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Showing 3 posts in OSHA and MIOSHA.

What Every Michigan Employer Should Know About Occupational Safety and Health in the Workplace

Regardless of working environment, be it a construction site or retail store, employers have a responsibility to provide workers with a safe place to work, and workers, likewise, must adhere to workplace health and safety guidance. Nonetheless, accidents, injuries and illnesses occur in the workplace. Read More ›

Categories: OSHA and MIOSHA

Contractors Face Jail Time for Worker Fatalities

Contractors looking at building plansIn a growing trend nationwide, owners of companies whose employees die in the workplace from workplace related accidents are increasingly looking at jail time, not just high OSHA or state OSHA penalties. Read More ›

Categories: OSHA and MIOSHA, Safety

MIOSHA Safety Violations Are Not a Joke Anymore!

Many business people in the State of Michigan (which is a “state plan vs. federal plan state”) routinely consider a citation from MIOSHA to be a mere nuisance and no more intimidating than a slap on a wrist or a parking ticket. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have had companies cited for workplace fatalities where the Presidents of the companies were actually tried on manslaughter charges. There will be an increased federal push to go after corporate executives in serious workplace fatality injury cases from now on. Being cited for a willful or repeated violation is not at all uncommon. There is a very low standard for being charged with “willful”, i.e. you merely had to know that what you were doing was probably wrong to be charged with a willful violation. Currently the minimum payment penalty for a willful violation is $5,000. It will shortly jump to $8,908, almost a 53 percent increase. Similarly, the maximum penalty for a willful will jump from $70,000 per violation to $124,709 per violation. That should be enough to get any CEO or CFO’s attention. On top of that, it is not unusual for MIOSHA to itemize citations or violations such that if there were three injuries caused by the same situation, they could be cited as three separate $124,000 violations.  Read More ›

Categories: News & Events, OSHA and MIOSHA