Navigating safety regulations: Safety, Standards & Compliance

If the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration just could make its regulations sticky and crimson, then they would embody red tape.

Its regulations “certainly can be complex,” said Alan Herberger, senior health and safety manager at Master Lock Co. LLC, Oak Creek, Wis., which manufactures security and safety products.

He cited the “Walking-Working Surfaces and Fall Protection Rule” as an example. OSHA extensively revised the rule this year, with most changes already taking effect but some being delayed by several months—or up to about 20 years.

“The rules vary quite a bit by the individual regulation,” Herberger said. “Some regulations are heavily performance-based, where OSHA spells out the outcome they want to see and leaves it up to you to get there. They also have some very prescriptive standards, where OSHA goes into elaborate detail defining exactly what a ‘hole’ is, for instance.”

Hybrid guarding solutions utilize two or more safety product lines to create a custom safety solution. This one uses T-slotted and electronic safety devices to create a machine enclosure. Image courtesy of Faztek.

These standards might include what such a hole looks like, what type of guarding needs to be around it and what measurements those guards need to take.

Matt Brenner, vice president of sales at machine safeguarding specialist Rockford (Ill.) Systems LLC, sympathizes with companies subject to OSHA regulations.

“For end users, it’s very difficult to get through, analyze and understand what the standards are and what they mean—basically, to interpret them properly,” Brenner said. From an application standpoint, it’s hard to know how to make a machine comply while maintaining a high level of productivity, he noted. “I can’t stress enough that the standards are complex, the machines are complex and many times the machines’ usage is complex to the user.”

The challenge lies more with education than compliance, said Aaron McDevitt, president and COO of Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Faztek LLC, which builds customized industrial safeguarding equipment.

“Understanding what the regulations are and who they’re dictated by is difficult,” he said. “There’s a lot of confusion about what exactly is a regulation and what is a recommendation.” He described the OSHA standards book as incredibly hard to follow. “It’s not clearly laid out that ‘If you have this type of machine, you need to have this on it,'” he said. He understands that the many differences among machines make OSHA’s task difficult, however.

Matt Brenner, vice president of sales at Rockford Systems, conducts a machine safeguarding survey. Image courtesy of Rockford Systems.

It’s not only OSHA’s regulations but its enforcers who are inconsistent, according to McDevitt. He compared the discretion of the latter with that of the police. “You might be driving down the road going 63 miles an hour in a 55 zone and not get a ticket from one police officer. But the next day you’re going the same speed and you get a ticket from a different officer. That inconsistency leaves a lot of people willing to roll the dice with OSHA” because they don’t understand the regulations, he said.

Regs vs. Recommendations

“Then you’ve got ANSI, but they’re not necessarily providing regulations. It’s very confusing,” McDevitt said.

The American National Standards Institute is a not-for-profit organization that recommends voluntary workplace standards. Sometimes those standards are adopted or adapted by governmental agencies, such as OSHA.

“OSHA has the ability to set laws that, in their mind, protect workers from illness or injury and create responsibilities for their employers to comply with,” said Todd Grover, global senior manager for applied safety solutions at Master Lock. He’s a participating member of the ANSI Z244.1 committee on the control of hazardous energy and a delegate to the U.S. PC283 committee contributing to the upcoming ISO 45001 global standard for occupational health and safety.

From a regulatory standpoint, it is common for OSHA to be cut and dried in its expectations and requirements while organizations like ANSI seek to promote effective work practices that protect workers because they’re recognized as a valuable resource, according to Grover. He believes that because of the OSHA laws, many workplaces seem focused on simply meeting compliance requirements “instead of figuring out the very best methods to get the job done with the least risk to the worker. So complying with safety laws becomes conflictual rather than an incentive to improve processes.”

Lockout/Tagout

A good example of regulatory complexity is the lockout/tagout standard—formally titled “The Control of Hazardous Energy (Lockout/Tagout)”—which OSHA enacted in 1989. Lockout/tagout prohibits employees from maintaining
or servicing a machine unless its power is off and some sort of lock prevents people from resuming power during maintenance or service. Despite the standard being in place for 28 years with little revision, OSHA blames the failure to control hazardous energy for almost 10 percent of the serious accidents that occur in many industries.

Grover said complying with lockout/tagout is challenging because its expectations do not come with precise criteria for performance and its very nature is difficult to address. If a potential issue is not predicted, a facility may not be ready for it.