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#60: The Legacy of Dr. Eula Bingham
66 Plays5 years ago
In this episode, podcast series host Jill James is joined by Mark Catlin, an industrial hygienist from Maryland. This episode is a memorial dedicated to health and safety professionals—and workers—whose lives and professions were impacted by the work, research, and advocacy of Dr. Eula Bingham. Dr. Bingham passed away recently at the age of 90. She began her career as a toxicologist. She was the first woman to head federal OSHA under the Carter administration. She was a fierce advocate for worker training. If you’ve ever wondered how hazardous substance labeling came to be, well, that was Dr. Bingham. This is a can’t miss episode of the podcast.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Accidental Safety Pro
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. This special edition of the podcast was recorded June 18, 2020.
Tribute to Dr. Eula Bingham
00:00:20
Speaker
My name is Jill James, the Health and Safety Institute's Chief Safety Officer. Today's episode is a memorial and reflection dedicated to the family.
00:00:29
Speaker
health and safety professionals, and workers whose lives and professions were impacted by the work, research, and advocacy of Dr. Eula Bingham, who passed away five days ago at the age of 90. Dr. Bingham began her career as a toxicologist. She was the first woman to head federal OSHA under the Carter administration. She was a fierce advocate for worker training, and if you've ever wondered how labeling hazardous substances got its start, well, that was Dr. Bingham too.
Meet Mark Catlin: Connection to Dr. Bingham
00:00:59
Speaker
There is so much more to her work and legacy, which is why I've asked Mark Catlin to join me today. Many of you listening know Mark. Some of you may recall him as a guest from Episode 11, and many more of you know Mark as an industrial hygienist from Maryland. Many, many of us in this field regard Mark as our health and safety historian.
00:01:20
Speaker
Many of us have used, enjoyed, and taught with the historical health and safety films he's curated on his YouTube channel, including some on Dr. Bingham. Mark also knew and was mentored by Dr. Bingham, having first met her in 1989 when she came to Alaska to investigate worker health concerns during the early days of the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup. Mark, thank you for being here today and honoring Dr. Bingham's legacy.
00:01:49
Speaker
Thank you very much, Jill. Thanks for doing this. It's a great honor to be here and talk about, and talk about Dr. Bingham. Hmm. So who was Dr. Bingham Mark?
00:02:00
Speaker
She was this really larger than life figure, but when you got to know her, she was very down to earth and encouraging and supportive. And so she was a wonderful sort of mentor and probably mentored hundreds and hundreds of health and safety professionals in her day. And I was fortunate enough to be one of those. Yeah. So what was that first interaction like in 1989? How did that come about?
00:02:30
Speaker
Well, I was working for a nonprofit doing occupational environmental health in Anchorage and the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened in March of 1989. And so it was the first oil spill that actually had a lot of health and safety, worker health and safety as a focus. What had happened before that oil spill kind of in quick succession was the
00:02:56
Speaker
The HazCom standard had passed, so workers had a right to know, and employers had to provide information on hazardous exposures on the job. That was part of the oil spill.
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Health and Safety Insights
00:03:06
Speaker
The benzene standard had recently been updated after a 10-year fight, and so the new standard was in place. And that was an issue during the oil spill was the benzene exposure from the crude oil and the weathered crude oil.
00:03:20
Speaker
And then the third one is the Hazwhopper standard had just gone into effect a few months before the final version. And so that also affected emergency response. And there was an early question as to whether oil spills fell under Hazwhopper and it was determined by both state and federal OSHA that it did. So those sort of three issues raised health and safety to a more prominent position than in any other oil spill.
00:03:45
Speaker
Before that and also the how large it was in the state of Alaska and I was working with the labors Union the building trades and a lot of their members were working on the oil spill and we had actually been doing has whopper training under a federal OSHA grant for their members in the two years before the oil spill and so so we got then pulled into all sorts of questions about health and safety issues and
00:04:13
Speaker
protocols and procedures from those workers who are out in the field who had been trained and who started calling back to their union office and started calling my office and so we were we were then responding and trying to deal with this. It was a pretty chaotic time as you if anyone has been involved in a
00:04:31
Speaker
Oil spill or any of these other disasters that we've all faced more recently. It says a lot of chaos. Well, we reached out to the the labor's union at the international back in DC for assistance and they created a they put together a team.
00:04:47
Speaker
of health and safety experts to come up and assist us. And they needed to get a look at what was happening out of Valdez and on the oil spill. And so they said, well, we're going to send this team up and you'll meet her and you'll work with her and we'll see what
Dr. Bingham's Influence in Worker Protection
00:05:01
Speaker
we can do. And it was headed by Yula Bingham. And they had recruited her from the University of Cincinnati
00:05:07
Speaker
This was about a decade after she left federal OSHA. And it was the first time I'd worked with her. And so we met for breakfast at a hotel in Anchorage before we all flew to Valdez that day.
00:05:18
Speaker
She had these penetrating questions about what was going on. She knew lots of people in both Exxon and other oil industries that were participating in the response. I was sort of in awe as a young hygienist, like, here's Dr. Bingham.
