Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
On June 15, OSHA issued a new guidance document on “recognized and generally accepted good engineering practices” (RAGAGEP) in process safety management enforcement. Read the article to find out what the guidelines mean for your facility.
Are the benefits of your safety program functions and performance undervalued because of communication barriers? Are you effectively measuring the performance of your program—and communicating that performance to managers in language they can understand? Keep reading for tips on how to use the tools of business managers and the format and language of the organization’s […]
The average penalty for failing to prevent a hand injury among your workers is around $8,000. The average workers’ compensation claim for hand injuries is over $6,000 and climbing. Lawsuits can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. You should ask yourself, why not buy a really good pair of gloves instead? […]
A 25-yearold social service coordinator for a Maryland-based health company was worried about one of her clients. He had a history of violence and severe mental illness. She recorded her misgivings in her work journal, noting that being alone with this particular client made her uncomfortable. But it was part of her job to transport […]
Tomorrow, July 28, is World Hepatitis Day. According to the World Health Organization, 400 million people worldwide are currently living with hepatitis B and C, and 1.4 million die of these diseases each year. OSHA is taking workplace exposures to bloodborne pathogens seriously. On June 25, the agency issued enforcement guidance for inpatient healthcare settings […]
Are you ready for the new safety data sheets (SDS)? Writing for Safety.BLR.com®, Safety Editor Emily Clark has everything you need to know about the recently passed deadline and its implications. June 1, 2015, marked an important deadline in the 4-year phase-in period for OSHA’s revisions to its hazard communication standard. Effective that date, chemical […]
When you’re trying to motivate workers, it makes perfect sense to use both carrots and sticks—right? Unfortunately, when it comes to safety, the most obvious “carrot”—an incentive program that rewards workers for working safely—can easily go wrong. For example, rewarding a team of workers for not having any reportable accidents can result in the workers […]
A series of storms raged across Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma over Memorial Day weekend, 2015, killing as they went. Among the dead were some who were washed away by floodwaters, others who died in tornadoes, and at least three people who were working on post-storm cleanup. Is your workplace prepared for a natural disaster? The […]
In today’s Advisor, we receive guidance from one of BLR’s experts on when volunteer training should or should not be paid. Here’s the question: Do you have to pay employees for time spent in a voluntary training session offered during their lunch hour? And here’s how our expert responded: Lunch-and-learns are used by some employers […]
Employers have a great deal of flexibility in designing wellness programs under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—but there are also some pitfalls to avoid, and most of them involve laws that predate the ACA. Some employees who are subject to more stringent wellness program requirements designed by their employers under the ACA are suing—successfully—for discrimination […]