Good morning. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is How to Survive an OSHA Inspection. This webinar is in partnership with Optimum Safety Management. I'm Royce Covington, Manager of Member Services at PCI, and I'll be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to our presenter today, I have a few introductory items to note. All attendee lines are muted. The GoToWebinar toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, please type it into the questions pane, where I'll be keeping track of them to read to the presenter during the Q&A period. Also, a pop-up survey will appear after the webinar ends. Earlier today, we sent an email to all registered attendees with presentation handouts. The handouts for this webinar can also be found in the handouts section of your webinar pane. If you cannot download the handout, please email PCI Marketing at marketing at pci.org, as shown on your screen. PCI is a registered provider of AIA CES, but today's presentation does not contain content that is endorsed by AIA. Today's presentation is also non-CEU. Today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to the PCI eLearning Center. Our presenter today is Steve Yates, founder and CEO of Optimum Safety Management. Steve has a mechanical engineering background with vast experience in both manufacturing operations and construction technology. He is recognized for the development and implementation of effective safety management systems within many local, regional, and national firms. He is also a former OSHA Outreach Trainer. I'll now turn the controls over so that we can begin our presentation. Steve Yates. Bryce, thanks so much for helping us to get things started here on such a great footing today, and I appreciate the introduction. Here at Optimum, we greatly value our partnership with PCI and the members, and we're excited about the opportunity to bring yet another valuable topic to the membership. Whether this is your first or your 10th OSHA inspection, we all know that if we've been through one before, it can be a daunting experience, and there are some things that we can do up front ahead of the inspection, as well as during the inspection, and then post-inspection that can really help the inspection to go a lot better than what we've seen in some of the industry when people don't manage them well. So, we understand that if you manage the inspection well, you'll go through the inspection without many of your resources being expended and minimal repercussions to both your financial well-being, as well as the workplace and your reputation, but managing it poorly can really result in the opposite of that, and we've seen, unfortunately, many examples. Here at Optimum, we handle, I believe it's the single largest inspection since the BP oil refinery citations that were issued, about a $2 million set of fines that were handed out to a manufacturer related to a very negative experience they had with OSHA, and as we came in after the fact to try and help them manage the aftermath, what we uncovered is if they had attended a webinar like this ahead of time, their experience would have been vastly different, and they could have saved themselves a lot of litigation costs. The downstream good news is we've been able to help them eliminate a lot of the citations, about 65% of them have been vacated because of overreach from the agency, and a lot of the penalties vacated, still going after the rest of them, but their legal costs have been dramatic. So, again, for those that are on the line, I commend you for being here. You're going to learn a lot and hopefully be able to withstand an inspection a lot better than without this information. So, we want to talk about why you would potentially even be inspected by OSHA. There are four typical reasons, and we're going to start here with programmed inspections. These are inspections that are based upon either objective or neutral selection criteria. You see some of that criteria here, and it's very, very relevant nowadays in our industry because OSHA issued a national emphasis program on amputation hazards back in 2015. National emphasis programs are issued by the main government offices of OSHA at the national level. They are typically to drive reductions of injury due to particular causes, and within the precast industry, we're subjected to this national emphasis program on amputation hazards, which you might refer to or have heard referred to in the past as an NEP, national emphasis program on slitters, saws, and shears, is really an amputation hazard. It was revamped and reemphasized in 2019 and reissued again or extended, and it is very relevant nowadays. And pretty much if OSHA knows that you have slitters, saws, shears, anything within your facility that could amputate an employee, they can come in and inspect you. Now, also, there are local emphasis programs or special emphasis programs on things like silica. Silica is a special emphasis program for OSHA, and we know that that's highly relevant in our industry. Just because we have potential for silica exposure within our workplace, OSHA can actually walk through the door and begin an inspection. High injury rates are another thing to put us on, so we have to be very careful with things like our OSHA 300A submissions every year to make sure that we're not overreporting. We're aware of employers actually within the precast industry who have overreported their injuries and accidentally placed themselves on a emphasis program inspection for an injury overreporting. So, be careful that the people that are doing your incident reporting understand the recordkeeping standard. Now, program-related inspections are inspections that will occur when a compliance officer observes additional conditions that warrant further inspection. So, they might come in for a programmed inspection on silica, but while they're there, they might observe forklift issues, and then you'll get caught in the special emphasis program on forklifts. Or they might observe some sort of a lockout-tagout violation, and then you're going to get called into a physical hazard inspection for lockout-tagout violations. So, very, very