Workplace Safety & Health

The 2024 Corporate Rap Sheet

My colleagues and I collected more than 22,000 new entries for the U.S. version of Violation Tracker this year. We also launched Violation Tracker Global, which contains cases brought against large corporations in 52 countries. Here are some of the most notable cases of the year from both databases.

McKinsey and Opioids. McKinsey, the leading management consulting firm, had to pay $650 million in criminal and civil penalties to resolve a U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) case concerning its work for the disgraced pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma. McKinsey was charged with conspiring with Purdue to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin while misleading users about the addiction risks of the opioid.

TD Bank and Money Laundering. TD Bank N.A., a U.S. subsidiary of Canada’s Toronto-Dominion, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1.9 billion in fines and forfeiture to resolve DOJ charges that it violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to file reports on suspicious transactions and thereby facilitated money laundering by criminal networks.

BHP, Vale and a Mining Disaster. Mining giants BHP and Vale, co-owners of the Samarco joint venture, agreed to a US$31 billion settlement to resolve litigation brought by Brazilian communities destroyed by the 2015 Mariana mine-waste dam collapse that killed 19 people and polluted 400 miles of rivers.

Raytheon and Fraud and Bribery. Raytheon Company, a subsidiary of military contractor RTX (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies), agreed to pay over $950 million to resolve a DOJ criminal investigation into a major fraud scheme involving defective pricing on certain government contracts and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Arms Export Control Act.

3M and PFAS. A federal judge in South Carolina gave final approval to a class action settlement in which 3M agreed to pay an estimated $12.5 billion to more than 10,000 public water systems to resolve allegations that PFAS chemicals produced by the company for use in firefighting foam ended up contaminating water sources.

Apple and Improper Tax Breaks. The European Commission ordered Apple to repay 13 billion euros to Ireland after determining that the special tax breaks the company had been receiving for 16 years amounted to a form of illegitimate state aid.

Meta Platforms and Biometric Data. Facebook parent Meta Platforms agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the Texas Attorney General’s office to settle a lawsuit alleging it improperly captured biometric data from millions of users for its facial recognition system without the authorization required by state law.

Teva Pharmaceuticals and Copaxone. The European Commission fined Teva 462 million euros for abusing its dominant position to delay competition to Copaxone, its medication for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. The Commission found that Teva artificially extended the patent protection of Copaxone and systematically spread misleading information about a competing product to hinder its market entry and uptake.

Uber Technologies and Wage Theft. Uber paid $148 million to settle a case brought by the Massachusetts Attorney General alleging that it violated state wage and hour law in the way it paid its drivers. The agreement also required the company to begin paying a minimum wage of $32.50 an hour and providing benefits such as paid sick leave. The case also targeted Lyft, which paid $27 million.

Glencore and Bribery. The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland ordered commodities trading company Glencore to pay a penalty equal to about $152 million for failing to take steps to prevent the bribery of government officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo by a business partner.

Walgreens and False Claims. Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and Walgreen Co. agreed to pay $106 million to the DOJ to resolve alleged violations of the False Claims Act and state statutes for billing government health care programs for prescriptions never dispensed.

Veolia and a Workplace Death. A British subsidiary of France’s Veolia Group pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act after a worker died and another was seriously injured while decommissioning a North Sea gas rig. The Health and Safety Executive fined the company £3 million and ordered it to pay £60,000 in costs.

Goldman Sachs and Apple Card Users. The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Goldman Sachs to pay $64 million in fines and redress for mishandling customer service breakdowns affecting thousands of Apple Card holders. These failures meant that consumers faced long waits to get money back for disputed charges and some had incorrect negative information added to their credit reports.

You can find many more examples of the year’s corporate scandals in Violation Tracker and Violation Tracker Global. There is every reason to believe there will be many more cases for the Trackers to document in the coming year.

The Corn Dust Conspiracy

About 5,000 workers are killed on the job in the United States each year. Some of these are pure accidents, while others may result from a lapse in safety procedures. Most disturbing are those caused by a failure on the part of management to rectify known hazards.

Solidly in the latter category is the wrongdoing attributed to Didion Milling. In 2017 a dust explosion at a corn mill operated by the company in Cambria, Wisconsin killed five workers and seriously injured others. Six years later, corporate officials whose actions contributed to the disaster and then concealed its causes are finally being held to account.

A federal jury recently convicted Didion’s Vice President of Operations, Derrick Clark, of conspiring to falsify documents, making false environmental compliance certifications and obstructing the Occupational Safety and Health investigation of the explosion. Shawn Mesner, former food safety superintendent at the plant, was convicted of conspiring to obstruct and mislead OSHA by falsifying sanitation records concerning the accumulation of corn dust at the mill.

