A Texas contracting company is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to broadly apply the OSH Act’s “unpreventable employee misconduct” defense, saying an administrative law judge (ALJ) set an unreasonably high bar for invoking it when he upheld an OSHA citation for trench-safety violations against the firm.
September 17, 2026
A federal district judge has rejected Amazon’s challenge to a Washington state policy that required it to abate alleged safety violations at a warehouse in Kent, WA, even as it pursues an administrative challenge to the underlying citation, rejecting the company’s argument that it has been deprived of due process in violation of the Constitution.
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Federal appellate judges appeared skeptical of claims that OSHA’s safety standard for crane assembly and disassembly should not apply to preparatory steps prior to dismantling the equipment during March 7 oral argument over a 2016 accident where a worker was seriously injured when a crane touched a live power line during that preliminary phase.
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OSHA is pushing back against an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report that faulted its handling of OSH Act complaints, including claims that officials do not adequately consider testimony from witnesses or complainants in enforcement, saying it is based on a third-party audit that used an unrepresentative sample and misunderstood the agency’s processes.
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California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) appeals board has issued what the agency is calling a “precedential” decision affirming that provisions of water at outdoor worksites must be “as close as practicable” to the areas where employees are working to encourage frequent consumption, bolstering the state’s heat-danger protections.
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A federal district court has rejected South Carolina’s bid to block OSHA from enforcing its long-standing directive for state plans to match federal OSH Act minimum and maximum penalties, including annual inflation adjustments, holding that language in the 2022 adjustment renewing the mandate was not a new action and thus not subject to judicial review.
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The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) has again upheld an OSHA workplace violence citation that designated a healthcare facility and its management firm as a “single employer” for purposes of OSH Act enforcement, just as a federal appeals court is weighing its use of that test in a prior case targeting the same management company.
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Employer attorneys are raising alarms on OSHA’s quiet announcement that it plans to reinstate a controversial Obama-era policy known as the “Fairfax Memo” that allowed third parties such as union representatives to accompany OSHA officials on inspections -- even of non-union worksites.
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The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) has issued a pair of decisions that affirm OSHA’s approach to identifying heat dangers, scrapping an administrative law judge’s (ALJ) rulings that held its long-standing approach failed to show hazard to workers, but the panel is also setting a high bar for “feasible” abatement methods.
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South Carolina is pointing to OSHA’s latest inflation adjustment to enforcement penalties as fresh justification for its ongoing court challenge to the mandate for states to match those increases each year, saying the rulemaking repeats that directive and is ripe for judicial review.
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