Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
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 […]
OSHA’s latest regulatory agenda, released in late May, outlined the status of the agency’s currently pending prerules, proposed rules, and final rules. Today, BLR® Safety Editor Emily Clark provides information on what you can expect to see from OSHA in the coming months and which developments could affect your facility. Among the final rules, the […]
June 24, 2015, was a muggy Wednesday night in north Alabama. At the Federal Mogul manufacturing facility in Athens, 25-year-old Allen Michael Brown was outside the plant, trying to secure an empty barrel when he walked in front of a forklift. Brown was run over and killed by the forklift. Any time you have heavy […]
One of the persistent problems of fleet safety and fleet management is that so much of it is driver-dependent. Putting away cell phones and slowing down are proven ways to reduce the risk of crashes—but once a worker is operating the vehicle, the employer has no direct control over whether the worker actually does these […]
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 […]
Protecting workers from the heat is a critical issue during the hot months of July and August—so critical that OSHA is ramping up its awareness and enforcement efforts around heat illness prevention this year. Ideally, employers are supposed to prevent workers from suffering heat illness in the first place, but what happens after a worker […]
Working outdoors in the heat is extra stressful. There’s the stress from whatever work you’re doing, and then there’s the stress on your body created by the need to shed heat. Your workers may know they need to protect themselves. But some of what they’ve heard about preventing heat illness, identifying heat illness, and treating […]
It seemed like a good idea at the time: Reward workers for working safely by providing cash and goods that they could earn as incentives. Even better, put peer pressure to good use by rewarding workers in groups; workers, wanting their premiums, would encourage one another not to cut safety corners and to stay safe. […]
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 […]
In the early morning hours of November 15, 2014, a shift supervisor at DuPont’s chemical plant in La Porte, Texas, called 911 to report that he might have as many as five casualties as the result of a deadly chemical release. He offered no details about what chemical had been released, or when, and denied […]