With 2020 barely underway, the poultry industry has already experienced two workplace fatalities, at facilities in two different states. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) says those incidents, along with a government-approved increase in line speeds at poultry slaughterhouses, illustrate the need for safety reforms in the industry. The poultry industry maintains that employees are considerably safer now on the job than in the past, and points to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data to back up that claim.
When OSHA celebrates an anniversary, it does it up big. The federal agency otherwise known as the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) plans to commemorate its 50th anniversary this year with a yearlong celebration of past achievements, current events and future initiatives.
The Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon on December 29, 1970 – that one that created OSHA – gave the federal government the authority to set and enforce safety and health standards for most of the country's workers.
Employers across the world allow their employees to listen to music each day while on the job. Allowing workers to jam out can boost workplace morale, job satisfaction and productivity.
Listening to music is increasingly popular in construction-related fields since canceling out loud noise is required to protect hearing. The problem is that listening to tunes while performing high-risk jobs can often lead to unfortunate accidents.
This study found that workers employed in temporary agencies had higher overall injury rates than permanently employed workers performing comparable work from 2001 to 2013 among Ohio‐insured private employers. Injured temporary agency workers were younger, more likely to be male, and had less tenure (especially those with less than a year on the job) compared to permanently employed workers.
Whether they’re scissor lifts, boom lifts or some other kind of powered, mobile platform used to elevate workers to various heights, aerial lifts are very useful – and potentially dangerous.
Aerial lifts can be found at construction and telecommunications job sites and in warehouses. They’re used for everything from painting, drywall installation, maintenance, moving materials – even changing lightbulbs.
California employers may soon be required to provide their workers with access to the company’s written workplace injury and illness prevention plans (IIPP), if the state’s Occupational Safety And Health Standards Board moves forward on a proposal that would mandate it. The change would amend a requirement that employers have IIPPs that has been in effect since 1991.
An Arkansas manufacturing facility has been recognized for logging two million working hours without a lost time incident. Utility Trailer Manufacturing Company, a manufacturer of refrigerated trailers, dry freight vans, flatbeds, and Tautliner® curtainsided trailers, was presented with a safety award by the state of Arkansas for the achievement at its Paragould manufacturing plant.
OSHA has cited Mayco Manufacturing LLC – operating as Mayco Industries Inc. – for exposing employees to lead and arsenic in addition to machine, electrical and fall hazards. The Granite City, Illinois, lead smelter faces $223,148 in penalties for 18 serious health violations.
The inspection occurred after OSHA received a report that employees suffered caustic burns from water mixed with sodium hydroxide used to extinguish a fire.
OSHA updates a program designed to reduce amputations in the manufacturing industry; company execs in France found guilty of “institutional harassment” and alcohol-related fatalities are increasing in the U.S. These were among the occupational safety and health stories featured on ISHN.com this week.
Among the end of 2019-beginning of 2020 workplace incidents in the U.S. were employees killed or seriously injured by collapsed machinery, a pallet grinder and an exploding wheel.
In Nebraska, a 39-year-old woman sustained traumatic injuries to her head, arms and upper body when she was partially pulled into the pallet grinder she’d been working with. The woman, an employee of Tradewell Pallet in Gretna, was air lifted to a hospital by a medical condition, where she was reported to be in critical condition, according to news sources.
