What is stop-work authority?

Stop-work authority is a written company rule that any person on site, employee or contractor, may stop a task, their own or someone else's, when they believe someone could be hurt, and that nobody will be punished for a stop made in good faith, even one that turns out to have been unnecessary. Work restarts only when a named person has confirmed the hazard is gone or controlled. It is a policy, not a law, except in a few sectors such as offshore oil and gas in the United States.

Is stop-work authority required by OSHA?

No. The Occupational Safety and Health Act does not require a stop-work programme. It protects, under Section 11(c), a worker who refuses dangerous work in a narrow set of conditions: a good-faith belief that a reasonable person would share of a real danger of death or serious injury, no time to use the normal channels, and where possible a request to the employer to fix the hazard first. A few standards carry a narrow stop authority, such as the crane operator's right to refuse a load. Offshore oil and gas is the exception: the BSEE SEMS rule requires stop-work authority for all personnel. This is a description, not legal advice.

What is the difference between stop-work authority and the right to refuse unsafe work?

The right to refuse is a legal protection for the worker exposed to a danger, with a high threshold and a burden on the worker; in the United States it covers a good-faith refusal where a reasonable person would see a real danger of death or serious injury. Stop-work authority is a company rule with a lower threshold, a reasonable belief that someone could be hurt, that covers other people's work as well as the worker's own and ends with a named person clearing the restart. A plant that relies on the legal right alone has set the bar for stopping at serious injury.

Who can restart work after a stop-work call?

A named person in charge of the area, after two things are true: the hazard has been checked gone or controlled, and the people who will do the task agree the plan is safe. The decision, the reason and the time are written down. Not the person who stopped alone, and not the person who owns the schedule alone. If the stopper and the person in charge disagree, the work stays stopped and the question goes up a level.

What should a supervisor do when someone stops work?

Thank them first, by name, then go to the spot and ask what they saw rather than why they stopped. Look at the hazard together, decide the next step with them, put an interim control in if the fix will take time, and tell them what was done before the end of the shift. Do not argue about whether the stop was needed, do not swap in someone willing to carry on, and tell the story at the next huddle. The first minute decides whether the next person stops.

Why do workers not use stop-work authority even when the policy exists?

Because they do not believe the no-retaliation promise, because the written threshold reads as imminent death, because restarts are expensive and the line is behind, because their supervisor has never stopped a job, and because nobody around them has either. The fixes are to lower the threshold to include uncertainty, make restarts cheap, have leaders stop work visibly, measure the response rather than the stops, and tell the story of every stop at the huddle.

How do you measure a stop-work programme?

Count stops by area, shift and contractor and read them as a pattern, never as a target: no quota, no zero-stop goal, no count per person on the board. The indicators that matter are about the response and the fixes: time from stop to interim control and to permanent fix, the share of fixes at the top of the hierarchy of controls, the share of stoppers given feedback the same shift, recorded restart decisions, repeat stops on the same hazard, and how many different people have ever stopped. Set the baseline from your own first quarter.

Does stop-work authority cover contractors?

It should, in writing and by name, and the contractor's people should hear it at orientation and see it on the job safety analysis before they start. Contractors do a large share of the riskiest work on site and have the least reason to believe a client's rule protects them. The offshore SEMS rule gives the authority to all personnel, and ISO 45001 has clauses titled Procurement and Contractors for a reason.

Practical guide · Safety management

Stop-work authority: who has it, where it comes from, and how to make it real on the floor

Short answer

Stop-work authority (SWA) is a written company rule that anyone on site, employee or contractor, may stop a task, their own or someone else's, when they see something that could hurt a person, and that nobody will be punished for stopping, even when the stop turns out to have been unnecessary. It is wider than the legal right to refuse dangerous work, which in the United States protects a worker only in a narrow set of conditions. Writing the rule is the easy part. What makes it real is what happens in the first minute after someone stops: the supervisor thanks them, the team looks at the hazard together, the fix or an interim control goes in, a named person clears the restart, and the stop is logged and fed back to the person who called it. If nobody ever stops, if a stop is punished, or if a stop changes nothing, the policy is a poster.

Last updated: October 21, 2026

What stop-work authority is, who has it and what it covers

Stop-work authority is a rule the employer writes, not a law. In the United States the Occupational Safety and Health Act does not require it; the United Steelworkers' 2022 bargaining guide opens with that point. One regulator does require it, for offshore oil and gas, and that rule says in six lines what a good policy has to contain. Industry wrote the idea into policy because the law set the bar too high: the legal right to refuse starts at death or serious injury, and most of what hurts people on a plant floor sits below that line until the day it does not.

