Top 10 OSHA fines of 2009
February 22, 2010 by Fred HosierPosted in: Compliance, Falls, Fatality, Injuries, Investigations, OSHA news, Safety training, Special Report, Top-10 list, What do you think?, Who Got Fined and Why?, construction safety, cost of safety, criminal charges, enforcement, fire/explosion, inspections, whistleblower
In the first year of the Obama administration, OSHA was busy handing out fines the likes of which hadn’t been seen for eight years. Here’s our rundown of 10 significant fines from the last 12 months, and what they mean for businesses:
- OSHA issues largest fine ever: $87.4 million to BP. This fine demonstrates OSHA’s intent to check up on companies once they’ve made serious safety mistakes. The agency evaluated BP’s progress after the 2005 fire and explosion that killed 15 people and injured 170 more at its Texas City, TX refinery. OSHA issued 270 “notifications of failure to abate” and identified 439 new willful violations at the plant.
- Two executives face prison time and huge fines in deaths of five workers. Phillipe Goutagny and James Thompson, executives with RPI Coating, each face 2.5 years in prison and a fine up to $1.25 million if convicted. On Oct. 2, 2007, vapor from a solvent ignited inside a tunnel at a hydroelectric plant in Colorado. Workers survived the blast but were overcome by smoke and fumes and died of asphyxiation. OSHA says it will work more closely with the Justice Department in cases like these to bring criminal charges against executives with penalties that include prison time.
- OSHA wastes no time in using new per-employee citations, issues $1.2 million fine. G.S. Robbins & Co. of St. Louis, MO, was hit with 21 egregious willful citations for hazardous chemical handling. Each citation was on a per-instance basis. Even during this period of difficult economic recovery, OSHA won’t hesitate to use per-instance, per-employee fines to hike total fine amounts. This wasn’t the only instance in which OSHA used per-instance citations in 2009 (see item #7 below).
- Company hit with $1.14 million fine following employee complaint. Are the big fines relegated only to incidents involving deaths or multiple serious injuries? Hardly. OSHA began a December 2008 inspection at Milk Specialties in Whitehall, WI, in response to an employee complaint. Willful citations were issued for the employer’s failure to comply with OSHA’s confined space and lockout/tagout regulations. OSHA is taking employee complaints seriously.
- After two similar incidents, owner and manager go to jail. ANC Roofing of Santa Rosa, CA, owner Kenneth Alton pleaded no contest to failing to protect employees from a hazard. He was sentenced to nine months in jail and a $248,000 fine. Supervisor Robert McAfee pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor violation and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. On May 11, 2006, an ANC employee backed into an unguarded skylight and fell 21 feet to his death. Four months later, another ANC employee suffered major head trauma when he fell 19 feet from an unprotected skylight.
- OSHA fines Wal-Mart $7,000 for worker trampling incident. A Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death by a crowd of 2,000 shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving in 2008. OSHA said Wal-Mart should have recognized that its employees were exposed to being crushed by the crowd based on previous experience. Wal-Mart fought the fine. OSHA used the General Duty Clause to issue the fine and has said it will use the GDC in similar situations where safety was compromised but a specific regulation wasn’t violated.
- Company faces $1.09 million OSHA fine for 202 willful violations. OSHA didn’t really need anyone’s permission to start issuing per-instance fines (see item #3 above), but it got the go-ahead in the form of a decision from the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC). The appeals panel ruled OSHA properly cited Smalis Painting Co. on a per-employee basis for violations of the lead-in-construction regulations, in connection with a project near Pittsburgh, PA. OSHA monitored six Smalis employees for lead exposure. Based on that data, OSHA issued violations for all employees who would have been exposed to the same hazards.
- OSHA is getting companies to agree to implement safety and health improvements above what’s required by regulations. A-1 Excavating of Bloomer, WI, agreed to make numerous changes in its work processes in exchange for lowering fines from almost $900,000 to $470,000. A-1 has to hire a full-time safety director, develop and implement site-specific safety and health plans for all major projects, identify all job sites to OSHA before work begins for the next three years, reduce the salary of job superintendents and project managers who fail to comply with OSHA requirements, and retain a third-party safety consultant.