concerning to make sure you manage the scope of your inspections. Now, unprogrammed inspections are ones that occur in response to alleged hazardous workplace conditions due to maybe an employee complaint or some sort of an injury that would cause the fire department to report. A lot of our EMS groups have been spoken to by the local OSHA offices and given triggers of where OSHA wants them to give them a call. So, if you have an employee taken away in an ambulance due to a fall or an amputation or something like that, OSHA may get a call from that local fire department. Or if the fire department comes in and they just feel that there's a concern about worker safety at that facility, and all of a sudden there's a call made to OSHA. Now, unprogrammed related are similar to the program related. They're expansion of scope typically while a compliance officer is on your grounds, and they begin to see other factors where they will open up a deeper inspection. Oftentimes, we'll see it go the opposite of what I just described a minute ago, where they'll be in for a programmed inspection on a physical hazard, maybe a forklift inspection. They will smell something in the facility or notice some sort of a occupational health hazard, and they will open up then an industrial hygiene inspection. So, we see often when we look at a company's record for OSHA inspections that they will have physical hazard inspections going, and then in parallel, an industrial hygiene inspection has been opened up where a second set of inspectors come into the facility and are then doing air sampling and some other types of sampling of exposure. Okay, so now we know why OSHA can come into our facility. The question then becomes when they're in, what do we do? How do we handle this? So, there's a white paper that you're being offered that we'll talk about here towards the end of the webinar. The webinar follows the white paper pretty well where we're giving some deeper discussion and so on about that white paper, but the white paper has these types of graphs or charts or flows in it that can help you really navigate an inspection and teach your staff and the management in particular how to respond to and handle a governmental regulatory inspection. A lot of your EPA inspections and so on will follow this same type of a flow. There's some good best practices here that you can implement in those types as well. So, all inspections are going to have these different aspects, some all of them and some will skip over a couple of these, but this is a great flow for you to walk through. So, things like opening conference, walk around inspection, the interview process of employees, there'll be a document request and review that'll come from the agency. Depending on the scope of the inspection, there may warrant some industrial hygiene sampling. There'll always be follow-up activities of some level and then a closing conference issuance of citations and then the response and citation abatement. Now, we're going to walk through each and every one of these sections with you in more detail. We'll give you a context within which to understand them and then also some best practices to follow as a result of the different section of the inspection you're walking through. So, first thing is we're going to talk about the opening conference. So, this is not necessarily in a conference room. There are not people wearing suits and ties here. This is typically a very informal process, especially when it's on a job site. So, for those of you that are erector members, not necessarily plant producers, this can occur at a job trailer. It can occur at the job gate on an erection site. OSHA basically is informing you why they're there. They're telling you what the purpose and the scope of the inspection is and then you need to make sure that you understand that scope. So, whoever's handling that introduction of the OSHA inspector to the work site and to your employer needs to be making some notes and jotting things down and making sure that they really understand this. So, is the inspection a result of an employee injury? Is it a result of an employee complaint? You can request a copy of the complaint. Now, it will be redacted and very generic. It will not have or never have the name of the complainant on that, but it will tell you what the complaint was. They will tell you if it's a scheduled inspection. So, the compliance safety and health officer, who you need to know is a regular officer of the law, just like you have a police officer, they have a badge or an ID. They do not carry a gun. That's about the only difference. So, we want to be respectful of them. They are typically a federal compliance officer in about half of the states in the union. Here in Illinois and many other states, the state has adopted the federal standards and allows the federal government to enforce them. In states like Indiana, Indiana has adopted the federal regulations verbatim. However, they've chosen to run their own state OSHA program. States like Michigan and California have adopted the minimum OSHA standards from the federal government and have gone above and beyond that and actually constituted their own set of standards, and they have their own state inspectors. They run the program to the minimum of the federal requirement and then go above and beyond. So, you need to know, based on what states you're operating in, what to expect as it relates to the types of inspectors and what the standards might be. But your inspector may ask for a copy of your injury and illness report logs. That's your OSHA 300 or 300A, and you do have to comply with that requirement. You have four hours to submit those records, and you need to verify before you're submitting them that they're accurate. So, we always recommend to our clients that they submit those to us for a third-party review right before submitting to OSHA. Oftentimes, we find check boxes not filled in correctly and things that would then potentially trigger a record-keeping violation, and that's just bad business. There's no need to do that, have them reviewed. When it comes to best practices for opening conferences, we always want to know that