Each year, more than 100,000 construction workers, foremen, and other supervisory personnel take the OSHA 30-hour outreach training course to learn how to identify and control occupational hazards. The new 2.5-hour Foundations for Safety Leadership (FSL) module fills a long-standing need to provide leadership skills training. The FSL was developed with input from experienced OSHA 10- and 30-hour outreach trainers, construction workers, safety and health professionals, and leadership and safety climate specialists. Its two sections contain foundational material on skills and practices that lead to effective safety leadership and reinforcement activities to demonstrate what happens when foremen, superintendents, workers, and owners use or don’t use leadership skills when responding to real-world construction site hazards.

The FSL package has recently been updated to include additional materials such as a poster, toolbox talks, and a handbook that can be used by companies or other entities that want their foremen and lead workers to incorporate the 5 FSL leadership skills into their daily activities.

Reaching new and younger workers entering the construction workforce is critical to ensuring that safe work practices are learned early in a person’s career. While there are mechanisms and systems in place for incorporating safety and health information into apprenticeship training, little is known about career technical education (CTE) programs. Researchers at WVU and UC Berkeley have recently completed a project exploring the elements of effective health and safety education in post-secondary CTE construction programs and characterizing the state of existing health and safety education in these programs. The results of that research have led to a new guide and additional resources.

Small contractors in the residential construction industry are more difficult to reach than larger, well-established companies due to their isolated nature and hard-to-reach at-risk workers. This presents a challenge to the safety and health community. The OSHA Alliance Construction Roundtable has published a white paper, “ Proposed Strategies for the Occupational Safety and Health Community to More Effectively Reach Small Contractors in Residential Construction,” that addresses this problem.

For more information, see the original article by ASSE’s OSHA Alliance representative, John W. Mroszczyk, Ph.D., P.E., CSP.

OSHA has a wealth of technical resources and products that contain critical safety and health information on expected hazards for cleanup and recovery workers including the OSHA Hurricane Preparedness, Response, and Recovery webpage and the OSHA Flood Preparedness, Response, and Recovery webpage . To make it easier to find information by hazard or topic, OSHA has consolidated the key resources related to worker safety and health hazards and protective measures on these webpages and in an updated technical resource list . In addition, the Secretary of Labor and OSHA have recorded audio public service announcements that are available on the DOL Hurricane Recovery Assistance Page .

Hear from OSHA about the requirements for enclosed cabs under Table 1 of the new silica standard, and from NIOSH on how research conducted for the mining industry can be applied in construction to reduce exposures.
View the recording on YouTube.