Safety

OSHA

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration — federal agency that sets workplace safety standards.

OSHA — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — was created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and sits inside the U.S. Department of Labor. It writes and enforces the standards every U.S. employer must follow to keep workers safe, and runs the inspection program that backs them up. For construction contractors, the controlling standard is 29 CFR Part 1926; general industry (warehouses, manufacturing, service trades) falls under 29 CFR Part 1910. For a trade contractor, the OSHA requirements that come up most often are the ones tied to the "Focus Four" — falls, struck-by, caught-in/between, and electrocution — which together cause roughly 60% of construction fatalities. Concretely: fall protection (1926 Subpart M) on any work over six feet, scaffolding (Subpart L), excavation protection (Subpart P) on trenches deeper than five feet, ladders (Subpart X), PPE (Subpart E), and hazard communication (1910.1200) for chemicals on site. Silica (1926.1153) and respirable dust have moved up the citation list since 2017. For 2024, OSHA's most-cited construction violations were: fall protection (general requirements), ladders, scaffolding, fall protection (training), eye and face protection, head protection, hazard communication, and respiratory protection. Penalties scale by violation type — serious citations run $16,131 each as of 2024, willful or repeated up to $161,323, with daily-accrual amounts for failure-to-abate. Recordkeeping is its own discipline. Employers with more than ten employees keep an OSHA Form 300 (Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses) year-round, post the Form 300A summary from February through April each year, and file a Form 301 incident report within seven days of any recordable injury. Establishments with 250+ employees also submit Form 300A electronically through OSHA's Injury Tracking Application by March 2. Inspections happen for predictable reasons: imminent danger reports, accidents involving fatalities or three+ hospitalizations (reportable within 8 and 24 hours respectively), employee complaints, referrals from other agencies, programmed inspections in high-hazard industries, and follow-ups on prior citations. Workers have explicit rights — to file complaints anonymously, to refuse work in imminent-danger situations, and to participate in inspections without retaliation. Many states (about half) run their own OSHA-approved plans — California (Cal/OSHA), Washington, Oregon, Michigan, and others — with rules at least as strict as federal OSHA and frequently stricter. Cal/OSHA's heat-illness prevention standard, for example, has no federal equivalent. A contractor working across state lines needs to know which plan governs each jobsite.