Occupational Safety

Course Description

Occupational Safety examines the health and safety issues of various types of work. Students develop understanding of current occupational safety and health conditions in the United States and globally, including regulatory enforcement, and the involvement of workers, unions, and employers, and the course analyses the historical, economic, and cultural forces contributing to and inhibiting solutions to occupational safety and health problems.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ETI is the Engineering Technology (Industrial) prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered summer, with GEB3213 as prerequisite, giving approximately 45 contact hours at the prefix's unsuffixed convention.

⚠ The prerequisite tells you what kind of course this is. It is a business communications course, not a technical one — and the description's language about historical, economic, and cultural forces confirms it. This is a policy and management treatment of occupational safety rather than a hazard-recognition course, and it asks the harder question: why do known, preventable hazards persist decades after the solutions are understood?

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for its ETI courses, but the prefix convention is consistent: unsuffixed courses run at 15 contact hours per credit (ETI1000, ETI1411, ETI1628 and ETI1644 are all published at 3 credits and 45 hours) and C-suffixed courses at 20 (ETI1110C, ETI1701C, ETI1810C and ETI1830C are all 3 credits and 60 hours).

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the scope and history of occupational safety and health.
• Describe the human and economic cost of workplace injury and illness.
• Describe the regulatory framework, including OSHA and its structure.
• Describe the general duty clause and standard-setting processes.
• Describe inspection, citation, and enforcement processes.
• Describe recordkeeping and reporting requirements.
• Describe worker rights and protections, including whistleblower provisions.
• Describe the roles of workers, unions, and employers in workplace safety.
• Describe the hierarchy of controls and apply it to a hazard.
• Describe hazard identification and risk assessment methods.
• Describe common physical, chemical, biological, and ergonomic hazards.
• Describe occupational illness and its long latency problem.
• Describe safety management systems and their elements.
• Describe safety culture and the factors that shape it.
• Describe incident investigation and root cause analysis.
• Describe leading and lagging safety indicators and their limitations.
• Analyse the economic incentives affecting safety decisions.
• Describe workers' compensation and its effects on behaviour.
• Describe the historical development of safety regulation and what drove it.
• Compare occupational safety conditions internationally.
• Describe global supply chains and their safety implications.
• Analyse why known hazards persist despite available solutions.
• Communicate safety information persuasively to management and workers.
• Develop and argue a position on a contested safety policy question.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe industrial hygiene sampling and exposure assessment.
• Describe process safety management.
• Describe emergency preparedness and response planning.
• Describe behaviour-based safety and its critiques.
• Describe environmental regulation and its overlap with occupational safety.
• Prepare for a safety certification such as the ASP or CSP pathway.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Scope and history of occupational safety
• Human and economic cost of injury
• The regulatory framework and OSHA
• General duty clause and standards
• Inspection, citation, and enforcement
• Recordkeeping and reporting
• Worker rights and whistleblower protections
• Roles of workers, unions, and employers
• Hierarchy of controls
• Hazard identification and risk assessment
• Physical, chemical, biological, and ergonomic hazards
• Occupational illness and latency
• Safety management systems
• Safety culture
• Incident investigation and root cause
• Leading and lagging indicators
• Economic incentives and safety
• Workers' compensation
• Historical development of regulation
• International comparison
• Global supply chains
• Why hazards persist
• Persuasive safety communication
• Arguing a policy position

Optional Topics

• Industrial hygiene and exposure assessment
• Process safety management
• Emergency preparedness
• Behaviour-based safety and its critiques
• Environmental regulation overlap
• Safety certification pathways

Resources & Tools

• ASQ — American Society for Quality (asq.org) — certification bodies of knowledge and quality standards; the CQT and CQE credentials are recognised in manufacturing.
• ASME, SME, and IISE — the professional societies for mechanical, manufacturing, and industrial engineering technology; student membership is inexpensive.
• NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership (nist.gov/mep) — free practical resources on manufacturing improvement.
• OSHA (osha.gov) — free standards, guidance, and the OSHA 10 and 30 construction and general industry cards.
• ASTM and ISO standards — the testing and quality standards manufacturing actually works to; check library access before buying.
• Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction (Callister) — the standard materials text.
• Your programme's laboratory and its measuring and testing equipment — the reason to take these courses in person.
• ABET (abet.org) — free accreditation lookup; worth checking for any engineering technology programme you are considering.
• OSHA (osha.gov) — free standards, enforcement data, and the injury and illness statistics this course analyses.
• NIOSH (cdc.gov/niosh) — free; the research arm, and the source for exposure limits and hazard reviews.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics injury and illness data — free; the primary data for any argument about trends.
• Chemical Safety Board investigation reports and videos (csb.gov) — free, and the best case material available on why serious incidents happen; the animated reconstructions are used in industry training worldwide.
• BCSP (bcsp.org) — the ASP and CSP certification pathway for safety professionals.

