Safety Wars
Issues with a Retailer
July 31, 2022
Retailer is some of the most challenging areas to do safety in. This episode talks about the proposed OSHA citations for a retailer. For health and safety support for your organization contact us at jim@safetywars.com or 845-269-5772.
[00:00:00] :  This show is brought to you by safety FM. Warning. The following broadcast contains adult language, adult content, frank safety discussions and stories that might sound unbelievable. But believe me, every one of those stories is true. We didn't start the safety war but we are going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives. Let me preface today's episode by saying that OSHA penalties are proposed and may or may not be accurate until the situation is settled. At that point, the citations might be vacated and there might be no citations or fines issued. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. This is directly from the ocean website and the citations we're talking about today, the company has 15 business days from the receipt of their citations and penalties to comply, request an informal conference with OSHA or contest the findings before the Independent occupational Safety and Health review Commission. So now that we got that out of the way onto our program, the U. S. Department of Labor has proposed hundreds of thousands and penalties to restore in florida. After an investigation into a fatal shoplifting incident uncovered willful and repeat safety violations last year after struggling with a shoplifter in a failed effort to prevent their escape with merchandise, an employee experienced a medical emergency and die. I did a little bit more research into this situation with the original paperwork from OSHA. The employer received several citations for not reporting a fatality to OSHA within eight hours entrapment hazards, meaning their exits were blocked and everything else. Emergency exits, paths to travel. Things of that nature. And OSHA also noted the employer was issued a hazard alert letter for exposing employees to hazardous conditions associated with workplace violence. OSHA urged the company to develop and train employees on proper procedures in case of a robbery or shoplifting incident and to provide a means for workers to request immediate assistance. Note right there is the workplace violence standard for OSHA according to the paperwork from OSHA, some of these citations were willful serious and repeat thus large proposed fines. The repeat violations were the result of other recent investigations. So some things are obvious here. What are some of my questions? Right. What kind of training does the company have for its employees? Do they have any training? Maybe if they had training, this would not have happened. You would have managers aware of what the hazards are. But let's remember, I rarely ever get trained uh, in my training classes, managers that actually are there. That's a rarity for a lot of my customers when I see them. Guess what I point? I say, welcome to the class and everything else. If any training dance Son, maybe a basic ocean compliance training like in as an introduction to social outreach class sort of thing. Right. In that section of the outreach training classes, intro to OSHA. The managers in retail that I have spoken to over the years have no knowledge of OSHA or any other requirements, but they are again responsible for compliance at their facilities? I don't blame the managers here. I think if you have multiple violations over multiple years in multiple states, there's some kind of a systemic problem here. Number three repeat violations. That means that your company does not have a way of tracking any of the information and sending it out amongst the company in any form. Because why are you having repeat violations if everyone knows about this stuff going on? And let's remember, OSHA citations in one state can lead to a repeat violation in another state. Willful violations. What are those, those are usually violations of your stated policy or an obvious thing that you knew right? You had constructive knowledge of something, right? You should have been doing things. Number five. The alert for workplace violence. There was no citation issued under the general duty clause for that. Is that actually effective to have a we're gonna alert you to it. I don't think that they had enough comfort to issue a general duty clause violation. I'm drawing a slight inference here, and I'm not, uh, no condemning OSHA for this. They might not have had been able to make the case for this. That's all the employer. All right. What do you need for a general duty clause violation? You need four things and these. You need all 41. The employer failed to keep the workplace free of a hazard to which his employees are exposed. Okay, you can pretty much uh, identify that you could write the hazard was recognized. Okay. Did they recognize the hazard or not? Is it a recognized hazard? Is there an industry standard in this case? The standard was blocked exits, uh, for the fatality and related to fatality and some other stuff. But once the hazard recognized, did the employer know that this employee might have had a health issue? Number three, the hazard was causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm? I don't know, robberies, we do know that robberies are retail establishments, especially like convenience stores or bodegas as we call them here in new york, there's a high rate of fatalities that happens for robberies and number four, you need right. You need a feasible and use full method to correct the hazard, right? And it was available right? Kind of hard for OSHA to prove all four of these things. These elements, especially in this case. And let's remember another thing right. In this case, the employee's death was likely work related, but may or may not have been workman's comp issue right there separate. So just because something is a workers comp issue does not necessarily make it a workplace reality, workplace related type of situations are two different systems. One is managed by the state, the other federal government, it sounded like a cardiac event, but I'm not a doctor. So this might be some type of ambiguous situation and it might have been what we call a widowmaker where there was no indications of a problem until you have a problem. But a citation was issued for not reporting a fatality within eight hours. That's a that's a serious thing. You got to report fatalities within eight hours. So what do we do with this? It's obviously an issue with this company that there's a lack of training, lack of communication, something along those lines. And they need probably need an assessment trying to figure out what ocean regulations supply to these establishments. But we got to remember that ocean regulations are the absolute minimum and you may have to far exceed what the ocean regulations are. Go to industry standards. Go to common sense. Go to other types of things. So what do you do with any of this? You contact us at (845) 269 5772 or gym at safety words.com. And we can schedule a consultation for you can be a training class can be more why? In this case, I have a feeling that this company is going to continue to have issues and they're going to continue to lose the safety war. And that's how we're what we're value about winning that safety war and making yours workplace safer for safety wars. This is jim the views and opinions expressed on this podcast. Are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, J. Allen