The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has not slowed it rulemaking activities despite the attention COVID-19 has demanded over the past two years. In just the past six months, OSHA has:
On March 30th, OSHA published a proposal to dramatically expand the requirements of its Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses Rule (aka the E-Recordkeeping Rule). Read our full article here for more information about the history of E-Recordkeeping, the new proposed amendments to the E-Recordkeeping Rule, and the implications of the proposed changes.
In short, the proposed changes to the E-Recordkeeping Rule would:
Replace the current requirement for all workplaces with 250+ employees to annually submit to OSHA’s electronic Injury Tracking Application the data from their 300A Annual Summary of work-related injuries, with a new requirement for workplaces with 100+ employees in the “high hazard industries” listed in new Appendix B to submit the full panoply of OSHA recordkeeping records – i.e., OSHA Forms 300 (the OSHA Log), 301 (detailed incident reports for each recorded injury), and the 300A Annual Summary;
Require workplaces with 20+ employees in another larger list of so-called “high-hazard industries” (new Appendix A) to submit the data from their 300As; and
Compel all submitting employers to include their proper company name with the electronic data submissions.
That Federal Register Notice set the deadline for stakeholders to submit comments for Tuesday, May 31 — the day after Memorial Day and one week after the deadline to submit post-hearing comments about OSHA’s proposed Permanent COVID-19 Standard for Healthcare. Because of that crowded schedule and the importance of the proposed changes to the E-Recordkeeping Rule, last week, on behalf of Conn Maciel Carey’s Employers E-Recordkeeping Rulemaking Coalition, we prepared and filed a Letter to OSHA Requesting an Extension of the Comment Period. Continue reading →
On March 30th, OSHA published a new proposed rule to amend and dramatically expand the requirements of its Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses Rule (i.e., the E-Recordkeeping Rule). Read our full article here for more information about the history of E-Recordkeeping, the new proposed amendments to the E-Recordkeeping Rule, and the implications of the proposed changes.
As we have had to do too often the last couple of years, Conn Maciel Carey’s OSHA Team is organizing a flat fee-based rulemaking coalition of employers and trade groups to collaborate to work on submitting public comments on this new proposal and otherwise participate in the rulemaking process to advocate for the most manageable possible E-Recordkeeping Rule.
We held a kickoff call for the coalition earlier this week. If you were unable to attend, we are pleased to share links to the recording and a copy of the slides that we used. We expect to have a follow up virtual meeting in May to solicit detailed input from coalition participants and review our advocacy strategy.
There is still time to join our coalition if your organization would like to partner with us on this rulemaking. OSHA requested public comments to be submitted by May 31, 2022.
We expect to address, among other important concerns, that: Continue reading →
Who else misses the time when OSHA would issue a new regulation only once every decade or so?!?! Alas, OSHA has been quite busy the last few months on the rulemaking front, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. You’ve heard a lot from us about the various COVID-19 rulemaking efforts – two emergency standards and a new effort to make permanent the COVID-19 standard for healthcare. Now, OSHA has turned its attention to a more traditional OSHA subject – injury and illness recordkeeping.
OSHA first issued regulations requiring that employers record occupational injuries and illnesses in 1971. Pursuant to 29 CFR 1904.7, employers must keep records of work-related injuries and illnesses that involve death, loss of consciousness, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, medical treatment beyond first aid, or diagnosis of a significant injury or illness by a physician or other licensed health care professional. Additional requirements were added for Reporting of Fatality and Multiple Hospitalization Incidents, and later, in 2014, OSHA expanded the types of incidents that had to be reported to OSHA; i.e., a single in-patient hospitalization, amputations, and losses of an eye. (79 FR 56130)
In 2016 (amended in 2018), annual electronic injury recordkeeping data submissions to OSHA became mandatory both for establishments with 250 or more employees, and establishments with 20-249 employees in certain designated industries. The current version of the E-Recordkeeping Rule has undergone some changes and revisions, and indeed, as we have chronicled in the past, the E-Recordkeeping Rule has had a long and tortured history. Before promulgation of the E-Recordkeeping Rule, unless OSHA opened an enforcement inspection at an employer’s workplace or the Bureau of Labor Statistics requested an employer’s participation in its annual injury data survey, employer injury and illness recordkeeping data was maintained internally by employers. In a major policy shift, in 2016, President Obama’s OSHA enacted the E-Recordkeeping Rule, requiring hundreds of thousands of workplaces to proactively submit injury and illness data to OSHA through OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (“ITA”). More specifically, the 2016 E-Recordkeeping Rule required: Continue reading →
ANNOUNCING CONN MACIEL CAREY’S
2021 OSHA WEBINAR SERIES
As the Trump Administration hands over the keys to President-Elect Biden and a new Democratic Administration, OSHA’s enforcement and regulatory landscape is set to change in dramatic ways, from shifting enforcement priorities, budgets and policies, to efforts to reignite OSHA’s rulemaking apparatus. Following an Administration that never installed an Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, handled COVID-19 enforcement with a light touch, pumped the brakes on almost all rulemaking in general, and declined to issue an emergency COVID-19 standard in particular, the pendulum swing at OSHA is likely to be more pronounced than during past transitions. Accordingly, it is more important now than ever before to pay attention to OSHA developments.
