One Website for All Your Workplace Safety Needs

Q. Is an employer required to keep records of the training and/or certifications of its contractors? Is the fact that the contract specifies a certain level of training sufficient?

A. One of our legal editors had the following response to your question:

Generally no, except when the employer is directly controlling the activities of the contractor’s employees. For the purpose of complying with the OSH Act, the “employer” responsible for keeping training records and certifications is whoever controls the manner in which the employees perform their assigned work (the utilizing employer). The contractor must make training records and certifications available to the employer upon request.

Some OSHA rules, such as HAZWOPER and process safety management, have specific rules concerning employer/contractor responsibilities. If these standards apply to your operation, check them for recordkeeping requirements.

Q. Where can I find information on safety incentive programs?

A. See the following:

Training Tip

PA guidance document

There is also an excellent thread on incentive programs in our discussion forum. Access it here.

As you’ll see in the discussion forum, the concept of an incentive program is still a bit controversial. OSHA has generally discouraged them as they think it encourages underreporting of injuries and illnesses and violations in the interest of reaching set incentives.

---

Great news! BLR’s renowned Safety.BLR.com website is now available in Version 2.0. Take our no-cost site tour! Or better yet, try it at no cost or obligation for a full 2 weeks.

---

Simple, Quick, and Effective

“Ask the Experts” is just one of the many time- and labor-saving features that Safety.BLR.com has designed especially for busy safety professionals like you.

This kind of practical, actionable advice is just one of the reasons why we think Safety.BLR.com is such a terrific resource. In addition to answering your safety and health questions, this one-stop safety website also provides you with white papers on numerous current safety and health topics, national and state news about recent regulatory action, information about innovations in workplace safety, updates on the Washington scene and OSHA initiatives, and much more.

And when it comes to employee training, Safety.BLR.com is right there for you, too. It provides you with more than 185 prewritten safety meetings on just about any topic you can imagine. Training responsibilities become a snap with the website’s thousands of audio presentations, PowerPoint® sessions, meetings, toolbox talks, trainer’s guides, and much, much more. You’ll find training tools on more than 150 safety topics, many of them now available in Spanish as well as English.

---

Now there’s much more of a good thing! Try the new Version 2.0 of Safety.BLR.com. Go here to take a no-cost site tour or here to try it in your own office.

---

At a time when budget considerations are paramount, what makes more sense than an all-in-one safety training and compliance solution?

And BLR recently revamped Safety.BLR.com to meet your needs even better. Those of you who used the site in its original version will be amazed by all the new features and functionality. Highlights include:

• Side-by-Side State/Federal Compliance. By placing our state and federal regulatory analysis side by side, you easily see how to fully comply with both governmental entities.
• MSDS Library Expansion. The site now provides an immense library of 3.5 million MSDS forms, with about 10,000 more added or changed every week. Need one? Just call up the chemical by name, manufacturer, product group, or CAS number, and then print it out.
• Newsletter Wizard. If you’ve ever wanted to publish a safety newsletter but felt lacking in editorial skills, this new addition is for you.
• Plan Builder. Select from our library of safety plans, customize them to suit your company’s needs, and assemble them into collections you can save in our personal library.
• Incident Management tool. This optional feature enables you to centralize the recording, tracking, and reporting of workplace injuries and illnesses so you can stay in compliance with OSHA requirements.

We’re pretty excited about Safety.BLR.com and all of its recent enhancements, and we’re eager for you to experience it, too. That’s why we’ve created a complimentary site tour, available here. It takes just 5 minutes. If you like what you see, you’re invited to try the site at no cost and with no obligation. We’ll even give you a complimentary special report for doing so.

Other Recent Articles on You as a Safety Professional
Safety: Adapting to a Down Economy—Safety Daily Advisor–BLR
Checklists for New Hires – Young and Old Alike
Discrimination: The Other Big Compliance Risk … and Training Need