to set the stage for a good inspection, we begin right here at the opening conference. We need to have an OSHA response team, and we're going to talk about that right at the end of the inspection here, how to set that up for success ahead of time. But you want to notify that response team immediately as soon as the inspector arrives. For those of you that might have supervisors in field crews for erecting crews, we want to make sure they know do not entertain an OSHA inspection on your job site without your management team knowing it. It's a bad place to be. We have conversations with form and a month later when the inspection results in citations that say, what happened? That inspector showed up, they said everything was great, no need to worry, and then here a month later we got citations. Don't be surprised. OSHA's stated purpose is for enforcement of the standards. They don't come out and tell you everything's going great and just give you a couple suggestions. Those will result in citations. Always be polite and respectful. Building good faith now will serve you well later. I could tell you story after story after story of inspections we've been involved in where the person that represented the employer really upset the inspector and it did not go well for them later. We always want to ask to see the inspector's credentials. We want to make sure we understand who they are, that they're a bona fide compliance safety and health officer, and which area office they're coming out of. So we want to document that. Document, document, document is the name of the game during an inspection. Make sure you write all that down. You will need that information later. You want to get good contact information as well, email and phone addresses of how to reach that person. Walk-around inspections are typically the place that most inspections fall apart. So we want to make sure that a company representative who's trained on this process is with the inspector 100% of the time. They never walk away and leave the inspector on their own. So that person is going to guide the inspection, limiting it only to the items that are involved in the scope of the inspection. Now if the inspector requests to see an unrelated area, ask them politely to confirm again the scope of the inspection, keep them held to those areas only. You are at this point in a voluntary situation where you're allowing a federal or state inspector onto your property and one of our amendments we know, constitutional amendments, gives us the right to not have unreasonable search and seizure. So we want to exercise that right and say we're going to allow you into the facility but we need to control the inspection. At the point where you don't abide by that, we're going to ask you to leave. That could trigger a warrant for the inspection but that also then triggers all of your rights. You could have your legal counsel there and so on, including a safety consultant and other people that really understand how to do these. So I've already spoken about this. Don't leave the inspector alone but make sure that you're paying close attention and taking notes of things they're taking note of and also that you take photos. So if they take a photograph, you take a photograph. Document what they're seeing so we can put the inspection back together later in a boardroom to understand what the citations might be. We're going to guide the inspector so escort them only to the area that they need to observe. Don't allow open access to the entire facility. The employer I told you about that had two million dollars in fines, this is their biggest issue that they had. Basically allowed the inspector unfettered access to a one million square foot facility and because of that that resulted in a lot of citations. Choose the route carefully. So if they want to come in and observe a saw that was involved in an incident, an employee injured or an employee complaint and it's at the back of the facility, take them around the facility to a back door and walk them right into that area. Don't walk them through your whole facility. Make sure that you have a pre-walk through looking for hazards in the route that you're going to take them through so you don't expose yourself to unnecessary citation. This is a great way to involve your OSHA response team in preparation. Now, interviews are another area where things tend to fall apart. We need to make sure that employees are advised of their rights ahead of time. And typical questions that will be posed to the employees are shown on the screen here. These will be in your handout. So I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here, but they will ask, have you been asked or told to do something you knew was unsafe or were not trained to do? So you need to hear that for those of you that might be in a situation where that's happening in your workplace. The best way to stem a problem with an employee answering that question negatively is to build a good safety culture upfront. We can execute on that through the PCI safety culture improvement process. If you're not aware of that process at all, that might be a good call to the helpline to learn more about that. And we can help you build a culture where these inspections either don't happen or go very well if they do. Answer questions factually. We don't wanna be judgmental in our responses on questions. Things like, yeah, this company doesn't care about safety. That's a judgment and that's highly inaccurate typically in most workplaces. But again, we wanna stick to the facts. We don't wanna be volunteering information. So if you're a manager or supervisor, you need to be coached on this process. Some of you, I'll just be right up front, you talk way too much. You just do. We wanna be helpful. We think that the more helpful we are with a federal compliance officer, the better the inspection's gonna go. That is wrong. We don't wanna give a lot of additional information. It's just the facts. Those of you that remember the old Dragnet series, Sergeant Joe Friday, just the facts, ma'am. I just need the facts. We wanna hear that ringing in our ears. That's all the information we need. Ask for