Back to Basics is a weekly feature that highlights important but possibly overlooked information that any EHS professional should know. This week, we examine contractor and temporary worker safety.
Many workplaces are staffed by workers with different employers—a host company, contractors, and staffing agencies. If you own or operate a facility, you have complete responsibility for the health and safety of your own employees and a shared responsibility for those working for a contractor or staffing agency.
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) researchers have found that temporary workers have a higher overall injury rate than permanent workers in the same occupations.
For example, staffing agency nurses have higher rates of sharps injuries than their on-staff hospital coworkers. In the petrochemical industry, where simultaneous operations (SIMOPS) are common, temporary workers involved in maintenance and turnaround activities have higher injury rates than permanent employees. Temporary workers in plastics manufacturing have twice the injury rate of their coworkers in permanent positions.
Multiemployer workplaces
Host employers and staffing agencies at multiemployer workplaces need to define responsibilities for safety and health compliance and training, requiring a high level of communication and coordination. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can and does cite both host employers and staffing agencies for contract or temporary workers’ injuries and hazard exposures, especially in the agency’s enforcement of the hazard communication, lockout/tagout, permit-required confined space entry, and PPE standards.
OSHA recommends that safety and health programs at multiemployer workplaces include:
- Establishing effective communication among host employers, contractors, and staffing agencies and sharing information about workplace hazards and procedures for routine, nonroutine, and emergency hazards; and
- Establishing effective coordination, including safety-related specifications in contracts, harmonizing safety and health programs, and ensuring staffing agency employees are adequately trained and equipped before showing up at the workplace.
Safety and health responsibilities should be clearly spelled out in contracts and communicated to temporary workers. You may also want to coordinate any in-house accident, injury, illness, or “near miss” investigations with contractors or staffing agencies to determine root causes and identify necessary corrective actions.
However, you should understand that contract terms with a contractor or staffing agency won’t shield you from OSHA inspections and penalties. OSHA considers the staffing agencies and their clients joint employers of temporary workers. Your company and the staffing agency are jointly responsible for providing and maintaining a safe work environment for temporary workers.
Coordinated policies can prevent any safety lapses. If your company and a contractor or staffing agency have inconsistent policies regarding PPE, for example, temporary workers may mistakenly believe PPE isn’t necessary, resulting in injury or illness. Inconsistent policies can even lead to poor worker compliance with your safety rules if they begin to question the credibility of those policies.
Be mindful that OSHA may impose higher penalties on your company as the host employer than the staffing agency that employs a temporary worker.
During an inspection, OSHA compliance safety and health officers (CSHO) interview workers and supervisors and observe permanent and temporary workers performing their duties to assess whether workplace training complies with agency standards.
For example, CSHOs will check that you’re in full compliance with the hazard communication (HazCom) standard requirements. Any contractor or staffing agency at your facility is responsible for the HazCom training of temporary workers. Still, you should confirm that temporary workers understand the elements of chemical labels and know how to access safety data sheets (SDS) at your facility.
In addition to observing workers, agency inspectors will interview both permanent and temporary workers to assess whether they understand your HazCom program and know how to read chemical labels, where to find SDSs, and what precautions to take with hazardous substances at the facility.
California, federal OSHA enforcement activity
In 2019, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) cited a food manufacturer and its staffing agency, seeking over $300,000 in penalties for lockout/tagout and other violations after a temporary worker lost two fingers cleaning dough-rolling machinery. Neither employer had trained the injured worker to follow lockout/tagout procedures before assigning the worker to clean machinery.
An employee of a staffing agency was assigned to work at a Los Angeles food manufacturing facility owned by a maker and distributor of baked goods, noodles, and pasta. The worker’s left hand was partially pulled into the moving rollers while cleaning a dough-rolling machine, and two fingers were amputated.
State investigators found that the machine hadn’t been adequately guarded to prevent fingers from entering pinch points or de-energized and locked out to prevent the movement of machine parts while the worker cleaned it.
Last spring, federal OSHA reached a settlement agreement with one of the world’s leading suppliers of processed foods to resolve lockout/tagout and machine guarding citations after two temporary workers at a Cincinnati plant suffered injuries. The employer agreed to pay $1.7 million in federal OSHA penalties and invest $1.9 million to make safety improvements at the plant for a total of $3.6 million.
As part of the settlement, the company also agreed to transition most of its workforce from temporary to permanent employment within 6 months. The employer also agreed to develop a corporatewide safety and health management system that included input from management and workers, as well as create a safety committee.
