Every year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) publishes its top 10 list of safety citations. Although multiple standards swapped positions, the top 10 violations found on OSHA’s list of the most frequently cited workplace safety standards for fiscal year 2020 did not change from 2019.

The Top 10 Cited OSHA Standards

1. Fall Protection: 5,424 violations
2. Hazard Communication: 3,199 violations
3. Respiratory Protection: 2,649 violations
4. Scaffolding: 2,538 violations
5. Ladders: 2,129 violations
6. Lockout/Tagout: 2,065 violations
7. Powered Industrial Trucks: 1,932 violations
8. Fall Protection – Training Requirements: 1,621 violations
9. Personal Protective and Life Saving Equipment – Eye and Face Protection: 1,369 violations
10. Machine Guarding: 1,313 violations

Each citation can cost your company thousands of dollars in money and labor. And OSHA recently raised its penalty fees to account for increases in cost-of-living expenses. The maximum penalties for serious and other-than-serious violations increased from $13,494 per violation to $13,653 per violation. The maximum penalty for willful or repeated violations increased from $134,937 per violation to $136,532 per violation.

Safety Checklists

Recently Supply Chain Brain published a guide to help companies improve their workplaces, keep employees safe and lower OSHA citations. Along with the checklist provided in the guide, employers can explore some of the recent trends in safety technologies.

Why A Safety Checklist

It can be difficult to keep track of the various standards and protocols required to keep your workplace safe and your employees uninjured. Often citations are the result of ignorance more than malicious neglect. 

Specific to the citation, each checklist gives specific tasks to carry out to ensure the safety of their employees. This way a system is already in place to follow and it is simple for employers to survey their workplace and follow the checklist. The checklists also allow for the tasks to be delegated to various members of the team and not the one person well-versed in OSHA regulations.

Explore Available Safety Technology

The National Safety Council (NSC) is working to decrease the number of workplace deaths with its Work to Zero initiative. The initiative is to eliminate workplace fatalities through the use of technology.

There is a wide range of safety technologies for manufacturing companies to track trends, reduce hazards, and eradicate injuries and fatalities. These technologies include:

• Dashboards and analytics
• EHS management system software
• Drones
• Wearables
• Proximity sensors
• Virtual reality
• Digital gas monitors
• Downed worker devices
• Location geofencing
• Lone worker monitoring
• Exoskeletons
• Permit to work technologies
• Robots
• Work zone intrusion monitors

Click here to get your copy of these life-saving checklists.