Construction Law

6 Ways to Align With OSHA Standards

As OSHA defense lawyers, we represent clients with serious, repeat, and willful OSHA violations. We have extensive experience with the inspection process and understand how to effectively navigate the citation process. We are able to provide clients with legal expertise to increase workplace safety. We’ll provide you with six ways you can avoid OSHA trouble on your job site.

1. Enforce Safety Rules

Make it a top priority to have a safety program in place that covers policies, training, and best practices for a healthy and safe work environment. This means having a system for preventing hazards, injuries, and deaths. Your system should document, publish, and enforce your safety rules. Efforts should be made to ensure rules are accessible and understood by every employee at every level.

2. Use Engineering Controls

Have the proper engineering controls in place to eliminate or reduce exposure to hazards in the work environment. This will require removing the hazard completely, providing substitutes, or supplying barriers that discourage exposure.

3. Conduct Safety Audits

Are your safety programs and training working? A safety audit should be done to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your safety policies. This is done by collecting and measuring information to see how accurate and reliable they are. Once conducted, a plan should be put into place to correct any inefficiencies.

4. Be Aware of Common Hazards

Knowing about the most commonly cited hazard violations is the first step in preventing them and complying with OSHA standards. Common hazards that occur include falls, hazard communication, lockout/tag out, respiratory, electrical hazards, and scaffolding.

5. Take PPE Seriously

Take OSHA’s Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) standards seriously. Once you’ve identified common hazards overall, you should conduct an assessment of the hazards on your job site. Replace defective PPE, determine the proper PPE needed and provide the appropriate training for employees.

6. Pay Attention to Employee Concerns

The safety concerns of employees are extremely important to OSHA. Management level employees should strive for an environment conducive to open communication for all employees through training and meetings. Employees should be able to communicate safety concerns and not be retaliated against. If complaints are ignored, OSHA will aggressively investigate these complaints.

To request a consultation with a reputable OSHA lawyer, please call us today at 813.579.3278 or submit our contact request form.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article is for general educational information only. This information does not constitute legal advice, is not intended to constitute legal advice, nor should it be relied upon as legal advice for your specific factual pattern or situation.