THE SET-UP: Elon and Vivek’s mission, should We the People decide to accept it, is to make government more “efficient.” Based on what they’ve said—particularly Elon—that means getting government out of business’s way … including out of the way of his businesses. And he’s likely to get away with it because nobody likes “regulations” or the dreaded “regulatory overreach.”
On the other hand, there sure have been a lot of food recalls and sickened, hospitalized food consumers over the last 18 months. We’ve also seen a number of deadly train derailments. I guess you don’t miss “regulatory overreach” until it’s gone. - jp
TITLE: Four years later, the survivor of the Killen power plant collapse is still trying to learn why it happened
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/i-team/four-years-later-the-survivor-of-the-killen-power-plant-collapse-is-still-trying-to-learn-why-it-happened
EXCERPTS: Four years after the collapse of an Adams County power plant robbed him of his legs and livelihood, Travis Miller is bracing for his day in court.
“They’re going to know who I am before it’s done,” said Miller, 42, of Grayson, Ky. “When they wake up in the morning, I want them to think, ‘Man, he didn’t give up.’”
Miller’s tenacity has served him well since December 9, 2020, when the 14-story Killen power plant tumbled to the ground with Miller and others inside. Two men, Jamie Fitzgerald and Doug Gray, died in the collapse. Miller required more than 100 surgeries and now walks with the aid of prosthetic devices and crutches.
The Millers are preparing for another gargantuan battle as they try to force companies involved in the collapse to admit responsibility.
They’re alone in this fight. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration quietly settled its investigation with reduced penalties last year. The families of Gray and Fitzgerald signed confidential settlements this year.
The Millers doubled down on their quest by walking out of a court-ordered settlement conference in October. They replaced their lawyers with a new attorney who they expect will bring the case to trial in 2025.
They won’t say what offers they rejected or how much they’re seeking. But they insist it will take more than money to strike a deal.
“I just want them to own it,” Travis Miller said. “They need to say, ‘You know what? We could have done a lot of things different that could have prevented this.’ That’s what needs to happen.”
“We don’t have control over what happened,” Alissa Miller added. “We do have control over whether we keep our dignity or not.”
OSHA records show there was confusion on the job site about who was in charge. Warning signs were ignored, including the partial collapse of a smaller building in August 2020. And then there were those 'spidey senses' that one supervisor allegedly used to dismiss employee complaints about shifting steel.
The I-Team is revisiting the Killen collapse because it raises important questions about workplace safety, power plant closures and employee rights.
For example, their case could expand the rights of employees to sue companies over workplace injuries. Since 2005, Ohio contractors have been protected by state law that requires injured employees to prove “a deliberate intent” to cause injury when suing for damages.
“It’s a pretty high hurdle to say that a demolition contractor deliberately intended to cause death or injury to its employees,” attorney Thomas Yocum told the I-Team in 2022. “That’s the high hurdle the plaintiffs have in this case.”
Beyond that legal issue, the Killen collapse itself raises questions about the use of private investors to clean up coal-burning power plants after utilities close them. As the I-Team reported in 2021, the owner of the Killen plant had demolition problems at two other Ohio plants since 2015. Those problems included a smokestack that tumbled into the Ohio River at the Beckjord power plant in 2021 and the death of Adamo’s former CEO during the collapse of a bridge at the former Muskingum River plant near Beverly, Ohio.
Corporate affiliates of Missouri-based Commercial Liability Partners were named by the Millers as plaintiffs in their lawsuit, which alleges CLP and its affiliates “actively participated” in the demolition. The company has denied liability in court filings.
The Millers also question the effectiveness of OSHA, the workplace safety regulator that settled its case without determining what caused the collapse.
Their concerns come at a time of increasing dissatisfaction with government regulators, which the U.S. Supreme Court, President-elect Donald Trump and many others have criticized as too aggressive.
The Millers argue OSHA wasn’t aggressive enough.
“I feel like the investigation was done poorly, very poorly,” Alissa Miller said. “They stated that they interviewed everyone who was on the job site that day. That is not the case. Had they interviewed everyone there, I feel like all the pieces of the puzzle would have been placed together rather nicely.”
OSHA declined interview requests for this story, but an expert told the I-Team that OSHA likely settled because it couldn’t prove its original claim that Adamo Demolition Company committed a willful violation. That’s the most serious violation that OSHA cites, reserved for companies that “knowingly failed to comply” or “acted with plain indifference to employee safety.”
Curtis Chambers, founder of an OSHA training consulting firm in Dallas, said injured workers are often disappointed by the agency.
“This is the cold hard truth, OK? People think that OSHA is there to determine liability for personal injury, and they are not. They are there to determine if an employer violated one of these rules in our book, and that's it,” Chambers said.
