I think the push from companies is going to move more and more to terminating employees over safety offenses prior to them having injuries.

Employees may not like it this way. It used to be that if someone was unsafe, it was proven if they got hurt and disciplinary action would follow. Now that OSHA is pushing against discipline of injured employees, companies have no choice but to discipline safety infractions even if they did not result in injury or property damage.

Employees often have a hard time of understanding why they face discipline when “nothing happened”. I have a feeling that the pendulum is going to swing so far that employees will soon be complaining that their company terminated them for safety infractions in which no one was hurt and no property was damaged, therefore was the act really unsafe?

Just my additional 2 cents.

Although I’m not in agreement with firing people if they simply had an injury, I have to make a comment here.

The award says it is for “lowest casualty rate”. To me that implies “death”. How is someone not reporting an injury going to increase a fatality rate? It isn’t. If that is the case, they still would have achieved this award. Just saying.

This will be interesting to see once all of the evidence is out on the firings. I am sure there is more to the story and the company’s side of the story is yet to be told.