The purpose of the Oregon Safe Employment Act is to ensure as far as possible safe and healthful working conditions for every working person in Oregon, to preserve our human resources and to reduce the substantial burden, in terms of lost production, wage loss, medical expenses, disability compensation payments and human suffering, that is created by occupational injury and disease. To accomplish this purpose the Legislative Assembly intends to provide a procedure that will:
(1) Encourage employers and employees to reduce the number of occupational safety and health hazards and to institute new programs and improve existing programs for providing safe and healthful working conditions.
(2) Establish a coordinated program of worker and employer education, health and safety consultative services, demonstration projects and research to assist workers and their employers in preventing occupational injury and disease, whatever the cause.
(3) Authorize the Director of the Department of Consumer and Business Services and the designees of the director to set reasonable, mandatory, occupational safety and health standards for all employments and places of employment.
(4) Provide an effective program, under the director, to enforce all laws, regulations, rules and standards adopted for the protection of the life, safety and health of employees, and in so doing, predominantly prioritize inspections of places of employment to first focus enforcement activities upon places of employment that the director reasonably believes to be the most unsafe.
(5) Establish appropriate reporting and research procedures that will help achieve the objectives of the Oregon Safe Employment Act, identify occupational hazards and unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and describe the nature of the occupational safety and health problem.
(6) Assure that Oregon assumes fullest responsibility, in accord with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (29 U.S.C. 651 et seq.), for the development, administration and enforcement of safety and health laws and standards.