58
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, it's a public speaking thing. It's a microphone. It's a podium. I have to say yes. And so I say yes, and I just don't like it. It still makes me more nervous than anything else because I'm worried I'm going to, you know, skip a line or I'm going to miss something or I'm going to see something out of the corner of my eye and I'm going to get distracted and I'm going to super embarrass myself and I won't even have known I did it.
00:25:22
Speaker
Those are the times that make me most nervous. Right. And after a while you, you know, you embarrass yourself enough times that you get better and you get over that. But it's, yeah, I think it, but it's interesting. I look back and that was probably the one of the really key things that was not part of my, you know, thinking, you know, learning my science and developing my skills as an environmental scientist was what I thought was the most important, but probably one of the more important things was doing public speaking.
00:25:50
Speaker
Because if you can't do that well or if you don't work on that and you're not willing to do it, it really does limit what you do. I would have never taken that first job with the Allied Industrial Workers Union because part of that job was going to be doing teaching of our union members and speaking out in public forums like OSHA hearings and things like that. And if I would have just said no, I would have never had the opportunity to do all this really amazing
00:26:19
Speaker
amazing work. In high school, I knew I wanted to do environmental work, but I decided I should work in a laboratory where I never had to talk to people. Thank goodness you don't get what you wish for sometimes. I've had this most amazing
00:26:37
Speaker
you know, 30 plus years of doing really wonderful work that I feel good about. I, you know, there's a satisfaction to the work we do, right? Most days of the last, you know, 30 plus years, I wake up thinking I get to go to work today, which is yeah. And you always get something new. Yeah. And you're never done. You're never done learning. Yeah. So and I had Yeah, someone asked me yesterday for help with nanotechnology and safety.
00:27:05
Speaker
This is a land that I do not know, but I'm absolutely committed to finding out. And so it was, it was one of the more fun parts of my work week because it was, it was something different. And I get to dig into some research and find out, you know, like, how can I help? How can I help this individual source some information? So it's, it's never, there's never a dull moment in our career.
00:27:28
Speaker
And that's something that I've found about the health and safety work. It's been both challenging, but it's also so variable. I started out at doing sort of
00:27:40
Speaker
health and safety work in industrial plants. Pretty straightforward, not necessarily straightforward, but pretty common type of work. I mean, the work I just left with the Service Employees International Union, the major focus of my work the last four or five years, I've been in workplace violence prevention and dealing with workplace violence. I would have never guessed in 1981 that I was going to deal with workplace violence. But it
00:28:03
Speaker
It's a major issue in healthcare. We had lots of healthcare members, especially nurses, and this was a major issue that we worked on.
00:28:10
Speaker
you have to learn it, you have to be adaptable and you have to do your best. Yeah, I know that I know a little bit about about that work that you did with workplace violence. And you had mentioned a minute ago about testifying at OSHA hearings as well as an as another place that you were able to hone and test your public speaking skills. And that that leads me to wonder, what was it like with the OSHA hearings? How did that
00:28:38
Speaker
How did that happen for you? And have you been called upon numbers of times in your career to do that? And what were the outcomes with those? Well, I have I've had I've had actually lots of opportunities to sort of speak in these in policy meetings, whether it's often OSHA public hearings, but also in more informal meetings with NIOSH.
00:29:00
Speaker
Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Science and others. The more formal ones like the federal and state OSHA regulatory hearings, they're more formalized and there's less interaction. Those are useful because the outcomes are so powerful. A national OSHA regulation or state-based regulation can
00:29:26
Speaker
can have an impact on a lot of workplaces. I enjoy more the sort of more informal and the sort of interaction that happens with some of the other meetings, say with NIOSH or with the National Academy of Science where there's more discussion interaction as you're sort of thinking about policy and thinking about approaches that will
00:29:48
Speaker
potentially might become OSHA regulations down the road but at least become policy. So I had a wonderful chance it was in the toward the end of May this last year the National Academy of Science has a subcommittee that's looking at the use of elastomeric respirators as a alternative respiratory protection for health care which is not currently used by very many places and they're looking at whether this would help us
00:30:15
Speaker
both provide a better respirator for health care and deal with potential shortages of N95 respirators. And so I was able to go when I spoke to the committee and we had some good interaction talking about that. So that really feels good to do that sort of work.