Conn Maciel Carey’s complimentary 2021 OSHA Webinar Series, which includes (at least) monthly programs put on by the attorneys in the firm’s national OSHA Practice, is designed to give employers insight into developments at OSHA during this period of flux and unpredictability.
To register for an individual webinar in the series, click on the link in the program description below. To register for the entire 2021 series, click here to send us an email request, and we will register you. If you missed any of our programs from the past seven years of our annual OSHA Webinar Series, click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel to access those webinars.
As the world continues to focus its attention on all things COVID-19 related – especially as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention learns more and more about the virus and updates its guidelines — earlier this month, OSHA quietly published a treasure trove of employer injury and illness data as part of its Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses Rule (aka the “E-Recordkeeping Rule”). The move comes after numerous attempts by OSHA under the Trump Administration to delay and narrow the requirements set forth in the original E-Recordkeeping Rule promulgated by OSHA in May 2016 during the final year of the Obama Administration, and also attempts by Trump’s OSHA to withhold from disclosure, even pursuant to FOIA requests, the injury and illness data collected pursuant to the Rule since 2016.
History of E-Recordkeeping Rule
The current version of the E-Recordkeeping Rule has undergone some changes and revisions, and indeed, as we previously posted here on the OSHA Defense Report, the Rule has had a long and tortured history. Before promulgation of the E-Recordkeeping Rule, unless OSHA opened an enforcement inspection at an employer’s workplace or the Bureau of Labor Statistics requested an employer’s participation in its annual injury data survey, employer injury and illness recordkeeping data was maintained internally by employers. In a major policy shift, on May 11, 2016, President Obama’s OSHA enacted the E-Recordkeeping Rule, requiring hundreds of thousands of workplaces to submit injury and illness data through OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (“ITA”). At that time, the Rule also included a provision in which employer injury and illness data would be made available to the public on a searchable online database without scrubbing employer names or location details.
More specifically, the 2016 E-Recordkeeping Rule required:
All establishments with 250 or more employees in industries covered by the recordkeeping regulation to submit to OSHA annually their injury and illness data and information from their OSHA 300 Logs, 301 Incident Reports, and 300A Annual Summaries;
Establishments with 20-249 employees in select “high hazard industries” to annually submit information from their 300A Annual Summaries only;
All submissions to be done electronically, via a purportedly secure OSHA website portal; and
Employer’s injury data to be publicized in a “user-friendly” database for all the world to see.
There were numerous legal challenges to the Rule, some of which are still being litigated. Continue reading →
This is your yearly reminder about the important February 1st deadline to prepare, certify and post your OSHA 300A Annual Summary of workplace injuries and illnesses, for all U.S. employers, except those with ten or fewer employees or those whose NAICS codes are in the set of low-hazard industries exempt from OSHA’s injury and illness recordkeeping requirements, such as dental offices, advertising services, and car dealers (see the exempted industries at Appendix A to Subpart B of Part 1904). The Form 300A is a summation of the workplace injuries and illnesses recorded on the OSHA 300 Log during the previous calendar year, as well as the total hours worked that year by all employees covered by the particular OSHA 300 Log.
Note that February 1st falls on a Saturday this year, but that does not affect the deadline to post. So, if there will be noone present at your workplace to make the posting on that Saturday, be sure to get your 300A posted by Friday, January 31st.
This February 1st requirement to prepare, certify and post 300A forms should not be confused with OSHA’s Electronic Recordkeeping Rule. The February 1st deadline is only about the internal hard copy posting of 300A data for your employees’ eyes. The E-Recordkeeping Rule, on the other hand, requires certain employers to electronically submit data from their 300A Annual Summary forms to OSHA through OSHA’s web portal – the Injury Tracking Application. The deadline for those submissions this year (i.e., to submit 300A data from 2019) is March 2, 2020. Click here for more information about OSHA’s E-Recordkeeping Rule.
