AZASSP Technical Meeting FY27-05

Title: Decoding HazCom Through a Legal Lens

Instructor: Adele L. Abrams, Esq., ASP, CMSP

Description: Hazard Communication is one of OSHA’s most frequently cited standards, but compliance involves much more than maintaining Safety Data Sheets and labeling chemical containers. In this session, occupational safety attorney and safety professional Adele Abrams will examine HazCom through a legal and regulatory lens, exploring where employers commonly create exposure through incomplete programs, inadequate training, inaccessible or outdated SDSs, improper chemical classification and labeling, and failures to connect chemical hazard information with workplace controls.

Drawing on her extensive OSHA and MSHA legal and compliance experience, Adele will discuss the practical implications of OSHA’s revised Hazard Communication Standard, GHS requirements, multi-employer responsibilities, and the relationship between SDS information, PPE assessments, employee training, and employer liability. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how seemingly routine HazCom deficiencies can develop into OSHA citations and broader legal exposure—and what safety professionals can do to strengthen their organization’s program.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify common HazCom compliance and legal vulnerabilities, including deficiencies involving SDS accessibility and retention, container labeling, employee training, chemical classification, and multi-employer workplaces.
2. Explain key requirements and changes associated with OSHA’s revised Hazard Communication Standard and GHS, and evaluate how those changes may affect written programs, SDSs, labels, training, and chemical-management practices.
3. Apply a legal-risk perspective to HazCom programs by connecting SDS information to hazard assessments, PPE selection, employee training, workplace controls, OSHA enforcement, and potential employer liability.

Bio:

Adele Abrams is Senior Counsel with Littler in Washington, D.C., where her practice focuses heavily on occupational safety and health and employment law. She has more than three decades of legal experience and previously led her own nationwide OSHA/MSHA law practice for approximately 25 years. She is both an Associate Safety Professional (ASP) and Certified Mine Safety Professional (CMSP) and represents employers in OSHA and MSHA litigation while also providing compliance consultation, audits, industrial hygiene assistance, and training.

She also teaches employment law at the University of Colorado, has co-authored occupational safety and health publications for ASSP, and received the National Safety Council’s Distinguished Service to Safety Award in 2017.