This article appeared in the PSST! Linked In Newsletter on July 21, 2025
Wisconsin’s Public Sector enforcement is almost exactly the same as OSHA’s Consultation: hazard identification, Safety Manager and employee training, and abatement. We did not work in pairs, and sometimes my inspection sites were far into the backwoods of Wisconsin. While it was rare, interactions with the public sector Safety Managers and employers could get pretty tense. Respect for their feeling of invasion plus a good sense of humor, when it was appropriate, went a long way in creating cooperation.
This client location had a level of resistance I had not encountered in my consulting practice before.
Sampling Date #1
It was 4:30 AM at a client, three hours away from the office. My client’s Safety Manager and I were waiting for the selected employees to come to the nurse’s station for their air sampling equipment. The Safety Manager was nervous and finally confessed that the employees had been told that wearing the equipment was voluntary. In many workplaces, this would not pose a problem, but he was recently hired and had not had time to build up credibility with the crew or demonstrate that upper management had his back.
About half of the employees who were asked to wear sampling equipment trickled in and we were able to get a few more volunteers while walking around the production floor. The rest of the pumps were used for area samples. Before leaving to set up the area pumps one of the employee volunteers returned to the nursing station because a fellow employee had flipped the tube out of the sampling cassette, and she was unsure what to do. Given that the other employee’s hand had to be right next to her face to reach the short connecting tube to the cassette, I asked if she still felt comfortable, meaning safe, wearing the pump and tubing. She said yes, the guy was just fooling around. So, I reinserted the tube and noted the time and short duration of the break in sampling on the record.
The Mill’s Safety Manager did have a good reason to think that employees would step forward to wear a pump or dosimeter for the day. He was responding to the many complaints about air quality from the same employees he had tapped to be sampled. However, I have often found that some complainers are afraid the sampling data will put them in respirators rather than result in improved local and general exhaust ventilation. This was a paper mill, always hot and humid with visible clouds of paper dust in the air and piles of it on surfaces. In this environment, respirators would be very uncomfortable. Often, the employees worked in tight spaces between machine components and a respirator would be inconvenient.
Due to the hostile atmosphere, I did a walk around every half hour or less and checked that the pumps were running and the tubing was in place. Each time, asking if they were as comfortable as possible and thanking them for participating in assessing their exposure to paper dust. I made time to listen to complaints, stories, and share the lunch break with them. By the end of the day, I had accumulated information on a new health hazard an employee was concerned about. I learned about the process of choosing and buying young cow stock for a hobby dairy farm. And they learned the Safety Manager had brought me in specifically in response to their concerns about the health hazards of paper dust.
I figured out who had tugged the tube loose from the sampling equipment. I think he felt he’d gone too far and agreed to wear sampling equipment. I made an extra effort to connect with him, and we ended up sharing lunch. He explained he was upset that the sampling was on a day when his paper machine was running brown paper towels so the kind of poor air quality he’d complained about was not present for sampling. I assured him that the paper machine in the next bay was running white napkins and that we were sampling there as well. I told him the results would be clearly tied to the product rather than to which paper machine had a higher exposure.
Sampling Date #2
Unfortunately, this company rotates shifts and all that ‘ambassadorial’ work was thrown out the window t
he next time I came to sample because my new friends were on the second shift. This time, the employees were required by management to wear the sampling gear. All complied but I did find several employees putting up a quiet resistance. Such as the operator who clipped his sampling cassette holder to the back of his baseball cap. We just gave him a disgusted look, and the rest of the day he was seen with the cassette worn correctly. I did enjoy the happy greetings I got from the second shift, formerly the first shift, when I was collecting the area sampling pumps. They asked if I wanted to stick around but I was out of cassettes, maybe next time.
Are you wondering if it’s time for a health risk analysis? Whether you’re trying to stay compliant or be proactive, a timely industrial hygiene assessment helps identify and control exposure before it becomes a serious issue. Check out our “You may need sampling if:” guide!
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