Issue link: http://palletcentral.uberflip.com/i/638772
palletcentral.com PalletCentral • January-February 2016 25 chief explained that prosecutions would be open to "the ones making the decisions that lead to the deaths of others" including people in the corporate office, managers and supervisors in the field. Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates added: "On an average day in America, 13 workers die on the job, thousands are injured and 150 succumb to diseases they obtained from exposure to carcinogens and other toxic and hazardous substances while they worked. Given the troubling statistics on workplace deaths and injuries, the Department of Justice is redoubling its efforts to hold accountable those who unlawfully jeopardize workers' health and safety." Under the new plan, the attorneys in the DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division will work with the DOL's personnel at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), and the Wage and Hour Division (which has jurisdiction over issues including situations where minors illegally work in hazardous industries while under age 18) to investigate and prosecute endangerment violations. It is not news that you can end up doing prison time for violations of OSHA safety or health standards. The OSH Act provides criminal sanctions for three types of conduct that impact worker safety: (1) willfully violating a specific standard, and thus causing the death of an employee (there can be no criminal prosecutions, however, for violations of the OSH Act "General Duty Clause" that result in death); (2) giving advance notice of OSHA inspection activity (e.g., by calling inside a facility to give notice while holding inspectors outside, so that safety infractions can be remediated before discovery); and (3) falsification of documents filed or required to be maintained under the OSH Act. The problem, which is what led to the new enforcement initiative, is that DOJ typically refrained from prosecuting most federal OSHA cases eligible for criminal sanctions because, under It is not news that you can end up doing prison time for violations of OSHA safety or health standards.