What’s your procedure for handling workers’ complaints about health symptoms?
Some health symptoms are “nonspecific,” meaning they can have more than one possible cause. A headache, for example, can result from exposure to hazardous airborne chemicals—or the worker could be coming down with a cold or might have skipped lunch. It’s important to carefully investigate any symptoms your workers report, especially if you get multiple reports from multiple employees.
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If you fail to correctly identify the cause of workers’ symptoms, you could create trouble for yourself. One California employer learned that the hard way after eight workers ended up in the hospital with symptoms of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, leading to two willful citations from Cal/OSHA.