Safety Before Profits
By 
Michell McIntyre makes a strong case around one of my most important issues–the need to punish employers far more harshly for workers who die at their worksites.
During one of his early morning shifts, Jose Melena stepped into a 35-foot-long oven and began loading pallets of canned tuna at a Bumble Bee Foods plant. Not realizing Melena was inside, fellow employees shut the machine door behind him and turned on the oven. With temperatures reaching about 270 degrees, he was cooked to death.
In what is being called the largest known settlement in California criminal prosecution history for felony workplace safety violations involving a single victim, Bumble Bee Foods was ordered to pay $6 million for “willfully violating worker safety rules.” In addition to charging the company, prosecutors filed felony charges against the former Bumble Bee Foods safety manager and company director of plant operations for willfully violating the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) worker health and safety protocols governing employees and hazardous machinery.
“You don’t have warm blood running in your veins if you’re not affected by the way this guy died. It’s horrific,” said Hoon Chun, Assistant Head Deputy District Attorney for the Los Angeles County office’s Consumer Protection Division, who helped prosecute the case. “I cannot imagine a worse result of violating safety rules than something like this.”
If an employer knowingly puts their workers in harm’s way they should be held fully accountable by law. It is clear that civil penalties are simply a drop in the bucket and insufficient while no one is held accountable. The fines simply become the cost of doing business with little or no regard for the life of the employee and their devastated family. Even in cases where workers were killed on the job, the typical penalty was just above $5,000.
California district attorneys should be considered trailblazers for pursuing criminal charges for willful worker health and safety violations that result in death or serious injury.
On his second week on the job, Raul Zapata was buried alive in a trench. Three days before Zapata’s death, a city building inspector issued a stop-work order due to concerns that the unfortified dirt wall was prone to collapse. However, the owner of the construction company that employed Zapata and the project manager decided to defy the order and move forward with the work. California’s Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office brought criminal negligence charges against the owner and project manager, last week both were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison.
In fact what needs to happen is a lot more prosecutions of high-ranking employers like what is happening to Don Blankenship, making them personally liable for the terrible conditions of work they create. That outsourcing, franchising, and temp workers creating technical multiple employers on the same site makes doing so more difficult is in fact much of the point of those systems of evasive labor.