Who has it is the first test of whether a policy is serious. The honest answer is everyone on site: operators, maintenance, the temp on week one, the contractor's apprentice, the plant manager. Contractors matter most, because many of the stops that count happen where a contractor's job meets a running line, and a contractor who believes the client's rule does not cover them will keep going. Safety+Health's 2015 feature put the scope in one line from a contractor safety director: "If you see it, you own it." The authority covers the person's own task and other people's work, a machine, an area, a lift, an entry.

A policy makes three promises. Anyone may stop. Stopped work does not restart until a named person has confirmed the hazard is gone or controlled. Nobody is punished, teased or quietly moved for a stop made in good faith, including one that turns out to have been unnecessary. The third promise is the one that gets broken.

What a stop-work policy has to answer (illustrative)
Question	The answer a working policy gives	Where it goes wrong
Who may stop work?	Any person on site, employee or contractor, regardless of role or seniority	Only employees; only trained staff; only the person doing the task
What may they stop?	Their own task or anyone else's: a job, a machine, an area, a lift, an entry	Only their own assigned work
What counts as a reason?	A reasonable belief that someone could be hurt, including not being sure the plan is safe	Imminent danger only; a list of named conditions and nothing else
Who must comply?	Everyone told to stop, at once, while the person in charge makes the stop orderly and safe	A supervisor who can wave it off on the spot
Who clears the restart?	A named person in charge of the area, after checking the hazard is gone or controlled and the crew agrees	The person who stopped, alone; or whoever owns the schedule, alone
What is recorded?	Who stopped, what they saw, what was done, who cleared the restart and when, and what the stopper was told	Nothing; or a form so long that nobody stops twice
What happens to the person who stopped?	A thank-you in front of the crew and an answer within the shift	A talk about the schedule; a transfer; a name on a list

Illustrative. The right-hand column is a list of things that have been seen in real policies, not a prediction about yours.

Where it comes from

Stop-work authority has several parents: a narrow legal right and its equivalents abroad, a few industries that wrote the practice down after fatal events, a management-system standard, and a production idea from Toyota. What follows describes each and names the source. It is not legal advice; the rules differ between the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and within Canada between provinces.

The US law behind it: Section 11(c) and the right to refuse

Section 11(c) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 makes it unlawful for an employer to discharge or discriminate against a worker for exercising a right under the Act; OSHA says a retaliation complaint must be filed within 30 days. The right to refuse dangerous work sits inside that protection, and it is narrower than most people think. OSHA's regulation, 29 CFR 1977.12, says there is ordinarily no right to walk off the job over possible unsafe conditions; the normal route is to ask the employer to fix the hazard and, failing that, to ask for an inspection. The exception protects a worker who refuses in good faith when a reasonable person in the same position would conclude there is a real danger of death or serious injury, when there is not enough time to remove the danger through the regular channels, and when, where possible, the worker has asked the employer to correct it and the employer has not. OSHA's advice to the worker: ask for the hazard to be fixed or for other work, say you will not do the task until it is, and stay on site unless ordered to leave.

A few OSHA standards carry a narrow stop authority of their own. The cranes and derricks standard for construction, 29 CFR 1926.1418, requires that the operator have the authority to stop and refuse to handle loads whenever there is a concern about safety, until a qualified person has determined that safety is assured. A stop-work rule for one person at one machine; everyone else gets the authority from their employer or not at all.

The industries that wrote it down

Offshore oil and gas has the clearest written rule. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement's SEMS regulation for the US outer continental shelf, 30 CFR 250.1930, requires every programme to give all personnel the authority to stop work when they witness an imminent risk or danger: a condition, activity or practice that could reasonably be expected to cause death or serious physical harm, or significant environmental damage. The person in charge makes the stop orderly and safe; anyone told to stop complies at once; work resumes only when the person with ultimate work authority determines the hazard no longer exists, and that decision is recorded in writing. The rule also puts a stop-work statement in every job safety analysis, training at orientation and a review at every safety meeting. Onshore, the industry follows the same pattern through company rules; IOGP's Life-Saving Rules (Report 459) are its common set of nine rules for the activities most often linked to fatalities, and a stop-work policy is how a company backs them up. The rules' wording is controlled by IOGP and not reproduced here.

