Supreme Court refuses case on safety violations
Employers won a victory recently when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a dispute over when employers can be cited for safety violations. The refusal let stand a lower court’s ruling that the federal government must prove the employer could have foreseen and prevented the violations.
The case involved a steel erection company in Gambrills, MD, that had been fined $7,000 when an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspector saw two employees working 80 feet off the ground without fall protection at an Orlando, FL, work site. One of the workers was the supervisor responsible for employee safety.
OSHA originally tried to impose a $56,000 fine against the company, L.R. Wilson and Sons, but an administrative law judge reduced the fine to $7,000. Then the 4th U.S. Circuit of Appeals dismissed the fine and said the government had not proved that the supervisor’s acts were foreseeable and preventable by the company. In effect, the appeals court accepted the employer’s explanation that the individual supervisor acted recklessly on his own and the company could not have reasonably prevented his actions. In the past, federal appeals courts have differed over who bears the burden of proof in such cases.
The Clinton administration appealed the dismissal and said that employers seeking to blame individual employees for safety violations should have to prove that the violations were not foreseeable and preventable. The company’s attorneys argued that the disagreement among appeals courts was not worth the Supreme Court’s attention, and the justices apparently agreed.
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