The Wall Street Journal’s Melanie Trottman and Alexandra Berzon report that the Labor Dept. will step up its federal-state workplace safety programs:

The action follows calls from unions and senior congressional Democrats — including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and U.S. Rep. George Miller of California — for a tough response to 12 construction deaths that occurred on the Las Vegas Strip between December 2006 and June 2008 amid a building boom.

The report from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the Labor Department, listed a number of “serious concerns” with the way the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration handled a total of 25 workplace deaths during an 18-month period ended in June 2009. The report said the Nevada agency failed to cite employers for hazards, didn’t properly train inspectors and didn’t follow up to find out whether dangerous conditions were fixed.

Here is another example (clean air regulation and food policing would be two others from just the last two days of news) of the Obama regulatory team taking a relatively active approach. Federal OSHA rarely intervened into state health administrations during the Bush administration — it is telling that these initial 12 construction deaths happened on the Bush administration’s watch but there was no federal Labor Department response.

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