Construction has no general OSHA stop-work rule beyond the crane operator's, so the practice lives in contractor and owner policies, pre-task plans and orientations. Safety+Health's 2015 feature summarises what the better programmes do. Train everyone at hire and refresh hazard recognition. Teach people to intervene with a co-worker without making them defensive. Use the company's own rules as the reference for when work must stop. Treat discomfort as a valid reason to pause even when the area turns out to be safe, and read frequent use of the authority as a sign of a deeper problem. On response: thank the person, do not single them out, and never replace a worker who stopped a job with someone willing to carry on.

Nuclear power approaches it from the side of speaking up. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 1996 policy statement on the freedom of employees to raise safety concerns without fear of retaliation (61 FR 24336) defined a safety-conscious work environment as one where employees feel free to raise concerns, the concerns are promptly reviewed, prioritised by safety significance and resolved, and the employee gets timely feedback. The anti-retaliation rule is 10 CFR 50.7, which protects employees of licensees and their contractors who report concerns. The NRC calls the environment an expectation rather than a regulatory requirement; stop-work authority sits on top of it, in site procedures.

ISO 45001, the United Kingdom and Canada

ISO 45001:2018 does not use the words stop-work authority. Three of its clause titles are where an auditor will look for the idea: 5.4, Consultation and participation of workers; 8.1.3, Management of change; and 8.1.4, Procurement, with 8.1.4.2, Contractors. A written policy that covers contractors, a log of stops with the fixes that followed, and a stop-work line in every job safety analysis are the kind of evidence that speaks to those titles. The standard's text is not reproduced here.

In the United Kingdom the protection is section 44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996: a worker has the right not to suffer a detriment for leaving, or refusing to return to, a place of work where they reasonably believed there was serious and imminent danger they could not reasonably avert, or for taking appropriate steps to protect themselves or others. A 2021 order (S.I. 2021/618) extended the protection from employees to workers from 31 May 2021.

In Canada the right to refuse is in law in every jurisdiction, but not the same law. For federally regulated workplaces, section 128 of the Canada Labour Code, Part II, lets an employee refuse to use a machine, work in a place or perform an activity when they have reasonable cause to believe it would be a danger to themselves or another employee. The right has limits, where the refusal would directly endanger someone else or the danger is a normal condition of employment, and section 147 prohibits reprisals. Most plants are provincially regulated; each province and territory has its own occupational health and safety act with its own refusal procedure; the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety counts the right to refuse among the three rights every jurisdiction gives workers. The provincial procedures are not set out here. None of this is legal advice.

The lean parallel: the andon cord

Toyota describes jidoka as building human judgement into automation: when a machine, quality or work-delay problem occurs, the equipment stops itself or an operator stops the line by pulling a cord, the andon board lights to call the person in charge, and the defect is not passed downstream. Jeffrey Liker's The Toyota Way (2004) makes stopping to fix problems the fifth of its fourteen principles. Our andon guide covers the cord, the states and the escalation ladder. Stop-work authority is the same idea pointed at harm instead of defects: the person closest to the work sees the problem first, so the system's job is to make stopping cheap and the response fast. One difference matters. An andon pull is expected many times a shift and the line is built to absorb it; a stop-work call is rarer, the work has no buffer, and the person is stopping other people's work. That is why production pressure, covered below, is the real design problem.

Stop-work authority is not the same as refusing unsafe work

The two get mixed up in policies and toolbox talks, and the mix-up costs stops. A worker told about the right to refuse hears a high bar and a personal risk: I have to believe I could die, I have to have asked first, and I carry the burden of proof. A worker given stop-work authority hears a lower bar and a shared decision: I think someone could be hurt, I stop, we look at it together. The table puts the two beside the andon pull, since all three are ways of saying stop.

