Disagreements Over Safety Gear Rules

October 2, 2023

OSHA wants to re-define how safety gear properly fits

  • Federal job safety regulators are facing backlash over how to define the term “properly fit” as they review new regulations on the adequacy of construction worker safety gear.
  • OSHA proposed to change its construction rule to add a requirement that personal protective equipment that employers must provide for free—such as gloves, high-visibility vests, goggles, fall protection harnesses, and helmets—“properly fit” the worker.
  • OSHA said it has long enforced a properly fit requirement for protective gear issued to factory, medical, and warehouse workers.
  • Construction companies are worried the new standards will be subjective.
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Companies want to utilize AI for safety

  • More companies want to use AI to provide better workplace safety, according to a report from the National Safety Council, a nonprofit safety advocacy organization in Itasca, Ill.
  • Workplace fatality rates rose in 2021 to the highest annual rate since 2016.
  • A report by the National Safety Council evaluated recent findings from academic and industry journals and identified three new technologies having a strong impact on preventing workplace illness, injury, and death.
  • Computer vision technology monitors video footage and images in the workplace, detecting a wide variety of objects to identify risks.
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Albuquerque fighting OSHA fines

  • The City of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is contesting citations from the state over its handling of asbestos at the Gateway Center.
  • An investigation in the spring revealed safety problems at the old Lovelace Hospital on Gibson, which the city is renovating for the new Gateway Center for Homeless Services.
  • The state’s OSHA bureau fined the city and its contractor three-quarters of a million dollars, saying they willfully ignored safety rules when workers came across asbestos.
  • The city is challenging those citations, which means there will be a review process because of “some of the findings and factual representations and the method in which the fines were calculated.”
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