Variations in States’ OSHA Consultation Programs in Construction

Details

• Personal Author:
  Gray WB ; Mendeloff J
• Description:
  This report provides information for understanding the operations and outputs of OSHA's On-Site Consultation program and its relevance to preventing hazards, injuries and deaths in the construction industry. OSHA's consultation program has operated in some form since the 1970s, but this report focuses on more recent years-from 2016 to 2022-making it more relevant to current decision-making. Our earlier research (Gray and Mendeloff 2023) found that construction fatality rates are significantly lower in states with higher rates of consultation visits. The goals of the current research are to identify differences across states in their consultation activities and to consider how those differences might impact the effectiveness of consultations in preventing fatalities and serious injuries in construction. We conducted interviews with 31 state Consultation Program Managers (CPMs) to discuss their programs' activities, outcomes and possible impacts on injuries. The interviews included all 21 states where OSHA has given authority for private sector enforcement to state agencies ("state plan" states) as well as a sample of 10 states where federal OSHA itself operates the enforcement program ("federal OSHA" states). We also analyzed data provided by OSHA from the OSHA Information System (OIS) database covering all consultation visits conducted by all states from 2016 through 2022. This enabled us to identify differences across the states and to compare them with the interview results. Finally, to see whether different state program characteristics impacted the observed relationship between consultation visit rates and construction workplace fatality rates, we looked at adjusting visit rates for the intensity of a state's consultation visits. While much of the day-to-day operation of state consultation programs is similar across states, our interviews identified substantial differences among them. One obvious difference is funding. The consultation program requires a state to contribute only 10% of the program cost, with the federal government paying 90%, but many states contribute more than 10%. This is more common among state plan states. There's a correlation of +0.49 between a state's funding share and its number of consultation visits per 1000 construction employees. Providing extra state money seems to be connected to the funding source - states where consultation funding is tied to the state workers' compensation system tend to contribute more than states where the program funding is coming from general state government revenue. Based on the interviews, concentrating more on construction is sometimes connected to a perception that construction is especially hazardous, though it can also be driven by having individual consultants with a background in the construction industry and good relations with the firm managers who are deciding whether to request a consultation visit. During the period we examined, the share of consultations in construction ranged across states from 6% to 78%. State plan states tended to concentrate more on construction, with 8 of the top 10 rates of consultation visits per 1000 construction workers while federal states had 9 of the bottom 10 rates. We also identified differences across states in the way they allocated their consultation activity within construction. These differences were often reflected in the data they reported in the OIS. One key difference is how states record a visit to a large construction worksite where the consultant reviews activities involving a general contractor and several subcontractors. Some states record a single visit to the general contractor, while other states encourage the subcontractors - with the consent of the general contractor - to request their own consultations during the visit, so a single trip to the worksite could generate multiple visit records. This can be seen in the OIS data, with the first group of states recording a higher share of their visits at general contractors, while the second group have more visits recorded at specialty trades. Another difference is that some states report a full/comprehensive scope in the OIS data for most of their visits, while other states report more of their visit scopes as limited. Who gets a consultation visit and the reasons behind it may influence the visit's impact on workplace hazards. OSHA consultation programs must rely on firms asking for a visit, with the reasons behind the request showing considerable differences across states. Many states describe an indirect connection where the threat of OSHA enforcement can lead firms to request a consultation visit to fix any hazards and avoid the risk of being penalized for violations. We see in the OIS data that states with higher inspection rates tend to have more frequent consultation requests. In a few states, firms that have had an enforcement inspection are encouraged to request a consultation visit as part of their settlement agreement; in other states, firms that had a worker complaint that seemed less serious are referred to the consultation program to address the issue. States also follow a variety of outreach strategies to encourage consultation requests, with many requests attributed to referrals by previous consultation clients. Some states get most of their visits from firms that were their clients in previous years, while others focus more on visiting new firms. After identifying these potentially important differences across states, we considered how we could incorporate them into our earlier analysis of the connection between state consultation program activity and workplace fatalities in construction. Using the same control variables and the same estimation methods we used in the earlier analysis, along with fatality records from OSHA's accident inspection records, we estimate a similar negative connection between construction fatalities and state consultation visit rates that were found in the earlier data, though the impacts are a bit smaller. For our earlier research, OSHA had provided us with the consultation visit rates in construction for each state from 1992 to 2016. We multiplied the state's visit rate by a measure of visit intensity, the average number of hazards identified per construction visit, using the state's average intensity values for 2016-2022. Our analysis finds that the significant connection between consultation visit rates and workplace fatality rates is maintained when we account for the intensity of a state's consultation visits. Future research could benefit from access to earlier years of detailed data on consultation visits, allowing the regression analysis to incorporate changes in the intensity of a state's consultation visits over time. Research could also benefit from access to the firm and worksite identifiers used in earlier research (Mendeloff and Gray, 2002), allowing the use of more sophisticated analyses including firm-level changes over time. Such research could help identify whether the relationship we observe between state consultation visit rates and lower fatality rates in construction workplaces reflects a causal connection. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Construction Industry Mortality Occupational Health Safety Safety Management Workplace
• Keywords:
  Construction Industry Fatalities Occupational Safety And Health Administration OSHA Safety Monitoring Workplace Monitoring
• Publisher:
  CPWR-The Center for Construction Research and Training
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Report
• Place as Subject:
  Boston Region [OSHA] ; Maryland ; Massachusetts ; Philadelphia Region [OSHA]
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1-55
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20070316
• Citation:
  Silver Spring, MD: CPWR-The Center for Construction Research and Training, 2024 Oct; :1-55
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2025
• NORA Priority Area:
  Construction
• Performing Organization:
  CPWR - The Center for Construction Research and Training, Silver Spring, Maryland
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20090901
• Source Full Name:
  Variations in states' OSHA consultation programs in construction
• End Date:
  20240831
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:0a8fa0d5078e08a5021a898c76e3734d8ad53f37da3f061430ebd244dc50340bac222c4f2eacf573cc68e79f8232c9a1858bc2ea603b1b998a8227bf7c1ea6fc
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/208551/cdc_208551_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 3.09 MB ]