On yesterday’s Billboard Insider podcast Formetco Safety Director Jim Poage reviewed how to keep your workers safe. Here’s his advice on what to do when an OSHA inspector shows up.
An OSHA inspector has arrived at my company. What should I do?
Make sure they truly are OSHA inspectors. They’ll present a badge or the will have a business card that will have their office info on it. You call and verify their credentials…You want everyone to remember that they are government agents. You don’t want to be rude to them. There was a gentleman I heard about who had an OSHA inspector show up on his site that belly bumped the guy and knocked him off his feet because he wasn’t happy that he’d shut down his job site… and that was a $10,000 penalty. You don’t want to be rude or aggressive to them…The best thing to do is to stop working and shut the job site down, then see what they want. If they come into your facility you put them in a conference room…Ask them why they’re there. They need to tell you what their purpose is for stopping in…They will also identify what type of inspection they are doing. Is it an imminent danger, is it a scheduled inspection, or is it an employee complaint. From there what you want to do is comply and show them exactly what they want to see…The first thing many people want to do is to prove so bad that they are in compliance that they begin to show the inspector a ton of things they did not even ask for.…That’s not good. Everything you provide them with they can cite you for if they find something not to their liking. The next thing they’ll says is “I want to look at the work site.” They’ll walk through the area, take pictures, and may ask to perform industrial hygiene sampling. I recommend people taking the same pictures that the OSHA inspector takes and perform duplicate testing of anything they test. …After they finish all of this they may ask to talk to employees…OSHA says they have the right to interview employees and employees have the right to talk to OSHA in privet…The employer can tell their employees that the employee in the beginning is not obligated to speak to an OSHA inspector. The employee can say I am not comfortable talking to you about this or I would rather have someone in here with me, but it is their right to speak to an OSHA inspector. I do tell people that in 25 years of doing OSHA work I would never go one on one with an OSHA inspector.
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