- Cintas agrees to pay $3 million in fines and to comply with other conditions. In some cases, it hasn’t been an either-or situation between fines and strict safety improvements. After a worker was killed when he fell onto an unguarded conveyor and was dragged into a 300-degree industrial dryer, Cintas agreed to the huge fine and to retain a team of independent experts to develop permanent fixes and review interim controls. Cintas also agreed to hire additional safety staff, conduct more frequent internal safety inspections, and establish new systems to examine employee complaints.
- A construction company agrees to pay $750,000 in fines and cut the pay of unsafe supervisors. Broadway Concrete of New York, NY, agreed to reduce the salaries of senior job superintendents who failed to comply with job safety practices. Broadway also agreed to hire a full-time corporate safety director, develop a new corporate safety plan, and provide OSHA with information on major projects and access to all job sites for the next four years.
What do you think of OSHA’s recent enforcement tactics? Let us know in the Comments Box below.
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Tags: BP, Obama administration, OSHA fines, prison time, top 10
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February 23rd, 2010 at 9:43 am
I think OSHA sould hire more inspectors and increase the inspections in all types of industry and get into the health system more than what is being done now. Every facility and industry SHOULD be required to have a QUALIFIED Safety Officer in their facility and always know what is going on and be required to provide training to all staff every year.
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:15 am
Thank God we have an adminisrtation that is actually concerned about the woker and is proving it everyday.
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:20 am
I am concerned when I see companies being dictated to by a government entity, over which the citizens have no control, regarding basic company business like salaries and who they must have on staff. Each company should be allowed to make its own decision how to best implement the necessary safety requirements. This is comparable to the IRS dictating to individuals how they must fill out their W4’s in order to maximize tax witholding and avoid owing additional taxes on April 15th. They are certainly welcome to make suggestions but anything further smacks of socialism. OSHA should be reined in and only allowed to issue fines and file for possible criminal prosecution.
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:40 am
I am a Plant Safety Coordinator. I fully appreciate the need for OSHA to fine companies for safety violations, especially in the cases of wilful non compliance and failure to abate. However, I think it would be prudent to watch OSHA’s fining trends to make sure that the bankrupt OBAMA administration does not use OSHA as a cash cow.
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:41 am
Has OSHA also made it a point to reduce supers salaries if they don’t comply with regs. I don’t ever remember hearing about that form of punishment so to say.
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:52 am
looks like osha is going to be running more than GM
February 23rd, 2010 at 11:47 am
I am a Safety Coordinator and I see every day where companies know they are in violation and still continue poor practices. I disagree with Beard that OSHA should be reined in. I agree that they should be only allowed to issue fines and file for possible criminal prosecution. But when I see that there are salary reductions and added Safety Officers in an organization, that usually comes when the company is negotiating a reduction in their fines. It is usually a position of the company and not imposed by OSHA. OSHA takes into consideration the actions taken to correct the problems. Although when you fail to abate, they become more agressive in their fines. Lets not forget the purpose of the OSH Act, to police organizations that fail to provide a safe work environment for their employees. There are still a lot of orgnaizations that reduce safety to cut costs and need to be policed.
February 23rd, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Thank goodness for OSHA! For once we have a department that has helped fine instead of guide or warn so many companies in the U.S. that it has caused a lot of our jobs to go over seas. Employers need to stop being cheap when it comes to offering safety training and supplies and use common sense to avoid incidents.
February 23rd, 2010 at 1:10 pm
The more of OSHA enforcement tactics will indeed save lives! Laws are made to be heeded. When laws are broken, especially Safety laws, someone has to pay. It is better to pay a monetary amount than someone having to pay with their life.
February 23rd, 2010 at 1:32 pm
I agree that OSHA should not be turned into a cash cow. I also agree that OSHA needs to butt out when it comes to who is hired, fired and how much thay are paid. If I were an owner, OSHA would not have to tell me to get rid of a supervisor or pay them less. If they are not doing their job they are out of here. OSHA plays “good old boy policies” as well as anybody. Fine everybody, big and small. You won’t find OSHA on these small projects, particularly residential, because those little employers are “just good ole boys trying to make a living”…..by killing and injuring their framers, roofers, electricians, plumbers and all of the rest!
