Employer is Required by Law to Run Exposure Limit tests on Workers working with Chemicals... & Maintain Records for 30 Years

Testing for Exposure Limits

Employee inhalation exposure is generally measured using a calibrated air pump that sucks a known volume of gas through an adsorbent filled tube or an absorbent media in a known amount of time. The end of the tubing is placed in the breathing zone of the employee - a hemisphere approximately 6-9 inches in front of an employee's mouth and nose. The chemical compound of interest is captured by the adsorbent/absorbent and the tube/media is then sealed and shipped to a laboratory for analysis. Once the amount of compound captured has been determined it is possible to work backward and determine the amount of chemical compound (or elemental substance) in a known volume of air. If this value exceeds the regulatory criteria (generally expressed as milligrams of substance/cubic meter of air or parts of substance per million parts of air) a violation has been documented and the matter is then addressed through the remainder of the regulatory legal (citation) process.

The federal OSHA Hazard Communication Standard, 1910.1200, requires private employers to provide training and information to their employees.

Exposure to hazardous substances should be routinely evaluated. This may include collecting personal and area air samples.

You can obtain copies of sampling results from your employer.

You have a legal right to this information under OSHA 1910.1020.

An employer who uses a chemical in the workplace is required by law [29 CFR 1910.1020(d)(1)(ii)] to maintain employee exposure information and copies of the chemical's original material safety data sheet (MSDS) information for a period of 30 years. Thus, if a compound in use in the workplace is reformulated and remains in use in the workplace then a copy of the MSDS information for the original formulation must be retained and the new MSDS information for the new formulation must be obtained and subsequently retained for 30 years. It can be quite difficult for an employer to know when a formulation has been changed if the product has proprietary ingredients that are not listed individually on the MSDS information sheet. The employer must be notified by the manufacturer of any changes and must be provided with updated MSDS information [See 29 CFR 1910.1200(g)(5-6)] but it is often difficult, after the fact, to determine if this notification process was carried out efficiently by the manufacturer.

If the employer has a vested interest in the outcome of a product's use... as with inipol EAP 22

which was an Exxon product

overseen by Exxon

with MSDS by Exxon 7-28-89,

& a strong need for good image ... then who takes the exposure limit testing? Would it be someone neutral, who could not be influenced in any way in their reporting of the results?

Are there any consequences for withholding results from workers?

Workers' Survey