If you work in construction and that job has you out on the highway or any well-trafficked road, you know how dangerous that can be. Then it starts to rain, now what? That is when you know you need high visibility clothing that will let the drivers see you even in the rain.

For you, the worker, this just makes sense. The federal government agrees with you and has issued high visibility clothing requirements guidelines, rules, and regulations that pertain to what you need to be wearing when you are out on the road risking your life to make life better for the rest of us. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) has put out guidelines that detail the exact kinds of high visibility clothing that workers need to wear when they are working in these conditions.

Both OSHA and the FHA often cite the standard as released by the International Safety Equipment Association (ISEA) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Their collective standards are often referred to as the ANSI/ISEA 107 Standard. This has also been referred to as the American National Standard for High Visibility Safety Apparel and Headwear.

The standard sets out criteria for what it considers “high visibility clothing” to be. It could mean a number of things to a number of people. To make the clothing people wear to be seen uniform, they wrote up the standard. The focus, for them, is on the color and the level of brightness of the personal protective equipment.

These standards listed above and the ones that most federal, state and local government agencies use when looking at high visibility clothing for their workers. Most private companies that work in these areas use them as well. If you are asked to work in an environment that OSHA and the FHA deem to require high visibility clothing, your employer needs to supply it. It is not just good policy, it is the law.