Safety regulations are defined as mandatory requirements that aim to prevent or reduce injury. They include laws and regulations such as Confined space, Minnesota Right to Know, and A Workplace Accident and Injury Report (AWAIR) programs. On January 1, 1991, Minnesota adopted an amendment to Minnesota OSHA statutes that requires many employers to develop and use a formal workplace accident and injury reduction program.

How? By realizing the benefits when workers know health and safety practices, rights and responsibilities, such as lower injury rates, lower compensation costs, better worker morale, fewer stop-work orders, competitive advantage in bidding on jobs, and higher productivity.

The best and most profitable contractors today are the safest contractors.

For various reasons, smaller construction companies (fewer than 150 employees) have a higher rate of injury than larger companies. As a small contractor, you must pay particular attention to health and safety. A single workplace injury can have a devastating effect on business. Additional costs include:

• pain and suffering for victim and family
• increased compensation premiums
• an average cost of $34,000 and 28 days off work for each lost-time injury
• time to train replacement worker
• low morale
• delays and lost production
• equipment and property

A health and safety policy by itself is not enough. Contractors need a program to implement and support the policy. The program should cover these areas:

• health and safety responsibilities for every level of employee
• injury reporting
• personal protective equipment
• measures to prevent or arrest injuries
• safety equipment: trench boxes, gas meters, non-entry rescue equipment, and others
• supervisory personnel who will enforce safety

Safety training is mandatory. Every employer has a responsibility to train its employees in the hazards of the work place. Every employer has a responsibility to provide employees with a work place free of recognized hazards that could result in serious injury or death.

Some training has mandatory yearly requirements that each employee must be trained in order for employers to be in compliance with regulations. Requirements that mandate yearly training are:

I. AWAIR Program

A. How managers and supervisors and employees are responsible for implementing the program and how continued participation of management will be established, measured and maintained.

B. The methods used to identify, analyze and control new or existing hazards, conditions and operations.

C. How the plan will be communicated to all affected employees so that they are informed of work-related hazards and controls.

D. How workplace accidents will be investigated and corrective action implemented.

E. How safe work practices and rules will be enforced.

II. Minnesota Right to Know

A. Chemical and physical hazards in work place.

III. Confined Space

A. Minimum safeguards for preventing employee exposure to dangerous air contamination or oxygen deficiency within such spaces as silos, tanks, vats, vessels, boilers, compartments, ducts, sewers, pipelines, vaults, bins, tubs, pits, and other similar spaces.

IV. Respirators-Refresher training if using respirators

Some regulations require employees to show knowledge in hazard recognition and require that competent persons are available to perform tasks at the work place. The tasks are mandatory, but are also performance standards in which employees need to be trained to show proficiency in their workplace activities. These requirements are:

1. Competent person training for excavating and trenching. It is mandatory for each project that requires excavating or trenching to have a competent person on the project and to have employees trained to recognize excavating hazards.
2. Crane certification: Effective 2007, each over the hook crane 5 tons and greater requires certified operators.
3. Fork truck certification requires refresher courses every three years.
4. Minnesota operation of mobile earth-moving equipment: Employees working around earth moving equipment must be trained to recognize the hazards and understand the use of high visibility garments.

While some 10-hour and 30-hour programs may cover AWAIR, Minnesota Right to Know and some parts of Confined Space and Minnesota Earth Moving standards, it is still mandatory for each employer to train its employees in workplace hazards. Ten-hour and 30-hour programs are not considered to be competent person training under OSHA standards.

Some Minnesota general contractors and owners require training before they can bring employees on the job site. IBM, 3M and Target Corp. are a few owners that require safety training. More and more owners, such as the cities of Elk River and St. Cloud, now require construction employees to have competent person training, and the list will grow.

A common factor in determining whether regulation is used is the seriousness of the outcome addressed in terms of human health. For this reason regulation is more common in transportation and the workplace, where the potential for fatal injury is perceived to be relatively great but less common, and in the home and sports environments, where the potential for fatal injury is perceived to be less.

Regulations are often introduced in situations where the actions of one person can injure other persons who do not have the ability or opportunity to decide whether to accept the risks associated with those actions. The most common examples relate to regulations protecting the safety of workers.

When a person's actions are likely to cause self injury, regulation may be introduced if the costs of injury to that person are largely borne by the public. Perhaps the most contentious among this class of regulations in the United States are mandatory motorcycle helmet and safety belt laws. The overall effectiveness of safety regulations depends upon whether the requirement being mandated is capable of preventing or reducing the target injury and on whether the process of regulation is effective.

Some of the factors that influence the effectiveness of the process of regulation include whether the regulation requires active or passive compliance, the effectiveness of enforcement, public awareness of the regulation, and public support for the regulation.

Regulations can require active compliance by the person being protected — for example, putting on a safety belt — or they can provide passive protection, such as the installation of seat belts on equipment before leaving the factory. Compliance with passive protection is generally

much greater and there is less need for enforcement activity at the level of the individual when this approach to regulation is adopted.

To be effective, the process of regulation requires sufficient public knowledge about the regulation and adequate enforcement. Promotion of voluntary compliance to achieve a level of community support before regulating has been an effective paradigm in countries, such as Australia, with respect to issues like the mandatory use of safety belts and bicycle helmets. Once there is a high degree of public acceptance, there is less need for widespread enforcement and greater potential to focus enforcement on the nonconforming minority.

The most productive role of enforcement is to increase compliance rather than detect noncompliance. Public education about the regulation that stresses the likelihood of detection has been found to increase compliance with drunk driving and speeding laws.

There is little evidence that very large penalties produce significantly greater compliance by individuals than sizable, but not extreme, penalties. For companies, penalties are generally larger to minimize noncompliance based on commercial reasons. Selective enforcement of regulations can lead to ineffectiveness of the regulations for the group that is not being enforced and concerns about victimization from those groups being enforced. In the workplace, the enforcement role is undertaken by OSHA or by safety-concerned companies.