By February 1st every year, covered employers must:
Review their OSHA 300 Log(s);
Verify the entries on the 300 Logs are complete and accurate;
Correct any deficiencies identified on the 300 Logs;
Use the injury data from the 300 Log to calculate an annual summary of injuries and illnesses, and input those calculations into the 300A Annual Summary Form; and
Have a “Company Executive” certify the accuracy of the 300 Log and the 300A Summary Form.
Five Common 300A Mistakes that Employers Make
We frequently see employers make the following five mistakes related to this annual duty to prepare, post and certify the injury and illness recordkeeping summary: Continue reading →
We are three years into the Trump Administration, and we have seen a mixed bag of change and business as usual at OSHA in enforcement and rulemaking. We watched late Obama-era OSHA rules get repealed, delayed, or amended and a modest boost in compliance assistance—the sort of policy shifts you expect to see in a transition from a Democratic to a Republican Administration. However, we have seen plenty of the unexpected, such as increases in virtually every enforcement metric, including record numbers of $100K+ enforcement actions. And most surprising of all, OSHA still does not have an Assistant Secretary—the longest ever vacancy for the top job at OSHA—and it seems highly likely the Agency will remain without a Senate-approved leader for the entirety of this presidential term. As we move into an election year, the final year of President Trump’s current term, we expect more reshuffling of OSHA enforcement policies and rulemaking priorities, and surely more surprises, so it is critical to stay abreast of OSHA developments.
Conn Maciel Carey’s complimentary2020 OSHA Webinar Series includes monthly webinars presented by OSHA-specialist attorneys in the firm’s national OSHA Practice designed to give employers insight into developments at OSHA during this remarkable time in OSHA’s history.
To register for an individual webinar, use the registration links in the program descriptions below. To register for the entire 2020 Series, click hereto send an email request, and we will register you. If you miss a program this year or missed any in prior years, click here for our webinar archive.
We are exploring CLE approval for this series. If you are interested in CLE or other forms of Continuing Education credits,click here to complete a survey.
In the final days (and even hours) of the Obama Administration, OSHA promulgated several significant regulatory changes. For example, after several decades, it updated the Walking Working Surfaces Standard (the regulation covering slips, trips and falls). It also published a controversial Electronic Injury Data Submission Rule, two new occupational health exposure standards for silica and beryllium, and brought the U.S. Hazard Communication Standard (the chemical right-to-know regulation) more in line with the United Nation’s Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals. To name a few.
But, as a new administration took the reigns at the Department of Labor, many wondered what would be the fate of these “midnight rules”? While many agency regulations have been subject to additional rulemaking (or even rule-rescinding), as expected given Pres. Trump’s promise for deregulation, others have remained untouched. This webinar will review the status of these OSHA Rules and where they may be headed.
The state of California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, is perhaps the most aggressive and enforcement-heavy approved state OSH Program in the nation. California employers face a host of requirements that other employers around the country do not. Likewise, the Cal/OSHA inspection and appeal process creates several unique landmines for California employers.
Of particular significance in the coming year, California employers should be on the lookout for a new permanent E-Recordkeeping injury data submission rule, a new focus on finding Repeat violations, and the roll-out of several new California-unique rules.
OSHA’s controversial E-Recordkeeping Rule has been challenged and criticized by stakeholders since its inception, and finally, in January 2019, the Trump Administration unveiled its Final Amended Rule. However, the Amended Rule did not go nearly as far as many expected or hoped. Indeed, the Amended Rule eliminated only the requirement for large establishments to submit 300/301 data, but did nothing to alleviate the data submission burden on smaller employers, and did not address the controversial anti-retaliation provisions (e.g., limits to post-injury drug testing and safety incentive programs) at all.
Not to be confused with E-Recordkeeping, OSHA’s Significant Injury and Fatality Reporting Rule has created significant new interactions between employers and OSHA since its update in 2015. Many employers still wrestle with the nuances of when and how to report significant injuries involving hospitalizations, amputations, and fatalities to OSHA. In particular, employers are struggling to determine what constitutes a reportable hospitalization and amputation.
Yesterday OSHA announced and today OSHA officially published its Final Rule amending its Electronic Recordkeeping Rule. After years of advocacy for change to (or to rescind) OSHA’s controversial Obama-era rule to “Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses” (aka the E-Recordkeeping Rule), and a transition to the de-regulatory platform of the Trump Administration, OSHA has finally approved changes (hopefully just the first step) to pare down the E-Recordkeeping Rule.