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:30 pm
I believe we need OSHA in the United States. I believe that employers large or small have an obligation to provide safe working conditions. I also believe the fines and other penalties that OSHA issues casues businesses to be less competitive in the World marketplace because of the additional expense that every business is required to build into their pricing and and budget as a cost-of-doing-business.
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
OSHA is just another Govt. bureaucracy which has become little more than an expensive waste of taxpayer money and an incentive for US companies to move their operations to foreign shores…Govt. abuse ( Politicians ) , Trial Lawyers and Labor Unions have destroyed American manufacturing and business..
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:51 pm
You should be aware that not all of these penalty cases occurred initially in 2009. For instance, the case referenced paragraph #7 above was investigated in December 1993, The case was then tried before an OSHA Administrative Law Judge in March and April, 1995. The trial judge’s decision was issued in 1996. This appeal to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) wasn’t decided until 2009. In all, it took 14 years and it may not be over. Appeals from OSHRC can go to the the US Circuit Courts of Appeal.
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:27 pm
I worked for an offshore construction company in Louisiana for many years. We had several “visits” from OSHA over the years and it soon became clear that these were nothing but nuisance visits by bureaucrats trying to justify their existence. We then made it a rule that no OSHA inspectors were to be allowed through our gates without a court order…We were a lot better off thereafter except our taxes continued to pay for this useless bureaucracy..
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Yes correcting someone is always a vicious circle. Nobody likes when others come into their sandbox to make corrections. But when your sandbox creates a hazard for other americans we tend to protect ourselves. In doing so, we call on the government and they can go over the top someitmes. When you think of the jobs going to other countries, think also of the working conditions they have compared to ours. It may be cheaper but it is highly dangerous. I find that if more managers did the job that they were hired for (production and loss control), then the fines would be less.
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:55 pm
I think that the employees who had their salaries cut should count themselves lucky. Had there been repeat violation of H&S policies at our company, they sould have been fired. Negligence or worse, willfull would be dealt with by immediate dismissal.
By the way, it was the previous president who bankrupted the country by adding an additional 3.5 trillion to the debt, more than all the previous presidents combined. This one’s only trying to respond to the worst financial crisis in our history.
February 23rd, 2010 at 5:39 pm
OMG, Chris. When are WE going to take ownership? The Congress that you and I elect makes and passes the budget, not just the past administration. Just like our national financial mess, our national safety mess has everybody blaming somebody else, when everybody in the workforce has a responsibility to perform safely; no shortcuts, no “I cannot afford it”, no “it’s not in the budget”, no “It’s not my job”, no “it goes with the territory”, no “real men don’t need that”, and on and on.
February 23rd, 2010 at 7:12 pm
I see we have some labor union / Obama voters on here offering us their suggestions for hope, change, jobs & improvement…I have worked in both union & non-union shops in both America and Foreign lands…The non-union shops in foreign lands were the best, safest & most productive…After that comes the non-union jobs in the USA..Once you get the Govt. & Labor Unions involved, costs goes up , safety goes down and ALL the blame goes to the Company Executives who were not out in the yard and had nothing to do with the accident.
February 23rd, 2010 at 7:20 pm
On the contrary Doug, I agree with you. We should take ownership. I have laid off far to many people here just to sit back and do nothing. We finally are starting to see new work and finally, and I mean that in the most serious way, are starting to win bids again. Had the present administration done nothing, I don’t believe that I would be sending this e-mail. Instead, I believe I would have been standing in the unemployment line with all the others. As how this plays out with H&S. I also teach safety here and part of that education includes making the employees part of the solution, ownership of our future, reducing the X factor. I, as a representative of management, need to involve all in the solution, from the president of the company on down. Every time we have a recordable accident it means the possibility that we may be disqualified from the ability to bid a project, and, someone or many suffer. That simply isn’t an option, even in a healthy economy. Hope your doing well Doug.
February 26th, 2010 at 10:33 am
ENFORCEMENT WITH PENALTY IS MERELY ADVICE.
