Eric Reyes-Barriga

That agency was staffed with scientists.

They produced studies that both industry and OSHA could use when crafting safety rules.

From the beginning, the role of both OSHA and NIOSH was to work with industry for their economic benefit.

One of the first lines of the act refers to how worker injuries and illness can lead to, quote, loss production, wage loss, medical expenses, and disability compensation payments.

Despite the explicit emphasis on saving corporate time and money, lots of companies didn't welcome the creation of OSHA.

They preferred how they had operated before, with their own voluntary systems of safety controls.

Industry fought back against a flurry of actual and proposed regulations in the 1970s, including a proposed silica standard.

They ran a campaign called Nix on OSHA.

Industries with silica exposure formed the Silica Safety Association, a group that lobbied heavily against silica exposure standards.

Still, the agency was able to do important work in the 1970s.

It passed regulations limiting worker exposure to asbestos, vinyl chloride, and lead, among other toxic substances.

Workplace injuries and deaths began to decline.

When President Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981, he took a business-friendly approach.

His appointed OSHA chief recalled and destroyed three OSHA films about worker rights and safety.

Some union leaders defied the orders, and a few copies of the films, like this one, survived.

Regulatory actions have continued to ebb and flow based on presidential administrations.

But OSHA has never been as active as it was in its first decade.

Dr. David Michaels is an epidemiologist and a former OSHA administrator in the Obama administration.

Industry had been so successful at preventing OSHA from making regulation that when Michaels got there, the agency's standards were out of date.

And industry knew that.