OSHA Regional Offices Restructured to Reflect New Areas of Need

The U.S. Department of Labor restructured its Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) regional operations to make operations more efficient.

The changes include a new OSHA regional office in Birmingham, Alabama. The new office will oversee agency operations in Alabama, and those in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee as well as the Florida Panhandle. The Birmingham office will address the region’s growing worker population and the hazardous work done by people employed in food processing, construction, heavy manufacturing, and chemical processing.

OSHA is also planning to merge Regions 9 and 10 into a new San Francisco Region to improve operations and reduce operating costs.

As part of the changes, the agency will also rename its regions to associate them by geography, rather than its current practice of assigning numbers to regions. As such, the area OSHA calls Region 4 will be renamed the Atlanta Region with jurisdiction over Florida (excluding the Panhandle), Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The current Region 6 will be renamed the Dallas Region and have jurisdiction over workplace safety issues in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The composition of OSHA’s other regions will remain the same. When completed, the regions will be renamed as follows:

• Region 1—Boston Region
• Region 2—New York City Region
• Region 3—Philadelphia Region
• Region 4—Atlanta Region
• Region 5—Chicago Region
• Region 6—Dallas Region
• Region 7—Kansas City Region
• Region 8—Denver Region
• Regions 9 and 10—San Francisco Region
• Birmingham Region

“The changes reflect the nation’s demographic and industrial changes since the passage of the OSH Act and will allow our professionals to better respond to the needs of all workers, including those historically underserved,” said Doug Parker, OSHA assistant secretary. “With a stronger enforcement presence in the South and more consolidated state oversight and whistleblower presence in the West—an area dominated by states that operate their OSHA programs—we can direct our resources where they’re needed most.”

OSHA plans to fully transition to its new regional structure later in fiscal year 2024.