Unit III Essay

OSHA Operations Name Institutional Affiliation Course Instructor Due Date OSHA Operations Since its establishment in response to the passage of ISH Act of 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has played an indispensable role of making sure that American employees have access to safe and healthy workplaces. Consequently, safety professionals are expected to be fully conversant with OSHA’s operations so that they can help employers can minimize the levels of citations and/or penalties. To this end, one should be aware of the organization’s scheduling of inspections, the employee’s rights, employer’s responsibility, and OSHA’s citations and penalties process. This article provides an overview of OSHA’s operations. Inspections Approach OSHA’s legal authority is granted by the Occupational Safety and health Act of 1970. The Act dictates that the organization has the power to set and enforce standards that meets the stipulations of the general Duty Clause of the Act (Michael & Barab, 2020). In order to accomplish its legal mandate, OSHA has put in place a priority system intended to compensate for the lack of adequate personnel who can fully conduct inspection at every workplace. To this end, the system has four inspection priorities that are used for inspection scheduling (Minnick et al., 2019). At the top of the priority list is the imminent danger, where the agency prioritizes inspection in situations where death or a serious physical harm is likely. The second priority is the investigation of catastrophes and fatalities. Fatalities describe situations where an employee death resulted from a work-related exposure, while catastrophes define cases where work-place incident or exposure leads to hospitalization of more than three employees. The third priority of inspection is complaints and referrals. Complaints describe notice of safety or health hazard in the workplace and can either be formally made by an employee or their representative, or an informal one. Referral describes a situation where the agency receives allegations of potential violation from multiple sources. The least prioritized inspection in the system is programmed inspections. Programmed inspections describe targeted specific workplaces that are inspected due to their high-hazard nature. To this end, OSHA relies on National Emphasis Programs to determine the ideal allocation of its resources. The complexity of the inspection system increases in instances where OSHA has to inspect multi-employer construction worksites. In such cases, OSHA relies on the multi-employer citation policy. The policy dictates that the inspector should assess the role of each employer in relation to the creation and control of a given hazard (Cohen & Peterson, 2020). An employer can be designated as either the one who created the hazard, the one whose employee are exposed, the one who is contractually responsible for correcting the hazard, or the one who has the supervisory authority in the worksite. The policy reiterates that employers have a role to play in maintaining the safety...