How to react to tighter OSHA enforcement on safety training

OSHA is increasing enforcement pressure in yet another area: Making sure that employees receive safety training in a format they can understand.

OSHA is instructing its inspectors to issue “serious” citations if a “reasonable person” would conclude that safety training has not been provided to employees in a format which they are “capable of understanding.”

Rod Smith, Pat Miller and Matt Morrison of the Sherman and Howard law firm have published an excellent newsletter article with advice about how make sure your company meets the requirements. Here are some excerpts:

“This could raise several troubling issues for employers. Allowing inspectors to issue a citation based on the views of a hypothetical ‘reasonable person’ is an extremely ambiguous standard, and an invitation to arbitrary enforcement. Although many safety professionals understand the need to translate training materials into appropriate foreign languages, OSHA does not provide any guidance on how employers can present training in a manner which all employees are ‘capable of understanding,’ so as to avoid a citation.

“Learning styles vary widely among individuals, and some employees may be reluctant to admit to their employers that they do not understand the training material. … In short, this new enforcement initiative has the potential to saddle employers with unjustified citations.

“So, what should employers do to avoid a citation and ensure that their employees understand the safety training that they receive? Providing complex, written materials to employees with a sign-off sheet indicating that the employee ‘has read and understood’ the training material is not enough, especially if the employee cannot read or comprehend the rules. A better approach, as recommended by OSHA, is for employers to realize ‘that if they customarily need to communicate work instructions or other workplace information to employees at a certain vocabulary level, or in language other than English, they will also need to provide safety and health training to employees in the same manner.’

“Employers may find it worthwhile to:

• Adopt simplified safety rules and ‘plain English’ restatements of OSHA requirements.
• Utilize written tests, translated where necessary, to confirm employee knowledge.
• Where reading comprehension presents an issue, draft policies and training materials with diagrams or pictures, showing the ‘right way’ and the ‘wrong way’ to perform the job.
• Verbally quiz employees with language or reading comprehension barriers, making certain to document the determination that the employee adequately understands the materials.
• Use a documented task evaluation that requires employees to actually demonstrate how to safely perform a job, such as putting on a safety harness or locking out a piece of equipment.

“These efforts may go a long way toward ensuring that employees understand the safety training they receive and convincing OSHA that training was presented in a manner that employees were capable of understanding.

“To assist employers in meeting their training obligations, OSHA has created a web-based assistance tool intended to help employers communicate with a Spanish-speaking workforce. This tool is located on OSHA’s website.

“OSHA’s new enforcement policy is available here.