There was a Q&A session in one of the shows. One question was how hot it got on the shop floor. Sticks in my mind the answer was about 130 degrees, when all the forges were burning.
The real delight in the show is when the two finalists are competing, by building replicas of historical pieces. Some of those people are real artists, and turn in items that are amazing in quality of design, fit, and finish. And I have added quite a bit to my basic understanding of metallurgy from college.
As for foundries, I spent a summer working in a malleable iron foundry. I was in engineering, not on the pouring line, but my work did take me through heat treat quote often. A college classmate of mine had spent a summer working in a Corning glass plant, on one of the molding machines, making picture tube funnels. He said that, when he came out of that station, he wasn’t wet with sweat. His skin was covered with salt crystals however, as it was so hot in there that the sweat evaporated as soon as it formed.
Once an employer has an OSHA recordable injury/illness, it opens the employer up to a lawsuit from the injured employee. It’s in the employer’s best interest morally and financially to keep their employees safe and well cared for.
As a production manager I experienced 3 OSHA general on site inspections and 2 complaint specific inspections. The complaint specific inspections were found to be unsubstantiated. I speculate that the complaints were filed by employees that I had fired. Of the 3 general inspections, the first 2 they found minor non-conformances that they wanted us to correct, no fine though. The 3rd inspection was 18 months after the 2nd inspection. When I asked the inspector why we were receiving the extra scrutiny she replied it was because our injury incidence rate was far below our industry classification rate. It didn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, she found an area that she thought our fall protection was inadequate. She fined us $19k but said it would be cut in half if we didn’t contest it. It was debatable on whether she was correct in her opinion of the situation, but it wasn’t worth fighting. It required a minor modification to the production line which we did within 2 weeks.
Which shows your company was more concerned about the welfare of it’s workers than many. There are plenty of companies at the other end of the spectrum, which is why there are “big gummit” organizations like OSHA.
If we get another really Shiny regime in DC, that sort of “intrusive big gummit” might vanish from several spheres. Remember a Shiny, some 20 years ago, crying about “junk lawsuits”, as he worked to deny individuals access to the courts to sue “JCs” for damages?
I don’t know how “noble” it was versus just sound financial policy. Another example is we took care of our employees even when it was a personal injury. I had an electrician who injured his foot while installing a motor on his truck. He was on crutches and would need to be off for 2 to 3 weeks. He would be without an income and I would be short an electrician. I needed his knowledge and experience at work. So I made him and the group a deal. I pulled Ronnie out of the group pay wise, but matched his pay out of another account, so he didn’t lose any income. I put an additional swing person into the group to do the physical work that Ronnie couldn’t do. I paid the swing person from another account so the group made extra pay while Ronnie was “out” of the group. Everybody was happy and the cost to the company was minimal. And if you add in the goodwill it created it was a good “investment”.
It paid off handsomely about a year later. All of the electricians were out at the lake and one of the new hires twisted his ankle while skiing. He told the others that he would slip into work on Monday and say he fell from a ladder so he could get it medically looked at since he didn’t have health insurance. Fortunately Ronnie overheard this and came in early and told me of this guy’s plan. I met him at the clock. Asked him why he was limping and then fired him. Saved the company a false work comp claim. And got rid of a dishonest employee.
Was he by nature, dishonest, or forced into that plan by the US’ health care system? Would he have tried to lay the blame for the injury on the company, if the US had a national health system, so he could simply hobble into the local clinic, and have his ankle taken care of, without his shouldering thousands of dollars of bills? Would he have tried to lay the blame for the injury on the company, if he had been on the payroll for a year, so the company medical would cover it?
I don’t know. He was in his probationary period so I didn’t have a good read on him yet.
I guess some people can always find a reason to lie or cheat. It’s always someone else’s fault for their problems. But the one thing I never tolerated was lying. If you made a mistake and it cost the company money, my only concern was what did you learn from it. Owning up to it and telling me what you learned was all I needed to forget about the incidence.
