OSHA is touting a recent district court decision that found the United States Postal Service (USPS) unlawfully retaliated against a worker for reporting an on-the-job injury, but the ruling also rejected -- for now -- the agency’s bid for an order that would require USPS to strengthen its whistleblower protections nationwide.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is set to consider how strictly OSHA can apply its fall-protection standard in a construction company’s appeal of an enforcement case that has so far focused on how workers should apply the rule’s mandate to wear protective gear when crossing a height difference over 2 feet.
Unions representing workers at poultry slaughterhouses have voluntarily dropped their long-pending suit against the Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the safety impacts of line speed waivers for the sector, apparently in response to the beginning of a new Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) trial that replaced the Trump-era program they challenged.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit has found that OSHA properly treated two subsidiaries of Universal Health Services (UHS) as a “single employer” in a citation for workplace violence at a Massachusetts facility, rejecting the firm’s claim that doing so would render the test “near-boundless” -- but also classifying its decision as non-precedential.
A three-judge appellate panel appears skeptical of an Ohio contractor’s constitutional challenge to OSHA’s safety standard program, suggesting during recent oral arguments that the petitioner have a high bar to clear and questioning whether the case was intended only to challenge Supreme Court precedent on the so-called non-delegation doctrine.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could reverse -- or at least narrow -- the longstanding Chevron doctrine, which grants OSHA and other federal agencies discretion to reasonably interpret ambiguous statutory language.
An employer attorney says Amazon’s challenge to Washington State’s requirement for firms to abate alleged safety violations before administrative review of their citations is “ripe for an appeal” after a federal district court rejected the suit, holding out hope that further litigation could scrap the policy, though he warned that the retailer’s own arguments undercut its claims.
A new decision from the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) largely affirms an OSHA citation stemming from a 2018 shipyard explosion that killed three workers, agreeing with the agency that a salvage firm failed to train its employees on safety measures for confined spaces but rejecting its claim that the violation was “willful.”
The Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has issued modified waivers of statutory line speed limits for all 10 poultry processing facilities that were at the center of unions’ lawsuit over a Trump-era waiver program, opening the door for that suit to potentially resume after a stay of over a year.
The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) has upheld OSHA’s citation against a roofing company over an employee’s failure to use fall protection while briefly assessing the positioning of a crane director, refusing to apply what it says is a narrow exception in the standard for activity before the “actual start of construction work.”