00:30:31
Speaker
Right, right. You've placed your hand on so many different things across the country, Mark, in the years that you've done this work. What are some of your high points as in impacts that you made that you're proud of or that you were part of? Your hand was at least laying somewhere on that curve of change. That's something you're really proud of. What are some of those
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, I've been really lucky to work with, as I said earlier, with some really good organizations and mostly work with really wonderful co-workers and colleagues in the places I've been. So some of the highlights, I think, some of this, as I look back, one of the things I got involved with early on when I moved to Alaska was the development of asbestos training programs for a hero and then broader. And then, you know, then following up with that, there's training programs for has Whopper and
00:31:29
Speaker
But in the mid-80s, a lot of those training programs that I was involved in in Alaska were with the construction trades and with their labor management training funds. And a big part of what we were doing was training some of their experienced members to become trainers, peer trainers.
00:31:48
Speaker
To be able to have, you know, more, more capacity to do the training. And so, and I've done that with has Whopper and lots of other programs up until just my most recent job with service employees. And so I've, that's been, I think a real highlight is, is, is helping rank and file members helping
00:32:08
Speaker
frontline supervisors learn enough about health and safety and practice to become good trainers and to help spread this work. And then part of that is they then learn how to resolve issues, resolve health and safety problems, and to know when they need to call in for more help and then who to call. And so that's been something I think has been a really wonderful part of some of my work over time has been working with peer trainers
00:32:38
Speaker
and helping them grow the capacity to do our work. Right, right. I often refer to it as teaching people to fish, you know, but we're not fishing safety, fishing help. We're passing along the information. I love that part. That's really fulfilling to me as well. And so I remember getting a call
00:33:01
Speaker
after with someone with the labor's union that I worked with in Alaska. He had been through our training, had been a peer trainer, was kind of working on health and safety. And he called me one day after hours, and he said, you know, we had this lead exposure job. This was like 87 before the lead rules really kicked in promotion, EPA. And he said, you know, I realize lead is sort of like asbestos, not exactly, but here's what, and he explained to me what they had done to protect workers on the job.
00:33:30
Speaker
supervisor on and it was like perfect it's like it was like the perfect thing to do and where he was you know where he hadn't done what I would have done he was more protective because he was realizing that you know I'm kind of out of my depth here so you know to see people both be able to do the to kind of take what you've what they've been what they've learned and apply it to a work site and then apply it to a different type of work site and do a good job of it really really does give you the sense that you know we're on the right track here with the peer trainers and
00:33:59
Speaker
and helping frontline workers and supervisors learn more about how to do this work. And there's plenty of work for us as professionals. We need these folks' help.
00:34:09
Speaker
We absolutely do. Earlier this summer, actually, I was in a social setting in my community. And my partner and I were at a public event, and he was introducing me to a man that was on a board with him. And I said, well, I actually know who that is. I said, I remember him as being a company. I inspected his company many years ago as an investigator.
00:34:38
Speaker
And I said, he and I had this really powerful experience talking about silica. They were, it was a masonry company. And this man had inherited his business from his dad. And, you know, silica was a big deal at the time I was doing, it was coming back as a big deal, rather, at the time I was doing my inspections in the 90s. And he was absolutely shocked when I was telling him what the hazards of silica were. And he's like, why did we not ever know this? And
00:35:08
Speaker
And, you know, what, what, you know, like my dad didn't know how do we, how did, oh my gosh, what do I have to do? And so fast forward to this social setting. My partner introduces me, um, to him and the guy's like, yeah, nice to meet you, Jill. And I said, you know, I, I remember you, you might not remember me. And then I said, remember I'm the OSHA lady.
00:35:30
Speaker
because that's what everybody called me. And he goes, oh my gosh, yes, I do remember you. And he's like, brings his wife over. He's like, Julie, do you remember Jill, the OSHA lady? And they're like, yes. And then he said, do you remember about silica? I said,
00:35:46
Speaker
Yes, I do. It's very clear in my mind, there was this big aha moment that I couldn't believe that a Mason didn't know about this major hazard that they were working with, which again, helped shift and craft the way that I did my work, which was assume nothing. Just because it was his craft and industry didn't mean that he knew everything about that.
00:36:11
Speaker
And so that was just really sort of, you know, it changed the way that they did their work at that time. And it was kind of fun to revisit that. And I wasn't reviled as the OSHA lady that day. Yeah, that's nice, Dave. It's, you know, it's nice to have it be, there's some positive outcome to our work because it's,
00:36:30
Speaker
Certainly there's this public portrayal that our work is already adversarial. OSHA's work is adversarial. Union work is adversarial. And it is at times. But in many cases that people don't hear about, our work is very collaborative. And we can still fight inside that collaboration, but the outcomes.
