Companies are responsible for ensuring safe and healthy working conditions for workers. If a company is in this category, it faced allegations of violating workplace standards and was fined or reached a settlement.
Sources
Violation Tracker contains more than 250,000 entries on workplace safety or health cases dating back to 2000, with over $4 billion in penalties. All cases except for one hundred were handled by two agencies: the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). Nearly 90 percent of these cases were brought by OSHA with more than $3 billion in penalties issued. We also have about two dozen cases handled by the Justice Department.
The remaining 75 cases come from state attorneys general or district attorneys. State and local prosecutors account for $141 million of our penalty total.
There is also a small number of workplace safety collective action lawsuits, totaling nearly $57 million in settlements. For example, Meta and YouTube separately settled litigation alleging the two companies ignored workplace safety standards by allowing content moderators to experience psychological trauma from watching a high volume of disturbing videos.
Search Techniques
Violation Tracker offers multiple ways to locate workplace safety cases. In the Basic Search on the homepage, you can combine a company name with one of the federal agencies mentioned above in the Federal Regulatory Agency dropdown.
The best way to access workplace safety cases is through the Advanced Search page. Here you can combine a company name and/or other variables with the workplace safety or health violation choice in the Offense Type dropdown. You can use the Full Text search box to search relevant words or phrases mentioned in the description field of the individual entries. Use the Level of Government dropdown to limit your search to federal, state or local cases.
On the Summaries page you can retrieve an overview of all safety cases (not just workplace safety and health violations) from the Offense Group Summaries dropdown. You can also find such overviews for OSHA or other agencies from the Federal Agency Summaries or State/Local Agency Summaries dropdowns. The Current Parent Summaries include breakdowns by offense categories, including workplace safety violations.
To locate workplace safety class action lawsuits, go to the Advanced Search and choose private litigation from the Action Type dropdown and the workplace safety and health violation choice in the Offense Type dropdown. Private litigation entries include full case citations. Violation Tracker subscribers also have access to key court documents such as settlement agreements.
