Bill abolishing workplace safety committees advances

A requirement for Nebraska businesses to have safety committees to protect workers would be abolished under a bill advancing in the Legislature.

Nebraska established a workplace inspection program and has required businesses to have safety committees since 1994. But it stopped providing funding for inspections in 2003. Now, Sen. Mike Moser wants to repeal those requirements.

“I would hope that the Legislature would support my LB397, which removes some obsolete language from the labor laws that require safety committees. We don't have funding to support the formation of these committees. Employers are still permitted to have safety committees at their own discretion, and I would say most companies do have safety directors, and then down from there, they have other employees that manage their safety without this requirement,” Moser said in debate Tuesday.

Sen. Danielle Conrad questioned repealing the requirements.

“I'm wondering, because I know every member of this body is committed to workplace safety, if the better remedy isn't to reinvigorate and utilize these programs more robustly, rather than to simply wipe them off the books,” Conrad said.

Sen. Jane Raybould supported the bill, citing her experience as an executive of her family’s grocery store chain.

“You do not need a safety committee requirement telling you what to do. A business of our size that has now 2,000 employees, you have safety meetings all the time and required safety meetings. Why? Because, as a business owner/operator, you want to, number one, keep your employees safe and healthy, and number two, protect the customers that come on your premises,” Raybould said.

Sen. Jana Hughes also supported the bill, arguing it is in businesses’ financial interests to maintain safety.

“If you own a company and you're paying for workers comp, and you have an industry that is maybe manufacturing or a little bit more of a dangerous area to work, you are going to have an extremely active safety committee. You might even have a safety director, (a) full-time person, because you need to keep your people safe, and by doing so, your worker's comp costs go down. You don't have people out because of accidents. I mean, it's a win-win- win for the business,” Hughes said.

Moser said the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration funds the Nebraska Department of Labor to conduct safety inspections.

“The OSHA inspection program that the DOL does do works, because it found violations to help Nebraska businesses so they didn't have employees get hurt as often. The Department of Labor gets about a $600,000 appropriation from the federal government to run this program,” he said.

But Sen. George Dungan cautioned against relying on the federal government.

“If you vote yes for LB397, colleagues, my concern is that you are taking away that state authority under the Department of Labor, and simply giving that authority to the feds and trusting and hoping that federal funds are going to continue to be utilized in order to permit workplace safety inspections, which if those funds don't come in, if we are not permitted to continue to search or inspect in the same way, we might see detriment to workplace safety,” Dungan said.

And Sen. Megan Hunt doubled down on Dungan’s skepticism.

“OSHA is being decimated right now by the Trump administration. Regulations are being slashed. Leaders -- people are not being appointed to key roles to give oversight. People are being appointed to roles to give oversight who are political appointees who don't have any experience in OSHA or workplace safety or anything. And I don't see a reason that that trend won't continue in (the) federal government for the foreseeable future,” Hunt said.

After about 90 minutes of debate, senators voted 31-11 to give the bill first round approval.

In another development Tuesday, Sen. Barry DeKay introduced a bill (LB1261) for Gov. Jim Pillen that would allow the construction of privately-owned electrical generation facilities if they serve a single industrial customer and are located on site or next to those customers.

Current Nebraska law enforces the state’s public power system by allowing public power districts to use eminent domain to take over private power generators, except for certain renewable energy facilities.

The new bill would prohibit using eminent domain against private power generators that meet the conditions outlined in the legislation, including serving electrical power loads greater than 1,000 megawatts. Pillen said in his State of the State address that the legislation is intended to help supply large power users like artificial intelligence, aviation fuel or bioeconomy plants.