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New Employees 34% of Workers’ Comp Claims

Employees who have been on the job for less than a year account for one-third of workers’ compensation claims, according to a new report. Injuries suffered by new workers in their first year on the job account for nearly 7 million missed workdays a year due to injury, according to the “2023 Injury Impact Report”

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Follow the Law When Hiring Teens during the Summer

You may be considering taking on some extra workers for the summer months, and often many employers will gravitate towards hiring teenagers looking for temporary work. If you are planning on hiring any workers under the age of 18, you should familiarize yourself with federal and any state laws on child labor restrictions. The Fair

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Training Your Staff to Respond to Medical Emergencies

If one of your employees had a serious medical emergency while at work, would your staff know how to respond? Unfortunately, most U.S. employees are not prepared to handle cardiac emergencies in the workplace because they lack training in CPR and first aid, according to the American Heart Association. The AHA found that most workers do

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Rating Agency Recommends Tiny Workers’ Comp Rate Increase

In a sign of the long-lasting effects of reforms enacted a decade ago, California’s workers’ compensation rate-making agency will recommend that average benchmark rates increase a mere 0.3%. The recommendation by the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau is based on claims costs and frequency remaining low and slower cost inflation and would apply to policies

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Cal/OSHA Alert: Proposed Indoor Heat Illness Prevention Standard Issued

Cal/OSHA has proposed its long-awaited indoor heat illness prevention standard as increasingly hot summers are affecting workers in indoor spaces like warehouses, production operations, print shops and more. The proposed standard, largely based on the state agency’s outdoor regulations, will require employers whose workplaces at times are at least 82 degrees to have a written

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lockout tagout

The Basics of a Strong Lockout/Tagout Program

Every year, hundreds of workers in the United States die because they don’t follow lockout/tagout procedures or their employers did not have them in place – or, if they did, failed to enforce their rules. A lockout tagout is a protection system against unintentional exposure to hazardous energy from equipment and machinery.  You want a program

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Multiple Factors Driving Commercial Property Insurance Rates

The commercial property insurance market continues hardening, with average rates up 9.3% in the first quarter of 2023, according to MarketScout. Rates for business properties have been climbing steadily for the last six years, but those increases have grown at a faster clip since the COVID-19 pandemic crippled global supply chains and disrupted economies around

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Scam QR Codes Pose Threat to Your Organization

QR codes — short for Quick Response codes — are everywhere these days, on the tables at restaurants, on posters, print and electronic advertising, and even during TV programming and commercials. By training your smartphone camera on one, you’ll get a prompt to click to open a web page, typically one for the company behind

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Could Your Firm Weather a Two-Week Shutdown?

If you had to close your doors or stop taking orders for two weeks or two months, what would happen? Would you be able to recover? Would you be able to meet your payroll? Would you be able to keep up with tax, insurance, lease, rental and mortgage payments for that long? Or would you

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Coverage for PAGA Claims Hard to Come By

The average cost for employers of a court case brought under the California Private Attorneys General Act was $1.1 million in 2021, according to the CABRIA Foundation. But the insurance policies that business owners would expect to cover legal costs, settlements, and judgments for these claims may not provide much coverage. PAGA allows an aggrieved

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