OSHA injury reporting period starts next week

Many of our members have to maintain annual accident logs for the prior year. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration exempts many sorts of businesses from this reporting requirement depending on their risk class. Retail members with 10 or fewer employees are exempt, but our larger retail and all automotive members need to report.

Contact Rick Means, Washington Retail’s Director of Safety and Education, to learn whether your company is exempt, at 360-200-6454 ([email protected])

If you must report, you should have the OSHA 300 form updated with ‘recordable’ incidents for all of 2019. For a decision tree on what a recordable incident is, go here. The next step is to transfer the OSHA 2019 log (form 300) recordable totals onto the OSHA Summary sheet (300A). The OSHA summary sheet, form 300A, will need to be posted from 2/1/2020 until 04/30/2020 on the safety bulletin board for all employees to review. If you need forms, go here.

There’s an extra step this year for employers with 250 or more employees. You will need to electronically file the 300A to Federal OSHA here by March 2, 2020.

The OSHA 300 form, a copy of the 300A form, and any other supporting paperwork, such as copies of the Report of Accidents, should be kept in a binder in your office to protect privacy of the information on some of the paperwork. You need to keep five years of these forms on file (2014 and earlier can be tossed).

Rick also is available to members to help draw up safety plans and suggest topics for safety meetings.