clarification. So a lot of the inspectors tend to use compliance-based language that can be unfamiliar. They can also use very open-ended and leading questions. So don't follow that rabbit trail. Ask them if you're unclear. And then for management, we need to know that we need to give the inspector and the interviewee space when it's a frontline employee who's being asked the question. However, if it's a management employee, the management can sit in the interviews and should be in those interviews. We don't have the right to participate in hourly employee interviews, but we do and should participate in others. So make sure that you're protecting your rights there and getting good documentation of what OSHA is asking. Document requests are another area where this can go really awry. So we wanna be careful. So they commonly request OSHA 300 logs, lists of employees, lists of employees that were on duty. They will ask things like the employee's home address and contact information. You do not need to provide that. That is a privacy concern. We want the employees to answer questions, but we want them to do it when they're being paid for that and not bothered at home. So you can push back on those requests and you should do that with legal counsel or the advice of somebody like a third-party consultant that does this all the time. Other documents are things like training, documentation of incident investigations and disciplinary actions. Now, we wanna share with you why OSHA is asking those questions. They wanna expose the employer wide open and they wanna know if the employer has a defense ahead of time so they don't issue a citation that can be defended by the employer. So what I'm talking about is the unavoidable, isolated employee misconduct defense. I know that's a mouthful, but it's your only affirmative defense in an OSHA citation. So wouldn't you wanna know about that and prepare your employer for it? The answer is obviously yes. So how do we perfect this defense? Well, number one item, you have to have a safety and health program that's related to the hazard or citation. It has to be adequate. So in the case of an OSHA inspection on silica, you need to have a chapter on silica. It needs to be thorough. It needs to be well implemented, which means then you need to have trained your employees on that specific hazard. Now, if OSHA comes in to do a complaint inspection on silica and your employees are not wearing respirators when they're required to, then you won't have this item covered. So you need to have corrected the issues prior to OSHA seeing it. So if you're correcting it the day before the inspection because you knew they were coming and all of a sudden now you're correcting it after the fact, this leg of the defense goes away. So the other thing is that you need to have enforced the rules through good disciplinary action and inspection process. Now, here's the thing, folks. If you have all four legs of that stool, the defense stands up and we can help you or your attorney can help you be defended in the case of a citation, and we can save you a lot of money and a lot of trouble down the road for repeats. But if you don't have this defense perfected, you now have a problem. You know that if you have a four-legged stool and you break a leg off, or worse yet, two or three legs off, that stool is not standing. It's like a bad circus act. It's going to fall over. So best practices when it comes to document request and review, always ask for a formal document request. The inspector will tell you throughout the inspection, I'm going to need these documents. You should be taking notes, but at the end of it, you're going to ask them to put that request in writing. That gives you some time and it gives you the ability to go and talk to people about whether or not they're required. Don't be pulling items out in the middle of the inspection. OSHA will always ask you for copies or take your originals. Don't allow that. Make a list of those documents. We've talked about that. Submit that to your safety consultant or your attorney for approval before providing those documents. You want to put that party in between you and OSHA to make sure that they can help you understand your rights and the need for those documents. Industrial hygiene sampling, often the inspector will say we're going to need to do some sampling, especially if it's for silica, welding metal fume, hexavalent chromium, something like that. If you have prior sampling, that's always a benefit that can negate the need for OSHA to do sampling. And it puts you in a position where you're not going to be cited. If you don't have sampling ahead of time, almost always you're going to get cited because you should have done it ahead of time. So we want to be aware of that. Now, why industrial hygiene sampling? Well, it could be because of a complaint or engineering controls that are insufficient. So follow-up activities could result, and that would be things like additional interviews needing to be conducted, additional document requests. They can occur within the same day, several days, several weeks later. And all of that can be managed well if you have good counsel and thought through processes ahead of time. You're hearing me talk about that a lot. That might be important, right? Pre-planning is always important for compliance inspections. And the time to do it is not when the inspector's at the door. We need to have a conversation ahead of time to set this up properly. So conduct your IH testing ahead of time. If OSHA is going to come out, request advance notice, which you can do, and you can demand that you do it side-by-side sampling where you have your own industrial hygienist. Now, you're going to hear Brian Dudgeon come on the line here in a little bit to help you with the Q&A. Brian shared a story just yesterday with me about an inspection he had where their side-by-side sampling at an explosives plant yielded vastly different results, much lower results than the OSHA sample. And they were able then to combat the OSHA sampling and show that it was inappropriately taken and wrong, and it saved them a citation. But again, always being polite and respectful