On July 30, 2018, OSHA announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to amend the E-Recordkeeping Rule. 83 Fed. Reg. 36494 (July 30, 2018). The proposed Rule included only one significant change to the current regulation. Specifically, the proposal sought to rescind the requirement for the largest employers — those with individual establishments with 250 or more employees — to annually submit to OSHA’s online web portal the data from their 300 logs and 301 detailed incident reports of recorded injuries and illnesses.
The proposal left intact the requirement for these large employers and many more smaller employers to annually submit 300A annual summary data. Perhaps even more concerning to employers than leaving in place a portion of the electronic data submission requirements, the final rule does not disturb in any manner the controversial and duplicative “anti-retaliation” provisions, or the interpretations of those provisions included in the Preamble to the 2016 Final Rule. These are the provisions that endeavored to restrict employers’ authority to discipline employees for late injury reporting or for safety violations, as well as limit employer’s ability to perform post-incident drug testing and to provide safety incentives. For more information about these elements of the E-Recordkeeping Rule, check out our previous blog article regarding the E-Recordkeeping Anti-Retaliation provisions.
Tortured History and Difficulties Implementing E-Recordkeeping
Historically, unless OSHA opened an enforcement inspection at an employer’s workplace or the Bureau of Labor Statistics requested an employer participate in its annual injury data survey, employers’ injury and illness recordkeeping data was maintained internally. In a major policy shift, President Obama’s OSHA Continue reading →
This is your yearly reminder about the important February 1st deadline to prepare, certify and post your OSHA 300A Annual Summary of workplace injuries and illnesses, for all U.S. employers, except those with ten or fewer employees or those whose NAICS code is in the set of low-hazard industries exempt from OSHA’s injury and illness recordkeeping requirements, such as dental offices, advertising services, and car dealers (see the exempted industries at Appendix A to Subpart B of Part 1904).
This February 1st requirement to prepare, certify and post 300A forms should not be confused with OSHA’s new-ish Electronic Recordkeeping Rule. The February 1st deadline is only about the internal hard copy posting of 300A data for your employees’ eyes. The E-Recordkeeping Rule, on the other hand, requires certain employers to electronically submit data from their 300A Annual Summary forms to OSHA through OSHA’s web portal – the Injury Tracking Application. The deadline for those submissions this year (i.e., to submit 300A data from 2018) is March 2, 2019.
By February 1st every year, however, employers must:
Review their OSHA 300 Log(s);
Verify the entries on the 300 Log are complete and accurate;
Correct any deficiencies identified on the 300 Log;
Use the injury data from the 300 Log to calculate an annual summary of injuries and illnesses and complete the 300A Annual Summary Form; and
Certify the accuracy of the 300 Log and the 300A Summary Form.
The Form 300A is a summation of the workplace injuries and illnesses recorded on the OSHA 300 Log during the previous calendar year, as well as the total hours worked that year by all employees covered by the particular OSHA 300 Log.
Five Common 300A Mistakes that Employers Make
We frequently see employers make the following four mistakes related to this annual duty to prepare, post and certify the injury and illness recordkeeping summary: Continue reading →
As we have reviewed previously on the OSHA Defense Report, federal OSHA’s Rule to “Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses” (aka the E-Recordkeeping Rule) requires small employers that operate in certain “high hazard industries” and all large employers to proactively submit their electronic injury and illness data to OSHA through a web portal – the Injury Tracking Application (“ITA”).
When federal OSHA promulgated the Rule in 2016, it built into the Rule a mandate that all State Plans adopt substantially identical requirements within six months after its publication. Implementation of the federal Rule, however, has been mired in difficulty from industry challenges, shifting guidance, informal changes, extended deadlines and mixed signals about the future of the rule as we transitioned from the Obama administration to the Trump administration. As a result, numerous State OSH programs failed to initially adopt the rule. After some headbutting with federal OSHA, almost all of the delinquent states, including California, have now implemented rules to “catch-up” to the federal OSHA data submission rule.
