Crown Provides Insight and Best Practices for Safety Standards and Education

Crown Equipment Corporation, is deepening its existing relationships with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Industrial Truck Association (ITA) Alliance to create industry safety guidelines and facilitate education for forklift operators.

Steve Johnson, a material handling group leader at Crown, was selected as the first forklift operator to participate on the newly formed Implementation Team for the OSHA-ITA Alliance. As part of the team, Johnson plays a key role in guiding the creation of nationally distributed safety materials that are relevant and useful in forklift operator safety training.

“Crown Equipment, as well as our partners at OSHA and ITA, understands the vital role experienced forklift operators can play in the education of their fellow operators,” said Brian Duffy, director of corporate environmental and manufacturing safety, Crown Equipment. “Steve’s 17 years as an operator are a testament to his ability to understand and communicate thorough safety practices that exceed OSHA requirements. His experience allows him to clearly communicate safety initiatives through the voice of an operator.”

In addition, Crown’s product engineering team is working with OSHA and ITA to develop and facilitate forklift safety training for OSHA personnel across the country. Components of the training package include a review of regulations and national standards, as well as insights on forklift design, testing issues and rules of safe operation.

“OSHA compliance officers are an important constituency group that has a vested interest in ensuring safe forklift operations. Everyone stands to benefit from more discussion about forklift safety," said Steve McDermitt, project coordinator, industry standards with Crown. "And, Crown’s proactive approach to educating our own operators and reducing incident rates, in addition to our existing partnerships with ITA and OSHA, make us a natural fit to help compliance officers better understand the operator, the forklift and environmental aspects of operator safety.”

The OSHA and ITA Alliance was established to reduce preventable forklift-related injuries throughout the United States. Among other safety-related activities, the Alliance provides information on the safe operation of powered industrial trucks for possible inclusion in operators’ manuals, and distribution through both print and electronic media and from the organization’s respective websites.