November 2015
Employers are becoming more and more aware of just how
aggressive federal agencies have become in recent years with their enforcement
efforts as well as their interpretation of the laws and regulations they
enforce. Most of the time this does not bode well for employers. However, in one recent case an employer
challenged an OSHA citation in which the Secretary of Labor assessed a very
large penalty of $490,000.00 as a result of a single workplace accident. The
citation claimed that an incident where a large piece of metal broke off and was
ejected from a lathe, killing its operator, violated an OSHA barrier guard
safety regulation. The employer appealed
OSHA’s sizable fine and prevailed in court.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the employer
that while serious, this unfortunate accident was the result of the catastrophic
failure of the lathe, not a safety regulation violation. In other words the court found that, even
though an employee was killed, the employer was not at fault. The pertinent
part of the OSHA regulation relied on for the citation expressly referred to
the type of hazards related to the routine operation of
machinery, such as flying chips and sparks. The court determined that it was
quite a stretch for the Secretary of Labor to apply such a limited regulation
to an event that was anything but routine.
Generally courts will defer to an agencies’ interpretations
of its own regulations. However, in this
case neither the language of the regulation nor the agency’s prior
interpretation of the regulation would put the company on notice that it needed
to install a safety guard specifically to protect against this type of catastrophe. Unfortunately, many employers lack the resources
to challenge a federal agency in court when it has misapplied its own
regulations to come down hard on the company.
Yet where the stakes are worth the battle, as they were in this
particular case, it can pay to take them on.
Questions? Contact our Minneapolis attorneys at (952) 746-1700 or email Chrissy Beggan at chbeggan@wesselssherman.com.
