Written by Adam R. Young, Patrick D. Joyce, A. Scott Hecker and Craig B. Simonsen from Seyfarth Shaw LLP on September 12, 2024
Seyfarth Synopsis: OSHA recently unveiled an online tool allowing the public to access severe injury reports, injury trends over time, geographic trends, and trends specific to each employer.
OSHA’s new Severe Injury Report dashboard allows the public to search and download data by year, industry NAICS code, state, establishment name (i.e., employer), and Occupational Injury and Illness Classification System codes. The dashboard includes information on all severe injuries reported by employers covered under federal OSHA from 2015 through the end of 2023.
OSHA defines a severe injury as “an amputation, in-patient hospitalization, or loss of an eye.”
OSHA’s new dashboard continues its years-long push to obtain compliance by publicly shaming employers and raises concerns about data interpretation and improper use by third parties. Now, for each employer under federal OSHA jurisdiction, any member of the public can see injuries, hospitalizations, and amputations over a 10-year period, including in visual form such as a graph. Requestors will also get national trends and a pie chart of top five events and exposures. Anyone with internet access can search by NAICS code, types of events, and body parts affected to compare Company data to industry data.
This tool provides injury data without contextual information or consideration of other metrics taking employer size and other trends into account – all of which could present a fuller picture of an employer’s total injury rate. We anticipate that third party tracking services will use OSHA’s now publicly-available data to track companies and their alleged injury risks based on only a partial snapshot. The publication of this data further reinforces the importance of accurately reporting injury data, assessing the risk associated with corresponding OSHA citations, and determining how they are best resolved.