00:36:49
Speaker
can be very positive for workplace safety health. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm sorry, I was just thinking, you reminded me of in 1988 or 89 or so, I was working with construction workers in Alaska and some of their contractors in the oil fields and found out that they had knew almost nothing about benzene and the hazards of benzene. And OSHA had just recently updated their benzene standard, but there had been a lawsuit
00:37:18
Speaker
back in the late 70s and early late 70s when OSHA tried to update their bending center the first time and led to a Supreme Court decision. And then years later, there was a new final standard. Many of the workers and managers had just thought this had come out of nowhere. They had no idea what the long history had been. And so we would do some training and talk about that.
00:37:40
Speaker
the history and they were both fascinated but sort of appalled in the same way that oh my gosh, how come we didn't know this for 15 years? Why is this brand new to us?
00:37:49
Speaker
All right, very interesting. So Mark, when you had mentioned that you got this great opportunity in Seattle at the university and you left Alaska to take that, was that kind of your first job that you had where you weren't having this vast exposure to all these different types of employment settings or am I guessing wrong there?
00:38:12
Speaker
It was it was really different, you know, I working in an occupational medicine clinic at the at the University of Washington. And it was the we were one of the major kind of we were a research center where we trained occupational medicine docs and provide patient services to the to the in the, you know, in the Northwest to
00:38:32
Speaker
for an occupational disease, and some on back injuries and seeking help, but mostly the focus was disease. And so what was different was I suddenly wasn't going out to work sites very often, but what was happening is sick workers were coming to our clinic. And so we saw lots of workers with asbestosis and potential lung cancer, and some of these are delioma cases. We saw lead poisoning. Solvent exposures were very common.
00:39:03
Speaker
Um, and so a lot of indoor air cases, this was in the early nineties and a lot of indoor air issues. We saw lots of, of asthma and so environmental sensitivity cases from around the Northwest from, from things like crab asthma, which is in the, in the crab processing from Alaska was a common disorder. Yeah. And, and to, you know, to, you know, to radiator, you know, workers in radiator shops getting lead poisoning and then
00:39:30
Speaker
the historic asbestos diseases that were showing up just because of the long history of asbestos use in the Pacific Northwest. And we were seeing people who had started the exposures during World War II in workplaces or the military. And then there's a culmination of that. So it was this, I always urge my young colleagues or students to get a chance as a hygienist to work
00:39:57
Speaker
or spend time in an occupational medicine clinic, please go do that. Because most of us until you do that, you don't really see the people that have the diseases that result from the failure of health and safety work. And so it was a fascinating observation on our profession and our work. It was great to work with the physicians and the occupational medicine docs. And it was really fun to work with the occupational medicine
00:40:24
Speaker
fellows who were in training. And because we're at the university, we would work with the other divisions of the School of Public Health. So I'd have a chance to work with the industrial hygiene faculty and students, undergraduate and graduate, and the occupational health nursing faculty and students. And so it was this wonderful collaboration. And then we worked closely with all sorts of other state agencies, some federal agencies, lots of private sector employers and organizations.
00:40:52
Speaker
on safety and health. But it was a really different role because suddenly my role was to explore the exposure histories of workers coming in to help the doctor understand the relationship to the symptoms and the signs they were seeing. And so it wasn't prevention. It was really sort of after the fact. And we try to do prevention, but it's difficult in occupational medicine clinic to kind of lead on prevention. You're mostly dealing with people who have
00:41:20
Speaker
We have problems and you're kind of dealing with that very much more narrow focus. Yeah. But it was, but I say if you get a chance as a hygienist to go work in a clinic and take exposure histories and work with doctors, it's a really wonderful way to broaden the experience of our profession and see how we can play a stronger role with occupational medicine docs.
00:41:42
Speaker
in terms of understanding controls and understanding exposures. Yeah, agreed. I spent about three years in an occupational medicine clinic as well. And don't regret any of that time as well as workers' compensation case management because it gave you kind of a similar glimpse into that. And so that was very powerful learning experience for me as well.
00:42:05
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead. And it's part of my work in the clinic, even though I was the industrial hygienist, I was the primary one to deal with workers' comp because that was just kind of how it had evolved, which is... Made sense. And I was fortunate in that the state of Washington has a state-based workers' comp system that probably functions better than most states.
