Insight & Commentary on Occupational Safety & Health Issues
Fatality and serious injury reporting to OSHA has expanded, but can now be done online. Under reporting rules that went into effect in January 2015, employers must notify OSHA of a work-related fatality within eight hours and of a work-related hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours. https://www.osha.gov/report.html
Report a Fatality or…
Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez and Dr. David Michaels announced during a conference call with non-business stakeholders on December 21st that a draft of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s final rule on occupational exposure of crystalline silica was sent to the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)…
Season 1, Episode 3- 3 mins 16 sec
Listen to this brief podcast to find out the estimated dates for OSHA’s final rules on crystalline silica and electronic recordkeeping.
If you have issues trying to play this file, right click on the link and choose “save target as” and save the file locally (such…
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 was signed into law by President Obama on November 2, 2015. Section 701, “Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015” requires OSHA to increase its civil penalties for the first time since 1990. A one-time “Catch Up Adjustment” will occur in 2016 with penalties increasing up…
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 contains a few surprises for employers covered by the OSH Act. To date, OSHA’s monetary penalties have not been subject to inflationary increases and, in fact, have been static since 1990. The proposed “Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvement Act of 2015” which applies specifically to the OSH…
The recent Review Commission case of Sec’y of Labor v. Lake Erie Constr. Co., OSHRC, No. 11-0146 still leaves Lake Erie Construction Company waiting for a final decision on the merits. However, the Review Commission case is already a landmark decision because it overrules a 34 year-old precedent established in the case of Gerard Leone…
For the last several years, OSHA has expressed concerns regarding a host of employer practices it believes may result in underreporting of injuries and illnesses as depicted by several recent high-profile cases of alleged employer underreporting. Heightening OSHA’s interest is the position taken by some stakeholders that the annual injury and illness statistics published by…
In what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration described as a collaboration among government, industry, and organized labor, the safety agency has proposed a comprehensive rule to reduce exposure to beryllium among employees in general industry. Read more.
In an interpretation letter to the National Athletic Trainers’ Association dated July 6, 2015, OSHA reversed its earlier interpretation that the use of kinesiology tape is considered medical treatment for recordkeeping purposes.
Late 2014, OSHA issued an interpretation letter to Ms. Linda Ballas, which stated that the use of kinesiology tape is considered medical treatment…
Employers may soon find OSHA Compliance Safety and Health Officers (CSHOs) asking for additional information during the course of an OSHA inspection. On July 31, 2014, the President signed Executive Order 13673 (Order): Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces. The purpose of the Order is to ensure that employers who contract with the federal government…