That is for sure. In my years at RS and Office Depot, I saw plenty of people who would buy a new item. Then, when home, take the new item out of the box, and put an old, worn out item, in the box, then come back to the store demanding a cash refund, hoping the store clerk does not inspect the item in the box and discover it is old and beat to death. The OD I worked at refunded a Western Digital hard drive a customer had bought a few days earlier. The returned drive was sent back to WD. WD sent the drive back to the store, with a note “this is not our drive”. I saw the drive. It had all the WD labels on it, but the integrated circuits on the drive’s controller board said “Seagate”. That guy went to a lot of work moving the labels from the new drive to the old one, to get himself a free HD by using the refund scam.
But, in the case of your guy, would he have tried to blame his injury on the company, if he could have had it treated at nominal cost via a national health plan? If he had confessed when you confronted him, would you have put his claim on the company medical, which he was too new to qualify for? It’s a tough call. His actions may have been entirely motivated by fear of a big medical bill he couldn’t pay, rather than any desire to cheat the company.
Geez, lots of misinformation in this thread - no disrespect intended.
Workers’ Compensation laws in most states shield employers from civil liability. This protection for employers extends up through the contractual chain. Example, if a subcontractor gets injured, they can’t file suit against their employer, the general contractor, nor the project owner. There are exceptions for extreme negligence and gross misconduct. OSHA can, and has referred such cases to the DOJ for criminal prosecution as well.
When employees get a lawyer, their lawyer can argue for more benefits through WC, but this is very different than bringing a civil suit.
The reason why companies contest questionable violations is to manage future risk. Repeat violations of the same standard result in super hefty fines. To be clear, just because you contest, doesn’t mean you don’t fix the hazard. If a company has solid ground to formally contest, they should. Even if they lose the contest, their fine is often much lower than the initial fine.
I don’t know how long ago your experience was…but it hasn’t been like that for 20+ years. CSHO’s can’t issue fines. They can’t negotiate settlement. Their sole job is to conduct inspections, looking for evidence of violations. They bring their evidence back to an Area Director who decides if it warrants a violation.
It’s not the company’s fault that the US doesn’t have a national health care system. Lots of companies offer all sorts of benefits, including health insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability. Lots of supervisors also take care of employees who get hurt outside of work, as described by @gcr2016.
Fraudulent WC claims hurt companies in many ways, from higher premiums, to an inability to get more work, to negatively affecting worker morale. Jaded supervisors who’ve been burned by a fraudulent claim, start questioning legitimate claims. This lasting impact screws over injured workers far into the future.
No matter his motivations, it’s wrong. Please don’t call me a JC…
I shouldn’t have used the word “civil”. I should have worded it like you did. But we had our share of work comp injuries that the injured employee would lawyer up. I personally liked it when they did because I no longer had to communicate anything to them. Everything went through the lawyers. And I’ll note the only ones that ever lawyered up were the ones who thought they could sue their way to riches. They were always the pain in the arse employees too.
We were never a company to contest safety issues. In fact we invited the Kansas version of OSHA into the plant to do a full inspections for us every so often. Even though we had our own scheduled safety inspections and our corporate HR department inspected our facility twice a year, we welcomed an outside set of eyes. They usually could find something that we had been overlooking. Plus they were always up to date on the latest standards.
I didn’t mean to imply that she issued the citation at the time of the inspection. The citation came with the written report that we received a few days/weeks later. The inspector was not involved in any of the follow up communication. Sorry I wasn’t clear on that.
It’s been 10 years since I was a production manager. I’m sure many things have changed. I miss the employees and the camaraderie. I don’t miss the deadlines and pressure.
OSHA has a consultation arm separate from their enforcement arm. A lot of companies wisely use OSHA consultation to help identify opportunities for them to improve worker safety. Consultation rarely results in any violations, something would have to be a serious IDLH situation.
Tying back to the topic - Federal OSHA’s inability to effectively address heat-related illness in workplaces is a real problem.
There’s not a federal standard to enforce. General Duty Clause citations are weak and ineffective.
There aren’t enough enforcement officers to carry out inspections that focus on heat-related illness.
States using Federal OSHA as a crutch to ban state and local laws are misguided and wrong.
What’s interesting is that these states frequently use their bullhorn to blast “State rights” and “Let’s leave it up to the states”! Weird that they want to leave this up to the feds…