00:05:38
Speaker
So you knew who she was before you met her that first time at that breakfast? Yeah, yeah. You knew of her legacy? Yeah, I knew of her legacy. My first boss had worked for Fed OSHA for a long time and had just would talk praises about Eula's work and things that she had been doing during the Carter administration. And then I was also, I worked, my first job was funded by one of her legacy programs, which was a New Directions Training Grant program, so that my first job was paid for by
00:06:05
Speaker
This funding that the union got through through federal OSHA. And so I didn't know her directly because of that, but her that program gave me my start in this profession. So running into her in 1989 and going over to this really immediate crisis of the oil spill and
00:06:22
Speaker
worker exposures was really quite amazing and and so to spend several days with her in pretty You know pretty austere conditions because there were no there were no places to stay we stayed at one of the union reps houses We all slept on the floor. She got the bed because she was former head of OSHA She and so she was she got the bed and rest of us slept on the floor around the house Wow
00:06:46
Speaker
And she just led us through a series of meetings with the oil industry, with the state officials, with other people, and asked these really amazing good questions about the oil spill and what was being done to protect workers.
00:07:01
Speaker
We had been raising questions like that, both in Anchorage and a little bit in Valdez, and not getting a whole lot of traction. But having Dr. Bingham next to us got everyone's attention and got people to actually answer questions or at least say they would go get information for us in a way that we could never get. Because she had the legacy and she knew people and she had the respect of so many that
00:07:27
Speaker
And so that was my first time working with her and it's been a joy ever since to have spent time with her and been helped by her. Yeah, so she really opened some doors for your work at that time. Yeah. By just the fact that she showed up and, as you said, asked the right questions. You had mentioned that she was 10 years past OSHA by the time that you met her.
00:07:54
Speaker
But her career started way before that and even before OSHA as a toxicologist. What do you know about her work as a toxicologist? Well, I had read some of her papers because she was well known in occupational health and toxicology for her work early on. She did a lot of work on carcinogens, especially PAHs.
00:08:22
Speaker
And she had done a lot of work in that area and had led advisory committees and other work before she went to work for OSHA. So I had read her work, but it's always different to read someone's work and then actually meet them and spend time working with them. And I had known, again, then I was more familiar with her
00:08:44
Speaker
her work during her time as heading OSHA from both my first boss and other people that I had gotten to know who had worked with her at the time. And so I heard these wonderful stories about her vision of what OSHA should be, could be.
00:09:00
Speaker
and what she tried to do in her time at OSHA. She left OSHA and then went back to the University of Cincinnati where she had come out of and went back and resumed her public health work there. It sounds like from what I've been able to read and videos, thank you by the way for curating those that I've been able to watch about her,
00:09:22
Speaker
that she was really surprised about this ask to head OSHA. Can you fill in some of those blanks as to how did all that happen? How did it happen that President Carter reached out to her?
00:09:37
Speaker
Well, it's been it was interesting the last five, five or 10 years I've spent more time with her.
Dr. Bingham's Journey to Leadership
00:09:43
Speaker
And a lot of it was because of my historical channel and work on gathering materials I was finding that involved her. And so I always sent her materials and we talked about those. And so she would she would tell me stories I hadn't heard before. So the story the story on how she came to OSHA was very interesting because she was the first woman. She was the first woman that had OSHA. And what she said was
00:10:06
Speaker
She had gotten to know a lot of union safety and health people. Tony Mazaki, she had gotten to know Dr. Epstein, who was famous for his asbestos work, and others because of her health and safety work and her willingness to be on advisory committees.
00:10:23
Speaker
involved in policy and so and she she talked about a trip to Sweden to look at occupational health in Sweden that was that was sponsored by some congressional offices and the United Auto Workers in probably 1974 75 and she went with a whole group of people from academia government and unions to
00:10:49
Speaker
to spend a couple weeks in Sweden talking to labor and management and government folks about how they did occupational health there. And she said that really was how I met a lot of the people that were involved later with the Carter administration and that they seemed to remember me and they reached out to me as a possible head of OSHA. She said she actually turned them down.
00:11:12
Speaker
Because she turned him down because she said, I had a lot of success. My career at the university was taking off. I had a brand new lab and a lot of financial support. But she also said I was a newly divorced single mother and I had little kids.
00:11:29
Speaker
And so I just couldn't see how I could go to OSHA and be Assistant Secretary. She said she finally realized that women and people that essentially weren't white men weren't offered, weren't often offered these kind of positions and that she had to say yes. And so she figured out how to make it work with a lot of help, she said, from her mother and relatives and other folks who helped her back. And then she did lots of travel back and forth from
00:11:59
Speaker
from from Cincinnati area to DC and then home on the weekends and so she said it was pretty hectic but you know they made it work and she you know she did a remarkable amount of work for all of us in occupational health by taking on that role.
00:12:14
Speaker
You had mentioned your first job came by way of funding that she had advocated for. And I've heard a bit about the fact that she did a pretty big ask not knowing it was sort of inappropriate about worker training. Can you talk about that?
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, I can. And there's actually a recording of her that was put out the last couple of years by the Center to Protect Worker Rights where she expands on this story. So I know we're going to give people links to some of these recordings so people can go hear her speak in her own voice. And I know toward the end of her life, she would tell me and others, she said, I want to make sure my legacy is what I remember being, not somebody else telling everybody what my legacy was. So she spent a lot of effort wanting
00:13:02
Speaker
to be remembered in the way that she thought was important. But I'll remember this story as best I can and try to do her justice. So she had accepted the nomination to be the Assistant Secretary for OSHA, and she was making her rounds among the Senators and the House members who she would have to work with and who needed to approve her.
