Questions

The ones worth answering honestly, including the ones where the answer is not flattering.

Do I actually need an IIPP?

If you have employees in California, yes. Title 8 CCR §3203(a) opens “Every employer shall establish, implement and maintain an effective Injury and Illness Prevention Program.” There is no employee-count floor and no exemption for small businesses, offices, or people who work from home.

Isn’t a free template enough?

Cal/OSHA publishes a free model program, and for some employers it is genuinely enough. Two things go wrong with templates in practice. They cover everything, so a countertop shop ends up with chapters on crane safety and a plan nobody reads — and the standard asks whether your program is effective, which a document describing work you do not do makes harder to argue. And they go stale silently: we benchmarked a 254-page consultant manual dated 2026 that contained zero mentions of workplace violence, a plan required of nearly every California employer since July 2024.

What this does instead is generate only the programs your answers say you owe, with each one citing the section it comes from so you can check it.

What do I actually get?

Each program as its own document with its own version and review date, the whole thing as one read-through file for whoever runs the program, a short Employee Safety Handbook to hand every worker, a compliance calendar listing every recurring duty with its interval and its authority, and blank record forms. Both sample programs are the whole thing, every page, if you would rather read one than read about one. The forms matter more than they look: Cal/OSHA judges a program partly on whether employees know it exists and whether it was communicated to them, and those are things you prove with records rather than with prose.

Is this legal advice?

No. It is a document generator. Every citation in it was read against the live regulation text at dir.ca.gov rather than recalled or copied from another program, and the dates of those checks are recorded — but that is verification, not advice, and it is not a substitute for a safety professional or an attorney who knows your workplace.

Has a safety professional reviewed this?

Not yet, and where that matters most the documents say so on their own face. The silica and respiratory protection plans carry the highest cost of being wrong, so they print a notice stating that their standard language has not been read by a Certified Industrial Hygienist or a California safety attorney. That review is in progress. Until it is finished, those plans are generated and marked rather than quietly sold as reviewed.

Can I edit what it produces?

Yes — they are ordinary Word documents. Editing them here creates a new version rather than overwriting the old one, so the history of what changed and when survives, which is the part an inspector asks about.

What happens when the regulations change?

Each plan carries its own version and its own next-review date, and the manual’s front page lists them. A plan past its review date is shaded and marked overdue rather than quietly listed — a manual that hides its own staleness is worth less than one that admits it.

Do you cover construction? Food?

Both. Construction work brings the Construction Safety Orders with it, including a Code of Safe Practices and tailgate meetings at least every ten working days, and the silica plan for construction is a different standard from the one for a fixed facility. Food businesses get kitchen and food production content in their Code of Safe Practices.

Food handler cards are a separate matter: that is the California Retail Food Code, enforced by county environmental health, not Cal/OSHA. There is a free determination tool for it, kept deliberately outside the safety program so the two are not confused.

What about the free silica screener?

It is genuinely free and needs no account. It works out whether §5204 reaches your work and which of your tasks are high-exposure trigger tasks. Nothing you enter is stored.

Refunds?

Full refund within 7 days, as long as you have not downloaded the documents. See the refund policy for what counts as downloading and why the rule works that way.

Something else

Ask. If the answer is that the tool does not do something, you will be told that rather than sold something adjacent.

Not legal advice.