00:42:30
Speaker
There was, especially around the issue of asbestos disease, there was a small group of case managers who dealt with anything that had the word asbestos on it that went into the state workers' comp system they dealt with. So they actually knew what was going on. They knew what evidence we needed to provide. They knew about the treatments. So that was really helpful. But it's a whole other part of our work that I hadn't really seen much before. So workers' comp.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's good work. So you were in the Pacific Northwest. You're currently in Maryland on the other end of the country. Had you mapped out your career as to how you were going to end up on the East Coast? How did that work for you? I'm assuming there's a lot of years between, but you went from one end to the other.
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah, I sort of never had a strict career plan other than have have work I really like doing and certainly and and and would look and you know and and when opportunities showed up for other good work I would
00:43:33
Speaker
be happy to move on. And so I ended up being out west for almost 20 years. And so there were two things happening. One was, I was at the University of Washington at the OCH Med Clinic for a couple years. After a couple years, not being so directly involved in prevention started to kind of seem like that's something I needed to go back to.
00:43:56
Speaker
So I ended up leaving the university. And at the end of my time in Seattle, I was actually working for a private sector consulting firm that did occupational environmental health. And part of the reason for doing that work was there were a lot of really good colleagues who worked at the firm in Seattle, the Preson Associates, and they've since been born out and dissolved.
00:44:18
Speaker
But the other part was I had a lot of colleagues who worked in the private sector say, well, you've mostly worked for unions, nonprofits, the university. You don't really know the real world. You don't really know the real world. And so I worked for this consulting firm. And that may not be the real world either. But essentially what I was happy to find was that we could do the same level of health and safety work in much of the same way that I did working for a union at the consulting firm.
00:44:47
Speaker
You know, I, the language would be a little different, but you know, I was often working with, with, with frontline supervisors or mid-level managers on how to resolve issues. And, you know, they were, you know, they were, they were at least the people we work with, the employers were people who wanted our services. They were paying us to help them solve problems. And so, um, if you're looking at problem solving, then, you know, then that's easier. You know, we weren't working for companies that were going to hire us who were trying to hide their problem and, and, you know, and
00:45:16
Speaker
from people that we were we were a company that actually was pretty well known to be we were expensive but we are well known as people you we could help you out and so so it was it was good to see that that I could you know that you could work for the consulting firm number one do good work and do the work in the same way that you could in other areas of our work and and and you know have that have a good impact
00:45:41
Speaker
So great so I was there for a couple years and then I was working with them a couple years and then there was this opportunity to to come to the East Coast and to work for Another small nonprofit that was also one of these committees on occupational safety health like I had worked with in Alaska But it was based in DC and they were doing a huge amount of training of workers and training peer peer were trainers and
00:46:09
Speaker
around the country to do occupational safety and health work. And it was called the Alice Hamilton Center. And so I took the chance. And I also, after 20 years out west, it felt like moving closer to my siblings and closer to my family, it was time to do that. So I moved back to the DC area where I've been ever since.
00:46:32
Speaker
Wow. So for anyone who's been listening to Mark share his story and you're thinking, wow, I'd like to get inside that guy's head or like just sit next to him and hear about all of this history. Because as you're telling your stories, Mark, you're weaving in all of these historic facts that kind of go along with, you know, like how did we get where we were in the country at that time? How did these things come to be? And kind of leaning into the background of
00:47:02
Speaker
how all of this happened. And so I'm interested for you to tell your story about how and why you started curating a collection of historic videos about workplace safety.
00:47:19
Speaker
Yeah, this has been one of the really, really wonderful parts of the last 15 years. And so when I started work in 81 and sort of was sort of new to health and safety, and the start of my work coincided with sort of a real burst of publications, articles, and books about the history of our profession.
00:47:44
Speaker
And so there were some historians at Columbia University who are still around who've done just wonderful books on the history of health and safety. And there was lots of interesting research coming out. And so I was fascinated by that. And I started reading the histories and the histories of old industrial hygienists who had been around since the 30s and 40s.
00:48:08
Speaker
And the AIHA had put out a book on sort of history of our profession and that came out in the mid-90s, mid-80s. So I started reading these things and they were fascinating. So as I started, as I was teaching various classes, I would try to interject some of the history because I found it interesting and oftentimes students found it interesting. And so I kept doing that.