In other words, Clark and Mesner were found to have covered up dangerous conditions before the explosion and then engaged in a cover-up after the fact. They did not act alone. Three other company officials previously pleaded guilty to related charges. A sixth official was acquitted.

The company was also prosecuted. Last month it pleaded guilty to falsifying records related to its Occupational Safety and Health Act and Clean Air Act obligations. Although Didion has not yet been formally sentenced, it has agreed to pay $1 million in criminal fines and $10.25 million in restitution to the victims of the accident and their families.

The Didion case exemplifies some harsh realities about U.S. workplace practices.

First, it demonstrates the willingness of some employers to put the lives of their workers at risk to boost their bottom line. It is no secret that corn dust is highly combustible and needs to be reduced through careful sanitary practices. Didion and its managers decided to sidestep these practices and instead falsify records to conceal their reckless behavior.

Second, it illustrates the myth of over-regulation. The Didion facility had been cited by OSHA for dust explosion hazards six years prior to the explosion. In 2011 it was fined all of $6,300—which it negotiated down to $3,465. It appears that Didion then began keeping false records while OSHA was kept in the dark about the increasingly dangerous conditions at the mill.

Third, it shows how the country has become blasé about both workplace hazards and the difficulties faced by an over-extended OSHA to do anything about them. I find it remarkable that the Didion accident and the subsequent revelations and legal proceedings have received so little coverage outside Wisconsin.

It is true that Didion is not a well-known company, but the story of its egregious behavior needs to be more widely told. This case also deserves more attention in that it is a rare instance in which managers were held personally liable for their efforts to subvert the regulatory system. The sentences they end up receiving will be an indicator of how serious a crime such behavior is considered to be—and how much we value the lives of workers.

A Harebrained Response to Labor Shortages

At a time of widespread labor shortages, one might expect policymakers to welcome asylum seekers and economic migrants eager for an opportunity to make a living in the United States. Instead, as the Washington Post reports, legislators in some states have come up with a harebrained proposal for filling those jobs: loosening the restrictions on child labor.

Lawmakers in Wisconsin lifted restrictions on working hours during the school year, but the measure was vetoed by the governor. The Ohio Senate passed a similar bill but it died in the House. Even worse are bills introduced in Iowa and Minnesota that would allow teens as young as 14 to work in dangerous occupations such as meatpacking and construction.

It is unclear whether these legislators are aware that labor activists and social reformers fought for many years in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to restrict the exploitation of children in factories, mines, mills and other workplaces. They eventually made progress at the state level, leading to the passage of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The FLSA barred young workers from some occupations and limited the hours they could work in others, both for safety reasons and to prevent adverse effects on educational attainment. Adoption of strong child labor laws came to be viewed as one of the hallmarks of a humane society.

While the FLSA and state regulations eliminated the worst forms of child labor, they did not end abuses entirely. Violation Tracker documents more than 4,000 cases over the past two decades in which an employer paid a penalty for breaking the rules. The fines imposed in these cases amount to $99 million, or an average of about $24,000 per case—a reflection of the fact that penalty levels are far from harsh.

Most child labor violators are small firms, but some large corporations have also committed the offense. Chipotle Mexican Grill has the highest penalty total, mainly due to a $7.75 million settlement the company reached in 2022 with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development. An audit conducted by the agency of Chipotle outlets had found over 30,000 violations across the state. Two years earlier, Chipotle reached a $1.87 million settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General over child labor and other wage and hour violations.

Among the other big companies with substantial child labor penalties from multiple cases are: CVS Health ($464,099), Albertsons ($337,790) and Walmart ($317,378).

Most child labor violations are related to potential harm to young workers, but there are also cases in which the harm is real and even deadly. A 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office cited estimates that workers aged 17 and under sustain thousands of injuries each year. That same report included data showing that work-related fatalities for that same age group totaled 452 for the period from 2003 to 2016. The largest numbers of deaths were in agriculture, followed by construction and mining.

The sensible response to all these statistics would be to tighten the rules regarding child labor, not to weaken them. There are better ways to address labor shortages.

Derailing a Strike

The Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats purport to be pro-union, but in their desperation to prevent a rail strike they fail to understand something fundamental about collective bargaining: Sometimes workers have to inconvenience the public in order to achieve their legitimate goals.

A strike is a form of disruption. It is designed to put direct economic pressure on an employer by curtailing operations. Yet it also uses indirect means. The hope is that customers, suppliers, creditors and other stakeholders will press management to settle its differences with the union, resulting in better terms for workers. The louder the public uproar, the more likely there will be concessions by employers.

