A new awareness campaign led by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration was announced by Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis on April 26^th, 2012 with the goal of providing employers and workers with life-saving information and educational materials about the prevention of deadly falls in construction. This includes working safely from ladders, scaffolds and roofs.

More than 10,000 construction workers were injured as a result of falling while working from heights with  another 255 workers killed back in 2010.

“The best way to honor Workers’ Memorial Day is to make sure that another family does not have to suffer the pain of losing a loved one because of preventable workplace injuries,” said Secretary Solis. “Falls are the most fatal out of all hazards in the construction industry, accounting for almost one in every three construction worker deaths. Our simple message is that safety pays, and falls cost.”

You can read the full article here.

President Barrack Obama followed the announcement with a proclamation two days later in which he dedicated the 28^th of April as Worker’s Memorial Day. You can read it in full here. 

OSHA has also created a new fall prevention Web page that provides detailed information in English and Spanish on fall protection standards.

A new directive by OSHA has been released as of recent. Following a workplace fatality, this new directive assists OSHA representatives in communicating investigation procedures with the family members of the victim. OSHA representatives will contact and explain the investigation process and timeline, providing the family with updates throughout the investigation. This ensures that early in the inspection process, an established point of contact can be made which results in maintaining a focused, working relationship with the family members. Once the investigation comes to a close, OSHA will explain findings to them and address any questions. If an employer has been issued citations, OSHA will provide a copy of the citation(s) as well.

More information about the new directive can be found here.

“OSHA is committed to working with families to explain the circumstances surrounding the deaths of their loved ones. This directive ensures that OSHA receives the necessary information from the family to assist in the investigation, and keeps the family informed throughout the investigation and settlement processes.”

- Dr. David Michaels.
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health

From OSHA’s Quicktakes section of their website:

Robert Christopher Kennedy has been sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania to six months of house arrest and three years of probation for willfully endangering workers at a Washington County, Pa., construction site. Kennedy’s intentional disregard for OSHA’s safety standards contributed to the fatal fall of Carl Beck from a 40-foot pitched roof in August 2009.

Mr. Kennedy was the superintendent for Hospitality Builders, the general contractor on the worksite where the fatality occurred. His guilty plea follows the 2010 sentencing of Beck’s employer, Christopher Franc, who was on the roof when the worker fell. Investigators found that immediately after Beck’s death, Kennedy told Franc to put fall protection equipment on the roof to mislead OSHA investigators into believing that the gear was in place before the fall. In 2010, OSHA cited Franc’s construction company for 10 per instance willful citations for failing to protect workers from falls, for a proposed fine of $539,000.

Fatalities from falls are the number one cause of workplace death in construction. For more information and educational materials on fall protection, visit OSHA’s Fall Protection page.

This will be a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the OSHA fall protection standard and how you can incorporate the concept of designing for Safety (DFS) into your workplace. DFS is a principle for design planning for new facilities,equipment, and operations (public and private) to conserve human and natural resources, and thereby protect people, property and the environment.

We also believe that events like this one work to establish a Hierarchy of Controls, that being a systematic approach to avoiding, eliminating, controlling, and reducing risks, considering steps in a ranked and sequential order, beginning with avoidance, elimination, and substitution.

Residual risks can be controlled using engineering controls, warning systems, administrative controls, and personal protective equipment.

We hope you will greatly benefit from attending this show, we look forward to seeing you all!

A worker’s perception of safety in the workplace and the work-life balance that businesses establish with their employees have a significant effect on the numbers of on-the-job injuries according to a recent University of Georgia study.

“We’ve known for some time that certain occupations are more dangerous than others due to a variety of physical and other hazards. But in the last 20 years, there has been growing evidence that management and organizational factors also play a critical role. That is, actions taken or not taken at the organizational level can either set the stage for injuries or help prevent them.” 

-Dave DeJoy, University of Georgia professor of health promotion and behavior.