00:48:34
Speaker
One of the things that happens just because you're in the profession and you get older is there were there were training films and things that I had that OSHA had put out and some other agencies put out in the in the in the 80 in the early 80s and that we'd use them in teaching. And then, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's now the late 90s. And
00:48:53
Speaker
people are looking at I'm still looking at these as as new and interesting films and the student reaction is all these are really old and this is like were you around when these were made and like well they didn't used to be old films but but so I started picking up you know both getting older that needed to really talk about things as incorporating history and then I was I was when I was working with the service employees in National Union and we had a training grant with a wonderful federal program called the National Institute for Environmental
00:49:23
Speaker
Health Sciences Worker Training Program and it's a cooperative grant program that still exists and it's really just wonderful collaboration between public and private sector.
00:49:34
Speaker
It was 2006, and YouTube had come out. And the director of this training grant program in IEHS, a public servant named Chip Hughes, he put out a call, because he was always looking at this new technology. And he said, is YouTube something we could use for teaching? Would it be a good resource? How could we think about using this? And so I volunteered as one of the grantees. I volunteered to explore YouTube as a film resource.
00:50:03
Speaker
And so I, I uploaded because one of the reasons was I was I was sort of not a, I was not a technophile. So I figured if I could do it, it was most people could do it. So, so I went to YouTube and read some stuff and I uploaded some films that I had had digitized that were old films I had used in the early 80s from OSHA.
00:50:22
Speaker
and uploaded them and it was easy and so i kept i uploaded some more and it was a you know it was becoming a good good resource at one point youtube emailed me and said i had a channel which is the channel we've talked about and so i said oh well that's cool and so i just kept i just you know kept uploading stuff i kept finding interesting films and materials and then and then a colleague let me know that who had done some film work had let me know that
00:50:50
Speaker
Not far from where I lived on the University of Maryland campus in College Park was the United States archive film library where they had 300,000 films. And so I went there and found out it was not hard to get access to the films. And then with a little bit of equipment, you could actually digitize old films
00:51:11
Speaker
from their archive and take them home with you. And they were almost all in the public domain. So I then started just this serious hobby of adding films from World War II films on gas masks and chemical warfare from like 1919
00:51:28
Speaker
Two films on how to put a gas mask on your horse from the military from World War two. Oh my god. And then a whole range of other, you know, occupational health and safety. So I found an old film from the Civilian Conservation Corps from like 1936 on safety and health and CCC work.
00:51:46
Speaker
And just this whole range of stuff that I just found fascinating and it really fed my interest in history. So this film channel which I continue to maintain as a resource for our profession and for trainers now has over 1100 films on it. It's had almost 9 million hits over the past 12 years.
00:52:09
Speaker
And you know, I continue to add to it. And I just added a film recently, I was mentioning to you before we started this, a film on histoplasmosis from the 1950s, which talks about farmers developing histoplasmosis from their exposure to dust, and how to control that dust. So this is like something we still do today, right? We still recommend it. Absolutely. So, yeah, so you know, we, you know, we've done a, we did a podcast during the year about the film channels. And so I think,
00:52:36
Speaker
we can link people to that. And I would encourage people to go to my site, take a look at the films, both to get a better sense of the history of our profession of occupational environmental health. But then where you can use them in your teaching, either teaching professionals or teaching workers or managers, I think it can become a wonderful resource for people. And I hope people use it. I'm going to continue to do this into my retirement.
00:53:03
Speaker
It's really fun. Exactly. So the name of Mark's YouTube channel is Historic Workplace and Environmental Safety and Health Films. And Mark had referred a moment ago that he and I did a webcast earlier this year, which we did together. It's called Heroes in Safety. But I had gotten so interested in listening to Mark's stories about the history of our profession.
00:53:29
Speaker
And that I asked him if we could do a webcast together about it and highlight some of what we ended up calling the heroes and safety. So dating back quite a ways and just kind of marching through history and highlighting a number of people who were really game changers to occupational health and safety across our country.
