OSHA’S TOP 10 VIOLATIONS

This year’s OSHA’s Top 10 violations emphasizes the most consequential violations, include “willful”, “serious” and “repeat” abuses.  Such detail is possible because of OSHA’s efforts to inspect higher-hazard worksites, as measured by employers’ reported injury and illness rates, enabling the agency to target more serious violations.

These Top 10 violations run from the end of September 1999 to the beginning of September 2000.  “We’re looking (especially) at those hazards that are killing people,” says Richard Fairfax, OSHA’s compliance director.  He noted that a lot of the significant cases (involving penalties of more than $100,000) come from incident investigations.

During the first nine months of OSHA’s fiscal year 2000, which ended June 30, the number of incidents cited by the agency jumped considerably from the previous year.  While total OSHA citations rose nearly 11 percent to 60,736 over the same nine-month period of fiscal 1999, those for willful, serious and repeat violations increase 12.6 percent to 41,299.

Top 10 Lists – “Raw” and “Most Serious”

Here are the figures for fiscal 2000 (through Sept. 9), for the “raw” Top 10 standards by OSHA citations (federal), and the “most serious” Top 10 standards (combined serious, willful and repeat):