February 26th, 2010 at 11:50 am
I also teach a variety of Safety Topics including those authorized by OSHA and I have written a lot of Health and Safety Programs. While OSHA will not (Cannot due to organized labor) fine the employees. Those companies that follow my recommendation of fining their employees including the supervisor involved AND with a “three strikes and you’re out” policy have a greatly improved safety program and fare better with OSHA if an accident occurs. To me there are three keys to a good Safety Program: training, inspection and enforcement. When I do HAs I can just about predict the position and attitude of the owner / manager by what I see on the job site and vice-versa.
February 26th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Wow, some heated discussion. Was a good read, thanks.
My thought, Why was Wal-Mart only 7000. and why was that in the top 10.
March 2nd, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Definitely some passion in the replies, gave me lots to think about. What I would like to remind all is that productivity must coexist with safety if the company cannot stay productive then it will cease to exist. So safety without regard for production, and production without regard for safety are both formulas for failure.
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Good point, Scott. Does anybody remember the six “Ps” of success? A good manager not only knows that but he knows how to balance Budget with Schedule with Quality with Safety, all the while not disregarding his most important asset: his People. Neither of these is my original thought, but they are some of the principles I use in decision making.
March 16th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Nearly every OSHA safety rule has it’s inception in a death or severe injury. If employers had been following OSHA regulations, and ensuring the safety of their employees, would we even be having this conversation?
I saw needless fatalities and a chance for more fatalities in the Top 10 list. There are a lot of husbands, wives, sons and daughters who were buried 6 foot under because safety regulations got short shrift.
Let’s take the politics out of the discussion and focus on the people who didn’t come home from work.
BTW, as tragic as it was, I don’t think the Walmart incident fits with the other Top 10. Not supporting Walmart, couldn’t care less about the company, just not sure that what happened was all that predictable. However, I may not know the whole story behind the fine.
March 27th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
OSHA serves a great duty! So be it, million dollar fines equal compliance. Fining the employees for unsafe practices is not the answer, firing the managers that fail to train and provide a safe working enviroment would be a start. How can we sit here and critize the only government entity that actually looks out for the working class. Yes the fines and penalties may be a bit extreme, but how else will they get the point across to those people who supervise and monitor the ones doing all the work?! As Safety First put it, “If employers had been following OSHA regulations, and ensuring the safety of their employees, would we even be having this conversation?”
March 29th, 2010 at 10:10 am
the only accurate way osha can cite on a per person proposed violation is to be there and see it first hand. This is the next step in the feds going full out facist is to have a fedederal osha safety person on the staff of each company. We did it to the airports under the guise of safety now lets do it to all business.
I am not saying that the private sector should not create new safety jobs but not the fed - they are simply too inept
March 29th, 2010 at 10:28 am
I am seeing a lot of “fire the hard-hearted, penny-pinching, don’t care about the safety of their employees manager” comments….I have been a safety manager for 2 years and I provide my people with every PPE known to man, regular training, and am constantly upgrading our equipment and processes to ensure their safety…still every time I walk thru the plant they are not using their PPE or following the safer processes! We are a small, compounding company and these guys know our blends inside and out. They would be extremely hard to replace. Should I fire them? Would it be better for them to be out of work? Would it be better to let our company suffer and possibly go out of business, causing 6 other people to be out of work? Why should I be fired because my employees don’t follow the safety rules?
March 29th, 2010 at 11:14 am
First off, let me be a little more clear. Being a Safety Manager for a company or even just a supervisor comes with responsibilty. The job is to train, know what they expect of you, then to monitor and finally enforce. If you have employees that know what you expect and know the companies safety policies, yet continue to ignore your procedures, first I would question your leadership style. “Why do these employees continue to fail to work safely and do what I say?”
Now it would the time to retrain and educate those employees. Enforcement of safety rules is the responsibilty to the company. If those employees then continue to not utilize the well provided PPE, then it is them firing themselves, and clearly displays they were incapable of being responsible and doing their job safely.
