Top 10 OSHA Violations in 2020 & Creating A Culture Of Safety In Construction

OSHA, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has recently unveiled its preliminary Top 10 list of the most cited violations for the fiscal year 2020. Traqspera's commitment to your employee's safety is one of the key pillars driving our platform's functionality. While fostering a culture of safety in any business starts with management proactively working to identify, train and mitigate everything on this list.

OSHA, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has recently unveiled its preliminary Top 10 list of the most cited violations for the fiscal year 2020. Traqspera’s commitment to your employee’s safety is one of the key pillars driving our platform’s functionality.

While fostering a culture of safety in any business starts with management proactively working to identify, train and mitigate everything on this list. By empowering employees to take ownership of safety protocols, and giving everyone the tools to easily digitally store employee work logs, site photos, safety attachments and documents, and site notes, sets everyone involved up for success.

Let’s take a look at the top ten OSHA offenders are:

No. 1 – For the 10th consecutive year in a row, Fall Protection has held its position as the most frequently cited OSHA violation. General fall protection rules state that an employer is required to provide fall protection systems for their employees.

No. 2 – Hazard Communication takes the second spot on this list. OSHA standards dictate that the hazards of all chemicals produced or imported are universally classified, and the information concerning them is communicated to employers and their employees.

No. 3 – Respiratory Protection, unrelated to Covid regulations, comes in at No. 3. This regulation’s primary goal is to prevent workers from atmospheric contamination of harmful dust, fogs, fumes, mists, gases, smokes, sprays, or vapors.

No. 4 – Scaffolding. When it comes to scaffolding, each scaffold and scaffold component must support, without failure, its own weight and at least four times the maximum intended load applied or transmitted on it.

No. 5 – Ladders take the 5th spot on the list. Ladders refer to, for the most part, any climbing device a worker manually moves up, including job-made ones, at various types of job sites and locations.

No. 6 – Lockout and Tagout Procedures. These regulations cover the servicing and maintenance of machines and equipment in which the unexpected powering-on of the machines or equipment could harm employees.

No. 7 – Maintaining the same spot from 2019, the Powered Industrial Trucks category ranks at No. 7. These safety requirements are related to fire protection, design, maintenance, and use of fork trucks, tractors, platform lift trucks, motorized hand trucks, and other specialized industrial trucks.

No. 8 – Piggybacking on No. 1, Fall Protection Training that states employers shall provide a training program for each employee who might be exposed to fall hazards to enable each employee to recognize the hazards of falling and the procedures to be followed to minimize those hazards.

No. 9 – Misuse or underuse of PPE, specifically around the eyes and ears, falls into the No. 9 position. Employers need to ensure employees use appropriate eye or face protection when exposed to eye or face hazards from flying particles, molten metal, liquid chemicals, acids or caustic liquids, chemical vapors, or light radiation.

No. 10 – Machine guarding, or the protections in place to protect the operator and other employees from nip points, rotating parts, flying chips, and sparks from the machine they’re operating or machines in the spaces they’re working in.

Utilizing a construction management tool like Traqspera fosters a culture of safety on your worksites. Help keep your crews compliant with safety protocols by making it easy for them to document every safety measure in real-time. Automatically calculate your safety statistics and trends from TRIF, MIR, First Aid’s, Near Misses, etc. Improve communication, faster documentation, and quality of updates by reducing the steps for submitting and documenting safety measures. 

For more information, check out https://traqspera.com/features/safety-toolbox-meetings/.

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