DeJoy was involved with a team of researchers that worked with NIOSH to construct a “quality of work life” survey module that featured a number of scales and measures assessing different job and organizational factors. It was also included as part of the General Social Survey and given to a sample of nationally represented American adults. Both DeJoy and Todd Smith who are recent graduates of the Health Promotion and Behavior doctoral program in the UGA College of Public Health, created a study with the intent of examining safety climate perceptions here in the United States by obtaining information from a diverse group of occupations and worker groups. These range from offices to factories and will highlight the factors linked to injury.

The results from this study will be available in the March issue of the Journal of Safety Research.

According to the survey results:

Companies that run in a smooth and effective manner and have minimal constraints on worker performance can decrease injuries by 38% as worker opinions improve

A worker’s perception of a positive safety climate can decrease injuries by 32%

In situations where work interferes with family life or family demands affect job performance, they found that the risk for injury increased 37%

The nine factors they examined were participation, work-family interference, management-employee relations, organizational effectiveness, safety climate, job content, advancement potential, resource adequacy, and supervisor support. The study looked at occupational injury risk in terms of socio-demographic factors, employment characteristics, and organizational factors for 1,525 respondents using data from the quality of work life module. The study identified race, occupational category, and work-family interferences as risk factors for occupational injury and safety climate and organizational effectiveness as protective factors.

Consistent with previous studies performed by the Department of Labor Statistics, they found whites had higher injury rates than blacks, but both had lower rates than the “other” category, which is predominately made up of Hispanics.

“We used to think work was one thing and family was another, but now there is a realization that work-life balance affects performance and productivity.  Most prior research on organizational factors has focused on single occupations or single organizations. There has been a clear need to examine these factors across a diverse array of occupations and employment circumstances to see how generalizable (sic) or pervasive these factors are.”

-Dave DeJoy

“We can design the best safety controls, but they must be maintained, and that falls on management. Enacted policies and procedures—not formalized ones but those acted upon—define a climate of safety.”

“These results provide guidance for targeting interventions and protective measures to curtail occupational injury in the U.S. The data suggests effects are pronounced and generalized across all occupations.”

-Todd Smith

OSHA recently published several fact sheets that provide detailed information and examples on how to reduce and prevent falls that occur while performing roof work in the residential construction industry. These handy guides can be downloaded in .pdf format directly from OSHA’s publications web page.

We have also provided the links for you below:

Reducing Falls During Residential Construction: Roof Sheathing

Reducing Falls During Residential Construction: Installing Standing Seam Metal Roofs

Reducing Falls During Residential Construction: Re-Roofing

OSHA published their final rules today of the Federal Register that revise regulations governing whistleblower complaints. The act protects employees of publicly traded companies and their subsidiaries, and of certain other employers, from retaliation for reporting mail fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, securities fraud, violations of SEC rules or regulations, or violations of any provision of federal law relating to fraud against shareholders. OSHA is requesting public comment on the interim final rule.

For the full story click here.

The interim final rule can be viewed here.

Fall Protection ranks #1 on OSHA’s top 10 most cited violations list of 2011 with falls contributing to the most casualties in construction. This data was revealed live on November 1^st during a presentation at the NSC. With the new OSHA rules being heavily enforced now, should we see a decline in 2012’s numbers? Or, can we expect to see the same or even worse because of the correlation between these figures and the attitudes some have towards investing in guardrail systems and fall arrest equipment in order to keep workers safe. Are certain truths becoming more apparent when one can see a possible cause and effect trend?

OSHA’s Top Ten Most Cited Violations of 2011

1. Fall Protection ~ 7,139
2. Scaffolding ~ 7,069
3. Hazard Communication ~ 6,538
4. Respiratory Protection ~ 3,944
5. Lockout /Tagout ~ 3,639
6. Electrical ~ 3,584
7. Powered Industrial Trucks ~ 3,432
8. Ladders ~ 3,244
9. Electrical ~ 2,863
10. Machine guarding ~ 2,556

As part of Tampa Bay Habitat for Humanity’s accelerated build event for Breast Cancer Awareness Month called the “Suzie Q Blitz Build”, HUGSafety’s Fall Protection Guardrail System was used to help expedite the building process by keeping their volunteers safe and allowing many of them to work on the roof at a single time. The name of the build honors Suzanne Hastings who passed away in 2008 at the age of 36 due to a lost battle with breast cancer. She was the wife of Habitat for Humanity of Hillsborough County crew leader Brian Hastings.