TITLE: Utah Quietly Downgrades Northrop Grumman Worker Death Charges
https://inkstickmedia.com/utah-quietly-downgrades-northrop-grumman-worker-death-charges/
EXCERPTS: Defense contractor Northrop Grumman will avoid the worst penalties it could have faced for the deaths of two workers from argon gas asphyxiation at a missile plant in 2023 due to a settlement with Utah’s workplace safety agency that removed the most severe citations from the case, documents obtained by Inkstick through a public records request reveal.
Northrop Grumman and Utah Occupational Safety and Health (UOSH) reached a settlement that removed two “willful, serious” workplace safety citations — the most severe category used by OSHA — from the case involving the deaths of employees Jonathan Steinke, 24, and Ken Tran, 48. UOSH downgraded those citations to just “serious.” A “willful, serious” violation would have triggered UOSH to refer the case to the local district attorney’s office for criminal prosecution, or justify in writing why it did not do so, and also to include the company on an OSHA blacklist known as the Severe Violator Enforcement Program (SVEP).
In a twist, the settlement both acknowledges the primary safety violation that led to the men’s deaths — that Northrop Grumman “reclassif[ied] a space that had previously been determined to be a permit-required confined space to a non-confined space” — while also vacating two of the original citations that fined Northrop Grumman for removing that classification without documenting its justifications for doing so.
Steinke and Tran died while argon gas, which is used in industrial welding processes and displaces oxygen, was leaking into a part of a plant in Magna, Utah, that workers referred to as the “pit,” an underground area below a large vessel known as an autoclave that is used to subject materials to high heat and pressure.
The permit designation would have required the company to perform a series of controls and safety measures to protect employees before entering the pit, such as atmospheric testing and providing workers respiratory equipment. And even though the new settlement removes the key “willful” language that triggers the most severe penalties, it then goes on to order Northrop Grumman to reinstate “full permit-entry protocols” to the basement area where Steinke and Tran died.
The company was tight-lipped about the men’s deaths from the day they occurred, declining to publicly name them and publishing just a short note of condolences in local media. Through public records requests and interviews with families and coworkers, Inkstick became the first outlet to name the men and detail the circumstances of their deaths in an exposé last October.
UOSH offered Inkstick Media no explanation for why the agency agreed to downgrade the citations, and the settlement records include no reasoning for the changes. Northrop Grumman did not respond to requests for comment on why it appealed the original citations or a request for a copy of its appeal. The Utah Office of Attorney General did not respond to questions from Inkstick about why it advised UOSH to accept the seemingly one-sided settlement. A spokesperson for the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office told Inkstick that the worker death case had not been referred to it for criminal charges.
“Criminal prosecutions are one of the few ways that you can actually get under the skin of a major company,” Eric Frumin, the former health and safety director for the labor union-affiliated Strategic Organizing Center, told Inkstick. That’s because the fines levied by OSHA are so low — in the revised settlement the company will pay just $81,918 in penalties for the safety violations that led to Steinke and Tran’s deaths — that they do little to deter corporate wrongdoing, Frumin added.
A less harsh, though still meaningful, response to their deaths would have been Northrop Grumman’s inclusion on an OSHA blacklist known as the Severe Violator Enforcement Program (SVEP).
Created by OSHA in 2010 to “more effectively focus enforcement efforts on recalcitrant employers who demonstrate indifference to the health and safety of their employees,” the program involves systematic surveillance and inspections of dangerous workplaces. A “willful-serious” fatality citation would have landed Northrop Grumman on the list, though Utah SVEP records Inkstick obtained through a public records request showed that the state only included three small companies on the list during all of 2023 and 2024. The defense contractor never made it on.
In addition to the nuisance of increased scrutiny — during which inspectors could easily find other safety violations to fine the company for — inclusion on SVEP also comes with “reputational damage,” Frumin explained.
The fallout from Steinke and Tran’s deaths could have been very different if Republicans hadn’t won control of Congress and the White House in 2016. Workers’ rights were embedded into the federal procurement process for a “brief period of time” due to an Obama-era set of regulations known as the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order, Frumin said. Those regulations required federal contractors — the largest of which are the defense ones — to disclose OSHA and labor law violations before applying for federal contracts and for agencies to deny contracts to companies that repeatedly violate workers’ rights.
“That was an extremely, extremely controversial move by the Obama administration,” Frumin said, “to put labor law violations that far and deeply embedded into the federal procurement process.” Shortly after the 2016 election, a Republican-controlled Congress voted to repeal the regulations, and then-President Donald Trump signed the repeal into law.
Frumin, who has spent five decades advocating for compliance with and strengthening of OSHA laws, didn’t hide his frustration that cases like these could end up having no consequences for a company continuing to receive billions in taxpayer-funded federal contracts.
“All of [the federal procurement process] would have changed if the Congress hadn’t repealed those revised reg[ulations] in early 2017 that the Obama crowd issued,” Frumin said. “All the serious and willful and repeat violations would have been shoved down the throat of every defense procurement bureaucrat, and they would be choking on them.”
