The redacted OSHA Form 301: What to delete for an authorized employee representative

An authorized employee representative asks for your Form 301s. You have to provide them, and you have to remove specific information first. Most employers have never done this and work it out under time pressure, which is exactly how a disclosure happens.

The short answer

Nine elements are deleted from the Form 301 before it goes to an authorized employee representative: name, address, date of birth, date of hire, gender, name of the physician, the location where treatment was provided, whether treated in an emergency room, and whether hospitalized overnight as an inpatient. Records are due by the end of the next business day.

Who can ask, and what they get

Access rights differ by requester, and conflating them is the first mistake.

• The employee themselves, a former employee, or their personal representative: entitled to the complete Form 301 for their own case, unredacted.
• An authorized employee representative (typically a union): entitled to the 301s, but only the part of the form containing the description of the incident, with the nine elements removed.
• Anyone entitled to the 300 Log gets the log with privacy concern cases already anonymized.

The redaction obligation attaches to the representative request, not to the employee's own.

The nine elements

California enumerates these explicitly at §14300.35(b)(2)(E)2. Federal OSHA states the same principle in more general terms, which in practice means the enumerated list is the safer standard to work to wherever you are.

1. Employee name
2. Employee address
3. Date of birth
4. Date hired
5. Gender
6. Name of the physician or other health care professional
7. The facility name and address where treatment was provided
8. Whether the employee was treated in an emergency room
9. Whether the employee was hospitalized overnight as an inpatient

Notice what stays: what the employee was doing, what happened, what the injury was, and what object or substance harmed them. That is the point of the disclosure. A representative is entitled to understand the hazard, not the person.

Why items 6 through 9 are on the list

The first five are obviously identifying. The last four look like clinical detail and are on the list for a different reason: in a small workforce they are re-identifying.

If a facility had one overnight admission last quarter, "hospitalized overnight" plus a date names the person to anybody who works there. The treating physician and facility do the same job. Redaction lists in general are designed against this, and it is worth understanding when somebody argues that a particular field is harmless.

The deadline

By the end of the next business day. That is short, and it is the reason to work out your process before a request arrives rather than after.

If your 301s are PDFs in a folder, the estimate for a year of cases is most of a day with a redaction tool, done by somebody nervous about missing a field. If they are records, it is a different rendering of data you already hold.

The mistake to design against

The intuitive implementation is a flag on the existing form: same template, hide nine fields when a checkbox is set. It works, and it is one careless edit away from a disclosure. Somebody adds a field to the form six months later, does not know about the flag, and the field prints on both versions.

The safer shape is a separate template that cannot reach the identifying data at all. Not "hidden if," but structurally unable to load it. Then a future edit cannot leak, because there is nothing there to leak.

That is how carefoundryESC does it: the redacted 301 is its own template that never loads the employee relation, with a test that fails the build if it ever does. It is part of the OSHA compliance baseline, available to any employer.

A short checklist

• Know who is asking. Employee, personal representative and authorized employee representative have different entitlements.
• Work to the nine-element list even under federal jurisdiction. It is the enumerated version of the same rule.
• Test your process before it is needed: produce a redacted 301 for last year's cases and have somebody who was not involved check every field.
• Confirm you can meet the end-of-next-business-day deadline with the records you actually have.
• Do not implement redaction as a flag on the full form.

Check the current text

Read 29 CFR 1904.35, and 8 CCR §14300.35 if you are in California, before relying on this summary.