OSHA SPECIFIES CONTRACTOR SAFETY RESPONSIBILITIES ON JOB SITE

By Lucy Perry

CEG CORRESPONDENT

Who does OSHA look to first when multiple contractors are at work on a job site where safety is called into question? If your company has any control over the work process, the agency’s Multi-Employer Worksite Policy specifies that the responsibility likely falls on you. Have you done everything you could to prevent an accident?

OSHA uses the policy to assess responsibility on a construction site where there are likely many different companies at many different contract levels. The four employer categories are creating contractor, exposing contractor, fixing contractor and controlling contractor.

As the name implies, the creating contractor creates a hazard resulting in an incident or accident. The exposing contractor puts his or her employees in harm’s way whether they created the hazard or not. The fixing contractor, who may or may not be the creating contractor, is responsible for fixing the safety violation. Finally, the controlling contractor holds contracts with and has authority over the contractors on site.

“An exception may come when a creating contractor has already demobilized from the site, and the correction of a hazard has been assigned to another entity,” said John Braun, CEO of EHS consulting firm Signature Safety.

He gives as an example a steel erection company which has left the site with perimeter cables in poor condition but a concrete company has been contractually obligated to maintain the cables.

“The controlling contractor is the one that needs attention here,” said Braun. “If they are not exerting enough control over their contractors, OSHA can and most likely will cite them for their inaction.”

How much control is enough is certainly up for interpretation, he said.

“Control is one of the most hotly contested points of clarification I’ve seen in expert-witness cases.”

What is the Multi-Employer Worksite Policy? Did the general contractor or construction manager perform enough inspections? Did they provide any training or, at the very least, ensure that proper training had been conducted? Did they clearly communicate expectations? Did they even do any prequalification of their contractors?

“Questions like these will be considered when determining how responsible the controlling contractor is. You need to be asking yourself if you are responsible, what can you do to ensure your contractors’ safety is up to par,” continued Braun.

While creating, exposing and correcting employers may have clear responsibilities to prevent hazards, the standards for controlling employers are more confusing, said Stan Liang, health and safety consultant of Tetra Tech.

“But controlling employers also carry a higher responsibility for compliance, so it’s important to understand what a controlling employer’s obligations are.”

To determine whether a controlling employer is subject to citations under OSHA’s MECP, it must be determined if the actions of the employer were enough to meet its obligations. OSHA expects controlling employers to exercise “reasonable care” to prevent hazards, including inspections of the work site, noted Liang.

“How often the employer should be inspecting the workplace is determined by many factors: the nature of the work being performed, the scale of the project, what the employer knows about the potential hazards and what the employer knows about the safety practices of the other employers at the site,” he said.

“For example, if a subcontractor is known to have a history of frequent safety violations, it is expected that the controlling employer will perform more frequent worksite inspections.”

Failing to exercise reasonable care to prevent safety violations could cause the controlling employer to receive an OSHA violation, even if they did not directly cause the hazard, he stressed.

OSHA uses its Multi-Employer Worksite Policy to assess responsibility on a construction site where there are likely many different companies at many different contract levels.

see OSHA page 68

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