00:13:28
Speaker
And she said she went to meet with Congressman Obie, who was on the Budget Committee, and he also had a strong interest in occupational safety and health and OSHA matters. And at some point in their discussion where she was supposed to just get to know him and listen to him, he asked her what was the most important thing that she thought that she could do at her time. And she said, what came out was she said, I think we need a training program to train workers and managers
00:13:55
Speaker
Other than health and safety professionals, we need to train other people about OSHA if we're going to have a broader reach and be able to have more, you know, accomplish more.
00:14:06
Speaker
And apparently, Obie came back and said, how about $2 million for a program? And she said, OK. And so she said, I was new to this world. She said, I got back to whatever office she was at within OSHA. And they said, you're not supposed to talk to Congress about money. That's not something we do. That's not proper. And she said, well, he asked me, and I just answered.
00:14:31
Speaker
And so Congressman Obie put two million dollars I believe was the number into the in 1978 into OSHA's budget for a new directions training grant program to allow universities, unions, employer associations to hire health and safety staff to try to
00:14:51
Speaker
with with an idea that they would it would be seed money and that these organizations would then continue the programs after the seed money was finished and the seed money was three to five years and so so that that went into effect as this new directions grant program and that was what that was what funded my first job with the allied industrial workers union that i got in 1981 of
00:15:14
Speaker
pretty much after I got out of college and was looking for safety and health jobs. And so, you know, there were probably hundreds of us who ended up working at one point or another in our early careers under that grant program, which, which, yeah, and so, you know, you have to, you know, you look back and you say, wow, I was so lucky to have had that opportunity. I worked for that union for three years and I did all my, I got a,
00:15:40
Speaker
industrial hygiene experience. I did factory inspections. I did sampling. I conducted classes for our members. I was involved in lots of what we call technical assistance requests where people would call you with questions. I worked with our employers in labor management settings where we tried to improve conditions. And many times the employers for our union were happy to have our help because it was free consulting service.
00:16:08
Speaker
And so I had this, and the AIW, the Ally Industrial Workers Union, was originally an auto parts union, but they represented
00:16:19
Speaker
They had come to represent a much wider swath of workers. So we had workers in foundries and auto parts plants, but we also had workers in grain elevators and in sort of office work. And so it was a really broad experience where I met a lot of small employers, some large employers.
00:16:41
Speaker
And it was a wonderful way to get started in this career, and then led me into the rest of my work for almost 40 years after that. So thanks to Dr. Bingham for talking to Congressman Obie and getting this program started. A lot of us- Isn't that fab? Yeah. So does that program live on today? Does it have a new name? I'm kind of guessing what it might be.
Evolution of Safety Training Grants
00:17:05
Speaker
Yeah, it does live on. The New Directions Program,
00:17:09
Speaker
continued on into after after dr Bingham left OSHA and when Ronald Reagan came in and he had various assistants and secretaries there was enough congressional support and other support for the program that it continued on it dwindled the money wasn't as much uh and the focus changed some but but the money actually continued on until the until the early
00:17:33
Speaker
1990s before it sort of finally ended and actually when I was working with the labor's union in Alaska and I had moved to Alaska and gotten a job and and we had as I mentioned we had done this has whopper training that was pre oil spill
00:17:47
Speaker
But that was actually of New Directions Training Grant also, and so I worked with the Labor Union in Alaska, and we trained hundreds of construction workers about has Whopper. We thought we were training people to clean up hazardous waste sites, which there were many in Alaska.
00:18:02
Speaker
And they and the union saw this as a big source of potential work they had seen the, the growth of the asbestos industry and saw the growth of hazardous waste work, but one that done safely and so we were doing this training and didn't realize that it would, you know, that didn't think about oil spills directly as a, as a big area we'd work in and turned out it was so.
00:18:21
Speaker
But when that program dwindled, OSHA then, in the mid-1990s, renamed it the Susan Harwood Training Grant Program. And then that program continues until today. And the focus is different. When I was under New Directions,
00:18:42
Speaker
the the staff that were that if you were hired under the grant you were expected to do a full range of say occupational safety and health work on-site inspections technical assistance requests and teaching and training was was one part of it the susan harwood program for various reasons is focused almost entirely on uh training and training numbers and and it's a much more um narrow focus program than what i was lucky enough to work under and
00:19:12
Speaker
And I think to myself, if I would have worked under something that was more narrow like the current program, would I have stayed in occupational health or might I have moved on? I was originally going to work in
00:19:23
Speaker
and larger environmental health issues. And I might have moved on, but because of the New Directions program and the work was so interesting that I, you know, I made it my career. So. Yeah. Yeah. You got to see a lot of everything. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, you had mentioned that you've spent quite a bit of time with Dr. Bingham. It sounds like toward the end of her life and talking about her legacy, what were, what were some of those things that she wanted, you know, that she wanted to be remembered for and, and to live on in her own words?
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's interesting because when she was the assistant secretary, she had a communications director who thought that videotaping a lot of her press conferences. She did a lot of press conferences, assistant secretary. And so there's this large body of video recordings, which I've been able to find in the National Archive. And she also had copies of things that I had never seen before that she had kept in her personal records at
00:20:22
Speaker
that she provided. But so there's this really probably most extensive legacy of any assistant secretary up till probably David Michaels with the Obama administration about her public, you know, her public pronouncement and a lot of her work. So I would think that, I mean, I think the New Directions program was something she was really proud of and proud of what
00:20:47
Speaker
of that it really accomplished a lot of what the goal was in terms of both supporting young health and safety professionals who were brought into the field and stayed and we've all had our own various legacies. But it also trained a lot of frontline workers and managers about safety and health so that they were better able to both figure out problems and solve problems
00:21:11
Speaker
and also asked better questions when they needed help from health and safety professionals. So I think she always saw the real value of the training education piece of involving workers. The other two pieces I think she was really proud of were sort of really landmark standards that really either got started or got passed during her administration.
