A railroad wheel maker in Ohio is fined $610,034. A California explosives manufacturer is charged $292,235. A Missouri plumbing contractor faces $714,000 in OSHA® penalties. These are not hypothetical scenarios, they’re what actually happened within the month of June alone. To be more accurate, these fines were issued within less than two weeks of each other. Sadly, there were many more that didn’t make this article.  

Regardless of your occupation or even industry, OSHA® fines can cripple your entire company. We hear it time and time again. Companies who have the best of intentions go under because of on-the-job accidents that are totally preventable.

The question then becomes, how do we prevent accidents, fines, and – most importantly -- loss of life from occurring? The answer lies in employee engagement.

Read More >>

Ensuring safe work environments for employees is not only required by law but is also a necessity of good and ethical business practices. Unsafe work spaces can end up costing companies millions, through workers compensation claims, loss of work and in productivity, not to mention potential fines or lawsuits.

According to OSHA®, the cost of direct workers’ compensation claims is estimated to be around $1 billion per week. Ensuring employee safety can be a challenge, particularly in a non-engaged work culture.

Read More >>

In this blog -- the second in our series examining OSHA®’s recently proposed rule changes -- we’ll take a look at the organization’s remaining set of proposals. If you missed our last blog, where we summarized the first set of proposed rule changes, you can find it here.

Read More >>

OSHA®, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, recently proposed a number of new rule provisions to the agency’s general industry, maritime, construction and recordkeeping standards.

The proposed changes are an effort to modernize OSHA standards, while saving employers millions of dollars per year. Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels says that, if implemented, the new provisions will “help employers better understand their responsibilities, increase compliance and reduce compliance costs."

 

This blog post will take a look at the first nine of these proposed changes.

Read More >>

OSHA® – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – recently announced some updates to their new Severe Injury Reporting Program, which requires companies to report any serious injury or hospitalization within 24 hours. The first year was found to be quite effective for the companies that complied. Unfortunately, not all businesses did. Thus, the agency announced that they would be issuing even more citations and increasing the amount of fines in the second year of the program

Read More >>

The Challenges of Incentivized Safety

When building an effective recognition strategy for the workplace, incentive programs can play a key role in developing higher levels of active engagement. Combined with additional tactics, such as employee referrals, milestone awards and wellness packages, these efforts have the potential to increase productivity, employee ownership and even individual self-worth. Keep in mind that if you choose to incentivize your company’s safety program, it must be done in a manner that’s conducive to your policies, efforts and regulations. If incorrectly set into motion, you run the risk of encouraging team members and managers to hide and/or not report injuries that occur.

Read More >>