00:53:50
Speaker
And you had mentioned earlier, Mark, that you worked at the Alice Hamilton Center is one of the things that brought you to the East Coast. And I know we talked about Alice Hamilton in our in our webcast together. Do you want to give our audience just sort of a glimpse as to what Alice wanted some of the contributions, Alice? Oh, sure. Yeah. And the organization I worked for had been named after her. So Alice Hamilton was an occupational medicine doc who who did her work in around 1910, up until
00:54:19
Speaker
She died in 1970. She was mostly active from about 1910 until the mid-40s, but Dr. Hamilton was a
00:54:28
Speaker
was a rarity. She was a female doctor, which was unusual at the time. Most medical schools didn't allow women to be doctors, but she did that work. She grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, went to medical school at the University of Michigan, and was a physician who worked at Hull House, the house that worked with immigrant
00:54:51
Speaker
the community that worked with immigrant workers in the Chicago area. And that's where she got her introduction to occupational health issues. She was appointed to an Illinois commission in around 1910, 1911 to look at occupational disease in Illinois. And then that propelled her, that work.
00:55:09
Speaker
propelled her to the national stage and international stage as a premier occupational safety and health doc. And a lot of her work actually was not as a physician. A lot of her work was more what we call an industrial hygienist today, doing workplace inspections and looking at the environment and looking at controls as opposed to just looking at workers who have illness and disease.
00:55:33
Speaker
So, Dr. Hamilton was involved in work during World War II on health and safety and munitions work. She did a lot of work on solvent exposure and lead exposures into the 30s. In 1919, she was appointed to a position at the School of Public Health at Harvard, and she was the first female faculty member at Harvard.
00:55:58
Speaker
And so that's one of her claims to fame, but she's been a, she was someone who I learned early on in our profession as a most amazing historical figure. And she has a biography that came out on exploring the dangerous trades, which is really a must for anyone who's a student or in our profession. That's a really wonderful thing.
00:56:20
Speaker
book to read. There was a book of her letter, she was a renowned correspondent, and so there's huge numbers of her letters that go back and forth on both her health and safety and other work.
00:56:33
Speaker
that's a fascinating read. And then just two years ago, a colleague at the University of Illinois found a recording of an interview with her in 1963. I was just going to ask you about that. Yes, we played part of that on the on the webcast. So in 1963, there was a series of interviews that were recorded oral histories of folks who faculty who had been founders of the Harvard School of Public Health. And so there's a there's a there's this
00:56:59
Speaker
about an hour and a half interview with her at her home in Connecticut with a dog barking in the background and she's 93 but her voice is still pretty strong and so we put a little bit of that up onto the website, up onto the channel for people to look at and we have plans when we get a chance to put more of that up because she tells stories about doing occupational health work you know in the decades before OSHA when there was no legal
00:57:28
Speaker
right to do to access it as an outsider and and to to do work in you know in lots of industries our health and safety was certainly not especially the health issue health issues were not viewed as important issues to work on or worth work and so it's it's you know she's one of one of the heroes of that I have and lots of I think other folks have in in our profession because she's a really wonderful wonderful historical figure to look at
00:57:59
Speaker
Thank you so much for starting and maintaining that YouTube channel for us all to be able to access, to look back at our own history and where did we come from in this profession that we chose and continue to work on. Thank you for doing that. Oh, you're welcome. I hope folks will take a look at the channel and use it and contact me if they have any questions.
00:58:24
Speaker
Absolutely. So Mark, as we're getting ready to wrap up today and you're looking at this lengthy career and all of its stopping points literally across the country, is there any particular advice that you'd have for people now in our profession or maybe even someone just starting out?
00:58:45
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm not done yet. I have a few more good years in me, I hope. Right, absolutely. But I think the advice that I got early on from some wonderful older mentor was to take opportunities that show up and just go for it. And especially early on, not to be too concerned about making the wrong choice because you just make choices.
00:59:12
Speaker
And so that, you know, that sort of following that advice led me to Alaska to do wonderful work that didn't led me to the University of Washington.
00:59:22
Speaker
to do, again, wonderful work. And it's led me to keep finding really wonderful places to work and wonderful colleagues to work with. So I would say for people just to be open to opportunities that show up, do the preparation, prepare yourself both technically and public speaking, and then just see where it goes. It's sort of luck, but it's also you're prepared for the opportunities that show up.
00:59:50
Speaker
Good advice, Mark. Good advice. Thank you. So this has been Mark, industrial hygienist, who's just getting started. Thank you, Jill. This has been remarkable to talk with you. Thank you. Oh, I really appreciate it.
01:00:05
Speaker
your time and thank you all so much for joining in and listening today and thank you for the work that you all do to make sure workers make it home safe every day. You can listen to all of our episodes at vividlearningsystems.com or subscribe in the podcast player of your choosing. If you have a suggestion for a guest, including maybe if it's even you, please contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.