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SB 826 passes, Trump rollback on injury tracking defeated

Posted over 5 years ago by Lori Wolfe

SB-826 Corporations: boards of directors.(2017-2018)

ENROLLED  SEPTEMBER 05, 2018
PASSED  IN  SENATE  AUGUST 30, 2018
PASSED  IN  ASSEMBLY  AUGUST 29, 2018
AMENDED  IN  ASSEMBLY  AUGUST 20, 2018
AMENDED  IN  SENATE  MAY 25, 2018
AMENDED  IN  SENATE  APRIL 03, 2018

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB826

With this law, every board of directors in California must have a woman on the board starting in 2019.

The proposed rollback on the 2016 tracking rules have been defeated; at this time, the 2016 rules will be maintained. Read below to learn what the changes would have meant to I and I reporting. Thanks to Soo-Jeung Lee for bringing this to our attention.

FAQ’s on OSHA 2016 Improve Injury and Illness Tracking Rule
And the 2018 Trump Administration Proposed Rollback

Why does the ‘injury tracking’ rule matter to OSHA, workers and
others?
The data from the 300 Log and 301 Incident Reports contain essential details for OSHA
inspectors, workers, employers and researchers to understand the causes of worker
injuries and the ways to prevent them. These would be an unprecedented source of
research information in the nearly 50 years since the passage of the OSHAct.
For decades, OSHA’s inspectors, workers and others have been kept in the dark about the
actual patterns of severe injuries and illnesses, even though that information has been
available in employers’ offices. Easy access to these data would greatly enhance studies
and other evaluations of worker injuries and illnesses at individual worksites and across
entire regions and industries – far more useful than the summary data (Form 300A)
OSHA now collects for targeting inspections at high-rate worksites.

What records of worker injuries/illnesses do employers maintain now?
For decades, OSHA has required almost all employers to keep standardized records
covering millions of workplace injuries and illnesses each year, including:
OSHA Form 300A: Summary data of total number of injuries, the number of disabling
injuries/illnesses and the number of “full-time equivalent” employees.
OSHA Form 300 Log: Detailed list of injuries/illnesses describing briefly who, where,
when, what and how these occurred, and
OSHA form 301: Incident report for each case on the OSHA 300 Log, which describes
in detail how an injury/illness occurred and related information.

Under the 2016 rule, who must submit which information to OSHA
electronically?
Establishments with 250 or more employees that are subject to OSHA's recordkeeping
regulation must electronically submit to OSHA some of the information from the Log of
Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses (OSHA Form 300), the Summary of Work-Related
Injuries and Illnesses (OSHA Form 300A), and the Injury and Illness Incident Report
(OSHA Form 301).

2

Establishments with 20-249 employees in certain high-risk industries must
electronically submit to OSHA information from the Summary of Work-Related Injuries
and Illnesses (OSHA Form 300A).
Establishments with fewer than 20 employees at all times during the year do not have
to routinely submit information electronically to OSHA.

Does the 2016 rule require employers to start keeping new records or
change how they keep the records?
No. The new requirement does not add to or change an employer's obligation to
complete, retain, and certify injury and illness records. It only requires certain employers
to electronically submit some of the information from these records to OSHA.

What injury records did OSHA actually ‘collect’ from employers before
the 2016 injury tracking rule?
Before to the 2016 regulation, OSHA collected very little of the information from
employers about the millions of worker injuries and illnesses that employers maintain at
the workplace. OSHA inspectors usually only saw those records during one of the few
on-site inspections that OSHA does every year.
The only records that OSHA collected were the employer’s annual summary – a
statistical ‘body count’ with no details about the individual cases. OSHA collected these
(since 1996) from only about 20% of employers who are now reporting these records
under the 2016 rule, and released them publicly since 2004. OSHA routinely used it for
ranking the places with the highest injury/illness rates to target inspections.
In contrast, OSHA’s sister agency the Mine Safety and Health Administration has for
decades been collecting electronically detailed employer records of almost every miner
injury or illness, under its ‘Mine Data Retrieval System.’

3

In the 2016 final rule and 2018 proposed rule, what did OSHA say about
why it was collecting the data and how they would be used and what is it
saying now?
In 2016, OSHA wrote that the electronic submission of establishment-specific injury and
illness data will enable OSHA to use its enforcement and “compliance assistance”
resources more efficiently. Analysis of the data will improve OSHA's ability to identify,
target, and remove safety and health hazards, thereby preventing workplace injuries,
illnesses, and deaths.
In 2018, OSHA claims that it is amending its recordkeeping regulations to supposedly
protect sensitive worker information in the OSHA 300 and 301 forms from potential
disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to reduce the costs to OSHA of
collecting and using the information as well as the ‘reporting burden’ on employers
”given the uncertain benefits of collecting the information.”

Is worker privacy and personally identifiable information a real issue?
Despite the Trump Administration’s stated concern about worker privacy, OSHA’s 2016
final rule already addresses the issue of individual privacy protection. First, the final rule
does not require employers to report personally identifiable information (PII), and the
reporting forms exclude these information fields. The preamble to the standard also
clearly states that employers are not to report Personally Identifiable Information’ (PII) to
OSHA. But to counter accidental reporting, OSHA “will follow accepted procedures and
protocols to prevent the release of such information,” same as “other government
agencies,” such as MSHA, which “are able to handle vary large amounts of PII.”

What has OSHA collected since the 2016 final rule?
Since issuing the new Injury Tracking Rule in 2016, OSHA has been working, with
delays, to collect the Annual Summary Form 300A from over 460,000 employers, and is
currently using that to target inspections to the workplaces with the highest rates of
reported injuries.
OSHA was supposed to collect the detailed information on these injuries from the Log
300 and 301 forms from the 37,000 large worksites (with 250 or more employees),
starting July 1, 2018, covering an estimated 775,000 individual cases of worker
injury/illness. But OSHA has refused to start that data collection, and has proposed to
repeal that reporting requirement.

4

Does OSHA routinely make injury and illness records available to the
public?
Since 2004, following multiple FOIA requests, OSHA has been publicly releasing the
Summary data (300As) it was receiving from the small number of employers from whom
it requested these records.
When OSHA issued the Injury Tracking rule in 2016, it promised to release all of the
information to the public – while at the same time assuring that worker’s personal
identifiers were excluded from the entire database. But the Trump Administration has
refused to release the newly-collected summaries, and is facing legal challenges under the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for that refusal.

How can employers use detailed injury data required by the final rule to
improve their own health and safety record?
 
Employers can use this information to benchmark their own safety performance.
Currently, employers have no easy way to compare their safety and health performance
with other firms in their industry. Using data collected under the final rule, employers
would be able to compare injury rates, and types and causes of injuries at their
establishments with those at similar establishments, and set enhanced workplace safety
goals.
 
What about the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Workers
Compensation agencies and other sources of Information about workers’
injuries and illnesses?
 
No other standardized source of information on worker injuries offers the detailed data,
ready access and worksite identification. The data collected by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) – based on only a sample of these same employers – are confidential, and
cannot be used for targeting inspections, identifying specific “worst-case” employers, or
showing emerging trends in workplace hazards at individual workplaces. Workers’
compensation data for individual firms collected by insurers and government agencies are
considered confidential and not readily available to workers, researchers, other employers
and public health agencies.