Refusing unsafe work, stop-work authority and an andon pull compared
	Refusing unsafe work	Stop-work authority	Andon pull
Where it comes from	Law: OSH Act Section 11(c) and 29 CFR 1977.12 in the US; ERA 1996 s.44 in the UK; the Canada Labour Code and provincial acts in Canada	The employer's policy, or a collective agreement; required by regulation only in a few sectors, such as offshore oil and gas (30 CFR 250.1930)	The production system's standard work
Who may use it	The worker exposed to the danger	Anyone on site, employee or contractor	Anyone at the station, and the team leader
What it covers	The worker's own assigned task	Any task, machine or area, their own or someone else's	The line or the station
The threshold	In the US, a good-faith belief that a reasonable person would share of a real danger of death or serious injury, with no time for the normal channels	A reasonable belief that someone could be hurt, including being unsure that the plan is safe	Any abnormality: a defect, a delay, a missing part, a quality doubt
What the person does	Asks the employer to fix it or assign other work, says they will not do the task, stays at the site	Says stop, makes the area safe, calls the person in charge	Pulls the cord or presses the button; the board lights
How it ends	The employer corrects the hazard, or the worker seeks an inspection; disputes may end up with a regulator	A named person confirms the hazard is gone or controlled, the crew agrees and the restart is recorded	The team leader resolves it within the takt or the line stops at the fixed position
Protection	Anti-retaliation law, with a filing deadline (30 days to OSHA in the US)	The employer's written promise of no retaliation, enforced by what supervisors do in the first minute	A culture in which pulls are thanked and response times, not pull counts, go on the board

The legal column describes the rules as the agencies state them and is not legal advice. Canadian provinces have their own refusal procedures, not set out here.

A plant that relies on the legal right alone has, without meaning to, set the bar for stopping at death or serious injury and put the burden of proof on the person with the least power in the room. The Steelworkers' guide adds a point that is easy to miss: stop-work authority is an administrative control and a backstop, never the main way a site deals with hazards. The hierarchy of controls comes first. A plant stopping work every day for the same missing guard has a guard problem, not a stop-work success.

How to write a one-page stop-work policy

One page, in plain words, signed by the site leader, posted where jobs start and read aloud at orientation. The length is the point: a policy nobody can hold in their head is one nobody can act on in the two seconds they have. The table gives the lines a working policy needs, with illustrative wording; the offshore rule above covers the same ground and is a useful check.

The lines of a one-page stop-work policy, with illustrative wording
Line	What it has to do	Illustrative wording
Purpose	Say why the rule exists, in one sentence	Nobody at this site is expected to do, or watch, work that could hurt someone. If you see it, stop it.
Who	Name everyone, and say contractors out loud	Every person on this site has stop-work authority: employees, agency staff, contractors, visitors. No role is too junior and no visitor is too senior.
When	Set the threshold low and include uncertainty	Stop when you believe someone could be hurt, when something has changed that the plan did not cover, or when you are not sure the work is safe. Not sure is a reason.
How to stop	Make the stop safe and the words simple	Say stop and the name of the task. Make the area safe. Do not put yourself at risk to stop someone else. Call the supervisor or person in charge.
Who must comply	Remove the argument at the point of the stop	Everyone told to stop, stops. The person in charge makes the stop orderly and safe. Whether the stop was needed is discussed afterwards, never at the moment.
What happens next	Put stopper and supervisor on the same side of the hazard	The person who stopped and the person in charge look at the hazard together, decide what is needed to make the work safe and put an interim control in if the fix will take time.
Restart	Name who clears it and what they check	Work restarts when the person in charge of the area has confirmed the hazard is removed or controlled and the people doing the task agree. The restart and the reason are recorded.
No retaliation	Say it in the plainest words you have, and include the unnecessary stop	Nobody will be disciplined, moved, marked down or given a hard time for stopping work in good faith, including when the stop turns out not to have been needed. Supervisors who break this line will be held to account.
Record and feedback	Keep it short and close the loop	Every stop is logged with what was seen, what was done and who cleared the restart. The person who stopped is told what happened before the end of their shift.
Training and review	Say when people learn it and when the site re-reads it	Covered at orientation for every person, including contractors. Stops are reviewed at the daily tier meeting and the policy at the monthly safety meeting.

Illustrative wording. Have your own counsel, your union if you have one, and your contractors read the draft; the law on refusal and retaliation differs between the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

What to leave out is as useful as what to put in. Leave out a list of exclusions; every exclusion is an argument someone will have at the moment of the stop. Leave out any approval before stopping; approval belongs to the restart. Leave out qualifiers like reasonable and justified in the no-retaliation line, which invite a debate about whether this stop qualified. Then put the sentence that says anyone may stop into the header of every job safety analysis, as the offshore rule requires, so the authority is restated on the one document the crew reads before the job.

Making it real on the floor

A policy can be written in an afternoon. The twelve months after it is posted decide whether it means anything, and most of that is done by supervisors, in the open, in the first minute after someone says stop.

