The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has announced it will conduct two informal stakeholder meetings on May 25 in Washington, D.C., and June 3 in Chicago, Ill., to collect information prior to preparing a proposed regulation on ways to modify its current injury-and-illness recordkeeping regulations and develop a modernized recordkeeping system.
OSHA said its and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) data-collection systems provide a vast amount of information, but said both have "limitations" that affect the agency's ability to make policy decisions based upon available data. OSHA specifically cited its OSHA Data Initiative (ODI), which only provides summary data for each establishment and does not enable the agency to identify specific types of hazards or problems in a particular establishment. Further, OSHA maintained there currently is a two- to three-year lag between the occurrence of a workplace injury or illness and the availability of those data for OSHA's use. By contrast, OSHA said BLS data are available in the year following the calendar year that the injury or illness occurred, and provides a wide range of estimates by industry, establishment size and details of the injuries and illnesses. But while BLS data may identify the industries with the highest specific incident rate, OSHA said, they do not identify the specific establishments where they occur.
The stakeholder meetings will focus on the scope, uses and methods of the data collected, as well as the potential economic impacts of the rule.