Workers continue to suffer on-the-job injuries at Northrop Grumman in Utah. Eric Olsen, a spokesman for the Utah Labor Commission, told Inkstick in September that the commission was “aware and investigating” reports of several recent hand and foot injuries, including allegations that three workers’ feet were crushed by a falling 6,750-pound piece of equipment, at plants in Promontory and Clearfield.
The injuries point to the dangerous nature of the work of missile production. An internal safety training slide for Northrop Grumman, sent by an employee to Inkstick, says that 104 fatal injuries have occurred at Northrop Grumman’s propulsion systems properties since 1960. Those worker deaths included ones at companies Northrop Grumman acquired such as Hercules, which formerly operated the Magna plant, and Thiokol, a chemical company whose search for “cheap, unproductive land” where it could conduct “explosive” operations in the early years of the Cold War are part of the origin story of the nuclear weapons industry in Utah.
Spokespeople for Northrop Grumman did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the alleged workplace injuries and the historical death figures.
TITLE: Radical Change at OSHA During Second Trump Administration?
https://www.environmentalsafetyupdate.com/2024/12/radical-change-at-osha-during-second-trump-administration/
EXCERPTS: From the first Trump Administration, we know that the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors and OSHA inspections dropped significantly. During the Obama Administration (2008-2016), the number of OSHA inspectors fluctuated but generally stayed above 900, rising to 1,059 inspectors from 2009 to 2011, then declining to 943 from 2011 to 2015, then rising again in 2016 to 952 inspectors. However, by the close of fiscal year 2020, the last year of the first Trump Administration, that number had fallen to 790. By the end of 2023, there were 878 inspectors at OSHA, representing an 11% increase from fiscal year 2020. Those numbers are likely to fall below 800 again, if not further.
We also know that that regulatory legal landscape is very different now than it was during the first Trump Administration, due in large part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451, 603 U.S. __ (2024). There, the Supreme Court held that courts, not agencies, are best situated to interpret ambiguous statutory provisions, even in areas of agency expertise. In doing so, the Supreme Court has reined in agencies, like OSHA, from effectuating their enforcement agenda based on the agency’s own interpretations of its regulations.
Against that background, and consistent with the soon-to-be-president’s stated goal of a more limited federal government, including less federal government involvement in the workplace, we can expect:
·Fewer and slower inspections and a slimmer regulatory agenda. During the first Trump Administration, OSHA faced initial years of flat budgets and OSHA had a difficult time competing for safety professionals with private industry when trying to hire compliance officers. The agency will very likely face the same pressures again during the second Trump Administration. We also anticipate fewer new OSHA regulations, fewer OSHA Emphasis Programs focusing enforcement on specific hazards and industries, and less programmed inspection activity.
Substantially reduced emphasis on whistleblower and anti-retaliation claims. The Biden Administration invested significant resources in bolstering OSHA’s and the Department of Labor’s whistleblower investigation programs. We anticipate a rollback of those efforts and potential return to more business-friendly Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) and cooperative compliance programs over time.
Abandonment of OSHA’s heat safety rule. OSHA published its proposed heat safety rule and began accepting public comments in summer 2024. The rule would apply to all employers and be triggered when employees are exposed to temperatures of 80ºF for more than fifteen minutes in any given sixty-minute period. The public comment period will close on December 30, 2024, and there will very likely not be enough time to consider the public feedback and finalize the final rule before the end of the Biden Administration on January 21, 2024. Republican elected officials recently have expressed opposition to heat illness protection, with the Texas and Florida governments passing laws preventing municipal rules relating to water breaks. Given the anti-regulatory orientation of a second Trump Administration OSHA, we anticipate OSHA bringing the heat illness rule-making process to a screeching halt.
Potential withdrawal of OSHA Walkaround Rule. On April 1, 2024, the Federal Register published OSHA’s final rule revising its regulations regarding whom employees can authorize to act as their representative(s) to accompany compliance officers during on-site OSHA inspections. The revised regulation clarifies that employees have the right to designate a non-employee, third party to be their representative during the physical walkaround. In doing so, OSHA has effectively indicated non-unionized employees can look to unions for support during an OSHA inspection.
Leaders with pro-business leanings overseeing OSHA. During the Biden Administration, the Department of Labor was led by individuals with pro-labor ties: former union leader and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, and Julie Su, the former head of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency who formerly worked as a civil rights lawyer. OSHA was led by Doug Parker, who began his legal career as a staff attorney at the United Mine Workers of America. President Trump is likely to nominate an Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSH with ties to the business community rather than organized labor.
In a somewhat surprising move, President-elect Trump has proposed Republican Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor. Ms. Chavez DeRemer, who was defeated by her Democratic opponent in November, is known as a relatively pro-labor Republican and past supporter of the PRO Act, a legislative effort during the Biden Administration to protect Union organizing rights. While Ms. Chavez-DeRemer may face opposition in the Senate, we anticipate she would be more open to union policy agendas, including maintaining the OSHA Walkaround Rule discussed above. President-elect Trump has not yet nominated an Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSH; the choice of nominee may further clarify the agency’s enforcement agenda for 2025.