What triggers a stop

Someone could be hurt now: a hand near a running nip, a load overhead with people under it, live equipment without lockout, a confined space without a permit, work at height without protection.
A guard, interlock, light curtain, emergency stop or isolation point is missing, defeated or not working, whether or not anyone is near it.
Something has changed that the plan did not cover: a new tool, a new person, a different material, a changed method. Our stop, think, act poster makes change a reason to stop on its own.
The crew is short, someone is visibly exhausted, or the task needs a skill nobody present has; the Steelworkers' guide lists staffing and fatigue among its triggers.
The person is not sure the work is safe and cannot say why. Treat that as a reason: an investigation that finds the area safe does not make the stop wrong.

Stop, think, act, restart

The sequence below is the stop, think, act check from the poster with a fourth step added, because a stop-work has to end in a decision somebody owns. The figure shows the four steps and who holds each one.

Anyone may stop. A named person clears the restart.

Stop
Anyone on site
- Says stop and names the task
- Crew stops at once
- Person in charge makes it orderly and safe
Think
Stopper and person in charge, together
- Go to the spot
- What could hurt whom, and what changed
- Act, condition or both
Act
A named owner, with a due date
- Fix it now, or put an interim control in
- Permanent fix as high on the hierarchy as possible
- Check the other lines
Restart
Person in charge of the area, crew agrees
- Hazard checked gone or controlled
- Decision and time written down
- Stopper thanked and told what was done

The stop, think, act check from the poster with a fourth step, because a stop-work has to end in a decision somebody owns. Anyone on site may stop. The person in charge of the area clears the restart once the hazard is checked and the crew agrees, and writes the decision down.

1
Stop: say it, make it safe, call the person in charge
The person who sees the hazard says stop and names the task, so everyone within earshot knows what is stopping. The crew stops at once; the person in charge brings the task to an orderly, safe state, which may mean lowering a load or isolating a machine first. Nobody puts themselves at risk to stop someone else: a shout and a signal, not a hand on the equipment. Whether the stop was needed is not discussed yet.
2
Think: look at the hazard together
The stopper and the person in charge go to the spot and look at it together, with the crew. What could hurt whom, and how badly? What changed? Is this a condition, an act or both, and what is behind it (our guide to unsafe acts and unsafe conditions has the questions)? Does the job safety analysis cover this step? A short conversation, not a meeting, with the stopper as a participant rather than a witness.
3
Act: remove or control the hazard, and decide who owns the rest
Fix it on the spot if that can be done without a new risk. If the permanent fix needs parts, people or a design change, put an interim control in now (a barrier, an isolation, a second person) and raise the permanent fix with a named owner and a due date, as high on the hierarchy of controls as you can reach. Ask whether the same hazard exists on the other lines or at the contractor's other jobs.
4
Restart: a named person checks, the crew agrees, the decision is written down
The person in charge of the area confirms the hazard is removed or controlled, briefs the crew on what changed, and asks the people doing the task whether they are ready. If the stopper and the person in charge disagree, the work stays stopped and the question goes up a level. The restart, the reason and the time are logged. The stopper is thanked in front of the crew and told, before the shift ends, what was done about the cause.

Who clears a restart

Not the person who stopped, alone, because that puts the whole decision back on one pair of shoulders and the next person will think twice. Not the person whose schedule the stop hurt, alone, for the obvious reason. The offshore rule gives the decision to the person with ultimate work authority and requires it in writing. A plant can do the same with the person in charge of the area, provided two things are true before anyone touches the equipment: the hazard has been checked gone or controlled, and the people who will do the task agree the plan is safe. Where the two disagree, copy the Steelworkers' model process: the work stays stopped and the disagreement goes up at once rather than being argued out at the machine. A restart ordered from the office, by someone who has not looked, ends the programme as surely as a punished stop.

How to log a stop

Log every stop, including the ones that found nothing; the log is the only record of whether the authority is used and whether it changes anything. Keep the form short and have the supervisor fill it with the stopper. A near miss report form or a safety tag with a stop-work category works; these are the fields it needs.

