Chances are if you go back and read any of my articles in 2008 or 2009 it would have a warning about the Obama agenda. My worst fears centered on an Ergonomic Standard. The Obama OSHA guy referred to this as the 800 pound gorilla. He was anxious to take it on. Next on the list was a required written program for every workplace. Neither made it to the launch pad.

  Instead, we saw the delayed launching of globalization initially proposed by George Bush (41) and brought to life by Barack Obama. You saw this play out in OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard as they adopted the Globally Harmonized System of Chemical Classification. Or for brevity, doing away with the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and replacing it with the universal Safety Data Sheet (SDS) that is now used globally. 

    This was OSHA’s first efforts at globalization. There will be more; not just in OSHA, but in many government agencies as well as private industries. Where business, finance, trade, manufacturing and distributing, and other transactions take place between countries, there is a real need for uniformity. It will impact small business whether we want it or not. This has been the change of the last 20 years and it will probably be the dominant force behind change over the next twenty.

    How these new regulations filter down to funeral homes and other small businesses may surprise you. Ten to twenty years ago, an owner or manager might ask an employee if he or she were computer literate. It was as much as anything a question intended to relax the employee. Then, the job applicant might laugh it off by saying they could not even find the “on – off” switch. If the owner had a top ten skill they were seeking, computer literacy was not on the list. It is top five today.

  If all employees exposed to industrial hazards are computer literate, you can keep the SDS file on a computer, thumb drive, CD or other media device. It’s a piece of cake. If not, you must resort to managing SDS’s in an alpha file. Each SDS is about ten pages. The SDS binder will be over a thousand pages. That becomes a head-ache. Eventually, globalization will impact many more OSHA standards and most federal agencies.

  None of this can be blamed on President Obama. None of it can be stopped by his successors. Regulations tend to favor employers who can cope and deal with a busy regulatory agenda. It favors employees who read and understand regulations they have to follow. The Triple Crown for embalmers is an employee that can work the front or back, lift, and operate a computer.

  I still talk to funeral home owners who think OSHA regulations are about over. They think there will come a time when they have all been written and everyone can relax. They cannot be more wrong. The last twenty years was the beginning of a never-ending story. Globalization will continue for a long time. The advantage will go to firms that hire tech savvy employees.