About This Course and Why Housekeeping Is a Safety Control

This course is awareness training on workplace housekeeping and safe cleaning, aligned with the rules of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). It is written for cleaners, janitorial and facilities staff, and for the supervisors of any work area: a workshop, a warehouse, an office floor, a laboratory corridor or a construction site.

The course covers the housekeeping duty in the general industry standards (Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 1910, or 29 CFR 1910) and in the construction standards (29 CFR 1926), housekeeping as a way to control hazards, combustible dust, cleaning chemicals and their labels, the difference between cleaning and disinfecting, personal protective equipment for cleaning, wet floors, cleaning machines, the strain cleaning puts on the body, and how to plan and check cleaning work.

Housekeeping is a hazard control

Many people think of housekeeping as making a place look nice. In safety, housekeeping means keeping every work area, passageway and storage area clean, orderly and free of things that can hurt people. It is one of the oldest hazard controls there is, and one of the cheapest.

Poor housekeeping sits behind many kinds of harm. A cable across a walkway trips someone. A spill nobody wiped up causes a fall. A pile of cardboard beside a heater gives a small fire something to grow on. A pallet left in an exit route slows an evacuation. A layer of fine dust on beams can feed an explosion. In each case the hazard was visible, and someone could have removed it in minutes.