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In an effort to raise awareness and help prevent future accidents in the workplace, employers are required to post a log of work-related accidents beginning on February 1, 2007. The forms must remain posted in a prominent place until April 30, 2007.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, also known as OSHA, is charged with ensuring safe working conditions for US employees. If an employer fails to post the forms for the required length of time, they could be fined and cited by OSHA for non-compliance. Not only does this put employees at risk, but the business could be in jeopardy as well.

Common gathering places are a good place to post the California OSHA 300 form. The form is a log of injuries employees suffered in the prior year (in this case, 2006). Included in the log are any deaths resulting from a work-related accident.

Employers nationwide are required to submit a copy of the log to OSHA each year so OSHA can compile statistics related to workplace safety. Only employers in the private sector are mandated to track injuries sustained on the job. OSHA does not require statistics from government and other public sector employers. Twenty-five states in the US have elected to follow OSHA guidelines in all business environments. These statistics, however, are not included in OSHA’s report on safety in the workplace.

The latest statistics available from OSHA reveal an astonishing 4,214,200 accidents in the workplace in 2005. Of those accidents, 5,702 resulted in death. Over 1 million workdays were lost due to injuries on the job. A total of 270,890 workers suffered painful back injuries. Sprains, strains, and muscle tears accounted for more than half a million injuries and 255,750 people fell at work.

The second most common accident in the workplace is attributed to slips, trips, or falls. It is common to think these types of injuries are minor. However, OSHA statistics from 2005 report that 732 people died as a result of a fall while they were working.

Three California community colleges and one government agency were recently awarded coveted federal grants totaling almost $7 million. The grants, from the U.S. Dept. of Labor, are to train highly skilled workers for the 21^st century.

Schools receiving the California Dept. of Labor grants include the California Community Colleges based in Sacramento, which received a grant of $ 1,992,481 for transportation programs. Also receiving grants were Los Medanos College of the Contra Costa Community College District in Pittsburg, California. The school received a grant of $ 1,484,918 for training programs in advanced manufacturing. The West Hills Community College of Coalinga received a grant of nearly $2 million to fund programs in several disciplines.

An unusual award went to the Merced County Department of Workforce Investment, which received more than $1.8 million to fund a healthcare training program. To date, nearly all of the other awards nationwide under this program have been to community colleges.

The California Dept. of Labor grants are just 4 of several in a program across the U.S. to train workers for high-demand occupations, including construction, healthcare, advanced manufacturing and energy. The grants are awarded based on a competition between 429 schools.

“The $125 million these 72 community college partnerships will receive under the President’s Community-Based Job Training Initiative is going to help workers succeed in careers in health care, advanced manufacturing and other growing industries,” said U. S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

So far, more than 104 grants, including the California Dept. of Labor grants, have been made since the program’s inception in 2005.  The purpose of the U.S. Labor Dept.  grants is to increase worker skills in the area, especially in high-demand areas such as healthcare. Skilled workers can enter growing industries and contribute to economic success. The community college’s ability to equip workers with the skills that are most in demand is crucial to our nation’s success.  

One of the hot topics that we’ve debated a bit on this blog is over the whole purpose of the new employee reporting system. As we saw from our discussion on all of the different ways that each state in the Union handles their systems, we learned that there was really one big overarching purpose to the system, which originally got its impetus on the federal stage.

What was that major impetus? Well, simply put, the major reason that the new employee hire reporting system is the way it is today is to be able to track down and punish parents who run from their debt to their children, in the form of child support payments. Delinquent parents can still try to hide in another state from their children, in an attempt to avoid having to pay those child support payments. But the new hire reporting system makes it much harder to hide—unless a worker has the complicit support of their employer, who agrees either not to report them, or to report fraudulent info.

California’s new law—AB 2440—which goes into effect in the new year—is meant to help close this last loophole. So California employers—not that you were conspiring against the new hire reporting system or anything—please be careful and understand that state of California has new-found rights to punish you for abetting these delinquent parents.

The new California law makes it so the state can actually impose a penalty on any employer who helps an employee or even one of their contractors in evading meeting their child support payments. Part of this includes a new penalty if employers purposely fail to report new hires.

What does this mean for most employers in California? It probably does not mean much to all employers who have up to this point already done a good job keeping up with the requirements of the state new hire reporting system, and a good job of keeping accurate and up to date personnel files.

Now that we are coming upon the New Year, what better time could it be, loyal readers, than now to address all that has happened in the world of labor laws and human resources in California in the past year. The New Year, after all, is about airing dirty laundry, rehashing the recent past, learning from our mistakes, celebrating our accomplishments, and moving forward into the new year with a clean conscience and an eye for the future.

What did all of that mean just now? I am not sure myself, but I think what I was trying to say is: Before we move ahead and look at all of the labor laws and regulations that California’s employers will have to worry about new in the year 2007, we should make sure we have a firm grasp of all of the labor laws that we were supposed to be following in 2006.

Some of these new labor laws in California in 2006 included the one that said that all final wages to employees had to be paid by direct deposit to the employee’s bank account where they had been sending their direct deposits all along. That is a pretty big new labor law, though it doesn’t sound like much. Previously, of course, as anybody who has quit or left a job may know, employers would send your last paycheck in the mail, or give it to you on your final day.

Another California labor law that you may not have heard about in 2006 affects all employers who deal with minors on their payrolls. The law stated that the period for minors to file a claim under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, or FEHA, could be extended beyond the time that they are legally considered a minor. That time would be one year past their 18th birthday.

Friends, colleagues, loyal readers—I continue my service to you as a provider of all that is labor law news across this great land. Here we continue our look into the labor laws that came into affect in 2006 in California, with the obvious and important notion in mind that we must master what we face now, before we can face what will come at us in 2007. In other words, before we start worrying about the labor laws that will affect California employers in 2007, let’s make sure we know what the heck went on in 2006 in the labor law world in California.

One of these 2006 labor laws in pure California. Hollywood, in fact. The labor law states that a collective bargaining agreement for the motion picture industry’s employees, or employees in the world of broadcasting, which gives those employees meal periods and money payments when those meal periods are missed, is more important than other labor laws, such as those in the California Labor Code and the California Wage Orders. That means that any employer who agrees to these collective bargaining agreements are held to those above all else, even if they say that the employees get five hours of meal time a day.

Another California labor law backs up a federal law when it comes to employee privacy. This 2006 labor law in California stated that all documents that contain personal information on your employees—the kind of personal information that would be included in credit reports—must be destroyed by the employer.

Privacy issues in 2006 were huge news not just in California of course. The whole issue of protecting your employees’ privacy and personal info came into stark spotlight each time an employer or federal agency had a laptop stolen with their employees’ info on it, or their system was hacked into and info stolen.