Each year, Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration releases a preliminary list of the 10 most frequently cited safety and health violations for the fiscal year, grouped after surveying nearly 32,000 inspections of workplaces by federal OSHA staff.
The list of OSHA’s Top 10 violations for 2017 remains unchanged from 2016, except for one new category. Fall Protection – Training Requirements (1926.503) entered the list in ninth with 1,523 violations, just ahead of Electrical – Wiring Methods, with 1,405 violations.
The top five violations remained identical to the 2016 list, with Fall Protection – General Requirements leading by a wide margin with 6,072 violations. In a distant second was Hazard Communication with 4,176 violations.
Since the violations remain largely consistent year to year, it's important to conduct a thorough walkthrough of your own best practices to make sure they align with OSHA.
Approximately 4,836 workers were killed in the year 2015 alone, with one in five employees (21.4%) working in construction.
Refer to this list when looking at your own workplace safety standards:
- Fall Protection – General Requirements (1926.501): 6,072 violations
- Hazard Communication (1910.1200): 4,176
- Scaffolding (1926.451): 3,288
- Respiratory Protection (1910.134): 3,097
- Lockout/Tagout (1910.147): 2,877
- Ladders (1926.1053): 2,241
- Powered Industrial Trucks (1910.178): 2,162
- Machine Guarding (1910.212): 1,933
- Fall Protection – Training Requirements: 1,523
- Electrical – Wiring Methods (1910.305): 1,405
