The Occupational Safety and Health Administration released its 2018 list of the most frequent workplace safety violations. The list, which covers the fiscal year from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, includes recorded violations from a number of different industry segments in New Jersey and across the country. In the printing industry, the most common violations were hazard communication failures, lockout/tag-out procedure failures and machine guard violations.
The OSHA Hazard Communication Standard creates requirements that workers be informed regarding hazardous chemicals they may be exposed to. Employers are also required to inform employees about protective steps to safely work with these chemicals. In the 2018 list, however, employers were most commonly cited for failure to have a written safety program, failure to properly train employees and failures with chemical labels or data sheets.
OSHA’s lockout/tag-out regulations require employers have procedures to ensure machines do not start up unexpectedly and chemicals are not unexpectedly released. The most common OSHA violations in this category for the printing industry in 2018 were failure to have a written program in place, failure to conduct annual machine-specific procedure inspections and failure to properly lockout or tag-out equipment.
OSHA requires that employees are protected from exposure to dangerous moving parts and machine operations. Employers must provide physical guards covering moving components, in-going nip points and points of operation. Violations of these or other OSHA regulations can lead to serious injuries. People who are hurt at work might be able to get benefits through the New Jersey worker’s compensation system. An attorney could assist a client who has witnessed OSHA safety violations in the workplace. Legal counsel with experience practicing workers’ comp might be able to help an injured party secure compensation for injuries and medical care. In some cases, workers’ compensation may cover the costs of retraining a person to a new job or provide the injured party with replacement income.
