The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has finally issued a long-expected order to expand electronic record submission for work-related injury and illness information. This new rule covers a wide variety of industries, including logging, sawmill and other wood product manufacturing (including pallets), and it takes effect on January 1, 2024.
While most employers are required to maintain illness and injury logs and post a summary each year at their worksite, currently only establishments with 250 or more employees and businesses in certain high-hazard industries with 20 or more employees are required annually to submit their OSHA Form 300A Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses. But starting next year, OSHA is expanding who is covered and what documents need to be electronically submitted.
Under the new rule, employers with 100 or more employees in designated high-hazard industries will be required to electronically submit information from their Form 300, Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses, and Form 301, Injury and Illness Incident Report, to OSHA. These submissions are in addition to the submission of Form 300A, Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses.
To improve data quality, OSHA is also requiring employers to include their legal company name when making electronic submissions. The agency will publish on its website some of the data collected to allow employers, employees, potential employees, employee representatives, current and potential customers, researchers and the general public to access information about a company’s workplace safety and health record. The idea is that transparency will help the general public make informed decisions about a company’s workplace safety record. OSHA will also use this data to target some employers for inspections. Although information related to identifying employees, such as names and contact information, will not be publicly released, employer incident data and descriptions of injuries will be available to the public.
Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health Doug Parker explained, “OSHA will use this data to intervene through strategic outreach and enforcement to reduce worker injuries and illnesses in high-hazard industries. The safety and health community will benefit from the insights this information will provide at the industry level, while workers and employers will be able to make more informed decisions about their workplace’s safety and health.”
Labor law firm Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart stated in its review, “The rule increases OSHA’s ability to target employers in programmed inspections…The new rule gives OSHA a more in-depth understanding of the injury and illness history in that establishment that the agency may be able to use to predetermine whether the establishment should fall under the instance-by-instance citation policy. This knowledge could significantly increase the exposure of employers in those establishments if OSHA analyzes the data to determine areas within the worksite that need to be subject to scrutiny… The new rule will allow OSHA to enter an establishment with the names of employees who have been injured or who have been ill and target those employees for interviews as opposed to randomly asking for employees to be produced for interviews.”
So, how should you respond to this new rule? If you are a pallet manufacturer, recycler or sawmill and have 100 or more employees, you are covered. You will need to submit electronically the records indicated above starting next year. Labor law firm Fisher Phillips recommended, “Given that OSHA intends to make much of the data it collects public, you should ensure you are accurately completing OSHA Forms 300, 301, and 300A. The public release of such information can have a broad impact on your business. So, be sure to evaluate each injury or illness to ensure that the OSHA standards actually require you to record such information and avoid recording any extraneous details.”
The final rule can be accessed by visiting https://tinyurl.com/yc8n9dnx.
