Here we are entering another new year with a veritable plethora of global issues to deal with that are affecting all of us. The Covid Pandemic is winding down but not completely gone so folks are still getting sick.
The unemployment rate is incredibly low and yet there are some 10 million jobs that are going unfilled. Gasoline and diesel fuel have recently been at all-time highs and are just starting to come back in line (at one time a few months ago, I filled up with diesel at over $6 a gallon and it cost me just over $162 to fill the tank of my diesel SUV).
There continues to be a war in Ukraine that is nowhere near done and won’t be anytime soon.
And then there is inflation. We are all paying more now for everything compared to what we paid a year ago. Eggs are reported to cost 300% more, our health insurance just went up by 12.5%, and it seems like a bag of groceries is more this week than last. Even one of my personal favorites from the food nutrition pyramid, ice cream, has gone up by at least a buck a quart. And if all that is not enough, OSHA has finally gotten into the fray.
As part of the Federal Government’s “Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015, which further amended the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Act of 1990, as previously amended by the 1996 Debt Collection Improvement Act” (No joke, this is how their memo reads), OSHA raised their penalties by a “multiplier” of 1.07745. This multiplier is based on the “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for October 2022 (not seasonally adjusted”, of course).
This takes the maximum penalty for “Serious” and “Other-than-Serious” violations (which represent the majority of OSHA’s citations) from $14,502 to $15,625 and the maximum for Willful or Repeated violations from $145,027 to $156,259!!! I believe when I worked for OSHA from 1974 to 1978 those numbers were $7,000 and $70,000 respectively!!! In that 48-year span, that represents a 223% increase.
My reason for taking the space to describe all of this is that we are actually getting many more calls from companies that have had OSHA inspections, that have resulted in significant penalties because they are not in compliance in a number of areas. Therefore, we are suggesting that you should have a heightened awareness of that fact regarding your own compliance efforts. It is important to understand that OSHA has been around since 1970 and they do have an expectation that companies should have taken the time to become compliant in those 52 years. So, for those that have not, they feel the high penalties are warranted.
The most common issues OSHA cites are:
- Fall Protection
- Hazard Communication
- Respiratory Protection
- Ladders
- Scaffolding
- Lockout/Tagout
- Powered Industrial Trucks (Forklifts, etc.)
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
- Machine Guarding