with a compliance officer, just like you would with a police officer if you're pulled over. And pushing back gently and professionally on scope expansion. So let's talk about the closing conference now. So what happens during a closing? Again, this doesn't have to be very formal. It is typically the last stage of the formal progress or process. Could be the same day if it's a very minor or clear issue. It could be more likely several days, weeks after. It can actually happen within 180 days of the opening. That's six months. So OSHA has, from the start of the process, six months to issue citations and close its inspection. So it can be a very extended period of time. If OSHA does an inspection, maybe a little bit of follow-up, a document request, and you don't hear back from them for four months, don't get the idea that you're out of the woods. We have people quite often think that they are. And on day 179, the registered mail packet comes along with a press release out in the media telling them what a bad actor you are and how OSHA is taking you to task because of a worker safety issue. Don't believe it? Give us a call. We'll share several examples with you. So it's really a serious issue and we want to take great notes. We want to immediately store those notes in a safe place. You're going to need them later. You can ask if citations should be expected. Depending on the inspector, you might get word that, yeah, I'm probably going to recommend some citations. Oftentimes they'll tell you it's not up to me. It's my area director that will make that determination. Don't let that lull you to sleep. They have a lot to do with it. So again, really, really important that we're paying good attention to them and that we're treating them respectfully. When it comes to the issuance of citations, once you receive the citations in the mail, sometimes by email, but it's typically a formal response in mail with a registered mail receipt somebody has to sign for. You have 15 days to respond before they're entered as a final judgment. That's 15 business days. So excluding weekends and holidays, federally recognized holidays. Simply paying the citations is not the only option and oftentimes not the best option. So your response options are to accept the citations and penalties, not your recommended option. I'll tell you right up front. You can request an informal conference with the area director. That's where you go in and negotiate the citations and or penalties, typically both. The other option is to file a formal notice of intent to contest the citations. That is oftentimes a good option. It's not the best. Usually we recommend that informal. There are also posting and abatement requirements that you have to meet as a result of the citations that are issued. And you should get some advice on that as soon as you receive those. Now, these two stages are incredibly important for the future of your company. I can't overstate that enough. Incredibly important. The reason is that if they're managed well, it can be a positive experience and your penalties can also often drop to a fraction of the initial amount. And quite often we can negotiate the citation value or the citation classification down. Every inspection and set of citations is different. There's no one perfect way to navigate this, right? So the best is always, and some of you might be saying, hey, this sounds like an advertisement. I'm gonna give a shameless plug here. Whether it's us or someone else, you must, must is a strong word. You should very strongly consider involving legal counsel and a third party consultant. If not for your own good, please for the good of the industry. Every citation that you take is a precedent that is set across the industry for a particular issue. We did a lot of work on it, a lot of conversations around this topic of walking working surface and fall protection on trailers and panel stacks. Every citation you take or every citation that you don't prepare for adequately upfront and you end up taking a citation for is a problem for your competitors or your friendly competitors or fellow members in the industry across the country. So please don't do this without getting some advice. You have access to a free safety helpline through our partnership with PCI. Please call us. We'll give you free advice on this and let you know how to handle it or where you should get advice and don't just take the citation. So with a strategic approach, you can turn this into a much more manageable process and amount and impact. And then always make sure that all of your abatements are documented and photographed because failure to abate can be a daily penalty of up to $14,000. So how do you go about selecting and setting up an emergency OSHA response team? You should have an emergency response team for your emergency action plan in the event of a fire, in the event of an incident or an injury within your facility. That should include your OSHA response. If you're not doing good pre-planning for an EAP or emergency action plan, you are missing it. And this slide alone could really be something that can save your bacon. And I mean that in the way of a lot of money and a lot of impact to your organization in the future. Please understand the energy is not like shaming energy. It's sense of urgency energy because we unfortunately get called in to defend an employer after the fact. And if you had done some of these things up front, you may have not even needed to call us. A free call up front could avoid a lot of this trouble. So internal responders on your OSHA response team, who is the location or site manager and your safety director? Who's your C-suite or president or executive response team member that's gonna need to be contacted to handle things like your legal counsel, maybe your insurance program, could be your CFO or a finance director. Who's your legal counsel? Oftentimes organizations will have a in-house counsel or outside counsel that they wanna contact right away. And we're working with that entity to manage the process. Having a safety consultant involved is always a good idea. Together they form your OSHA response team. And if you're a