Our guest speaker for the January General Membership Meeting was Angelo Costa, OSHA Compliance Safety and Health Officer for the local Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency responsible for enforcing regulations to keep workplaces healthy and accident-free have a positive effect on the operational cost of business. He briefed us on a new study by economic experts at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley’s findings that workplace safety inspections do indeed work. Compared with uninspected firms, the companies subject to random inspections showed a 9.4 percent decrease in injury and a 26% reduction in injury costs and those findings were consistent for both large and small accidents.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have announced the preliminary Top 10 most frequently cited workplace safety violations for fiscal year 2012. 1. Fall Protection – General Requirements (1926.501) Total violations: 7, 2502. Hazard Communication (1910.1200) Total violations: 4, 6963. Scaffolding (1926.451) Total violations: 3, 8144. Respiratory Protection (1910.134) Total violations: 2, 3715. Ladders (1926.1053) Total violations: 2, 3106. Machine Guarding (1910.212) Total violations: 2, 0977. Powered Industrial Trucks (1910.178) Total violations: 1,993 8. Electrical – Wiring Methods (1910.305) Total violations: 1,749. Lockout/Tag out (1910.147) Total violations: 1,572 10. Electrical – General Requirements (1910.303) Total violations: 1,332
The Voluntary Protection Program VPP recognizes employers and workers in both private industry and Federal agencies who have a documented Safety Management System with an effective employee participation program whose rates are below the National Bureau of Labor and Statistics average for illness and injury. The two levels of the program are STAR and MERIT and both an application and evaluation are required.
Angelo Costa boasts of a reduction of daily fatalities from 38 to 12 since OSHA had begun regulatory inspections and education over the last 40 years.