Owner, manager face jail in death of pregnant employee
October 22, 2010 by Fred HosierPosted in: cost of safety, criminal charges, Fatality, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, lockout/tagout, Safety training, What do you think?
PDF When investigations into workplace deaths find particularly egregious safety failures, the penalties won’t stop with fines from OSHA. These cases can be forwarded to prosecutors for criminal charges. That’s what happened in this California fatality.
The owner/CEO and manager of Digital Pre-Press International, a San Francisco printing company, face jail time and huge fines in connection with the workplace death of an employee who was four months pregnant.
Margarita Mojica was crushed to death by a creasing and cutting machine on Jan. 29, 2008.
Mojica was preparing the machine, which functioned like a giant, mechanized clam shell, for a printing job and reached into it.
The machine turned on, trapping Mojica.
Rescuers had to be called to release her from the machine. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Owner Sanjay Sakhuja and manager Alick Yeung are charged with involuntary manslaughter. If convicted, the penalties are from two to four years in prison and fines up to $250,000. The company could be fined $1.5 million.
Cal/OSHA violations in connection with the death include not instructing employees to turn off the machine’s power before reaching into it to set up jobs, and not having required safety devices on the machine.
Should criminal penalties such as jail time and six-figure fines be potential punishments for company owners and managers in cases such as this one? Let us know what you think in the Comments Box below.
SafetyNewsAlert.com delivers the latest Safety news once a week to the inboxes of over 270,000 Safety professionals.
Click here to sign up and start your FREE subscription to SafetyNewsAlert!
Tags: death of pregnant employee, involuntary manslaughter, jail time
Loading ...
October 26th, 2010 at 8:17 am
Yes, I agree. Maximum penalty. Employer should have equipped the machine with a mechanism that would not machine to operate while operator is inside.
October 26th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I agree as well. The price of light curtains, training, or other means of guarding is SO much cheaper than a death! Not to mention that you just killed someone! How could you live with yourself!
It’s aggrevating to hear that employers won’t guard machinery to save a buck.
On the other hand, if an employee plain out ignores the safety rules and you’ve guarded the heck of out your equipment, it’s a shame, but employers should not be held accountable if everything was done correctly.
Document, document, document! People need to make sure your employees UNDERSTAND what they are learning!
How sad to have a fatality. We’ve had one here at my work - before my time - but I still see the effects on people when they talk about it. You never really get over it.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Thats horrible, it should be included in training, from day one. All employees should be instructed in the proper operation of thier machines. The article also said there was no safety devices on the machine? Where was the safety rep for that company,the machine rep? Did they even have a written step by step policy how to use this machine? Im sure that if some sort of training was done this type of accidents might not be as frequent.
October 26th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Can someone say “Lockout Tagout”?
March 18th, 2011 at 9:01 am
Lock out -Tag out. Thank you Ken for pulling the process out of the dust. Being LOTO is a process that requires human involvement and a willingness to perform it I doubt it would have helped here. LOTA I am willing to wager when used dilligently by a company will reflect that company and their great safety track record. Why… because they think about the most basic procedures when working with equipment. Turning off/unplugging the machine.
Print shops are hectic places to work at best of times, I know this first hand as I was print room manager for NATO in Norway and Belgium back in the 70′s-80′s and ran 2 print shops in Boston, 1 union and 1 not. Nobody can wait for the finished product. It is an extreme environment.
The machine mentioned I belive is a die cutting machine. Put something in, take it out and the process repeats itselfover and over, get out of sequence and you can be reaching in when you should have been pulling out. Follow that? The speed some operators do this is scary with no room for error. Have a look…http://www.friendsenggcorp.com/img/die_cutting_machine1.jpg
Unfortunate incident but common in the printing industry. Removing the guarding equipment will certainly increase prodcution but the employee suffers in the end. Willingness on the part of the employee to operate equipment without the safety gear projects them as a team player in their eyes to their employers.Production over Safety. You know that is a common place behaviour. The employer probably is a personable type but ultimately he is accountable and should be fined. The fine should match the crime and sending these fellows to jail certainly makes a strong case for what could be called ‘crimes against employees’. Forget calling these continuing incidents safety infractions, begin calling them ‘Crimes” and looking at the employers as ‘Criminals”. Now would that not puit a twist on things.
JS