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Why is it Important to have OSHA Training in your Workplace?

Any business that has employees needs to know about OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act), which was passed in 1970. The law was passed to help ensure that the environments employees worked in are safe. If you have a business with one or more employees, then you are required by law to comply with OSHA regulations.

How do you stay compliant with OSHA?

The following are some of the major responsibilities that employers have:

• Your workplace must not have any hazards as recognized by the OSHA act and must comply with all of their standards, rules and regulations.
• You must examine your workplace conditions to ensure that they conform to OSHA standards.
• You must warn your employees of potential hazards through the use of signs, posters, labels or color codes.
• You must establish operating procedures that establish safety and health requirements and relay them to your employees.
• You must provide your employees with safety training in a language that they understand.
• You must post an OSHA poster that informs employees of their rights and responsibilities.
• You must create and implement a written hazard communication program if your workplace contains hazardous chemicals. Employees must be trained how to handle exposure to these hazards and the proper precautions they should take.
• You must report all work-related fatalities within eight hours.
• You must report all work-related hospitalizations, amputations, or loss of an eye within 24 hours.
• You must keep records of all work-related injuries and illnesses, and you must provide access to these records to employees and former employees and their representatives.
• You must allow OSHA to perform an inspection, during which authorized employee representatives may be asked to accompany OSHA compliance officers.
• You may not discriminate against employees who report OSHA violations.
• All OSHA violation citations must be posted in the area of the workplace where the violations occurred.

Why must you comply with OSHA in an industrial setting?

Industrial settings often require employees to operate heavy machinery and to deal with potentially dangerous mechanisms. Your employees need to be trained in safety measures to ensure that they use equipment properly so that they don’t risk injury to themselves or risk injury to others.

OSHA also requires that you perform regular safety audits in order to identify potential safety issues, which you must address to ensure the safety of your employees. Essentially, complying with OSHA is the best way to ensure the safety of employees working in an industrial setting.

Why is it important to stay compliant?

First, if you don’t stay compliant with OSHA, then you’re basically risking the safety of your employees. This won’t sit well with your employees and can hurt your reputation — especially if someone ends up getting hurt because you were found to be noncompliant. Secondly, you’ll be fined by OSHA. These OSHA penalties fall into the following categories:

• Serious violations – $12,934 per violation
• Other-than-serious violations – $12,934 per violation
• Posting requirement violations – $12,934 per violation
• Failure to abate violations – – $12,934 for every day beyond the abatement
• Willful or repeated violations – $129,336 per violation

Common OSHA violations

The following are just some of the more common OSHA violation citations that are handed out that you will want to avoid:

• You don’t enforce your own safety rules – Document your efforts to enforce your safety rules so that if someone is hurt on the job, you can provide proof that employees weren’t breaking the rules because you weren’t enforcing them.
• You don’t do anything about safety issues found during an audit – If you perform a safety audit and find issues that pose a safety hazard, you need to address them. If it comes out that you performed an audit and didn’t address the safety concerns that came up, resulting in an injured worker, you could be facing some serious questions.
• You ignore hazards cited by OSHA – If an OSHA inspection cited hazards that you don’t address, it could prove to be a serious problem if someone is hurt as a result.
• You ignore or retaliate against employees – If an employee raises a safety concern, you need to address it serious. Ignoring it or punishing them is going to put a target on your back for OSHA.

As a business with employees, maintaining compliance with OSHA is incredibly important. Not only do you want to avoid stiff fees, you’ll want to ensure the safety of your employees by remaining compliant.

Keeping that in mind, you’ll want to enroll in our OSHA safety training course. Doing so will help you create a safer work environment, help prevent OSHA violations and avoid OSHA citations, and could obtain recognition from the Department of Labor for having completed training by an OSHA-authorized trainer. For information about enrolling in our OSHA safety-training course, contact us at NTT Training today.

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