In 2021, OSHA cited four employers at Foundation Food Group (FFG), a poultry processing facility, when six workers died from nitrogen exposure caused by a malfunctioning freezer, seeking nearly $1 million in penalties.
After a shift began at the Gainesville, Georgia, poultry processing facility, a freezer at the plant malfunctioned, releasing colorless, odorless liquid nitrogen into the plant’s air, displacing the oxygen in the room, according to the agency.
OSHA cited the facility’s operator and three contractors with 59 violations and proposed $998,637 in penalties.
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) also investigated the incident at the FFG facility. The CSB identified several safety issues in the incident, including FFG’s failure to inform, train, equip, drill, or otherwise prepare its workforce for a liquid nitrogen release and a lack of a documented process safety management policy.
OSHA issued no citations or penalties after a 2021 tornado struck Amazon’s Edwardsville, Illinois, warehouse, where six contractors were fatally injured and another severely injured. However, the agency did issue a hazard alert letter.
Agency inspectors interviewed Amazon and contract employees at the facility and found that some couldn’t recall the facility’s designated severe weather shelter-in-place location. Instead of using the megaphone identified in the facility’s emergency action plan (EAP) for emergency communications, managers verbally warned warehouse personnel, instructing them to take shelter in a restroom.
Some workers were unaware that the designated tornado shelter was a restroom on the north side of the building. Instead, they took shelter in a restroom on the south side of the building near the facility’s loading docks. Five of the deceased workers and the injured worker took shelter in the south-side restroom.
SIMOPS
SIMOPS are tasks performed by multiple teams in the same location at the same time. Some work can create hazards that pose risks to the workers performing their assigned tasks and those working on unrelated tasks.
The CSB investigated a fatal fire at the Evergreen Packaging paper mill in Canton, North Carolina, which involved SIMOPS.
During a plant shutdown for maintenance and capital improvement projects, two crews performed separate work in connected process vessels, the upflow and downflow towers of one of Evergreen’s pulp bleaching units. The crew in the upflow tower applied flammable epoxy vinyl ester resin and fiberglass sheets to the vessel’s inside walls. Cooler nighttime temperatures caused the resin to harden more slowly than the workers anticipated, resulting in the sliding of the newly applied resin and fiberglass down the vessel’s walls.
The workers used a portable electric heat gun to warm the resin, hardening it more quickly. During the night, the heat gun fell into a 5-gallon bucket of flammable resin, igniting it.
The workers in the upflow tower—who were applying the fiberglass sheets and resin—escaped and evacuated the vessel. Flames and smoke spread to the connected vessel, fatally injuring the two workers in the downflow tower.
Evergreen had considered the upflow and downflow towers separate spaces, but the CSB concluded that connected vessels were a single confined space, requiring oversight and coordination of the two projects.
The board also investigated a hydrogen chloride (HCl) release at the Wacker Polysilicon North American facility in Charleston, Tennessee, that led to a worker’s fatal fall.
The CSB found that multiple contract workers were present on the fifth floor of an equipment access platform at the facility at the time of the incident. Contract workers from two firms performed different tasks on the elevated platform, wearing different levels of personal protective equipment (PPE).
An apprentice worker on one team applied excessive torque to the flange bolts on a heat exchanger outlet pipe containing HCl, causing a graphite pipe to crack and release the hazardous chemical in the workers’ vicinity.
As a white cloud of HCl expanded, the workers on the platform couldn’t see their surroundings or access the staircase, which was the only exit from the platform. Three workers who were performing an unrelated pipe insulation task on the same structure where the pipefitter crew was working weren’t wearing full-body chemical-resistant suits. Unable to see or reach the staircase, they began climbing down the side of the structure to escape the HCl cloud. All three workers fell approximately 70 feet during their attempt to escape. One of the workers died from the fall, and the other two sustained serious injuries.
Safety issues identified in the CSB’s report included a lack of written procedures for torquing flange bolts on the pipe segment, a lack of hazardous energy control measures, the single means of egress, and a failure to evaluate risks posed by simultaneous operations.
In October, the CSB released a safety video summarizing the findings of its investigation into the HCl release at Wacker Polysilicon. In the video, CSB staff stressed the need for procedures, regulations, and guidance addressing the hazards of SIMOPS.
One of the CSB’s open recommendations for OSHA is to revise its existing standards or establish a new one requiring employers to coordinate SIMOPS involving multiple work groups, including contractors.
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