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Parent Category: Safety Info Posts

Category: OSHA Compliance Posts

Published: 23 May 2017

NOTE: a reduction in penalty can come about many different ways, so a reduction in penalty does not imply that the hazardous condition did not exist at the time of the inspection.  Many reductions in penalties occur due to negotiations requiring abatement of the hazard and extra's like training supervisors in OSHA 10-hr course. 

 

Since the winds have shifted in D.C. with the new administration, there is a lot of debate in the safety community regarding OSHA's "Shaming Campaign" where OSHA would issue press releases regarding inspections, even before the informal conference had taken place.  The amount of money in the citations that would "make you famous" varied over the previous 8-years, but if a business was cited over $50,000 you can pretty well expect a "press release" from OSHA and a posting of the citations. Anyone who follows me knows I use these citations to show the types of items that OSHA was finding in regards to PSM, LOTO, PRCS, and Emergency Response; however, I always scrubbed the names and locations of the business from my postings (although I provided links to the citations which had names and addresses).  So you can probably tell I was not a fan of the "Shaming Campaign" and here are two (2) good reasons why... it was NOT FAIR or as it turns out, NOT VERY ACCURATE. With all the dust up about the lack of press releases this year I thought I would go back and do a snapshot analysis to see just how accurate the press-releases were.

I went back to December 2016 and took the last ten (10) General Industry Cases and looked at the "Initial Citation" vs. the "Final Citation" amounts.  As far as data goes , I merely started at the end of December 2016 Press Releases and worked my way back until I had 10 cases.  No Hocus-Pocus, just a grab sample of data to see how accurate these press releases were.  Here's what I found:

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