Material handling consists of the moving, handling, and storing of materials in a facility using manual force, employee-operated equipment (forklifts), and automated equipment (conveyors). The handling and storing of materials inside a facility includes activities like:

OSHA has cited Diaz Professional Construction LLC for exposing employees to falls at a Montgomery, Alabama, residential worksite. The framing contractor faces $31,879 in penalties.

Today’s workplaces look far different than they have in the past, taking on many shapes, sizes and settings. As a result, more workers from multiple employers are working side-by-side at the same locations, increasing the shared responsibility for worker safety among employers.

Imagine that on the first day at your new job, the foreman tosses you a harness and a 6-foot lanyard and says, “Be careful out there!” That may seem like an extreme example of a woefully inadequate fall protection training program, but I will bet dollars to donuts it happens more often than we think.

Unfortunately, many organizations have a false perception that merely employing someone in a safety capacity is a risk control, as in, “Your Honor, we did our due diligence in safety… see, we hired a Safety Person (points to the ‘Safety Person’).”

This will be a series of short articles designed to provide a different perspective—a paradigm shift -- in terms of how most of you think about industrial safety. And how most of you think about accidental injury causation in general.

Individual oversights and errors can and will eventually lead to unwanted consequences. However, we need multiple checks and balances that limit fallout and the continuance of loss, or possibly, an egregious event.