March 29th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
until the responsibilty is shifted from the company to the employees the safety issues will not go away.
the responsibilty of the company is to know the product and process and write the assessmend and train. An employee that ignores this should be fined. Think about a truck driver. The company sends him out in a good piece of equipment - the driver must operate suscessfully and safely, if the driver wrecks the driver gets the ticket not the trucking company.
March 29th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Safety officers are a job made necessary by labor unions and personal injury lawyers.
Safety officers are actually of very little use and provide little or no additional safety on the jobsite…They are not even a necessary evil, they are simply useless..
March 29th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
I believe that to be a little overstated there bstrong. Certainly in todays world of labor that is getting more and more reliant on the government the need for safety officers is necessary to buck the trend of an overbearing government
March 29th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
I would tend to agree with bgstrong. If Managers and Supervisors would do their job I would not be needed. But I have seen too many times that Managers and Supervisors work too hard on production and scheduling that they overlook safety and training. If they would do their job (manage and supervise) they could cut me loose to do things other than the work they are not willing to do.
March 29th, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Regarding the role of safety managers, all you have to do is compare safety statistics between the early thirtys and today, even the 70’s and today. The difference is that fewer people are getting hurt or killed and the majority of it is due to government regulation. When I was in construction in the 70’s, no one was talking about the effects of lead in the workplace, heat stress, cave in hazards (I can’t tell you how many times contractors had us working in trenches or footings that were not suitable for entry). If it hadn’t been enforced by law (Hazard Communication, PEL’s, PPE, etc.) you can bet that industry wouldn’t have done anything about it. That was the history of labor prior to OSHA. Safety managers are a must in this day and age due to the complexity of regulations and the need to manage manage them correctly within the company. Our companies recordables and incidents have fallen dramatically over the past 15 years due to a strong safety culture and, most importantly, having everyone buy into a strong safety philosphy. We have one of the best EMI’s of any demolition company in the country, not easy to do in this industry.
March 30th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I am the safety director for our company and I beleive ,that if myself or even you , try to comply with all the regulations to keep your employees as safe as possible, in the work place ,you will receive an, at a boy, for doing this. We are a 9 year member of SHARP, which is the Safety Health Acheivement Recognition Program, of the on-site cosultation division of OSHA. All of these programs and help, are FREE, to help you maintain all safety standards at your company. We were not perfect , but SHARP has helped us to get as close to perfect as we can. If a company has willfull violations and failure to abate, this means there is no consideration for there workers and they should receive fines, but the fines should go to the people that supported the willfull violations which would help to keep companies in buisiness and replace the people that do not care about the safety of their employees
March 30th, 2010 at 9:30 am
… and when osha walks in one day and tells you that an oat process you have been doing for 15 years is not unsafe because a sugar plant blew up 800 miles away and so here is $250k violation and you are no longer eligable for SHARP because you have a fine you can’t pay off for 16 months and you should have known better because “combustible dust is all the talk” so we as osha are going to call this willful……… then what do you do. I know what our safety director did… threw in the towel. I know what our attorney did… adivised us to bend over and kiss our a… goodbye.
Not every business is as easy to comply with osha as others are. Where osha has been pushed by the feds they only look for the kill. Some industries are not worth their effort. Try being a safety director in the feed industry where litterally overnight every food item that has the potential to have dust come off of it is not a hazardous chemical. Our hazardous chemical list went from one insecticide and one pesticiide (used for spraying the fencline) to 300 items from peanuts to potato to parsley… literally… make that sound easy.
March 30th, 2010 at 9:35 am
chris h
you should not belive what you just wrote..
Look at the statistics from 1900 to today, the rate of injuries and accidents is following the same decline after 1970 as it did from 1900 to 1970.
Osha has done nothing substancial except take the cost of protection from $100 per person to 100,000 per person.
December 1st, 2010 at 1:42 pm
This is great. I am curious if the top fines of 2010 will be the same. What do you guys think?
December 13th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Having worked in heavy industrial construction for years, I can say without a doubt that OSHA is a good thing. Far to many greedy, and lazy plant operators have been guilty of forgoing safety for the almighty dollar. I think the idea of making them retain an onsite safety director is great, along with harsher fines, and stronger enforcement of already established laws.