The OSHA Strategic Partnership Program (OSPP) provides opportunities for OSHA to partner with employers, workers, professional or trade associations, labor organizations, and other interested stakeholders. OSHA Strategic Partnerships are unique agreements designed to encourage, assist, and recognize partner efforts to eliminate serious hazards and enhance workplace safety and health practices. OSHA Strategic Partnerships establish specific goals, strategies, and performance measures to improve worker safety and health. OSHA Strategic Partnerships focus on improving safety and health in major corporations, government agencies, at large construction projects and private sector industries where OSHA has jurisdiction. Most OSHA Strategic Partnerships are based out of local OSHA Area or Regional Offices.
Strategic Partnerships Overview
The OSHA Strategic Partnership Program Directive (OSPP), originally adopted on November 13, 1998 and revised effective November 6, 2013, is an expansion and formalization of OSHA’s substantial experience with voluntary programs.
- In a Partnership, OSHA enters into an extended, voluntary, cooperative relationship with groups of employers, employees, and employee representatives (sometimes including other stakeholders, and sometimes involving only one employer) in order to encourage, assist, and recognize their efforts to eliminate serious hazards and achieve a high level of worker safety and health.
- Partnering with OSHA is appropriate for the many employers who want to do the right thing but need help in strengthening worker safety and health at their worksites. Within the OSPP, management, labor, and OSHA are proving that old adversaries can become new allies committed to cooperative solutions to the problems of worker safety and health.
- OSHA and its partners can identify a common goal, develop plans for achieving that goal, and cooperate in implementation.
- OSHA’s interest in cooperative Partnerships in no way reduces its ongoing commitment to enforcing the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. While employers in Partnership remain subject to OSHA enforcement, the OSPP provides them an opportunity to work cooperatively with OSHA and workers to identify the most serious workplace hazards, develop workplace-appropriate safety and health management systems, share resources, and find effective ways to reduce worker injuries, illnesses, and deaths.
- Most of the worksites that have chosen to partner with OSHA are small businesses.