fan of the Disney movie, The Incredibles, you know that capes are not a good idea on your superheroes. That's just a little funny thought. But hopefully people on this call have a little bit of a sense of humor. We can have a sense of humor when it's ahead of time after the fact is really tough. But you wanna select people who have a proven track record of mitigating these types of citations. Oftentimes that is not your insurance brokerage, safety and risk people. We have had customers that have thought that that was the case, and they have reached out to them and found out that they don't provide this type of response. You need to make sure that you're selecting resources that you've talked to and vetted that have a track record of being able to handle a response like this. So wrapping it up. So remember that if viewed positively, an OSHA inspection can be a catalyst for great change. Let's do it proactively ahead of time, right? Let's not have a situation like how I got involved in safety and health was the workplace I was working at, got inspected by OSHA and we were not prepared. However, the president and ownership basically said that we're gonna use this inspection as a catalyst for change and we're gonna be better as a result. So remember key takeaways now. Know the inspection scope and keep it limited. Always be polite and respectful. And the most important is select that response team in advance and notify, activate that response team immediately when the inspector arrives. That means that your receptionist at the front desk of your organization knows who the response team is and they know the main points of contact internally at your attorney and at your consulting firm so they can contact them right away and we can help them to manage that inspection. Now equip that team. So we have a guide here that you can download at this Bitly link. So a Bitly link is just a short link. So right in your address bar, you can type in there bit.ly forward slash nine OSHA tips. OSHA is all caps. All the rest of the letters are not. So bit.ly forward slash nine OSHA tips. When you type that link in, it'll take you right to the download version where you can download this right away off of our website. And you'll have a great guide that you can give to your response team. Start preparing that team today, okay? For those of you that are on the line that are not aware of this, I wanna make you aware of a tool that's available through our partnership with PCI. For those that are aware, if you're not taking advantage of this, you're missing it. So on the members only section of the PCI website, you'll log in, you'll get this page that's shown, you'll head to the safety resources page. As of our partnership late last year, PCI has a greatly expanded set of resources to the members free of charge, all included in your membership. You should be taking advantage of these. You can fill out this form and gain access to the portal on the Optimum Learning Management System where you have access then to several hundred toolbox talk topics in English and Spanish that can be downloaded in a PDF format. We also have access to online LMS for an additional charge. Those are paid services, but you have access to at least the downloadable PDFs. There are many more tools available on that site. If you're not availing yourself of those free resources, you really need to go there and avail yourself of them. They are a tremendous resource. So at this point, Brian, I'm going to go ahead and turn us loose a few minutes early actually for our Q&A section for you and I to have a dialogue and get the folks on the call answers. I'll just remind everybody, if you have not submitted a question, you can still do that through the questions and answers section of your GoToWebinar portal. You'll see a box like this. Just type that question right in and submit it and it'll send it right over to Brian where he can get it into the queue. Brian, I'll let you take it from here. Thanks, Steve. We've got a couple of questions that have come in during the webinar. I'll read the first one to you. I agree with the ocean specter and the citations we received. Now, I'm not sure why you would agree, but maybe you feel like it was a fair inspection and you think the citations were oriented. In that case, what is the purpose of asking for an informal conference? That's a great question. Great question. So, you know, Brian, we have limited time on these webinars so we always have to scale back the information within them. One of the things that we didn't cover is the different levels and values of citations. So we want to make sure the folks on the call understand that when a citation is issued, the citation classifications can range from other than serious. That means that the condition that OSHA is citing is maybe a technical violation of the standard that doesn't really have the ability to cause a serious physical harm to an employee. Maybe it's a record keeping violation. A company didn't fill out their OSHA log correctly and OSHA is going to cite them for that. Or maybe it's a technical violation of a lockout standard that the company had most things in place, but there was one technical area that got cited. And we typically see those citations issued with a pretty minor value on the citation. They carry a lower gravity and a lower seriousness on the citation. So they'll typically be valued at maybe, we've seen it as low as $1,500 all the way up to 4,500, 5,000, maybe $7,000 value, which in today's world is less dollars than it used to be, right? Used to be that OSHA's maximum penalty amount was 7,000. However, under the Bush years, GW, there was a budget that wasn't being passed and the opposing administration, the opposing side of the administration basically said, hey, we'll pass your budget if you tuck some pork in here, some things that we want. And one of the things that got tucked into the bill to pass the budget that year was the concept that OSHA could then escalate citations tied to cost of living. So now every year we see the citation penalties, the maximum penalty amount go up. And in that particular year, they took it from 7,000, adjusted for