The fields of a stop-work log entry
Field	Why it is there
Date, time, area, task and who was doing it	Lets the stops be read by shift, area, line and contractor later
Who stopped the work (name, or anonymous by choice)	So the thank-you and the feedback reach them; anonymity stays available for the plant where that is still needed
What they saw, in their words	The reason as the stopper saw it, before anyone has judged it
Act, condition or both, and what was behind it	Points the fix at the system rather than at the person
What was done at once	The interim control, or the fix made on the spot
Permanent fix, owner, due date and level on the hierarchy	Turns the stop into a tracked corrective action
Who cleared the restart, when, and on what grounds	The written restart decision; the offshore rule requires it, and every plant should
Minutes stopped	Costed to the hazard, not to the person; useful later to show leaders what the fixes bought back
Feedback given to the stopper, and when	Closes the loop; the single field most often left blank
Where it was shared	The tier meeting, the toolbox talk, the other lines with the same equipment

The production pressure that makes people hesitate

Nobody hesitates because they have forgotten the rule. They hesitate because the line is behind, the last restart took twenty minutes, the supervisor's face said what his words did not, and nobody around them stopped either. The 2015 Safety+Health piece reported a survey in which most workers at sites with a stop-work policy said they would still not speak up, citing retribution, being ostracised, production pressure, peer pressure and contradicting a supervisor. Each of those has a design answer.

Say at the tier meeting, more than once, that a stop is a plant decision made by whoever saw the hazard first, and that the lost minutes belong to the hazard. Account for them that way on the board.
Make restarts cheap. A machine that takes twenty minutes to come back to speed teaches people not to stop it. A controlled stop that keeps it warm and a restart that does not lose the batch are safety investments.
Build slack for stops into the schedule. A plan with no room for a single stop assumes nobody will see anything.
Have leaders stop work themselves, visibly, including when it costs output, and talk about it afterwards.
Put the response on the board, never the stops per person: time to interim control, time to permanent fix, share of stoppers who got feedback that shift. Our andon guide makes the same rule for pulls.
Never swap in a worker who is willing to carry on. It tells everyone watching what the policy is worth.

The first minute: how a supervisor responds so the next person will stop

Thank them first, by name, before asking anything. The tone and the face are what the crew reads.
Go to the spot; do not decide from the office over the radio.
Ask what did you see, not why did you stop. The first invites a description; the second invites a defence.
Do not argue about whether the stop was necessary. If it was not, that is a gentle conversation for another day.
Tell them what happened before they go home. A stop that disappears into a system is a stop nobody repeats.
At the next huddle, tell the story with the stopper's name and the fix. One good story does more than the poster.

The three ways it fails

Stop-work programmes fail in three recognisable ways, each visible in the log before it shows up in an injury. A fourth pattern, the authority used every day for the same hazard, is a different failure: the programme is working and the hierarchy of controls is not.

Three failure modes of a stop-work programme
Failure	How it looks	What is usually behind it	What to do
Nobody ever uses it	The log is empty or nearly so; near misses are being reported but nobody stops; contractors have never stopped anything	People do not believe the no-retaliation promise, the threshold reads as imminent death, restarts are expensive, supervisors have never stopped a job themselves, orientation covered it in a slide	Lower the written threshold to include uncertainty; have leaders stop work visibly; tell the story of every stop at the huddle; ask the crew, in private and without a form, what would happen if they stopped tomorrow; look at the restart cost of the machines people avoid stopping
It is used, then punished	A stop is followed by a talk about the schedule, a transfer, a joke at the stopper's expense, a name on a list, a replacement who carried on; the log goes quiet within weeks	A supervisor measured on output and not on response; a policy with reasonable and justified in the no-retaliation line; a site leader who did not back the supervisor who backed the stop	Treat the retaliation as the incident: investigate it, correct it in the open, and say so. Change what supervisors are measured on. Remove the qualifiers from the policy. Give the stopper and the crew the first visible evidence that the promise holds
It is used, and nothing changes	Stops are logged, the restart is cleared, the same hazard is stopped again next month; the feedback field is blank; corrective actions sit overdue	The stop is treated as the end rather than the start of the action; no owner or due date on the fix; interim controls that became permanent; stoppers never told what happened	Make every stop a corrective action with an owner, a due date and a level on the hierarchy; review open stop actions at the tier meeting; set a feedback deadline of the same shift; count repeat stops on the same hazard and treat a repeat as an escalation

The second failure is the most expensive because it is the hardest to reverse. A plant where one stop was punished three years ago is still paying for it; the story outlived the supervisor. The only repair is a public one: the retaliation investigated like an injury, the finding shared, and the next stop thanked in front of the same crew.

How to measure it without turning stops into a target

The moment a stop count becomes a target it stops being a measure. A quota produces stops that are theatre; a zero-stop goal produces silence; a count per person on the board produces whichever the supervisor prefers. Count stops, read them, and never set a number for them. The useful indicators are about the response and the fixes, read together with the near miss and observation counts from the same areas.

