A recent study on distracted driving from in-car data collection and analysis showed that drivers spend more than half their time focused on things other than driving.
There are a variety of activities that count as distractions, and it’s estimated that these distractions contribute to more than 5,000 traffic fatalities each year.
Here are some of the most common driving distractions, any of which can result in higher workers compensation insurance rates if they occur while on the job:
- Talking on a cell phone
- Texting
- Eating and drinking
- Attending to child passengers
- Grooming
- Reading, including maps
- Using a navigation system
- Watching a video
- Adjusting a radio, CD, MP3 or temperature controls
Your Business and Your Workers Comp Insurance Rates
When your workers are behind the wheel on your company’s behalf, their safety is your business. And since texting takes your drivers’ attention away from the road for almost five seconds (the equivalent of driving the length of a football field at 55 mph blindfolded), it is important that you prohibit them from texting in your commercial vehicles.
“It is well recognized that texting while driving dramatically increases the risk of a motor vehicle injury or fatality.” Explains David Michaels, Assistant Secretary at Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “We are asking employers to send a clear message to workers and supervisors that your company neither requires nor condones texting while driving.”
Your Legal Responsibility to Safeguard Drivers at Work
As a business owner or manager, your legal responsibility under OSHA is to safeguard drivers at work. And it makes no difference whether they drive full-time or only occasionally to carry out their work, or whether they drive a company vehicle or their own. When OSHA receives a plausible complaint that an employer requires texting while driving or organizes work so that texting is a necessity, they will investigate and issue citations and penalties where necessary.
Your cooperation can minimize the danger to your business
Building a workplace culture of safety requires clear, explicit policies and sound practices. OSHA, which enforces worker safety laws, has joined with the Transportation Department, other agencies, key associations and organizations to enlist the help and cooperation of businesses of all sizes in a nationwide outreach, education, and enforcement effort to stop the dangerous practice of texting while driving.
Here are a few of the recommendations for employers to follow:
- Prohibit texting while driving. OSHA encourages employers to declare their vehicles “text-free zones.” Also, emphasize that commitment to their workers, customers, and communities.
- Establish work procedures and rules that do not make it necessary for workers to text while driving in order to carry out their duties.
- Set up clear procedures, times, and places for drivers’ safe use of texting and other technologies for communicating with managers, customers, and others.
- Incorporate safe communications practices into worker orientation and training.
- Eliminate financial and other incentive systems that encourage workers to text while driving.
Millions of Americans drive on the job every day, and this deadly behavior, texting while driving, has put them at risk. And that risk continues to grow as texting becomes more widespread. OSHA believes that by improving our understanding of how mental and physical distractions impair your company drivers and by educating them about avoiding distractions, we can eliminate these needless deaths and make our businesses safer while lowering commercial vehicle insurance and workers compensation insurance costs.
For more information about safe driving, commercial vehicle insurance, and workers comp insurance, contact us online or call (800) 947-1270 or (610) 775-3848.
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