Delinquent State Plans Began Adopting E-Recordkeeping
In the midst of uncertainty surrounding federal OSHA’s E-Recordkeeping Rule, several State Plans delayed adopting state versions, even after OSHA made it clear that state plans needed to act soon. While the majority of State Plans acted promptly to promulgate their own version of the E-Recordkeeping rule by the end of 2017, eight State Plans had not yet adopted the rule, including:
California (Cal/OSHA);
Washington (WA DLI, WISHA, or DOSH);
Maryland (MOSH);
Minnesota (MNOSHA);
South Carolina (SC OSHA);
Utah (UOSH);
Wyoming (Wy OSHA); and
Vermont (VOSHA)
Give the substantial number of State Plans that failed to comply with the Rule’s order, federal OSHA attempted to force covered employers in these State Plans to submit 300A data despite not being subject to the rule or federal OSHA’s jurisdiction. Specifically, on April 30, 2018, federal OSHA issued a Continue reading →
After years of wondering how OSHA could possibly manage and use data collected under the 2016 E-Recordkeeping Rule, the agency has finally revealed its hand. Last month, OSHA launched its Site-Specific Targeting 2016 (“SST-16”) inspection plan, which outlines the agency’s strategy to target establishments for inspection based on the 300A data collected by OSHA under its Final Rule to Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illness (i.e. the “E-Recordkeeping Rule”).
What is OSHA’s SST-16 Inspection Plan?
The SST-16 Inspection Plan is OSHA’s site-specific targeting inspection plan for non-construction workplaces that have 20 or more employees. The Plan is based on the calendar year 2016 300A injury and illness summary data that employers submitted to OSHA via OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (aka, the E-Recordkeeping Portal) in December 2017.
Employers should not be surprised by OSHA’s site-specific targeting plan, as this is not a novel program for OSHA. SST was the grandfather of all OSHA enforcement emphasis programs. Prior to 2014, SST programs used injury and illness information collected under the former OSHA Data Initiative to target the agency’s inspection resources.
OSHA believes the SST Program is “program helps OSHA achieve its goal of ensuring that employers provide safe and healthful workplaces by directing enforcement resources to those workplaces with the highest rates of injuries and illnesses.”
The SST-16 Plan selects individual establishments for inspection based on their CY 2016 300A injury data submitted under the E-Recordkeeping Rule. OSHA has created a software that will generate a list of targeted establishments for enforcement from this pool of data. The targeted establishments will be those with Continue reading →
We are now two years into the Trump Administration, and we have seen a mixed bag of changes in the OSHA enforcement and regulatory landscape. We have watched some late Obama-era OSHA rules get repealed by the Congressional Review Act or delayed and amended through deregulatory rulemaking. We have seen some efforts to boost up the VPP Program and other cooperative programs—the sorts of policy shifts at OSHA many expect in a transition to a republican administration. However, we have also been surprised by OSHA increasing the number of inspections, setting records for the number of $100K+ enforcement actions, and continuing to issue hard hitting press releases. And most surprising of all, OSHA still does not have a Senate-approved Assistant Secretary—the longest ever wait for a permanent OSHA Administrator.
As we move into the out years of Pres. Trump’s first term, we expect more reshuffling of OSHA’s enforcement priorities and policies, and more surprises, so it is critical to stay abreast of OSHA developments. This complimentary 2019 OSHA Webinar Series, presented by the OSHA-specialist attorneys inConn Maciel Carey’s national OSHA Practice Group, is designed to give employers insight into changes and developments at OSHA during this unpredictable time.
On May 11, 2016, OSHA published its Final Rule for injury and illness recordkeeping electronic data submissions — what we refer to as the E-Recordkeeping Rule. The rule fundamentally changed OSHA’s long-standing injury and illness recordkeeping program by requiring injury and illness data to be proactively shared with OSHA, which intended originally (and still, but after some delay) to publicize the data for all the world to see. The 2016 E-Recordkeeping Rule required:
All establishments with 250 or more employees in industries covered by the recordkeeping regulation to submit to OSHA annually their injury and illness data and information from their OSHA 300 Logs, 301 Incident Reports, and 300A Annual Summaries.
Establishments with 20-249 employees in select “high hazard industries” to annually submit information from their 300A Annual Summaries only.
In addition to the electronic data submission requirements, the E-Recordkeeping also introduced (out of left field) some new anti-retaliation restrictions that were intended to eliminate employer policies that may discourage employees from reporting injuries, purportedly for the nefarious purpose of reducing the numbers of injuries the employer has to share with OSHA. These anti-retaliation provisions included very generic, vague language, but through a series of memos, interpretation letters, and other guidance, we have learned that the anti-retaliation elements primarily restrict employers’ use of safety incentive programs (prizes for injury-free work), post-incident drug testing, executive compensation and bonuses, and post-incident discipline. Although none of those terms even appears in the 2016 regulatory text, OSHA included a panoply of new restrictions impacting very common workplace policies and programs in the Preamble to the Final Rule. For more information about the controversial anti-retaliation elements of the E-Recordkeeping Rule, check out our previous blog post.
