OSHA Targets Unlikely Suspects in 2022: Top 5 Employer Takeaways as Fisher Phillips Unveils OSHA Inspections Tracker

From Fisher Phillips, March 8, 2022

Just because you aren’t a large employer in the construction or manufacturing field, 2022 may be shaping up as the year that you get visited by a federal workplace safety inspector. That’s according to the nation’s first OSHA Inspections Tracker map, just unveiled by the Workplace Safety and Catastrophe Management team at Fisher Phillips and created by our Knowledge Management and Technology teams, allowing employers to examine the up-to-the-minute state of workplace safety inspections in a detailed manner. By clicking here and maneuvering around the map and accompanying data lists, you can determine the likelihood of your business being visited by OSHA inspectors based on your location, industry, and company size. It’s just the latest innovative offering from the firm that recently won the Law Firm of the Year Award at the 2021 American Legal Technology Awards. What are the five biggest takeaways for employers upon examining the FP OSHA Inspections Tracker?

1. State OSHA Plans are Being Aggressive Early in 2022

The first thing your eye may track when looking at the heat map is that the usual suspect stands out as the state with the most total OSHA inspections in 2022. Given its size and the prevalence of manufacturing and construction operations, it’s no surprise to see California leading the pack with over 1,000 inspections already launched in 2022. But when you adjust the map for total number of inspections per employee count, the top five states become Washington, Michigan, Alaska, Hawaii, and Oregon – all five of which are State OSHA Plan states.

In fact, when looking solely at the raw number of inspections carried out, only five of the top 10 states so far this year are State OSHA plan states. But when you factor in the relative size of each state’s employee population to determine the actual likelihood of a workplace being targeted for an inspection, you’ll see that nine out of the top 10 states are all State Plan states (the list also includes Puerto Rico, Utah, Kentucky, and Nevada). Employers in those areas need to be especially on guard regarding workplace safety practices and OSHA inspection response procedures in 2022….

LINK: OSHA Inspections Tracker

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