OSHA wants some violations to carry prison terms

OSHA has raised the ante on enforcement to a whole new level. The agency now would like to see some violations treated as crimes with prison terms attached.

Speaking to the American Society of Safety Engineers at the Safety 2010 meeting last week in Baltimore, OSHA’s head, David Michaels, said: “It’s an unfortunate fact that monetary penalties just aren’t enough. We believe that nothing focuses the mind like the threat of doing time in prison, which is why we need criminal penalties for employers who are determined to gamble with their workers’ lives and consider it merely a cost of doing business when a worker dies on the job.”

Later in the week, OSHA officially launched another enforcement initiative, the Severe Violators Enforcement Program.

The program, details of which were previously announced, would identify employers with repeated, serious violations, and subject them to increased inspections of the site where the violations took place as well as inspections of other sites the company may operate.

According to OSHA: “SVEP is intended to focus enforcement efforts on employers who have demonstrated recalcitrance or indifference to their OSH Act obligations by committing willful, repeated or failure-to-abate violations in one or more of the following circumstances: a fatality or catastrophe situation; in industry operations or processes that expose workers to severe occupational hazards; exposing workers to hazards related to the potential releases of highly hazardous chemicals; and all egregious enforcement actions.”

For advice on preparing yourself for OSHA scrutiny, see my article “How to meet the challenge of greatly increased OSHA scrutiny”

You may also wish to have a mock OSHA inspection conducted at your site.