00:21:35
Speaker
And you'd mentioned the Hazcom standard, which they really, during her day when they started to focus on that was on labeling of hazardous materials in the work site and what she would call the right to know, workers having a right to know. But it also gave employers the right to know what was in the products that they were buying, which wasn't always something employers knew about, especially small and medium.
00:22:02
Speaker
sized employers. So she would, and that didn't finish under her administration, they put out at the very last of her administration before the Reagan administration took over, they put out their version of a labeling has come standard. And it was one of the first things that the Reagan administration did was to pull that back. They had an ability to pull back regulations that were
00:22:25
Speaker
promulgated toward the end of the previous administration. They could pull those back and they did. But that then started a movement of unions and nonprofit organizations called cash groups. Started a movement to have right to know laws passed at the state level across the country. And by the mid, by 83, 84, probably half the states in the country had some version of a state new directions labeling program.
00:22:55
Speaker
And what happened then was a lot of the large chemical corporations that have national operations, they were faced with having to comply with all these multiple different state regulations. They then went to federal OSHA and asked the Reagan administration under Thorne-Octor, we need a national right to know, a national HASCOM standard, which is what we all eventually got passed a few years later and what we all have.
00:23:21
Speaker
Today, so that was really an amazing legacy that yeah, that that's really interesting mark in my home state of Minnesota
00:23:30
Speaker
The the law that supersedes the hazard communication law because we're a state-run OSHA agency. It's called the right to know law and You know, it sounds like it came directly from from what Yula had started Along a long time ago. So that thank you for that history lesson. I didn't I didn't know that myself I know I know when the law was adopted in my home state and it was right around the same time period that you're talking about Yeah
00:23:55
Speaker
It finished up around 86 or so, and there were some nuanced legal issues after that, but mostly until the more recent change with the updating of the MSDSs and the labeling up in the last couple years. The other regulation I think she took great pride in that often isn't mentioned a lot is
Impact of OSHA Regulations
00:24:15
Speaker
is OSHA in 1980 promulgated the access to medical and exposure records. And that was a regulation that provided that workers and their representatives unions had a right to the exposure information that employers had
00:24:32
Speaker
And also that workers had access to their medical information from medical you know medical physical exams and other medical testing that was done on workers and some of the individual OSHA standards had had requirements that that information be collected and That unions and workers would have rights to it But what she what her administration did under her guidance was to make that a generic standard. So It didn't when it first came out in 1980. It didn't require employers to
00:25:02
Speaker
collect any additional say exposure records air sampling other things or or any other medical testing but it simply said that if the employer had these whether they were required by existing or future OSHA standards
00:25:18
Speaker
or the company policy that if they had those, then they had to make those available on request if workers or their unions made a written request. And there's some restrictions like there always are, but it became a very broad way for workers in there. And when I worked for various unions, it was a very important standard for us to get information about internal air sampling that employers had done if we were investigating a problem or consultants had done from the outside
00:25:47
Speaker
And it allowed it allowed us to really. It allowed for a lot of action and improvement of workplace conditions because sometimes employers would have. You know, hired consultants and they had gotten, you know, a consultant report, but the report might not be very good.
00:26:06
Speaker
And so we could get a copy of it from the union side. I would then analyze it and we'd go have discussions about, well, the consultants, for example, found this, they found that the exposure, the air sampling showed everything was legal.
00:26:21
Speaker
But we would show the employer that while OSHA was working on a new standard, or that the TLVs had a much lower exposure limit, and so why not do better? And we could then use that information to push for better conditions. And I was always surprised how often we could convince employers to do the right thing.
00:26:41
Speaker
Yeah, fascinating. So what have that been? Medical records, you know, for like blood lead testing and asbestos exposures and, you know, things like that, it would have included audiometric screening, like kind of all of those things, all those little, they're not little, but all the regulations that have those requirements in them, then kind of funnel into this access to records.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, so it was you know, it was it was any sort of medical record that the employer kept which is interesting now because You know with all the with the pandemic and all that Yeah, I was just gonna ask about that Well with all the pandemic and the and the medical screening or the other testing that's being done those things even even the temperature Screening falls under those requirements of having to be made accessible to workers and and kept as a as a historical file up to 30 years and so
00:27:33
Speaker
It's an interesting far-reaching regulation that I think those of us in the field are just kind of used to it. We just know it's there. But many workers and many frontline managers have never heard of it before, even though there's a requirement for annual notification.
00:27:49
Speaker
and some training about the standard. It's not a very well-known standard, but it's incredibly useful and powerful standard. Not just for people like me who are advocates from the worker side from a union, but for employers who then, if you're working inside a corporation, then there's a reason they have to keep records for a long time that allow you to see if you're working for them as a consultant or on staff to see what has happened in the past. And many times those records would get lost or disappeared.
00:28:19
Speaker
And so, you know, it's really been something that's quite remarkable piece of regulation. Dr. Bingham saw the need for OSHA to come up with generic standards that applied across the board to big areas of health and safety work instead of the model of working on individual issues like
00:28:40
Speaker
things she did. So she worked on the benzene standard and the lead standard and the cotton dust standard, which were really important standards, but these generic standards could cut
Modern Relevance of Dr. Bingham's Work
00:28:53
Speaker
across all industries and have a much wider swath and a much wider impact over time.
