Under a final rule issued By the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Sept. 11, contractors will face new deadlines and requirements for reporting severe injuries on the jobsite. The rule will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015 for all employers covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act, even those who are exempt from maintaining injury and illness records.

The Obama administration has recently issued several heavy-handed executive actions that affect the federal contracting community, particularly the construction industry. These actions cover everything from potential blacklisting to super-minimum wage to overtime.

As required under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Department of Treasury (Treasury) Aug. 28 released draft information reporting form instructions that employers will use to report on the health coverage they offer their employees. This impacts employers with 50 or more full-time employees and full-time-equivalent employees as well as employers that self-insure. Effective 2015, employers must collect the information required to be reported under ACA and, beginning in 2016, file the information reporting returns with the IRS. Learn more by reading the update from Littler Mendelson, ABC’s general counsel .

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) New York District has issued a survey requesting comments from the construction industry on the potential use of a project labor agreement (PLA) for a beach erosion and dredging project in Sea Bright, New Jersey.

Green Globes® certification guides projects to save money, conserve energy and water use, use sustainable materials and create healthy indoor environments. It is a cost-effective system for designing, constructing and operating high-performance interiors, buildings and facilities.

In a court ruling Aug. 28, a San Diego, Calif., superior court judge upheld legislation (S.B. 7) that allows the state to limit construction funding to charter cities that do not subject their locally funded projects to prevailing wage requirements, negatively impacting merit shop contractors that complete public projects within those cities and the taxpayers paying the bill for the projects.  

Finding the right way to thank your employees can be difficult, but through ABC’s Workforce Development Awards, we’re giving you the opportunity to showcase their talent, hard work and dedication to the construction industry. Your construction craft professionals have the chance to win our national award, Craft Professional of the Year along with additional prizes. All you have to do, is nominate them.

This year, elections for all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 36 U.S. Senate seats, 36 governorships, and numerous state legislative and local government offices will take place Nov. 4. While turning up to vote in the upcoming elections is critical, there are things you can do now to directly advocate for the needs of your business and employees.

The key behind a world-class safety program is maintaining a strong culture where the people work together every day with the same uncompromising core value: that every incident is preventable. The road to forming a culture of interdependence--where a company’s employees aren’t simply expected to work safe but actively work to keep others around them safe— can be filled with many challenges both expected and unexpected  but the end result is worth it.

ABC and its allies in the construction industry once again cautioned OSHA that if the agency moves forward with its proposed rule to address silica exposure in the construction industry, contractors will be stuck with unnecessary regulations that are technologically and economically infeasible to implement.