Judge rules company’s deadly violation of logout/tagout was not ‘willful’

An administrative law judge with the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission on Friday reduced by more than 80% a steel manufacturer’s fine over a worker’s death after it found that the Secretary of Labor failed to prove in part that violations the logout/tagout standards were “intentional.”

A worker was maintaining a machine at a Commercial Metals Co. facility in Sayreville, New Jersey, in 2022 when the machine unexpectedly energized, killing the worker. As documented in Secretary of Labor v. Commercial Metals Company, d/b/a CMC Steel New Jersey, and its successors, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation alleged three serious violations, one of them categorized as willful, totaling $159,529 in fines.

OSHRC case law describes willful as that which “is differentiated by heightened awareness of the illegality of the conduct or conditions and by a state of mind of conscious disregard or plain indifference.”

The administrative law judge ruled that evidence existed for the serious violations, writing that “respondent did not follow its own procedures for the shutdown of the machine in the lockout procedure,” but not willful, writing that “(w)hile the evidence shows that (the employer) had a heightened awareness of the standard’s requirements for lockout, evidence does not show that (the employer) had the requisite state of mind to support a willful characterization either through intentional disregard or plain indifference.”

The judge’s ruling reduced the proposed fines to $29,004.