Since promulgation in May 2016, implementation of all aspects of the Rule has been mired in difficulty. Continue reading →
When fed OSHA promulgated the Final Rule to “Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses” (aka the E-Recordkeeping Rule) in 2016, it built into the Rule a mandate that all State Plans adopt substantially identical requirements to the final E-Recordkeeping Rule within six months after its publication. However, because State Plans all have their own legislative or rulemaking processes, they cannot simply snap their fingers and instantly adopt a new Rule even if required to do so by fed OSHA. Also importantly, the State Plans, as well as all employers in the regulated community, were getting mixed signals about the future of the E-Recordkeeping Rule from fed OSHA under the new Trump Administration.
Accordingly, although most of the 20+ State Plans acted promptly to promulgate their own version of the E-Recordkeeping rule, leading up to the first injury data submission deadline last year, several State OSH Plans had not yet adopted their own version of an E-Recordkeeping Rule. Specifically, as of the end of 2017, these eight State Plans had not yet adopted (and some, like California, had not even started the process to adopt) an E-Recordkeeping Rule:
California (Cal/OSHA);
Washington (WA DLI, WISHA, or DOSH);
Maryland (MOSH);
Minnesota (MNOSHA);
South Carolina (SC OSHA);
Utah (UOSH);
Wyoming (WY OSHA); and
Vermont (VOSHA).
Given the uncertainty of the fate of the E-Recordkeeping Rule after the transition to the Trump Administration and OSHA’s announcement that it would soon issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to revisit the E-Recordkeeping Rule, each of these State Plans except for Vermont OSHA continued to delay adopting the Rule even as we approached the second data submission deadline of July 2018. And that is when fed OSHA started to speak up.
OSHA’s April 30, 2018 Press Release
On April 30, 2018, OSHA issued a press release announcing that employers in all State Plan States (not the State Plans themselves) must implement OHSA’s E-Recordkeeping Rule. In the press release, OSHA states that it had determined that:
Section 18(c)(7) of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act, and relevant OSHA regulations pertaining to State Plans, require all affected employers to submit injury and illness data in the ITA, “even if the employer is covered by a State Plan that has not completed adoption of their own state rule.”
State Plan State Responses
The remaining seven State Plan States provided conflicting responses to fed OSHA’s directive Continue reading →
As a small budget agency, OSHA has long looked for policies that will leverage individual enforcement actions to have the greatest impact on Industry. That is the origin of OSHA’s controversial policy of “Regulation by Shaming.” During the Obama Administration, employer shaming became a significant enforcement tool and came in many forms, from increasing use of enforcement press releases that included embarrassing and inflammatory quotations about employers, to maintaining a public bad actors list in connection with the Severe Violator Enforcement Program, and the piècede résistance – publishing a Rule by which OSHA will collect and publish employers’ injury and illness data and details about fatalities.
The Trump Administration has signaled it will take a different approach to public shaming, but at the very least, the vestiges of these policies still remain, and some Administration actions suggest they are here to stay.
After years of advocacy for change to (or to rescind) OSHA’s controversial Obama-era rule to “Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses” (aka the E-Recordkeeping Rule), and a transition to the de-regulatory platform of the Trump Administration, OSHA has taken a step (hopefully just the first step) to pare down the E-Recordkeeping Rule. Specifically, OSHA announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to amend the E-Recordkeeping Rule. While the proposed change will undoubtedly be welcomed by Industry, the scope of the proposed change, however, does not address most of the fundamental concerns employers have repeatedly raised about the controversial rule.
The Proposed Rule includes only one significant change to the current regulation. The proposal seeks to eliminate the requirement for the largest employers, those with establishments with 250 or more employees, to annually submit to OSHA the data from their 300 logs and 301 detailed incident reports of recorded injuries and illnesses via OSHA’s new online web portal. However, the proposal leaves intact the concerning requirements for these large employers and many smaller employers to annually submit 300A annual summary data via OSHA’s electronic portal.
Perhaps even more concerning to employers than leaving in place a portion of the electronic data submission requirements, the proposed rule does not disturb in any manner the highly controversial “anti-retaliation” provisions, or the interpretations of those provisions included in the 2016 final rule preamble. In addition to establishing requirements for electronic submission of injury and illness recordkeeping data, the 2016 E-Recordkeeping Rule endeavored to restrict employers’ rights to adopt employee injury reporting policies and expanded OSHA’s enforcement authority by introducing a vague new set of “anti-retaliation” provisions.
