June 10, 2024 — In 2001, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Labor broke state law when it withheld information about employees’ job-related injuries from PEF. The union sued after the state’s Industrial Board of Appeals upheld DOL’s decision to deny PEF full information provided on injury and illness logs.
The story began with DOL’s Statewide Health and Safety Committee’s request to review the records: “I wanted to see how many injuries were happening and how they happened, and how much time on the job was being lost because of them,” then committee co-chair Ron Goldstein stated in a July/August 2001 Communicator article. “All we want to do, is save the employees’ pain and injury and save the department money.”
Fast forward to 2024
Those logs are vital tools to address health and safety concerns in the workplace and PEF uses them today in efforts to rectify problems. PEF will go to bat to make sure these logs are made available when requested.
At a Health and Safety workshop at last year’s PEF Convention, members discussed analyzing data to identify workplace violence trends. This is where a worksite’s SH 900 logs can be leveraged. An employer is required by state law to keep an SH 900 log of all work-related injuries and illnesses and PEF has a right to request them and there is no need to state a reason for the request.