COLA, cost of living adjustment, 3% approximately per year from whenever it was set back in the 70s all the way up to that year in 2000, whatever that year would have been, I'm losing track now. And it took it from 7,000 up to about 12,003 from a maximum serious citation. So then all of the citations slid up in value based on that, including the other than serious. Today, that maximum penalty value has continued to slide up and I think it's somewhere around 13,700 and some dollars, 753 or something like that is the maximum penalty amount here in 2021. So it now continues to slide up. So that's on the other than serious. Now, if let's say you have a machine guarding problem where you just weren't providing a guard on a piece of equipment or let's say in your steel shop, your bandsaws are not properly adjusted, that bandsaw being out of adjustment, the guarding on it could be a serious citation that could go all the way up to the 13,700 as a penalty amount. Serious citations also pave the way for the employer having what's called a repeat citation down the road. Now, repeat is where you substantively repeat a violation of that same section of the standard down the road where OSHA can say, hey, we came in last or two years ago, anytime within five years, believe it or not, they expanded that window as well. Five years, it used to be three. So when they came in four years ago, we cited you for lockout or machine guarding, pardon me, for having that guard missing 1910.219, whatever the subparagraph is. And now we're seeing that same violation again. You've been doing everything great for three years and all of a sudden here in year four, they see it again. They can now take that penalty, Brian, believe it or not, from just 13,700 up to $137,000. So times 10 for a repeat. Now, we don't often see that. It's usually about half that value. But still, when you're talking $68,000, $69,000 for a repeat citation, suddenly we're talking real money. For a lot of the privately held employers that are on this call, even the publicly held ones, that's dipping into profits in a pretty significant way. That gets people's attention. So we want to protect against that upfront. So we've talked about escalation from other to serious, other than serious to serious, then to repeat. Now, we don't often see this until an incident is involved that involved an employee injury. But the amputation emphasis program, if you nip even the fingertip off of an employee and the doctor considers that an amputation, that's a mandatory report to OSHA within eight hours, that can cause OSHA to come into your facility. And when they come in, at that point, you're subject to all of these different citation amounts. Well, if they see that machine guarding and a lockout tagout issue, let's say your operator opened up the guards to change the blade on that bandsaw, this is something that's done in the fabrication shops in every precaster across the country. They all have exposure to this issue. So if that employee opens it up, they're not lockout authorized and they were in there without the machine guard or the machine guard was inadequate, now the employer can have multiple serious citations. If OSHA can prove that the supervisor, the foreman or supervisory staff or management knew that that was a violation of the standard through interviews, and they can prove that the employer knew through that supervisor, remember the supervisor commutes the employer's responsibilities all the way up into the employer, into that FEIN number. If the supervisor knew and willingly violated the standard and had that employee changing that bandsaw blade anyway, and then had an amputation because of it, now the employer can be cited for a willful violation. And that is always all, not always, but they can go up to 10 times and frequently do. At that point, it's a problem. In the event that you have a criminal situation where an employee unfortunately dies as a result of that violation, which we have seen within the precast industry, you can now have not only willfuls, but criminal willful referrals to the Department of Justice. Those are very, very serious. And you can imagine then, not only are we talking about the penalties and the bad press due to the press releases and citations, but now we have an issue where, you've got a very, very negative press release. So I think your initial question was, why do we want to do an informal conference? Well, even with a serious citation, we want to go in and talk with that area director and be building our reputation with the area directors so that we don't have them thinking that we're, Joe the bad actor precast across town, who's just wantonly injuring our employees. We want to be able to come in, talk about what we did to fix the problem, all the initiatives that we're going through in the workplace, just making sure that the area director understands who we are and that we're not trying to injure our employees because even if it's only an other or a serious, we don't want them coming back a month from now for a follow-up and then, issuing more and more citations every time. So hopefully that filled that in. Brian, if you're having any other thoughts on something I missed there, please share your experience. You've got as much, if not more experience than I do, dealing with OSHA and the regulatory bodies. No, I think you hit it right on. It just, it never hurts to go talk to them. If you're careful with what you say, you're not going to admit to any citations while you're there. You're not going to give them grounds for them to come back out and do more inspections. Go in and have a conversation. If you get a small penalty reduction, it's a win if you get no penalty reduction or no reduction in severity, but you get a chance to put a face on the company so that that area director is familiar with ABC Precast and they know that you're a serious organization that takes safety seriously. It can only help you in the future. You get a chance to exchange business cards. Now you have a contact there if you have questions. It's all around a positive experience. It's trying to make the best out of a bad situation if you've received citations. That's