Insights

OSHA announced on January 21^st that they will commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act) with a year-long celebration of past achievements, current efforts, and future initiatives and goals to ensure the safety of the American workforce. Their 2020 celebration campaign is called Protecting the American Workforce.

The news release on this provided some interesting history on OSHA.  Did you know that the OSH Act was signed into law by President Nixon in December of 1970? Following the passage of the Act, OSHA was created in the spring of 1971. According to OSHA, the Act was created “to assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women.” Their statistics show that following the establishment of the OSH Act, workplace fatalities were reduced approximately 65 percent!

U.S. Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia commented that “America’s workplaces are safer and healthier thanks to the OSH Act and the […]

OSHA Form 300A, Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses, is used to summarize the recordable injuries and illnesses for the previous year and includes the number of days work was lost or restricted, and the types of injuries and illnesses that occurred.  Information about the company, including the average number of employees and total hours worked by all employees must also be recorded.

Form 300A must be posted from February 1 through April 30 each year.  If no recordable incidents or illnesses occurred during the previous year, the form must still be completed and posted reflecting zero recordable cases. The information in Form 300A is based on information recorded in OSHA Form 300, Log of Work Related Injuries and Illnesses. However, certain employers are exempt from these reporting requirements.

Employers with 10 or fewer employees are not required to prepare Form 300 or Form 300A. In addition, only industries within certain North American Industrial Classification (NAICS) […]

A basic tenant of any good industrial hygiene program is the application of the hierarchy of controls.  This mantra dictates that identified hazards should be addressed in the following order:

• removal of hazard
• substitution of hazard
• engineering controls
• administrative controls
• personal protective equipment (PPE)     

Generally speaking, the first two options are not available by the time it reaches the safety team.  This means that we are usually charged with finding the appropriate control mix to ensure employees are adequately protected.  This typically takes the form of some combination of engineering, administrative and PPE controls.

Engineering controls include equipment that physically removes or isolates a hazard from the employee.  Examples of engineering controls include fume hoods, interlocks on equipment and separate control rooms.  The proper use of an appropriate engineering control will either remove or greatly reduce the possibility of hazard exposure.  As the most robust form of hazard control, engineering options are always the first […]