A new decision from the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) underscores what the panel says is the higher standard OSHA must meet to show safety violations by a “controlling” employer at a multi-company workplace, scrapping an administrative law judge’s (ALJ) decision that upheld the agency’s citations in one such case.
The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) is taking up a novel case testing whether a “religious, agricultural, communal colony” in South Dakota is an “employer” subject to the OSH Act, after a member of the group died in a 2020 accident while working in its grain bin.
South Carolina is again challenging OSHA’s mandate for states to match federal minimum and maximum penalties for OSH Act violations, targeting the 2016 federal rule that first announced the policy after a federal court rejected its earlier suit that focused on language restating the mandate in the agency’s annual rules adjusting penalties for inflation.
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.
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.
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.
The long-delayed challenge to OSHA’s Trump-era rollback of electronic recordkeeping mandates is set to move forward after a federal appeals court lifted its long-standing stay on the suit, backing safety advocates’ argument that the Biden administration’s repeated delays of a rule to reinstate the requirements undermine the rationale for pausing the case.
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.
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.
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.