Is Your Workplace Making You Sick? Chemicals in the Workplace

When you think of workers’ compensation, you probably think of injuries that occur in the workplace that are compensable under the Kentucky workers’ compensation system. You could also be entitled to workers’ compensation benefits if you suffer an illness that is related to your workplace. Exposure to chemicals in the workplace, for example, causes a significant number of workplace illnesses and deaths each year in the United States. Is your workplace making you sick? If so, you may have a compensable Kentucky workers’ compensation claim.

The issue of chemical exposure in the workplace is something that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is concerned about. That means you should be concerned as well. According to OSHA, 50,000 workers are killed each year and another 190,000 become ill as a result of chemical exposure in the workplace. To put those figures in perspective, an average of 137 workers are killed, and over 520 workers become ill, every day across America because they are exposed to harmful chemicals in the workplace.

Moreover, OSHA says that these figures are an underestimate due to long latency periods between chemical exposures and the onset of disease in many workers. Exposure to chemicals in the workplace has been linked to cancers, and other lung, kidney, skin, heart, stomach, brain, nerve, and reproductive diseases.

Part of the problem is that although workers are exposed to tens of thousands of different chemicals in the workplace, many of which are suspected of being harmful, only a small fraction of those chemicals are regulated. Promulgating regulations for all the chemicals used in American workplaces would clearly be the ideal solution. However, regulation takes time and money. In the meantime, OSHA has developed a “Transitioning to Safer Chemicals” toolkit for employers and employees in an effort to encourage voluntary action on the part of employers who use chemicals in the workplace.

OSHA encourages employers to take voluntary steps toward transitioning to safer chemicals, pointing to a number of benefits for employers who do so, including:

• Improved worker health and safety – thousands of lives could be saved each year if employers used safer chemicals
• Reduced costs – “A 2008 study by the American Industrial Hygiene Association demonstrated that making process improvements designed to reduce or eliminate workers’ exposures to hazardous chemicals resulted in greater savings and other benefits than implementing controls further down the hierarchy (i.e., engineering controls, administrative and work practice controls, and PPE).”
• Reduction in the potential for regrettable substitutions – substitutions can create the same, or greater, harm if the potential substitution is not researched and determined ahead of time to be safe for workers and the environment.
• Compliance with laws and regulations – laws and regulations both within the U.S. and at the international level are becoming tougher and more protective of both workers and the environment. Non-compliance can be extremely costly for an employer.
• Creation of safer products for consumers and the environment – producing environmentally friendly products as well as actively protecting workers allows a company to brand the company as such, thereby increasing consumer loyalty.

Workers often fail to recognize the relationship between an illness and chemical exposure in the workplace. If you are suffering from a serious illness and you currently work, or once worked, around chemicals, consult an experienced Kentucky workers’ compensation attorney to determine if you are entitled to benefits that would cover the cost of your medical treatment as well as provide you with wage replacement benefits.