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I firmly believe that OSHA’s your friend. In construction we have a governmental agency called the Occupational Safety and Health Administration named OSHA. OSHA is a governmental agency in charge with keeping the nation’s workplace safer and healthier.

OHSA, for a lot of reasons, has taken a lot of beating from contractors. Let me tell you, OSHA is a friend of the construction industry. Why would I say that? Well, OSHA is somebody who wants what you want. They want safer behaviors. Now how do you get their attention when you want safer behaviors? You give fines, through tickets, citations, and those citations are the ones that aggravate the contractors to no end. But if you look at the follow-on activities after the citation, you know that there’s a 15-day settlement period. That is, there’s a period where OSHA wants to talk to you directly as a contractor and what they want to know is not when you’re going to pay them your fine, they want to know what you’re doing to lessen the liability, the probability of an accident. And so they’re not interested in the $7,500 fine. They’re interested in you changing your behavior. And certainly during that settlement period, they’re going to lessen that number. Some say 50 percent, some say even more. The point is OSHA does not make collecting fines from you its top priority. It makes changes in those behaviors its top priority with results, safer work sites, lesser worker’s comp expense, lesser liability insurance expense. Many good things that result from OSHA’s focus on changing behaviors. They are the construction industry’s friend.