ABC Protests OSHA’s Final Rule to Improve Workplace Injury and Illness Tracking

ABC stated its objection to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Better Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses final rule, which will erase the ABC-supported aspects of the 2019 final rule promulgated under the Trump administration and reinstate the 2016 Obama-era rule.

“Unfortunately, the Biden administration is moving forward with a final rule that does nothing to achieve OSHA’s stated goal of reducing injuries and illnesses,” said The Association of Builders and Contractors (ABC) Vice President of Regulatory, Labor, and State Affairs Ben Brubeck.

“Instead, the final rule will force employers to disclose sensitive information to the public that can easily be manipulated, mischaracterized and misused for reasons wholly unrelated to safety, as well as subject employers to illegitimate attacks and employees to violations of their privacy.

“For open shop construction contractors, these are not hypothetical concerns,” Brubeck continued.

“Over the years, high-quality, safety-conscious contractors have been targeted by unions and union-front organizations making false or distorted claims of ‘unsafe’ contracting based on isolated incidents taken out of context. The records at issue in the final rule are not reliable measures of a company’s safety record or of its efforts to promote a safe work environment, as they provide no context about the injuries or illnesses reported.”

“Smaller companies will also be negatively impacted by expanding the mandate to establishments with 100 or more employees,” said Brubeck.

“The recorded information can easily be backtracked to identify specific injuries and illnesses, and thereby the medical information of individuals in the workplace, violating their privacy.”

The final rule requires establishments with 100 or more employees in certain designated industries to report information from their OSHA Forms 300 and 301 to OSHA once a year electronically.

Some industries will continue to require establishments with 20 to 249 employees to electronically submit information from their OSHA Form 300A annual summary to OSHA once a year.

All facilities with 250 or more employees that are obliged to keep injury and illness records under OSHA’s injury and illness regulation will also be required to electronically submit information from their Form 300A to OSHA once a year.

OSHA plans to make a large portion of the data it collects publicly available online. The final rule goes into effect on January 1, 2024.

These OSHA forms contain sensitive and confidential medical information about individual employees, which has generally been kept private by the government.

This contains the workers’ addresses, birth dates, and specific information about their ailments.

In June 2022, ABC sent comments to the DOL explaining their concerns.