New Initiative Aims to Protect Temp Workers

In April, OSHA launched an initiative to protect temporary employees from workplace hazards. The agency issued a memo instructing its Compliance Safety and Health Officers (CSHOs) to take extra steps during inspections and investigations when reviewing employers’ efforts in protecting the safety and health of their temporary workers.

Within the last few months, OSHA received reports about temporary workers suffering fatal injuries. The unsettling fact? Many of these injuries occurred within a worker’s first few days on the job.

In some cases, employee deaths were caused by the employer’s failure to provide safety training or adequately address the hazards present. In other situations, workers were not protected from serious workplace hazards due to lack of personal protective equipment when working with hazardous chemicals and lack of lockout/tagout protections, as well as other problems.

Inspectors have been directed to specifically take note of instances when temporary workers are exposed to safety and health violations, and assess whether these workers received required training in a language and vocabulary they could understand.

Contact ECBM, LP today for employee safety resources, including bilingual resources, to get your temporary employees up to speed.