Stops raised, by area, shift, line and by employee against contractor. Read as a pattern, not a score: an area with none and a near miss count like its neighbours has a silence problem.
How many different people have ever stopped work. Breadth matters more than volume; a programme carried by two people is one transfer from ending.
Time from stop to interim control, and from stop to permanent fix, each as a median and a longest case.
Share of stop-driven corrective actions fixed at the top three levels of the hierarchy of controls, against the share that ended in a reminder or retraining.
Share of stoppers given feedback before the end of their shift, from the log field most often left blank.
Repeat stops on the same hazard. One repeat is an escalation, not a statistic.
Share of people on site, contractors included, who have had the orientation.
What the crew says when asked, in private, what would happen if they stopped the line tomorrow. Not a number, and the best indicator here.

Set the baseline from your own first quarter. No figure on this page or anywhere else says how many stops a plant of your size should have. Frequent stops can mean a programme people trust or a guarding problem; a quiet log can mean a safe floor or a silent one; only the other indicators and the walk tell you which. The safety pyramid poster explains why events that hurt nobody are the chance to learn early; a stop is the cheapest of them.

How LeanSuite supports this

LeanSuite does not replace the conversation at the machine. It gives the stop a record, an owner and a loop back to the person who called it, which is the part most plants lose.

Safety tags: anyone on the floor reports a hazard, near miss or unsafe condition in seconds by scanning the QR code on a machine or area, snapping a photo and choosing a category such as Unsafe Condition, Unsafe Act or Near Miss, and custom tags can be created for any process. Rules route each report to the right person or team by type and location, set the due date from priority and cap how many times it can be reassigned, so a stop-work record gets an owner rather than bouncing between people. A tag that cannot be fixed locally is escalated to tier 2 or tier 3 with its history, and a repeat hazard can be launched as a formal incident investigation in one click.
Near miss reporting: forms can allow anonymous reporting, the reporter is notified when their hazard is resolved, and Lean AI describes each photo and lists the hazards it sees. A hazard report can become a CAPA project with containment tasks tracked before the root cause analysis starts and time-stamped sign-off at every step, for an ISO 45001 audit trail.
Daily issue management: tags can be dictated instead of typed, serve as the corrective action log with owners and due dates in place of the sheet on the production board, and show opened against closed trends and hot spots by area on a floor plan that can run on a shop-floor TV.
Kaizen and project management for safety: every investigation and corrective action runs as a project with an owner, a workflow and due dates, overdue corrective actions raise a notification, and the dashboards show leading indicators such as safety observations, Gemba walks and completed JSAs next to incident rates and near misses, with standardised templates for JSA, LOTO and incident investigations.

Definitions and sources

Section 11(c) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the 30-day complaint deadline: OSHA's Workers' Rights pages (osha.gov/workers). The conditions for a protected refusal: OSHA, Workers' Right to Refuse Dangerous Work (osha.gov/workers/right-to-refuse), and 29 CFR 1977.12(b)(1) and (b)(2), Exercise of any right afforded by the Act. Crane operator's authority to stop: 29 CFR 1926.1418, Authority to stop operation.
Offshore stop-work authority: 30 CFR 250.1930, What must be included in my SEMS program for Stop Work Authority (SWA)?, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. IOGP Life-Saving Rules: IOGP Report 459 (revised to nine rules), as described on the IOGP bookstore page; the rules' text was not read for this page and is controlled by IOGP.
Construction and general practice, the survey on fear of speaking up, and the supervisors' response: Kyle W. Morrison, Stop-work authority, Safety+Health, National Safety Council, May 2015; Safety+Health, August 2018, Empowering workers to halt unsafe situations (lead paragraph only); Safety+Health, July 2022, report on the United Steelworkers guide.
The absence of SWA from the OSH Act, SWA as an administrative control and backstop, the triggers (including staffing and fatigue), the nine-step model process, escalation of disagreements and the no-retaliation language: United Steelworkers, Bargaining for Stop Work Authority to Prevent Injuries and Save Lives, 2022 (usw.org). A union publication, paraphrased.
Nuclear: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Freedom of Employees in the Nuclear Industry to Raise Safety Concerns Without Fear of Retaliation, policy statement, 61 FR 24336, 14 May 1996; 10 CFR 50.7, Employee protection; NRC Regulatory Issue Summary 2005-18 on the safety-conscious work environment being an expectation rather than a regulatory requirement.
ISO 45001:2018, Occupational health and safety management systems: clause titles only (5.4 Consultation and participation of workers; 8.1.3 Management of change; 8.1.4 Procurement; 8.1.4.2 Contractors). The standard's text is not reproduced.
United Kingdom: Employment Rights Act 1996, section 44, as amended by the Employment Rights Act 1996 (Protection from Detriment in Health and Safety Cases) (Amendment) Order 2021, S.I. 2021/618 (legislation.gov.uk); Health and Safety Executive, Involving your workforce in health and safety (hse.gov.uk/involvement).
Canada: Canada Labour Code, Part II, sections 128 and 147 (laws-lois.justice.gc.ca); Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, OH&S Legislation in Canada: Three Rights of Workers. Provincial and territorial refusal procedures were not reviewed for this page.
Toyota: Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Production System (global.toyota), on jidoka, stopping the line by cord and the andon; Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way (McGraw-Hill, 2004), principle 5.
Not legal advice. The legal passages describe rules as the agencies and statutes state them, for orientation; the rules differ by country and, in Canada, by province, and they change. Ask your own counsel before relying on any of them.
What was not used: no rate of stops, injuries or refusals appears on this page, because none could be traced to a study that applies to your plant. The examples and the policy wording are illustrative.

