The Safety Newsletter

Build the Program, Not the Binder

Safe & Sound Week runs Aug. 10–16. Focus on building a safety program your crew uses every day.

Every August, OSHA holds Safe & Sound Week; this year it runs Aug. 10–16. It is free and open to any workplace, and last year more than 4,600 organizations took part. The goal is simple. Spend one week building or refreshing a safety and health program, with help from OSHA and partners including the American Society of Safety Professionals, the National Safety Council, and AIHA.

Here is the part that matters most. The point of the week is not a banner in the break room or a policy someone signs and files. It is a program: a repeatable way to find and fix hazards before they cause an injury, instead of reacting after one.

OSHA's Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs focus on three key elements. One, management leadership. Somebody with real authority owns it and puts time and money behind it. Two, worker participation. The people doing the job help spot the hazards, because they see what the manual misses. Three, a system to find and fix hazards. Walk the floor, write down what you find, fix it, and confirm the fix held.

Why build a program instead of fixing problems as they come up? Because a one-off fix solves today's hazard and nothing else. A program catches next month's. As the campaign puts it, a working program lets you identify and manage hazards "before they cause injury or illness," which is very different from cleaning up after one.

If you are starting from nothing, do not try to produce a binder this week. Pick the one hazard everybody already complains about, fix it during Safe & Sound Week with your crew involved, and write down who is accountable for ensuring it stays corrected. That is enough to start. You can sign up and download free materials in a few minutes.

Safe & Sound Week ends on Aug. 16, but the program, training, and improvements should continue throughout the year.

Recent safety news, briefly.

OSHA hearings on proposed rollbacks begin Aug. 19. OSHA has scheduled virtual public hearings, starting August 19, on 25 proposed rule changes. Among them: removing a 2036 deadline to add fall protection on tall fixed ladders, dropping medical-evaluation requirements before workers wear certain respirators, and rescinding the safety color-code standard. Whether you support the changes or not, it's worth knowing what's on the table. Learn more ›

Falls are still the leading cause of death in construction. Federal data for 2024 counted 389 fatal falls to a lower level out of 1,034 construction deaths. Every one was preventable. OSHA's fall-prevention hub has free posters, factsheets, and training you can share with a crew this week. Learn more ›

Staffing up for the busy season? Check your warehouse hazards. As retail and logistics hire for the fall peak, the biggest risks do not change. Watch powered industrial trucks, struck-by incidents, and material handling. A refresher before the surge costs far less than an incident during it. Learn more ›

Workplace deaths dipped in 2024. The latest federal count shows 5,070 fatal work injuries, down about 4% from the year before, a rate of 3.3 per 100,000 workers. Transportation and material-moving jobs had the most, at 1,391. It is progress, but the total is still high. Read more ›

When You Hire Help, the Duty Comes With Them

A temporary worker died in a school crawl space. OSHA cited both the contractor and the staffing agency.

On January 7, 2026, a worker operating a mini-excavator in the crawl space beneath Converse Elementary School in Converse, Texas, was caught between the machine and a concrete beam and killed. He had been placed on the job by a staffing agency.

When OSHA finished investigating, it cited two employers, not one. The contractor running the work, D L Bandy Constructors, drew one willful and 15 serious violations, with $276,399 in proposed penalties. The violations were basic confined-space failures. A crawl space is a permit-required confined space, and there was no program to identify it, test the air, ventilate it, train the crew, or plan a rescue. The staffing agency that supplied the worker, Pacesetters Personnel Services, was cited too, with a proposed penalty of $23,170, for not making sure its temporary worker had confined-space procedures and training.

That second citation is the lesson. When you bring in temporary or seasonal help, you do not hand off the duty to keep them safe. Under OSHA's long-standing view of host and staffing responsibilities, you share it. The host controls the worksite and its hazards, and the agency has to know where it is sending people and confirm they are trained for the work. With hiring ramping up into the fall, now is the time to review those responsibilities. A worker's first days on an unfamiliar site are the most dangerous ones, and "they were only a temp" has never been a defense. Read more ›

What's ahead, worth noting now.

September · National Preparedness Month. Use the month as a reason to run the drill at work. Pull out the emergency action plan, walk the exits, and confirm everyone knows where to find the muster point. OSHA ›

Mon, Sept 7 · Labor Day. The biggest safety concern over Labor Day weekend is on the road. End-of-summer travel and fall work-zone season make roadway and struck-by incidents the risk to watch. OSHA ›

Sept 21–25 · National Farm Safety & Health Week. Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the country. If your work involves farms, ranches, or grain, it is a good week to cover equipment, grain bins, and rural roads. NECAS ›

The Records Request You Are Not Ready For

A worker can ask for their own exposure records tomorrow. The clock is fifteen working days, and some of those files have to reach back thirty years.

By Jenn Bliven, Vice President and Co-Founder, weeklysafety.com

Most employers do not think about OSHA's rule on medical and exposure records until someone asks. Then it is urgent, and the answer is a scramble through old files and a former safety manager's inbox.

The rule is 1910.1020. When an employee, a former employee, or their designated representative asks for records, you have to provide access in a reasonable time and manner. If you cannot manage that within fifteen working days, you have to tell them why inside those fifteen days and give the earliest date you can. The first copy is free.

Retention is where companies get caught, and the details matter more than the number. Exposure records generally have to be kept for thirty years. Safety data sheets are the exception most people miss. You do not have to keep every sheet, as long as you keep a record of the chemical, where it was used, and when, for the full thirty years.

Medical records run longer, for the duration of employment plus thirty years. Two exceptions matter. Minor first aid records are exempt only when a non-physician made them on-site and you keep them separately from your medical program. For anyone who worked less than a year, hand over their records when they leave and your retention duty ends.

Who is allowed to ask is the part employers most often get wrong. Employees can get their own, with one narrow exception. If your physician believes releasing a specific terminal diagnosis or psychiatric condition directly could harm the employee, it goes to a representative they name in writing instead. A recognized or certified collective bargaining agent is automatically a designated representative for exposure records, and can ask without individual consent by stating in writing the records sought and the occupational health need. Anyone else acts as a representative only through the employee's written authorization, and medical records always require specific written consent.

Some records sit outside the rule entirely, each with conditions. Physical specimens routinely discarded in normal practice. Health insurance claims, but only when kept separately from your medical program and not accessible by employee name or another direct identifier. Records created solely in preparation for litigation and privileged from discovery. Voluntary employee assistance program records, when kept separately.

You also carry an obligation nobody asks about. On hire, and at least once a year after, you have to tell employees these records exist, where they are, who maintains them, and that they can see them.

If you close the business, the records go to the successor employer. If there is no successor, you have to tell current employees about their access rights at least three months before you shut the doors.

Here is where to start. Find out where your exposure monitoring and medical surveillance records live, and who would produce them if a request landed on a Friday afternoon. Confirm the retention clock matches the rule, not your general records policy. Write down who is responsible. If a third party does your monitoring, keep your own copy.

A records request is not an accusation. It is usually a worker with a new symptom, or a family trying to understand an illness years later. If you can produce the records quickly and in full, your program was doing its job. Learn more ›

A version of this first appeared on weeklysafety.com.

The Column is open to anyone with a stake in workplace safety — safety staff, but also owners, supervisors, HR, trainers, suppliers, and the people doing the work. Pitch an idea or send a finished article. What runs carries your byline, your credentials, and a link back to you. We read everything and reply either way. Write for us ›

"Prepare and prevent, don't repair and repent."

A reminder as the month begins. A safety program only helps when someone runs it. Build it now, before the busy season starts. See you next edition.

— The Safety Newsletter