The cliche holds true:

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And while reliability and consistency can be good, in the realm of occupational health and safety, it can be frustrating, especialy when it comes to OSHA’s annual list of the top safety violations reported by inspectors.

With OSHA producing the list every year, one would think that eventually some lessons would be learned and some changes would be made to improve the overall numbers and perhaps make some other violation in the No. 1 spot with a small =er number of violations. But apparently that might be too much to ask, unfortunately.

The 2016 OSHA list of top safety violations came out, and it looks remarkably similar to the 2015 listing. Overall, about 4,500 U.S. workers are killed on the jbo everyear, and about 3 million are injured to various severities, according to date from the U.S. Department of Labor.  This lit only mentions those safety violations caught by OSHA inspectors and investigators, and does nto include everything in terms of causes for incidents and the like – only what the officials noted.

This top-10 list accounted for more than 35,000 noted violations in 2016.

  1. Fall protection (or laack of it) accounted for nearly 7,000 violations, or about 20 percent of the total.
  2. Failure to communicate hazards, nearly 5,700 violations.
  3. About 3,900 violations for scaffolding.
  4. Respiratory protection violations account for neary 3,600 violations.
  5. Insufficient lockout/tagout of machinery was worth more than 3,400 violations.
  6. Forklift use violations totaled almost 2,900.
  7. Unsafe ladders produced  more than 2,600 violations.
  8. Inadequate or missing guards on machinery, almost 2,500 violations.
  9. Unsafe electrical wiring, about 1,950 violations.
  10. Failure to meet electrical or general safety requirements, almost 1,750 violations.

Take a serious look around your worksite. Do any of these violations look familiar, whether your site has been cited or not? Are your safety issues being addressed and improved year to year? If not, why not?

This can be an excellent time to run a safety audit and assessment of your own worksite to see if you could face the wrath of OSHA, and figure out which of these violations are most prevalent on your site and address the steps to fix them before an incident happens and OSHA comes prowling.

You can check out the OSHA site and look up a history of the most common violations and see if any of the numbers have trended downward over the years, and see where emphasis should be placed in your own assessments.

Any way you look at it, something has to change on this list, besides just the year in the heading.