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Hearing Highlights Need for Tougher Penalties for Job Safety and Health Violations |
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Employers who violate workplace safety and health laws—even to the point where workers are killed or injured—now face such minimal penalties that too many ignore the law, witnesses told the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee during a hearing yesterday that coincided with Workers Memorial Day.
They called for tougher enforcement of safety laws and stronger sanctions against law-breaking employers.
Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO director of health and safety, told the panel:
Current OSHA enforcement and penalties are far too weak to provide any meaningful incentive for employers to address job hazards or to deter violations. As a result, workers are exposed to serious hazards that put them in danger and cause injury and death.
The maximum penalty for a serious violation that injures or even kills a worker is $7,000, and $70,000 for willful and repeated violations. But those are rarely assessed. Seminario said that the average penalty for a serious violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) is less than $1,000 and the average penalty when a worker is killed is $11,300.
Rebecca Foster told the committee that her 19-year-old step son Jeremy Foster was killed in October 2004 while working at a sawmill in Ola, Ark. OSHA cited his employer for a “serious” safety violation for improperly modifying a piece of equipment that resulted in his death. Yet the law only allows a fine up to $7,000 for such a violation.
We were appalled to see the amount of the fine: $4,500. Surely this was an error. Shortly afterwards we read in our state newspaper that the fine had been reduced to only $2,250. Did they place a value of our only son’s life at this amount?
Penalties for violating the OSH Act were last updated in 1990 and not indexed for inflation. Since the OSH Act became law 39 years ago, only 71 criminal cases have been prosecuted. But because the OSH Act classifies violations that result in the death of a worker as just Class B misdemeanors with a maximum penalty of six months in jail, the defendants in those cases served only a combined total of 42 months behind bars. Said University of Michigan Law School professor David M. Uhlmann:
Misdemeanor violations provide little deterrence and minimal incentive for prosecutors and law enforcement personnel, who reserve their limited resources for the crimes that Congress has deemed most egregious by making them felonies.
Last week, committee chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) and other committee members introduced legislation to strengthen and modernize the OSH Act. The Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067) would strengthen health and safety penalties, bring more workers under the protection of OSHA, protect workers who blow the whistle on employers who break the law and strengthen worker safety rights.
At yesterday’s hearing, Miller noted that “while both civil and criminal penalties are available under the OSH Act,”
criminal prosecutions of egregious violations of the law are only possible when a willful violation leads to the death of a worker. Even then, no matter how bad an employer acted, killing a worker is only a class B Misdemeanor
These penalties for failing to protect workers pale in comparison to the penalties for failing to protect animals or the environment generally. Even maliciously harassing a wild burro under the Federal Wild Horses and Burros Act can bring twice as much prison time as killing a worker after willfully violating the law.
Seminario said:
Action is needed to put teeth into enforcement of the job safety law, and to bring OSHA enforcement into line with the enforcement practices and authorities under other safety and environmental laws.
OSHA can and should take action under the existing law to make enforcement more effective and to enhance penalties for violations that put workers in serious danger and cause death and injury.
The entire OSHA penalty policy and formulas should be reviewed and revamped. The agency should use its full statutory authority to impose meaningful penalties for serious, willful and repeat violations of the law, particularly in cases involving worker deaths.
Click here to read the witnesses’ testimony and for an archived video of the hearing. And here for shorter videos of the testimony.
4 Comments
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Good comments. Bosses whom order workers to work in unsafe enviroments and do unsafe acts are criminals, not misguided folks. Tossing a few of them in jail would have some positive impact in folks complying with the law.
Death and Injury at the Workplace is CHEAP in Nevada!
Cost Containment on Enforcement is a Profit Opportunity for Employers, all at the expense of Human Lives from our workforce. These are the workplace “Crime” stories, and how Greed and Power diminishes the lives of our American Family. The cost of the lives of our Fathers and Mothers, our Sons and Daughters at work, are simply a “Cost of Doing Business” when there are no real consequences for “Death in the Workplace.”
