Worker safety appeals board rulings raise question

[ccharles000]

Rosa Frias was working the evening shift at Bimbo Bakeries in South San Francisco when she reached into her bread-making machine to remove a hunk of dried dough.

She screamed as her left hand, and then her lower arm, were sucked into the gears of the Winkler stringline proofer. That night, the limb had to be amputated above the elbow.

The incident drew a $21,750 fine from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health. But Bimbo paid nothing. It appealed to the Cal-OSHA Appeals Board, which dismissed the case on a technicality: The inspector had retired and Cal-OSHA could not prove that he had had permission to enter the factory.

Since that 2003 accident, five more employees in Bimbo's California plants have lost fingers or parts of fingers in accidents in which inspectors found similar safety violations. In two of those accidents, the appeals board reduced the fines by thousands of dollars.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-worker-safety21-2009oct21,0,3595409.story

[Selatius]

1. Apparently the Cal-OSHA Appeals Board cleared its entire backlog by simply punting on all cases.

Not a very effective way of doing things.

[TheMadMonk]

2. The first safety violation was introducing body parts into moving parts.

There may well be serious issues with the appeals process, but in several of the cases cited, the primary error was on the part of the machine opperators doing things they bloody well shouldn't have.

One of the major problems with fitting safety equipment/shields which makes it "impossible" for operators to do things like this, is that they often hinder proper operation or maintenance of the machine and as a result operators (and owners) deliberately remove or bypass them. Guarding against accidental entaglement as a result of things like slips/falls is one thing, but to try to prevent deliberate unsafe actions on the part of operators this way is ridiculous. Proper education and a one way ticket to the dole queue for violators is the correct way to prevent incidents such as several of those cited.