Workplace Strategies: Keeping Up With OSHA

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been busy this year implementing new policies and aggressively stepping up enforcement against employers. However, by paying attention to a couple of OSHA’s current hot spots, employers can keep themselves out of OSHA’s sights.

Recordkeeping

OSHA has launched a recordkeeping National Emphasis Program intended to identify employers who are not properly maintaining their OSHA 300 injury and illness logs.  OSHA is under the belief that employers are under reporting workplace injuries and illnesses resulting in artificially low injury rates.  Consequently, compliance officers have been instructed to carefully review employer’s OSHA 300 logs, workers compensation runs, accident reports and other company records to identify errors and/or unreported injuries and enforce strict compliance with the regulations.  (e.g. issue a separate violation and penalty for each error as opposed to a single citation and single penalty for inaccurate logs as a whole). 

Accordingly, employers should ensure that the person responsible for recordkeeping is properly trained.  The OSHA 300 logs are not difficult to keep if the recordkeeper knows what he or she is doing.  Unfortunately, too often OSHA recordkeeping is seen as a thankless task and delegated to an untrained employee or, by default, ends up being kept by the human resources department or an untrained “safety manager.”  These individuals have never been trained in proper recordkeeping and often make very basic errors that can cost the company thousands of dollars during an inspection.

We also highly recommend that the recordkeeper spend an hour reviewing the last three years of OSHA logs against workers compensation runs, accident reports and other company documents to make sure injuries and illnesses are being properly captured on the log.  For example, if there were only 10 injuries reported on last year’s log, but there were 25 workers compensation cases, you should take a close look to make sure injuries and illnesses are not being missed.  Correct all errors that are found and properly update the logs.

Native Language Training

OSHA cannot mandate that safety training be given in any specific language other than English.  However, OSHA is concerned that employees for whom English is not their native tongue are being put at risk for accidents and injuries when all of their safety training is given in English.  This is especially true for employers with a highly Hispanic workforce.  Therefore, OSHA  recently announced its Native Language Initiative, directing compliance officers to ensure that employees are receiving their written and oral safety training in a language they understand.  Where OSHA finds that employees receive safety training in a language that is not the employee’s native tongue, the compliance officer may issue citations and penalties for failure to properly train the employees.

Accordingly, employers should make sure safety training is being provided in a language that their employees understand.  If  some of your employees do not speak or read English, then make sure you are providing safety training in their native tongue.  Likewise, if your supervisors are giving their crews daily work instructions in a language other than English (e.g. Spanish) you should consider making safety training available in that language as well as English.  This also goes for written training documentation.  Do not provide employees with safety manuals or have them sign training acknowledgments that they cannot read.  Rather, have those documents translated into the relevant language that your workforce understands.  Likewise, consider using bi-lingual trainers or offer training sessions given in each language to ensure that your employees will understand their training.

For more information, please contact the Seyfarth attorney with whom you work, or any Labor and Employment attorney on our website.