Legal experts are warning that the Supreme Court’s recent decision holding that defendants are entitled to jury trials when contesting Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) administrative enforcement actions seeking civil penalties could tee up challenges to many agencies’ programs, and potentially make them less aggressive even if those suits do not succeed.
The California Labor Commissioner’s Office is fining Amazon.com Services, LLC nearly $6 million for alleged violations of the state’s “Warehouse Quotas” law at two distribution facilities, saying the lapses threaten the health of workers and putting new focus on a raft of state and federal enforcement actions against the online retailer that began in 2022.
President Joe Biden is nominating a longtime labor and trade official to one of the two vacant seats on the Occupational Safety and Health Association Review Commission (OSHRC), after the Senate’s inaction on a prior nominee has left the panel with just a single active member, and thus unable to decide cases, for over a year.
Employer groups are lining up behind House Republicans’ Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would scrap OSHA’s controversial worker walkaround rule, renewing their arguments that it oversteps the agency’s statutory authority and threatens workplace security, although the measure is all but certain to fail since it is subject to a presidential veto.
A slew of prominent associations representing employers and industry sectors has sued OSHA over its controversial “third-party” worker walkaround rule, incorporating arguments voiced by a range of trade groups and attorneys that the rule exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority, violates several federal laws and poses a threat to workplace security.
California lawmakers have approved a statewide audit of California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) inspection and enforcement processes, amid criticism that the “understaffed” agency is failing to adequately protect agriculture and other workers from on-the-job dangers and fails to properly cite and collect fines from violators.
OSHA is reworking the borders between several of its regions and abandoning the long-standing numbered designations for those offices, saying the changes will help it “direct its resources effectively and make the agency more resilient” in part by prioritizing states that lack delegated authority to implement the OSH Act.
Two employer attorneys are pointing to several aspects of OSHA inspections where they say companies could either contest the agency’s approval of “third-party” worker representatives under a controversial new rule or limit their access to job sites, previewing potential case-by-case disputes that could run parallel to broader litigation over the policy’s legality.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has denied a Texas contracting firm’s bid to overturn an OSHA trench-safety citation under the “unpreventable employee misconduct” (UEM) doctrine, backing the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission’s (OSHRC) application of a four-part test for employers to invoke that defense.
OSHA has released an FAQ document that aims to clarify implementation details for its controversial rule allowing worker representatives to take part in “walkaround” inspections even if they are not employed at the site under review, including how non-unionized workers can select representatives and steps employers can take to avoid disclosure to outsiders.