The July 1, 2018 deadline for large employers (250+ employees at a single work site) and smaller employers (20-249 employees) in certain so-called “high hazard industries” to submit injury and illness data to OSHA is less than a week away. We have been tracking closely the Trump Administration’s treatment of OSHA’s new E-Recordkeeping and Anti-Retaliation Rule, and while there have been plenty of signals that this rule is due for an overhaul, it appears that this deadline for the second data submission under the rule is going to stand.
Therefore, if employers have not already done so, they should immediately evaluate whether the rule applies to any or all of their workplaces, get familiar with and set up an account in OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (the portal that will receive the injury data), and submit covered injury data (i.e., their 2017 OSHA 300A Annual Summary data) by this Sunday.
For a last-minute primer on the nuances of OSHA’s E-Recordkeeping Rule, check out this blog article from Intelex, a compliance software development resource. Here is the opening excerpt from the article:
“Mandatory submission of injury and illness data to OSHA through a dedicated Web-based portal should, in theory, make the process quick and easy. However, a recent spate of real and proposed changes to the agency’s E-Recordkeeping Rule has left many employers wondering if they are required to submit injury and illness data for certain establishments, by when they must do it, and what the consequences are of not submitting the data.
The latest in Conn Maciel Carey LLP’s OSHA webinar series addressed these topics and provided some much-needed clarity for employers.”
A fascinating jurisdictional tug-of-war has broken out between federal OSHA and a few fed OSHA approved State OSH Programs, in relation to OSHA’s Final Rule to “Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses” (aka the E-Recordkeeping Rule). The E-Recordkeeping Rule requires large employers and smaller employees that operate in certain “high hazard industries” to proactively submit their electronic injury and illness data to OSHA through a special web portal – the Injury Tracking Application (“ITA”).
State Plan Adoption of OSHA’s E-Recordkeeping Rule
When fed OSHA promulgated the Rule in 2016, it built into the Rule a mandate that all State Plans adopt substantially identical requirements to the final E-Recordkeeping Rule within six months after its publication. However, because the State Plan states all have their own legislative or rulemaking processes, they cannot simply snap their fingers and instantly adopt a new fed OSHA rule.
Most of the 20+ State Plans acted promptly to promulgate their own version of the E-Recordkeeping rule, ahead of the deadline to submit data the first year of the Rule, but as of the end of 2017, when employers’ 2016 300A data was due to be submitted, eight State Plans had not yet adopted (and some, like California, had not even started the process to adopt) an E-Recordkeeping Rule. Those states included:
California (Cal/OSHA);
Washington (WA DLI, WISHA, or DOSH);
Maryland (MOSH);
Minnesota (MNOSHA);
South Carolina (SC OSHA);
Utah (UOSH);
Wyoming (WY OSHA); and
Vermont (VOSHA).
The delay by these States has primarily been a result of fed OSHA’s numerous announcements that it will soon issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to amend (or rescind) the federal E-Recordkeeping Rule. The State Plans have been reluctant to invest the time and resources to implement their own versions of the rule, only to watch fed OSHA change it, causing the states to have to change their own rules again very soon.
Of those eight states, only Vermont has since finalized its E-Recordkeeping Rule this year, and the other seven remain delinquent in their obligation to adopt the Rule.
Last year, fed OSHA and those eight state plans apparently recognized that only employers in fed OSHA states or State Plan states that had already adopted the E-Recordkeeping rule were required to submit their 300A data to OSHA. This year, however, fed OSHA spoke up about the delinquent states. Continue reading →
OSHA’s controversial Electronic Recordkeeping and Anti-Retaliation Rule was promulgated in May 2016. Despite a barrage of negative comments during the rulemaking, multiple enforcement deferrals, and two legal challenges that have been stayed pending the Trump Administration’s re-evaluation of the Rule, all elements of the rule are currently in effect. Indeed, last December, hundreds of thousands of workplaces, for the first time, submitted their injury and illness recordkeeping data to OSHA through its Injury Tracking Application (ITA) web portal.
The Trump Administration is ready to announce its future plans for the E-Recordkeeping Rule, signaling that it will publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to revise (or potentially rescind) the Rule later this month. However, the extent of the revisions to the rule remain unknown, and the timing is key as we approach July 1, 2018, the deadline for the second round of injury data submissions.