00:29:00
Speaker
Fascinating. And what a good thing to be talking about today with medical records, Mark, you know, and and safety and health professionals who might not have known about that piece or known about that regulation, like you said, who really can be leaning into it right now, as we're
00:29:17
Speaker
as so many employers are doing wellness screenings and all the things that we're doing to monitor the health of employees across all companies right now. That's powerful knowledge. And started with Dr. Bingham, how wonderful is that? Yeah, and I'm sure she would have never imagined that it was going to apply to a worldwide pandemic in terms of
00:29:40
Speaker
of these issues. I'm sure you've seen these too, Jill, but I've seen reports over the last month or so as more employers are reopening and they're doing more temperature screening. There have been some reports of employers who refuse to tell workers what their temperatures are.
00:29:58
Speaker
And so that's actually then a violation of this standard because you have to let workers know. Now workers have to make the written request and so workers have to have some knowledge about the standard. But my experience is it's a really good standard and it's been really helpful to have it both during this pandemic and during other
00:30:18
Speaker
in lots of other areas I've worked in in the past. We used it during the Exxon Valdez oil spill to make requests for medical or not for medical records, but for the exposure records that Exxon and their contractors were of all the sampling that they were taking during the oil spill. And so we would use this generic standard to get access to those records.
00:30:40
Speaker
Fascinating, fascinating. Yeah, so what else did you learn sitting at the feet of the legend, Mark? Well, it was, it was. That's what I imagine, you know, like I'm picturing, I'm picturing you and she having these conversations about her life. And I mean, what an, what an honor and what an, what an opportunity to be able to listen. Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker
and collect stories. It really was. I have colleagues who are older who actually worked at OSHA at the time and worked for her who have their own sets of really amazing stories, and then other colleagues who were active in safety and health during her administration who have lots of other really amazing, wonderful stories.
00:31:26
Speaker
But mine mostly came from the work I did with her, but then the work over the past decade or so with her
00:31:36
Speaker
remembering the past and also commenting on what was currently happening. So she was always an astute observer of what was happening in safety and health both within OSHA and beyond. And she was always willing to provide her opinion and advice about when she thought things should be done better, faster, bigger,
00:31:59
Speaker
And so I think she saw I think her role in her later life is really pushing our profession along and pushing us all to do more. But she was also really kind and what I remember is how kind she was and how much fun she was to be around with. I've had the pleasure a couple times with the
00:32:24
Speaker
with the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences worker training program. She was a strong supporter of that kind of big worker education program that I know you've been
00:32:36
Speaker
a part of and I was a part of for many years. And she was an advisor to their program and they really did a lot of, they would invite her in to provide advice and a historical perspective on a lot of things. And I remember two specific times I was on panels with her. And one was a panel where she was basically giving some of her historical experience to help us understand how we got to where we were.
00:33:04
Speaker
and think about the future. And at one point I remember she said to all of us, cause we're all kind of like, we're thrilled she's there and we're all wanting to learn from her. And she said, you all sort of think that I had a plan.
00:33:19
Speaker
when I started back with OSHA. She said, I had an overall plan to what I wanted to do, but I didn't have any specific plan. She said, you just have to jump in and whatever shows up, you start working on it and you respond and you think about it. And she said, the New Directions Program, which so many of you worked under, she said, that was not quite an accident, but it could have easily never happened.
00:33:44
Speaker
But I was willing to say during my meeting with Congressman Obie that this would be an important thing to work on. And he responded. She said the serendipity of that was something that wasn't planned. And she said, that happened over and over again. So her advice to us was go out and do stuff.
00:34:05
Speaker
and do what's in front of you. Don't think that somehow you have to have a master plan to move forward. And we're all seeing that now with the pandemic, right? How many of us plan to respond to the pandemic? So we're all running as fast as we can.
00:34:22
Speaker
to respond and keep up, and we're dealing with questions that we haven't thought of before, or we don't have strong answers to, but she would have said, yeah, that's the way this field is, and that's part of the joy of it, and it's part of the frustration. And not wait for someone to tell you what to do, but walk into it. Just go do it, yeah. And then I had another chance on another panel in 2013,
00:34:48
Speaker
where there was actually the NIHS and NIOSH and other agencies held a multi-day conference act basically on safety culture and what is safety culture and how do you think about it, how you define it, how do you use the idea of safety culture. And so she and I were actually, I was paired up with her to do a summary talk at the end of that, at the end of that discussions. And so her focus was to kind of look at it from a historical perspective
00:35:16
Speaker
And my focus was to look at it kind of moving forward and what vision maybe for the future. So it was both great fun because I spent a lot of time with her over several days as we listened and then talked about what the presenters had talked about and how we might summarize this at the end. And that was just a great joy. But at the same time, it was sort of like slightly terrifying because I have to sit with her and sound like really like I know what I'm talking about.
00:35:45
Speaker
And I'd been doing this work for 25 years or more at that point, but it was intimidating to be on a on a panel with Dr. Bingham. But she was incredibly kind. And we spent we spent a couple of really fun nights late into the night over over wine drinking and talking about occupational health. And it was really it was a wonderful, you know, a wonderful graduate program, an informal graduate program in occupational health.
00:36:12
Speaker
Do you recall what she had to say about culture, about safety culture? She had some concerns about how it was being defined because what she would often say was, she often didn't see a single safety culture at an organization, right?