READ ABOUT THE FACTS HERE:
“State deal in deaths at Orleans questioned”
Click here: State deal in deaths at Orleans questioned - Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jul/15/state-deal-deaths-orleans-questioned/
Click here: Influenced, OSHA bends - Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/apr/18/influenced-osha-bends/
Click here: OSHA goes easy - Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/mar/31/osha-goes-easy/
It’s about a REAL “Culture of Safety,” Not “Cost Containment!”
Your comments and feedback on the Articles above are Welcome and Encouraged
Craig Michie - Injured Worker
NvVIAW@aol.com
Nevada Voters Injured At Work
“YOU DON’T TOUCH A CASINO IN THIS STATE”
Don Barker, former safety director for Boyd Gaming
INJURED: David Snow was left with disabling injuries when he tried to rescue two Orleans co-workers in a sewage pit. Investigators said the hotel and casino “willfully” violated safety rules in the accident, which claimed the lives of the two workers. But political appointees at OSHA lessened that finding, a common practice in Las Vegas.
Twelve have died at buildings and construction sites. In case after case, the state has dropped or sharply reduced penalties proposed by investigators.
By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 28, 2008
LAS VEGAS — A recently hired plumber was sent into the bowels of the Orleans hotel and casino last year to unplug a sewer pipe in a large grease trap — an assignment that would be his last.
The hotel had no permit or training program to allow plumber Richard Luzier to enter a confined space where he might inhale poisonous sewer gas. He had no breathing apparatus or emergency rescue harness — all routine precautions.
Luzier fell 12 feet and landed face down in fatty sewage. As supervisors watched, a second unprepared worker, Travis Koehler, went into the pit to help. He collapsed on top of Luzier. A third man, David Snow, was sent in.
By the time city rescue personnel could enter the trap, Snow was in a coma, heaped atop the first two men, who were dead. Snow woke 23 days later in the hospital with a tube down his throat and permanent disabling injuries.
Investigators at the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded that the casino, owned by Boyd Gaming Corp., had “willfully” violated safety rules.
The company had a previous violation involving such confined spaces. And the investigators found evidence that in 2001 a worker fell sick after working in a grease trap and was cared for in a hotel room for several days before being sent to a hospital, according to state records.
But when the investigators tried to formally cite the company after the two men’s deaths, Boyd attorneys pressed two political appointees overseeing Nevada OSHA, Mendy Elliott and D. Roger Bremner, for a less severe finding. In a private settlement conference, Bremner, administrator of the Nevada Division of Industrial Relations, knocked the finding down to “serious” rather than “willful,” according to state records. A willful finding could have exposed Boyd to civil suits, normally prevented by workers compensation law.
“You don’t touch a casino in this state,” said Don Barker, the former safety director of Boyd Gaming. “I got paid to make things go away. I might go into a conference facing a $25,000 fine and leave with a $1,500 fine. This situation would never happen in any other state. The program has no teeth.”
You can read the full story at:
Click here: “YOU DON’T TOUCH A CASINO IN THIS STATE” how gaming resort contractors in Las Vegas get away with willfully neglec
http://gangbox.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/you-dont-touch-a-casino-in-this-state-how-gaming-resort-contractors-in-las-vegas-get-away-with-willfully-neglecting-their-workers-health-and-safety/
Your Comments and Feedback are Welcome!
Craig Michie - Injured Worker
NvVIAW@aol.com
Nevada Voters Injured At Work
It is deeply disturbing to hear AFL-CIO repeat the BLS recorded number of worker deaths as though this were the accurate total. It is not. The number of worker fatalities recorded by BLS is a gross under-report.
Worker deaths from toxic exposures and other work illnesses are conservatively estimated by NIOSH and other researchers at 50,00 to 60,000 deaths each year, or ten times the number of fatalities from work injuries recorded by BLS. It is a disaster of monumental proportions that goes largely unrecorded and unnoticed.
Occupational illness and injury deaths are now the eighth leading cause of death in the US (LaDou, 2006).
Patrice Woeppel, Ed.D.
Author: Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System