The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) is saying an administrative law judge (ALJ) was wrong to assume OSHA’s preferred method to abate workplace violence at a Colorado healthcare facility was “feasible” without reports from the company, reinforcing what the panel says is a high bar to make an adverse inference based on lack of financial data.
OSHA is touting its latest in a series of enforcement actions against Dollar General over allegations of widespread unsafe conditions, such as faulty emergency exits at the retailer’s stores, even after the agency agreed to drop a court action designed to enforce what it said was an “informal settlement” stemming from an earlier round of citations.
OSHA is urging a federal appeals court to reject a Texas construction firm’s argument that its safety standards for crane assembly and disassembly do not cover preparatory steps, arguing that the rule is “unambiguous” and that even if its scope is unclear judges should defer to the agency’s reasonable interpretation.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit is weighing competing briefs from OSHA and two subsidiaries of the healthcare giant UHS in an appeal testing when the agency can treat legally distinct companies as a “single employer,” as each side claims the other is trying to overturn foundational precedent on that question.
Employer attorneys are highlighting a recent decision by an Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) judge as a rare signal of the agency’s burden to show workers should be considered employees and not contractors under the OSH Act, just as the Labor Department is weighing a new rulemaking to define those categories.
An Ohio firm is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit to hold that Congress violated the Constitution when it directed OSHA to set workplace safety standards as “reasonably necessary or appropriate,” arguing that the OSH Act lacks any “limiting principle” on agency discretion, while also downplaying potential impacts of a future ruling in its favor.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit is weighing OSHA’s leeway to amend claims in its enforcement citations during the administrative appeal process, as an Ohio employer seeks to overturn a citation for a 2018 crane accident where it says a mid-litigation revision deprived it of “fair notice” of the agency’s allegations.
OSHA is touting a recent district court decision allowing a novel whistleblower enforcement suit over COVID-19 infection risks at a New York healthcare center to proceed despite the employee’s agreement not to sue over the alleged retaliation on her own behalf, calling it a “significant” victory for officials’ authority to prosecute similar cases across the country.
OSHA is again attacking South Carolina’s lawsuit targeting the requirement for OSH Act state plans to match the federal agency’s maximum penalty amounts, arguing ahead of a Nov. 16 hearing that the state’s arguments against that mandate are untethered from the “four corners” of its case and thus should be summarily rejected.
A federal appeals court has overturned a district judge’s ruling that invoked OSHA’s “primary jurisdiction” over workplace protections from COVID-19 to preempt Amazon warehouse workers’ suit accusing the retailer of violating New York pandemic safeguards, setting a narrow precedent for using that doctrine to limit suits over state policies.