U. S. Department of Labor

The principles of getting a job are fairly simple1. You will need to think like employers and understand the factors that make them and their organizations successful. You will practice doing that in this section.2. You will need to identify the skills you can offer that will contribute to the success of both the business you are targeting and the individual hiring decision makers who determine if it makes sense to offer you a job. You will have an opportunity to do this in Section 2 of this Guide.3. You will need to discover, research, and connect with employment opportunities that are a good match for your skills and interests. Sections 3 and 4 will help you accomplish these tasks.4. You will need to develop and deliver self-marketing messages that enable civilian hiring decision makers to recognize that they and their organizations will be more successful if they hire you. You will have opportunities to develop these messages in Sections 5 and 6.

"The fundamental problem... is that of family structure. The evidence--not final but powerfully persuasive--is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling." --From the introduction to The Moynihan Report, 1965Against the backdrop of President Johnson's War on Poverty and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, a young civil servant with the OFFICE OF PLANNING AND RESEARCH at the Department of Labor, DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN, wrote in 1965 his most controversial study The Moynihan Report--The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. This report drew widespread attention from critics and supporters alike. It concluded that the conditions under which black children were being raised, generally in single-mother households, were the leading cause of black poverty. As Moynihan wrote decades later: "The work began in the most orthodox setting, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew' that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so." Although Moynihan was a liberal politician and the report called for jobs programs and vocational training for blacks, many black and civil rights leaders found his report patronizing and that it relied on stereotypes of the black family and black men. The 1965 statistics, when approximately 25 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock, have not improved 50 years later, when this percentage has grown to 75 percent--with 50 percent for Hispanic babies and 29 percent for white babies. Also in other areas, such as income, employment, and incarceration, the statistics have deteriorated for blacks. The legacy of The Moynihan Report is that the debate it launched around cultural causes of black poverty is still not settled in modern day America.

On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig, located 45 miles off the coast of Venice, Louisiana, exploded and caught fire, resulting in the deaths of eleven workers. The rig sank on the morning of April 22, and on April 23 crews discovered oil leaking from the well's riser and drill pipe. Oil began reaching shore in late May. During the peak of the operations, more than 47,000 men and women were involved in responding to and cleaning up the oil spill each day. This included more than 42,000 response and cleanup workers employed by BP and its contractors, 1,600 members of the National Guard, and more than 2,400 federal employees. The area of operations spanned the coastline from Louisiana to Florida, as well as offshore operations from the shoreline to the site of the release; 6,400 vessels were involved in the operations. Many workers faced potential exposure to weathered oil, oil byproducts, dispersants, cleaning products, and other chemicals used in the cleanup process. Depending on their assignments, these workers also faced potential hazards from extreme heat, slips, falls, material handling, drowning, confined spaces, struck-by, fatigue, loud noises, sharp objects, and electrical hazards, as well as bites from insects, snakes, and other species native to the Gulf Coast region. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was part of the coordinated federal response to ensure that workers were protected from these hazards. The U. S. Coast Guard, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), other government agencies, and BP worked together to protect workers involved in the response. As a member of the National Response Team (NRT), the Department of Labor (DOL), through OSHA, provided guidance and safety and health expertise to the Coast Guard at the National Incident Command, the Unified Area Command (UAC), and the local incident command posts (ICPs)/unified commands. (See Appendix A for a description of the federal government's National Response System and Incident Command System/Unified Command.) OSHA's role in the Unified Command (UC) was to monitor the health and safety hazards facing workers involved in the oil spill response. OSHA continually monitored and evaluated BP's efforts to ensure that BP and its contractors were protecting workers from the hazards associated with their response and cleanup work.

This directive (manual) establishes OSHA's enforcement policy for its standards addressing the control of hazardous energy. It instructs OSHA enforcement personnel on both the agency's interpretations of those standards, and on the procedures for enforcing them. The application of this instruction will further OSHA's goal of uniform enforcement of these standards. However, OSHA personnel should exercise professional judgment consistent with their authority as appropriate when particular circumstances necessitate a deviation from the guidance provided in the instruction in order to effectuate the purposes of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act), to utilize resources to effectively administer the OSH Act, or to ensure CSHO safety.