This is your annual reminder about the important annual February 1st deadline to prepare, certify and post your OSHA 300A Annual Summary of workplace injuries and illnesses, for all U.S. employers, except those with ten or fewer employees or those whose NAICS code is for the set of low hazard industries exempted from OSHA’s injury and illness recordkeeping requirements, such as dental offices, advertising services, and car dealers (see the exempted industries at Appendix A to Subpart B of Part 1904).
This February 1 requirement to prepare, certify and post 300A forms should not be confused with OSHA’s new Electronic Recordkeeping Rule. The February 1st deadline is only about the internal posting of 300A data for your employees’ eyes. The E-Recordkeeping Rule, on the other hand, is a new requirement for certain employers to electronically submit data from their 300A Annual Summary forms to OSHA through a web portal. Depending on how OSHA resolves an internal policy debate and the outcome of legal challenges from labor groups, that data may also be shared publicly.
By February 1st every year, employers must:
Review their OSHA 300 Log(s);
Verify the entries on the 300 Log are complete and accurate;
Correct any deficiencies identified on the 300 Log;
Use the injury data from the 300 Log to calculate an annual summary of injuries and illnesses and complete the 300A Annual Summary Form; and
Certify the accuracy of the 300 Log and the 300A Summary Form.
The Form 300A is a summation of the workplace injuries and illnesses recorded on the OSHA 300 Log during the previous calendar year, as well as the total hours worked that year by all employees covered by the particular OSHA 300 Log.
Four Common 300A Mistakes that Employers Make
We see employers make the following four common mistakes related to this annual injury and illness Recordkeeping duty: Continue reading →
The December 15, 2017 deadline for large employers and small employers in certain “high hazard industries” to submit injury and illness data to OSHA has just passed, but it is not too late to submit injury data without being cited by OSHA for missing the deadline. OSHA announced today that will continue to accept employers’ 300A annual summary injury data for calendar year 2016 through the agency’s new Injury Tracking Application (ITA) (the portal that will receive the injury data) until midnight on December 31, 2017, and will not take any enforcement action against those employers who submit data between now and then, even though the submissions would technically be late. Beginning January 1, 2018, the portal will no longer accept 2016 data.
We have closely tracked the Trump Administration’s treatment of OSHA’s new E-Recordkeeping and Anti-Retaliation Rule, and while there have been plenty of signals that this rule is due for an overhaul, or even possibly to be rescinded entirely, no such action was taken to interfere with the first required data submission, other than to extend the deadline from this summer to December 15th, and now to December 31st, for all intents and purposes.
Therefore, if employers missed the deadline, they should immediately evaluate whether the rule applies to any or all of their workplaces, get familiar with and set up an account in OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application, and submit covered injury data (i.e., their 2016 OSHA 300A Annual Summary data) by December 31, 2017.
Background about the Electronic Recordkeeping Rule
Historically, unless OSHA opened an enforcement inspection at an employer’s workplace or the Bureau of Labor Statistics requested an employer’s participation in its annual injury data survey, employers’ Injury and Illness Recordkeeping Logs and related forms remained strictly in-house. Employers kept the data and their OSHA logs in their HR or Safety Department office, posted them internally for employees to view for a couple of months each year, used the data themselves to make decisions about how to reduce risks of injuries and illnesses in their workplaces, and then stored the records in a cabinet or desk drawer for five years. Now, OSHA’s new rule requires hundreds of thousands of employers to proactively submit these historically private records to OSHA, which in turn may publish the data online for all the world to see.
All establishments with 250 or more employees (in industries not exempt from keeping injury logs) must submit to OSHA annually their injury and illness data from their OSHA 300 Logs, 301 Incident Reports, and 300A Annual Summaries. In this first year of the rule, however, for 2016 injury data to be submitted in calendar year 2017, all employers, irrespective of size, are only required to submit 300A Annual Summary data.
The submissions to OSHA must be made electronically, via a purportedly secure web portal.
OSHA stated its original intent was to publish the data online, likely in a manner that is sortable, searchable, filterable, and as embarrassing to employers as possible. It is unclear whether the Trump Administration will publish the data, but the records may nonetheless be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests by plaintiffs’ attorneys, the media, union organizers, and competitors, to use the data in a variety of ways to harm employers.
Deadline to Submit Data – A Moving Target
The deadline to submit data has been a moving topic and source of uncertainty since the Trump Administration took the reins at OSHA. Continue reading →
Here is a summary of his observations.
