March 30, 2022

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published a proposed rule to amend its occupational injury and illness recordkeeping and reporting regulations. This proposed rule would reinstate aspects of regulations implemented under the Obama Administration that the Trump Labor Department rescinded. 

Today’s proposed rule would eliminate the requirement for all establishments with 250 or more employees (regardless of hazard level) to electronically submit information from the Form 300A to OSHA. Instead, it would require employers with 20 or more employees in construction and certain high-hazard industry sectors designated in Appendix A of the proposal by reference to the 2017 version of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) to continue to electronically submit information from their Form 300A annual summary to OSHA once a year. 

The proposed rule would also require that establishments with 100 or more employees in segments of NAICS industry sectors designated as highest hazard industries to submit electronically once a year their Form 300A as well as OSHA Forms 300 and 301. These high hazard industries are listed in Appendix B to the proposed rule and includes the “foundation, structure, and building exterior contractors” (NAICS code 2381) component of the “construction” sector.

OSHA intends to post data from the proposed annual electronic submissions on a public website after removing personally-identifiable information. OSHA believes that making establishment- and case-specific injury and illness data public would: (1) enable interested parties to gauge the full range of injury and illness case types at a given establishment; (2) allow employers to compare case-specific injury and illness information at their establishments to those at comparable establishments, and set workplace safety/health goals benchmarked to the establishments they consider most comparable; (3) allow employees to compare their own workplaces to the safest workplaces in their industries; and (4) improve the workings of the labor market by providing more complete information to job seekers, and, as a result, encourage employers to abate hazards in order to attract more in-demand employees.

In today’s proposed rule, OSHA would require establishments to include their company name when making electronic submissions and precludes the use of codes to identify establishments.

Comments are due by May 31, 2022 and can be submitted here using Docket ID OSHA-2021-0006.

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