"$1.6 million in fines from .....death of an employee"

One of government safety organizations tasks are enforcing safety laws. One method of ensuring that is done is by placing financial penalties upon companies. Here is a recent story of an aluminium company that was fined.

The (aluminium company) faces more than $1.6 million in fines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration stemming from an investigation into the death of an employee earlier this year.

According to OSHA, a 34-year-old man was killed when he was struck in the head. The agency alleges the company allowed employees to bypass guarding mechanisms designed to protect employees from a barrier door closing on them and that a malfunction in the door’s optic control existed prior to the incident. The worker who was killed was loading a part into a machine when the barrier door closed on his head.

A manager of the (aluminium company) facility did not return a call from the (local news media) seeking comment on Monday.

(Aluminium company) has 15 days from its receipt of the violation notification to either appeal the violations or pay the fines, which total $1.67 million. 

In its final report, OSHA notes four repeat citations, 18 “willful” and 16 “serious” safety and health violations, which resulted in (aluminum company) being placed on the agency's “Severe Violator Enforcement Program.”

“Aluminium company’s) failure to learn from recent incidents and follow industry standard and their own company policies created unnecessary and available hazards in its facility,” said the acting assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health. “A worker lost his life because the company put the value of production speed before the safety of their employees.”

Two of the OSHA violations were related to the employee’s death, but others dealt with safety involving sulphur dioxide, safety training and equipment for mitigating burn risk, lack of training on the pinch hazards offered by a variety of machines and the lack of lockout procedures and machine guards on some equipment.

According to OSHA, (aluminium company) management signed formal settlement agreements previously to resolve OSHA citations for machine guarding and lockout/tagout violations found during inspections conducted between 2015 and 2017, and hired a third party consultant to conduct comprehensive machine guarding and lockout/tagout audits between 2017 and 2019. The audits identified specific machine guarding and lockout/tagout program deficiencies and provided recommendations that the company failed to fully implement.

“After conducting repeated inspections at the plant and receiving formal assurances that safety procedures would be implemented, the company’s failure to do so is unacceptable. Employers are legally responsible for keeping workers safe on the job,” said OSHA Acting Regional Administrator.

We offer our sincere condolences to the worker’s family, friends, and coworkers. We pray that the government investigation and eventual penalty may help in some small way in lessening the pain they are experiencing on the sudden loss of this individual.

We purposely left the company name off. Though we can all agree that a worker did lose their life on the job at the aluminum company. The company has the right to contest these fines as per the rules. Whatever happens regarding the outcome on the fines the fact is a worker died.

Many companies have asked the editors to visit plants prior or after an osha inspection. We always recommend that plants use past osha inspection findings as a guide (or tool) on future internal inspections. There should be no justification in our opinion for the safety hazards previously identified by a government safety organization not to be corrected. In this incident the past safety violations if corrected may have prevented this tragedy.

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