Dr. Bingham's Mentoring and Advocacy
00:36:32
Speaker
There were often lots of different safety cultures. Workers might have one safety culture,
00:36:38
Speaker
the frontline supervisors had a second one, maybe top management had a third one. And she said it was harder for her to think about how to think about culture as a single entity. And there were a lot of people
00:36:54
Speaker
Years ago that we're thinking more about culture as a single entity as opposed to multiple cultures but she thought the idea I think she was she thought the idea made sense in terms of how you create change you had to understand the cultures within organizations and within a workforce and
00:37:12
Speaker
if you're going to make lasting change. Her historical idea of both generic standards and of giving workers and frontline supervisors access to information and responsibility to deal with safety and health was really, I think, a part of her legacy. Yeah, interesting. What an astute observation for her about that.
00:37:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, and you know, for my historical work, I've done a lot of looking at the life of Alice Hamilton. And yes, and I have to, you know, especially with her passing the last couple of days, I've really been thinking about in probably a lot of ways, I mean, she she really, she really was and is the Alice Hamilton of our generation. And which is, you know, I think I and I don't say I say that with with with incredible respect to both Dr. Hamilton, but also to Dr. Bingham,
00:38:05
Speaker
you know Dr. Hamilton was from the from my reading of history was was known to be quite a mentor of of you know occupational medicine docs industrial hygienists and others but I think of the
00:38:21
Speaker
The much larger probably impact that that dr. Bingham had because there was an OSHA program There was an expanded health and safety program in the u.s Into the 70s 80s and beyond and there were you know hundreds and thousands of us doing this work and probably in Alice Hamilton's day They were you may be hundreds of people doing this work, right? so there there were way more people doing this work that she could impact and
00:38:45
Speaker
than Dr. Hamilton probably ever envisioned would be doing this work. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah, there's a larger footprint by the time Dr. Bingham came around. Yeah. I mean, at some of the NIHS and other meetings I've been at over the years as she was getting older, we would sort of have discussions and say, we ought to make a list of everybody
00:39:10
Speaker
who worked under the New Directions Grant Program, who got their start or some early part to see how many of us there really were and maybe even do like it.
00:39:19
Speaker
a genealogy of where we all ended up. Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, and we never did it because when you started talking about the names of people that we all knew, it kept expanding and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And it would become almost like, wow, that's such a big project. Maybe we'll do it next year. What a big ripoff. Because it was so large.
00:39:45
Speaker
So when she left the Carter administration, she went back into teaching, is that right? She did. She returned to the University of Cincinnati and back to her toxicology lab research.
00:39:59
Speaker
But also she was, I believe she was back, I believe she was Dean of the School of Public Health. And she continued on with some of her research, but she also really continued on with her policy work and her advocacy work. And I remember- Stayed connected in that regard. Yeah, because I think coming out of OSHA with all that policy work, it would just be natural to continue that. And she certainly was a figure that people were
00:40:28
Speaker
were looking at and would, you know, and she had lots of opportunities to speak about her both OSHA experience and beyond. I can remember her speaking out in the middle 1980s as part of a coalition of occupational and environmental health advocates looking at
00:40:51
Speaker
the connection between occupational and environmental health issues. And she certainly was someone who saw that connection both from her time in OSHA and I think
Challenges in OSHA Standard Setting
00:41:04
Speaker
before that. But one of the things I remember she did at OSHA was she, before she left OSHA, because of her toxicology experience,
00:41:17
Speaker
studying carcinogens that she had done a lot of work in that area and when she was at OSHA one of the things that she said she worked on was trying to develop a generic carcinogen standard to try to deal with carcinogens in the same way that the HazCom standard and the medical access rule
00:41:34
Speaker
rather than deal with individual exposures, deal with the whole issue. And so she had been working on a generic carcinogen standard. It never went into effect. But part of the standard was to reach out and try to develop a uniform generic cancer standard across EPA and other agencies that dealt with carcinogens so that the federal approach was uniform and that everybody didn't have their own version of a carcinogen standard.
00:42:01
Speaker
or that the standards were different for each carcinogen. You can look back to some of the vinyl chloride and benzene and then some of the more modern standards of formaldehyde and silica dust. The standards aren't uniform. There's a lot of similarities, but they're not uniform. She had, I think, this vision that we could develop a uniform standard that would, number one,
00:42:28
Speaker
Would would would represent the way to regulate carcinogens so employers and everybody workers would know Kind of what that framework looked like but would also allow us to more quickly regulate carcinogens because if you had a certain amount of animal and Human data then you could say it fell under the carcinogen standard and then it was something was regulated without going through You know the 12 or
00:42:52
Speaker
12 or more years of standard setting. The benzene standard took over 12 years to get into place. The silica dust standard took decades to be put into place. And so one of her frustrations was the difficulty OSHA had of promulgating standards in a timely manner when they needed to protect workers.
00:43:14
Speaker
Isn't that the case? I mean, I think that's one of the misconceptions of the agency. Employers believe like, how am I supposed to keep up with this stuff? It changes so often, which it does not. It does not. And you're testifying to that now. And I remember that when I was in Alaska during the oil spill, because the benzene standard had recently been updated in 87, 88.
00:43:38
Speaker
And I remember working, I was again working with the Labor's Union, the Painters Union, and their contractors, and I would hear both union members and their contractors say, wow, you know, this OSHA standard, we'd never heard of it. It's just brand new. How did this get sprung on us at the last minute? And I remember saying, well, here's the, you know, OSHA started this in 1977. This isn't brand new.