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FAQ

Questions about stop-work authority

Stop-work authority is a written company rule that any person on site, employee or contractor, may stop a task, their own or someone else's, when they believe someone could be hurt, and that nobody will be punished for a stop made in good faith, even one that turns out to have been unnecessary. Work restarts only when a named person has confirmed the hazard is gone or controlled. It is a policy, not a law, except in a few sectors such as offshore oil and gas in the United States.
No. The Occupational Safety and Health Act does not require a stop-work programme. It protects, under Section 11(c), a worker who refuses dangerous work in a narrow set of conditions: a good-faith belief that a reasonable person would share of a real danger of death or serious injury, no time to use the normal channels, and where possible a request to the employer to fix the hazard first. A few standards carry a narrow stop authority, such as the crane operator's right to refuse a load. Offshore oil and gas is the exception: the BSEE SEMS rule requires stop-work authority for all personnel. This is a description, not legal advice.
The right to refuse is a legal protection for the worker exposed to a danger, with a high threshold and a burden on the worker; in the United States it covers a good-faith refusal where a reasonable person would see a real danger of death or serious injury. Stop-work authority is a company rule with a lower threshold, a reasonable belief that someone could be hurt, that covers other people's work as well as the worker's own and ends with a named person clearing the restart. A plant that relies on the legal right alone has set the bar for stopping at serious injury.
A named person in charge of the area, after two things are true: the hazard has been checked gone or controlled, and the people who will do the task agree the plan is safe. The decision, the reason and the time are written down. Not the person who stopped alone, and not the person who owns the schedule alone. If the stopper and the person in charge disagree, the work stays stopped and the question goes up a level.
Thank them first, by name, then go to the spot and ask what they saw rather than why they stopped. Look at the hazard together, decide the next step with them, put an interim control in if the fix will take time, and tell them what was done before the end of the shift. Do not argue about whether the stop was needed, do not swap in someone willing to carry on, and tell the story at the next huddle. The first minute decides whether the next person stops.
Because they do not believe the no-retaliation promise, because the written threshold reads as imminent death, because restarts are expensive and the line is behind, because their supervisor has never stopped a job, and because nobody around them has either. The fixes are to lower the threshold to include uncertainty, make restarts cheap, have leaders stop work visibly, measure the response rather than the stops, and tell the story of every stop at the huddle.
Count stops by area, shift and contractor and read them as a pattern, never as a target: no quota, no zero-stop goal, no count per person on the board. The indicators that matter are about the response and the fixes: time from stop to interim control and to permanent fix, the share of fixes at the top of the hierarchy of controls, the share of stoppers given feedback the same shift, recorded restart decisions, repeat stops on the same hazard, and how many different people have ever stopped. Set the baseline from your own first quarter.
It should, in writing and by name, and the contractor's people should hear it at orientation and see it on the job safety analysis before they start. Contractors do a large share of the riskiest work on site and have the least reason to believe a client's rule protects them. The offshore SEMS rule gives the authority to all personnel, and ISO 45001 has clauses titled Procurement and Contractors for a reason.

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