Inspections Might Not Be as Big a Burden as Many Believed

The study, entitled "Randomized Government Safety Inspections Reduce Worker Injuries with no Detectable Job Loss," was co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Toffel, Professor David Levine of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and doctoral student Matthew Johnson. The study examines workplace inspections conducted by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA). The research was published in Science magazine in May.

According to the researchers, "Employees almost surely gain from Cal/OSHA inspections," and there is "no evidence that inspections lead to worse outcomes for employees or employers" in terms of employment or company survival.

"The benefits of a randomized safety inspection appear to be substantial. These results do not support the hypothesis that OSHA regulations and inspections on average have little value in improving health and safety," say the researchers.

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Additional Information

• The cost savings applied to both small (less than $2,000) and large (more than $2,000) workers’ compensation claims, and the reduced injuries and cost savings lasted for at least 4 years after the inspection. These findings suggest the inspections had a lasting, across-the-board effect.
• Many previous studies attempting to evaluate the effectiveness of inspections have suffered from the biased way inspection sites are chosen (by complaints or previous accidents) and from problems with how the effects of the injuries are tracked (typically via OSHA logs, which tend to become more comprehensive after an inspection). The new study addressed both of these issues, because companies were selected at random and because the injuries were measured by workers’ compensation claims and other data gathered from sources independent of OSHA-mandated records.
• A 1993 California mandate requiring Cal/OSHA to conduct some of its workplace inspections at random provided the opportunity for the study. The mandate was not designed to evaluate inspections, but rather to improve compliance by including random inspections in addition to those initiated by complaints or problems. The randomized inspections examined in this study were carried out from 1996 to 2006. For each site chosen for a randomized inspection, the team identified a similar control firm eligible for a random inspection but not chosen.
• Processing the information took a considerable amount of time—5 years—because the researchers had to extract the Cal/OSHA data from a magnetic tape format the researchers had never encountered, and then match the inspected companies’ names and addresses to separate databases containing workers’ compensation and employment information.

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Ready-Made Checklists

BLR’s Safety Audit Checklists provides safety and health checklists on more than 50 essential workplace topics to help you provide employees with a safe workplace as well as prepare for inspections.

Each Safety Audit Checklists section contains:

• A review of applicable OSHA standards
• Safety management tips
• Training requirements
• At least one comprehensive safety checklist

Many sections also contain a compliance checklist, which highlights key provisions of OSHA standard. All checklists can be copied and circulated to supervisors and posted for employees.

All told, this best-selling program provides you with more than 300 separate safety checklists keyed to three main criteria:

• OSHA compliance checklists, built right from the government standards in such key areas as HazCom, lockout/tagout, electrical safety, and many more
• "Plaintiff attorney" checklists, built around those non-OSHA issues that often attract lawsuits
• Safety management checklists that monitor the administrative procedures you need to have for topics such as OSHA 300 Log maintenance, training program scheduling and recording, and OSHA-required employee notifications. 

Make as many copies as you need for all your supervisors and managers, and distribute. What’s more, the entire program is updated annually. And the cost averages only about $1 per checklist.

If this method of ensuring a safer, more OSHA-compliant workplace interests you, we’ll be happy to make Safety Audit Checklists available for a no-cost, no-obligation, 30-day evaluation in your office. Just let us know, and we’ll be pleased to arrange it.