00:44:02
Speaker
You know, the large employer associations, the industries, the oil companies had been involved in this for a long time. And, you know, this isn't something brand new. And of course, you know, if you're a frontline worker or frontline supervisor,
00:44:16
Speaker
That's not something you're going to be watching. Once they heard about it, they said, oh, we wish you would have been involved earlier. We could have given some good advice on how to write the standard or how to do this. But that helped because then they didn't feel the animosity toward OSHA that, oh, you just sprung this on us. It was like, oh, well, we need to figure out how to get more involved early on.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah, it shouldn't just be the large corporations that have a hand in it, you know smaller Construction firms and others and and I think OSHA's, you know to its credit over the years has done a better job probably of reaching out to to to Stakeholders to try to get that but you know, they still have the same problem of it taking decades to update or set a new standard I mean we're now facing the
00:45:07
Speaker
there's a push for a pandemic infectious disease standard that OSHA has actually had a draft standard they've been working on for almost a decade since after each one and one. And it doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon. It would be helpful if it was enacted now, but maybe sometime in the future.
00:45:27
Speaker
Gosh, I hope so. And this carcinogen standard you're talking about that has not seen the full legs that Dr. Brigham intended. Yeah, it was one of those things that they didn't finish up. They didn't get into place before they finished her administration. And if she would have had a second term, we probably would have seen a lot more of these generic standards, I suspect, coming out.
00:45:50
Speaker
But but she did I mean she was able to problem I mean she started the she started the OSHA had already drafted a benzene standard They'd already been working on a lead standard and they were already working on a cotton dust standard And she she got those major standards through for specific toxins that what and that was a lot and Mm-hmm and the one that I think she she
00:46:15
Speaker
that she was the proudest of and the one that I think she has a really amazing legacy on is really the cotton dust standard which which isn't looked at much anymore because that industry's really not become a you know it's really it's really died down as a major industry in our country sadly but but this standard was a major internal and external fight within it within with OSHA
00:46:38
Speaker
as they were developing their final draft in the late 1970s, that was at the same time there was a lot of pushback from employers but also economists inside the Carter Administration and other places that there needed to be cost-benefit analysis done on all OSHA standards and other agency standards so that you would look at the costs versus the savings in workers' lives and the illness
00:47:05
Speaker
And she was opposed to that kind of very defined proposition, but not- Yeah, right. Define a valuable life. Yeah, so at one point there was a sort of- she said it wasn't quite a showdown, but it's always described as sort of a showdown where
00:47:24
Speaker
She needed final approval from the White House to promulgate a cotton dust standard, which looks a lot like the one that's on the books now, which focuses on engineering controls and work practice controls and then respirators as a final option, which we in industrial hygiene would call our hierarchy of controls. And it's the way we look at these things, right? Because you do engineering controls first and PPE last.
00:47:49
Speaker
But there were economic advisors in the Carter administration that really wanted President Carter to tell her that she had to do PPE as the primary focus and not require engineering controls.
00:48:06
Speaker
And that would have lowered the cost of employer compliance with the standard. And she steadfastly refused to do that. And so she describes a meeting at one point where she and Ray Marshall, who was her boss at the head of the Department of Labor, were called to a meeting with President Carter and economic advisors. And he was going to make his decision on this point. And so she had decided that if he decided against her, she would resign.
00:48:38
Speaker
and that and her staff knew that so when she went off to to the to the White House they they expected if she held their breath yeah they didn't know if this was the end and this is and so she said we went to this meeting this is a big deal to go to the White House and she had met the president when she got confirmed and she had met him
00:48:58
Speaker
on the Willow Island Tower collapse that happened in West Virginia in her administration. And she had gone to talk to him about that. He had asked for her to talk to her about that. But this was a meeting. And she said, what she took with her as a prop, but to bolterize her argument on engineering controls, is she took a diagram that showed the industrial hierarchy of controls.
00:49:26
Speaker
You know, the standard triangle that we all know, right? The pyramid. And that so many people suddenly outside of our profession know now because of the pandemic. Right, and the CDC has now used it. But she said she went to that. Now, she knew that President Carter was an engineer.
00:49:43
Speaker
She had known that from her earlier discussions. He was really, at heart, an engineer. She showed him and she described the hierarchy of controls and defended why they wanted to use engineering controls first and the other hierarchy of controls. She said, you could see it resonate with him and it made sense as an engineer. At that meeting, he said, we're going to do what Dr. Bingham wants.
00:50:06
Speaker
And much to the dismay of his economic advisors, and she said she was grateful, but she said, I got back to the office, we came back to the office, and she said it's such a different experience to go to the White House and be in the Oval Office and have the President make decisions.
00:50:25
Speaker
that we said when i came back to the office and i got out of the elevator that all my staff were lined up on either side of the elevator and she said everybody looked at me and they thought that i had lost and they all were upset they thought i had resigned and i said no we won and but she said it was such an overwhelming experience that she was so serious when they when the elevator doors opened that then they celebrated and they and they put out the cotton dust standard that um
00:50:54
Speaker
You know, it has some changes, but it was upheld with a Supreme Court decision, and the basic idea of cost-benefit analysis strictly was not upheld, and the idea of engineering controls was upheld. Wow, what a great story.
00:51:11
Speaker
And had that not happened, we might be facing a generation of OSHA standards that really saw PPE as the first response to worker health hazard rather than the hierarchy of controls that our profession
00:51:27
Speaker
really has shown to be an important part of our work. What a legacy. And yet there's more to be done for everyone who's listening. There's much more to pick up from where Dr. Bingham and others have left off.
