Why OSHA standards shouldn’t be the high-water mark for contractor safety

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Each January, building corporations throughout the nation reset their calendars, their budgets and their targets. New tasks break floor. New crews come on board. New schedules promise effectivity, pace and development.

But security hardly ever will get the identical recent method.

In my work investigating catastrophic building accidents, I repeatedly hear the identical protection after a employee is significantly damage or killed: The positioning was OSHA compliant. Inspections handed. The bins had been checked. The paperwork was so as.

That logic is not only flawed. It’s harmful.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements had been by no means designed to signify the best stage of security achievable on a job website. They had been designed to ascertain a baseline. A ground. The minimal situations inside which work can legally proceed. Treating these requirements as a end line misunderstands their objective and places lives in danger.

Compliance doesn’t equal safety. OSHA can not anticipate each site-specific hazard, each shortcut taken underneath deadline stress or each cascading failure that begins with a small oversight and ends with a life-altering harm. Development websites are dynamic environments. They modify every day, generally hourly. Actual security requires fixed reassessment, not static adherence to minimal guidelines.

Probably the most severe circumstances I see don’t stem from blatant disregard for security. They arrive from a much more delicate and customary drawback: the belief that if a website meets OSHA necessities, it have to be protected sufficient. That assumption permits danger to cover in plain sight. It permits identified risks to be tolerated as a result of they fall simply exterior a regulatory violation. It permits corporations to confuse legality with accountability.

The beginning of a brand new yr is the suitable time to confront that pondering.

January can provide one thing building hardly ever has time for throughout the remainder of the yr: a pause. A second earlier than momentum takes over. It’s a nice alternative to ask onerous questions on whether or not security applications are proactive or merely “compliant,” whether or not coaching is significant or performative and whether or not danger is being managed or just documented.

True security cultures don’t ask, “What does OSHA require?” and cease there. They ask, “What may go improper right here?” They appear past checklists and take into account how actual folks work together with actual gear underneath actual pressures. They put money into planning, oversight and accountability that exceed the naked minimal as a result of they perceive the stakes.

Employees don’t measure security in citations averted or inspections handed. They measure it in whether or not they go residence on the finish of the day. Their households measure it in whether or not they hear footsteps on the door that evening.

OSHA compliance issues. It’s important. However it was by no means meant to be the ceiling.  Once we are pursuing litigation on account of an harm, we’re not merely seeking to see if an OSHA quotation was issued, we’re evaluating how an accident may have been prevented. Contractors have to set security above the ground and guarantee their tasks are protected for everybody.

As corporations set their priorities for the yr forward, an important decision they will make is to not solely meet OSHA minimal requirements, however to exceed them. No one needs to get operated on by a surgeon who had the bottom potential passing rating on their boards and no person ought to wish to work at a building website that meets the naked minimal requirements for security.  

Let’s begin 2026 on the suitable foot safetywise. As an alternative of simply setting the naked minimal for security on jobsites, let’s take into consideration what we will all do to verify staff return residence at evening.