exactly right. Yeah, thanks for that. Really good. Steve, there's one just straightforward question that came in. What's the Bitly address again? Oh, yeah. Can you put that back on the screen? No, let me just pull that up again because I want to make sure that I read that off correctly. So that Bitly address will be bit.ly. Sorry, give me one second. Bit.ly forward slash nine and then the word OSHA in all caps, O-S-H-A underscore, I'm sorry, and then in lowercase tips, T-I-P-S. So bit.ly forward slash nine OSHA tips. Everything is lowercase except the word OSHA, which is capitals, and that should work for them. Great, and I sent that response to the question asker as well. Excellent, excellent. We've got another question here. The OSHA inspector wants to look at areas of my facility that are unrelated to the complaint. What should I do? What can I do? That's a really great question. And I know we've got just about a minute here, Brian, so I'll keep this brief before I'll move to close. But OSHA is required through the reference manual that they have that's a directive from the OSHA directorate, the administration of OSHA, to follow certain protocols during the inspection. And your attorneys and firms like Optimum understand that manual and they understand to make sure that you get your correct rights observed and all that. But as far as the scope, if they start asking to go and see different things, you do have the right to have them respect the scope of the inspection. Now, I'll just address that there are some inspectors that are really good, and then there are some inspectors that are really bad. We have inspectors that do a lot of construction inspections during the Chicago market. And when they come into a plant, we find that we're having to educate them because they really don't understand some of what they're looking at. And then the other way around when they're an industrial inspector going into a construction environment, there's also inspectors that wake up on the wrong side of the bed, just like all of us. They might be having a bit of a bad day, and we need to be able to push back respectfully. So you do have a right to limit the scope. We want to make sure we understand those rights, doing it respectfully. You can control what the inspector sees. I have had some employers do some crazy things like putting curtains up within a facility so the inspector can't see through them. Gosh, I hope we don't have to do that in our facilities if we're running a good environment and we have a good safety culture and so on. But there are environments where maybe some of those things are warranted. So again, avail yourself of some good counsel before the inspection so you don't have to do things like that. So Brian, I'm going to go ahead and move us to our closing at this point. I just want to remind everybody that we are here to help. Optimum has about 23 years of experience, 24 years of experience now, not only within the safety and health arena, but specifically within the precast arena. I started out in safety in this industry. I've enjoyed a good long history in it, have helped a lot of employers. And we've got a number of our employees who have similar level of experience in the industry and some who have more experience than I do in safety and health. Some that have culture development experience in developing safety and health cultures like I do. There's a lot that we can lend. So we want to let you know that we're here for you. Brian Dudgeon, who you just heard on the line is a senior safety professional with us. Also an account executive here. He handles our PCI relationship. We want to let you guys all know that we're looking forward to our first in-person conference in over a year with the precast show coming up in May. We hope to see you there. We're all going to be at the booth with PCI on behalf of the industry association, helping to get you the information you need to take advantage of the partnership. Come see us there. I did mention the PCI safety culture improvement process. That's a great process. Whether you're a safety professional with years of experience, maybe you're just struggling with bandwidth. I know working in a facility, I had a problem with just having the time I needed to be able to do some of the things to help build culture. Maybe you're very tactical and you're a great compliance safety professional. You just haven't been around the culture development side. We've got tools to help you there. If you're a CEO, C-suite executive president, you want to talk to us about, hey, we're doing great. We're below industry average, but we're still injuring people and it's bothering me. You've got that kind of dialogue happening in your head. Reach out to Brian. Here's his cell phone number. You can call him anytime, day or night. No, just kidding. Please be respectful, call during business hours, but Brian's always got a listening ear and great stories to help illustrate points. So do reach out to us. We also have the PCI safety helpline available with an email address here. This is all on your members section as well, but you can dial us up anytime. Reach out to us on the safety helpline email address. Again, we're here to help. We'd love to help and have a dialogue with you. Royce, at this point, I'm going to go ahead and turn it back to you to close this out. And thanks for the opportunity to present once again to the fine membership at PCI. And on behalf of the association and Optimum, I want to thank everybody for being here today. On behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank Steve and Brian for a great and informative presentation. If you have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketing at pci.org with the title online safety webinar. We'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to the PCI e-learning center as well. And that a pop-up survey will appear as soon as this ends. Thank you again, have a great day and please stay safe. Thank you.

OSHA inspection

preparation

emergency response team

types of inspections

opening conference

walk-around inspections

employee interviews

document requests

industrial hygiene sampling