To read the full article and see the video, please visit: http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/good_day/habitat-breast-cancer-build-102111

OSHA’s implementation of the new fall protection standards have left many contractors wondering if creating a new safety strategy that involves the purchasing of fall arrest or guardrail safety systems can negatively impact their business by being too costly.

Regarding this issue, Bill Moore of Legacy Contracting Solutions had this to say when interviewed by the Palm Beach, FL. Post: “We’re getting beaten by people who say they don’t care about the rules.” Mr. Moore explains that his company is having difficulties adjusting because homeowners don’t want to pay the extra amount he now charges to compensate for expensive equipment purchased in compliance with the new standards. He goes on to mention that the extra labor is costly as well because of how much time is added to the roofers who are unable to move freely to easily complete their tasks. His deepest concern is going out of business after losing several jobs to lower bidders around the time these new regulations were set forth, but assures that the company will continue to remain OSHA compliant.

Aside from Mr. Moore, others are also speaking out, frustrated that these new rules allow for non-compliant builders to prosper while law abiding contractors are losing business in the process. Tom Shanahan of the National Roofing Contractors Association argues that on roofs with little slope, the lines can tangle leading to trip hazards for workers and that there have been more deaths resulting from such fall arrest systems. The common belief that he and others share is that the new OSHA rules make no sense, such as slide guards being no longer acceptable under most circumstances. Chairman Walberg at the “Workplace Safety: Ensuring a Responsible Regulatory Environment” hearing that took place October 5th openly questioned OSHA’s costly approach to workplace safety given the current economic state and specifically pointed out OSHA’s proposed injury and illness prevention program (I2P2) rule, changes to the silica standard, and the new fall protection rules for residential construction projects. At that same hearing, certain Republican members who were part of the subcommittee expressed concern and a certain dislike for OSHA’s policies stating the regulations were playing a large role in allowing businesses to stay viable, small businesses especially.

“In the opinion of Walberg and the other Republican members of the subcommittee, OSHA is not taking the concerns of small business owners into consideration when promulgating regulations and, according to some legislators, either is not seeking public input to regulations or is not listening when the input is received.”

OSHA Director Dr. David Michaels who also attended the “Workplace Safety: Ensuring a Responsible Regulatory Environment” hearing defended the new OSHA regulations and their impact on worker safety and job creation.

“OSHA enthusiastically welcomes public input. OSHA’s first priority is to issue standards that protect workers. But it makes absolutely no sense to issue standards that don’t work or that don’t make sense to businesses and workers in a real workplace. Getting input from workers and businesses, based on their experience, about what works and what doesn’t work is not only essential to issuing good, common sense rules, but also welcomed by this agency.”

Dr. Michaels testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Workforce Protections quoting President Obama: “I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety”.  He mentioned that in 1971, an average of 38 workers died on the job each day compared to 12 per day in present and even cited a Liberty Mutual Insurance report concluding that disabling injuries cost American employers more than $53 billion a year in workers’ compensation. He also noted that several cases of worker deaths and injuries lead to the closing of factories and attributed to a reduction in large jobs. “We know that OSHA regulations don’t kill jobs, they stop jobs from killing workers. And they don’t hurt the economy at all.”

Dr. Michaels concluded by saying that there was “evidence that both regulated industries and the agency itself generally overestimate the cost of new OSHA standards” and “Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), comparing the predicted and actual costs of eight OSHA regulations, found that in almost all cases, “industries that were most affected achieved compliance straightforwardly, and largely avoided the destructive economic effects” that they had predicted.”

So then is OSHA really to blame? Shouldn’t workers be protected because it is the morally responsible decision to make from the start? Which side presents a stronger argument, if in fact, there should even be one to begin with regarding this issue?