00:51:47
Speaker
Mark, when you talked with her, you had mentioned that she was a mom and a single mom. Did she ever tell stories about what it was like being a mother and a safety professional and how those things crossed over, if ever?
Balancing Personal and Professional Life
00:52:02
Speaker
What what she talked about was was when she was telling me the the Her reluctance to take on the position at OSHA was that when she decided to do it that she knew this was going to be hard and hard on her children and that this was a That this was a you know a real concern she had and so what she described was how she would you know she would work hard all during the week and then she would take all her work and
00:52:29
Speaker
on the plane with her and fly back to Cincinnati. She lived in, I believe she lived in Kentucky at the time. And she would fly back to spend the weekend to be a mom and be with her kids and also to work. And then she would fly back on Monday and she'd fly back to DC. And so she did this for a greater part of her time at OSHA. And so she said it was really hard, but she always,
00:52:56
Speaker
she said really kind things about the tolerance of her children with to put up with that life and and her mother was a big help to help with the children and other and lots of other friends and colleagues who were both supportive and helpful and how important that was but uh but i think you know she she's
00:53:17
Speaker
She always felt like she had some regret that she did that, but she also knew it was important to do this work. Her life would have certainly been really different. It would have been an amazing life, I think, as a toxicologist and a researcher at the university, but her life was certainly really different because of going to work for OSHA and making that decision.
00:53:40
Speaker
Well, it'd be interesting to hear from from her family as well and what they what they called their mom back then I know that and they were they were little when she took that job. Yeah, they were they were I and I didn't know her family I met I met one of her daughters later in life who would when I was in Cincinnati a few times or and I knew that her daughter would
00:54:01
Speaker
her daughter would help her get to the airport and make sure she got on the plane to fly to some advisory committee meetings or other things. Then other people would meet her on the other end and we'd make sure she was well taken care of. Because toward the end of her life, she was still actively working on advisory panels and committees and doing work at 89 and she just turned 90 recently.
Legacy and Gratitude for Dr. Bingham
00:54:24
Speaker
She had macular degeneration which made all that much more difficult and she had some other ailments
00:54:30
Speaker
of age and is as i'm turning sixty four sixty five i'm you know seeing how much harder it is to do this this kind of work now than it was twenty years ago i'm remarkable i'm i'm just impressed that she was doing this at that stage of her life and uh you know but
00:54:48
Speaker
you know, more power to her. And I was, you know, really honored to have spent the time I spent with her and worked on projects with her in those last, you know, 15 years. And, you know, yeah, a full life contribution. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. And I always think of her saying, just get out and do stuff. Just go do what's in front of you and go do it and make, you know, make an impact and do something that helps.
00:55:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic. Mark, and as we're getting ready to close today, I want to make sure that in our show notes that we include not only a link to your YouTube channel where people will be able to check out some of the footage and hear Yula Bingham's voice in her own words.
00:55:37
Speaker
But also, I think I would like to include the link to the medical access to that regulation. So if anyone's listening isn't familiar with it, that they have it right at the ready as well. Wonderful. That would be a wonderful thing to do. I think a link to that regulation. OSHA has some good documents and guidance documents on it also.
00:55:58
Speaker
But I'd really encourage people to go to the YouTube channel and I'll be able to set up a special tab which will have the videos that include her, Dr. Bingham speaking from back in the 70s and into the 80s. And so I'll have a link to that that people can go to if you'll put it on this.
00:56:19
Speaker
with the podcast and then people can go and I'd really encourage people to go hear Dr. Bingham in her own words speaking as both assistant secretary and after that about safety and health because she's really, I mean, she's really an important figure in our work and we still can learn from her after all these years. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I was listening to a video and she was asked to give advice to anyone who was starting out in the health and safety career.
00:56:50
Speaker
And her answer was, if you really care about people, you'll care about workers. And she said, you have to go into terrible workplaces. And she said, if it grabs you, you'll have it your whole life.
00:57:05
Speaker
And she said, you know, you have to have it with your heart. And truly, she did. Yeah, thank you, Jill. That's a great that's a great quote from her. She what I remember her talking about her when the will when the will island cooling towers collapsed and 50 some workers were killed.
00:57:23
Speaker
and she got to the scene. They went immediately to the scene and it was a long ocean investigation but she talked about how just horrific it was and the death and desolation and then talking with the families and talking with co-workers and the impact that really was a huge impact on her and in her press conferences
00:57:47
Speaker
months later, talking about OSHA's role, she really started off by remembering the workers and their families and not wanting us to forget that there are people that are part of why we do this work. You know, it's not just regulations and workplace settings, it's people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's the way to lead. Mark, thank you so much for
00:58:11
Speaker
sharing your stories today for sharing the history and work of Dr. Bingham. What an honor and privilege to be able to archive some of her stories today. Thank you. And thank you, Jill. It's been an honor to be talking to you about Dr. Bingham.
00:58:32
Speaker
And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution and making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day.
Engaging with the Podcast Community
00:58:42
Speaker
If you'd like to join the conversation about this episode or any of our previous episodes, you can follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro Community Group on Facebook. And if you're not subscribed and want to hear past or future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player that you'd like.
00:58:59
Speaker
You can also find all of the episodes at vividlearningsystems.com slash podcast. We'd love it if you leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It helps us connect the show with more and more safety and health professionals like Mark and I. If you'd like to have a suggestion for a guest, including if it's you, you can contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Special thanks to Will Moss, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for wishing.