Career Pathways

• Industrial engineering technologist or technician — SOC 17-3026.
• Quality control inspector and quality technician — SOC 51-9061; a common entry route with clear progression.
• Manufacturing production technician and process technician.
• Industrial production manager — SOC 11-3051; the usual destination of the management courses in this prefix.
• Operations and supply chain roles — planning, scheduling, and continuous improvement.
• Technical sales engineer — SOC 41-9031; frequently the best-paid route out of a technical background, and the reason ETI3690 exists.
• Occupational health and safety specialist — SOC 19-5011.
• Aerospace and space systems technician — a distinctively Florida sector on the Space Coast and through the aerospace supply chain.
• ⚠ Many aerospace and defence roles require U.S. citizenship and some require a security clearance — find out early if that pathway interests you.
• Quality management and Six Sigma — certification-driven and well paid.
• Continue to a master's in engineering management or industrial engineering — ⚠ note that an engineering technology degree is not the same as an engineering degree for professional licensure purposes; check requirements before assuming.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The hierarchy of controls — and why the bottom of it is where most effort goes

• Elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, personal protective equipment — in that order of effectiveness, and it is a hierarchy rather than a menu.
• Elimination and substitution actually remove the hazard, and they are permanent. Everything below depends on people behaving as intended, every time.
• Engineering controls protect everyone without requiring compliance — a guard, an interlock, a ventilation system. They work when someone is tired, distracted, or new.
• ⚠ Personal protective equipment is the least effective control and it is where organisations put most of their effort, because it is the cheapest and it transfers the responsibility to the worker. Noticing that pattern is one of the more useful things this course teaches.
• Administrative controls — training, procedures, signage — degrade over time and under production pressure.
• "Be careful" is not a control. Neither is a warning sign on a hazard that could have been guarded.
• Ask what the hierarchy would suggest whenever a control is proposed, and ask why the higher options were rejected.
• Cost is a legitimate consideration and it is not the only one — and being able to argue that clearly, in writing, to people holding a budget is precisely why this course has a communications prerequisite.

⚠ Occupational illness is the part that gets missed

• Injuries are visible and immediate; illnesses are slow and diffuse, and that asymmetry shapes everything about how safety is managed and measured.
• Latency defeats intuition. An exposure today may cause disease in twenty years, by which time the worker has changed employer, the process has changed, and causation is contested.
• That is exactly why exposure limits, monitoring, and records exist — they are the only mechanism that connects cause to effect across decades.
• Historical cases repay study — asbestos, silica, coal dust, benzene — because the pattern repeats: the hazard was known long before it was controlled, and the delay was economic and political rather than scientific.
• Injury rates alone are a poor measure of a safety programme. They lag, they can be suppressed by discouraging reporting, and they say nothing about illness or about catastrophic risk.
• ⚠ A low injury rate can coexist with severe process safety risk — several major industrial disasters occurred at sites with excellent personal-injury statistics, and that disconnect is a central lesson of modern safety thinking.
• Leading indicators — near misses reported, hazards closed out, audits completed — tell you more about the future than injury counts tell you about it.

⚠ This prefix spans PSAV certificates and a bachelor's degree — know which you are in

• ETI at Daytona State runs from 0000-level PSAV clock-hour courses through to 4000-level bachelor's coursework, which is an unusually wide range for one prefix.
• The 0000-level courses carry no college credit. ETI0450, ETI0456, ETI0481 and similar are PSAV clock-hour training measured in hours, not credits — a different credential entirely.
• The 1000- and 2000-level courses carry lower-division college credit and feed associate degrees.
• The 3000- and 4000-level courses are upper division, forming part of a bachelor of applied science in engineering technology.
• ⚠ A 1000- or 2000-level course does not substitute for a 3000- or 4000-level one, even where the subject overlaps — compare ETI1420C (Engineering Materials and Processes, lower division) with ETI3421 (Materials and Processes, upper division).
• Confirm with an advisor which lower-division courses feed the BAS, and in what sequence.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

ETI4704 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered summer at Daytona State, with GEB3213 as prerequisite.

⚠ This is a policy and management treatment, not a hazard-recognition course — expect reading, analysis, and written argument. If you need practical hazard training, an OSHA 10 or 30 card is a separate and inexpensive credential worth holding alongside it.