By trying to prohibit a strike by rail workers dissatisfied with the agreement previously negotiated with the help of the Biden Administration, Congress is eliminating both the direct and indirect pressures management might feel to improve on those contract provisions. It is trying to impose a clean solution in a conflict that is inherently messy.

At the insistence of progressives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to an add-on bill that would compel the railroads to provide additional paid sick days—a key point of contention—~~but as of this writing it seems unlikely that measure will pass the Senate.~~but that measure failed in the Senate.

Passage of a measure imposing the previous agreement and banning a strike would amount to one of the most egregious cases of strike-breaking by the federal government since Ronald Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union in 1981. It would also constitute an outrageous giveaway to a group of employers with a dismal track record on working conditions and safety.

As documented in Violation Tracker, the five U.S.-owned Class I railroads — BNSF, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific—have been fined more than 9,000 times by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration over the past two decades. They have paid over $100 million in penalties. The biggest offender is Union Pacific, with over 3,400 citations and $42 million in fines over safety issues.

The hazards indicated by these repeated violations—along with the grueling schedules imposed on rail workers—make the demand for ample paid sick leave all the more urgent.

That urgency applies not only to railroad employees but to the public. The safety lapses cited by the Federal Railroad Administration can lead to accidents such as collisions with cars and trucks at grade crossings or derailments in which hazardous materials spill out and endanger nearby communities.

Railroads have a history of trying to suppress information about dangerous working conditions. For example, in 2019 and 2020 BNSF, which is part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, was ordered to pay more than $1.7 million in damages and compensation to an employee who faced retaliation after reporting track defects.

CSX has been fined several times for whistleblower retaliation. For example, in 2021 OSHA found that the company violated the Federal Railroad Safety Act and demonstrated a pattern of retaliation after firing a worker in December 2019 for reporting safety concerns. The agency ordered the company to pay $71,976 in back wages, interest, and damages, and $150,000 in punitive damages.

In 2020 Norfolk Southern was ordered to pay $85,000 and reinstate an employee who was fired for reporting an on-the-job injury. Union Pacific has paid over $700,00 in five retaliation cases.

The rap sheets of the Class I railroads also include multiple environmental penalties. For example, in 2009 Union Pacific had to pay more than $31 million to settle alleged violations of the Clean Water Act in Nevada. In 2019 it paid $2.3 million to four California counties to resolve allegations relating to the mishandling of hazardous wastes.

In 2010 Norfolk Southern paid over $8 million to the Environmental Protection Agency in connection with a derailment and spill of hazardous chemicals in South Carolina. Three years earlier, it paid over $7 million to Pennsylvania to help pay for the restoration of waterways and wetlands affected by a lye spill.

In 2018 CSX paid $2.7 million to federal and state agencies to resolve liabilities related to water pollution caused by a 2015 derailment and oil spill in West Virginia. In 2004 BNSF paid North Dakota $29 million to resolve litigation relating to a massive underground leak of diesel oil.

The Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats may not have intended it, but their approach to the rail conflict ended up providing an extraordinary benefit to one of the least deserving industries.

The Infrastructure of Workplace Protection

Republicans are having limited success turning the public against the Biden Administration’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan by claiming the proposal is too wide-ranging. A new NPR poll shows solid support not only for the provisions relating to roads and bridges but also for spending on modernizing the electric grid, achieving universal broadband coverage and even expanding long-term healthcare.

Given the sweeping scope of the proposal, it is not possible for pollsters to ask about every component. I suspect there would also be high numbers for a portion of the plan that has received little attention. That is the provision that would strengthen the capacity of federal departments responsible for enforcing workplace protections.

Biden is proposing that $10 billion be spent to beef up agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Wage and Hour Division. The plan states: “President Biden is calling on Congress to provide the federal government with the tools it needs to ensure employers are providing workers with good jobs – including jobs with fair and equal pay, safe and healthy workplaces, and workplaces free from racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination and harassment.”

It makes sense to push for improvements in job quality at the same time the country is striving to bring the quantity of jobs back to the levels seen before the arrival of Covid-19. Workplace abuses predated the pandemic, in some ways got worse during the past year—especially with regard to job safety in industries such as meatpacking—and will be with us long after the health crisis abates.

Congress has perennially failed to fund these agencies adequately, leaving them with insufficient numbers of inspectors and investigators. For example, the most recent edition of the AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report notes that the number of workplace safety inspectors declined steadily during the Trump years both at the federal and state levels. These staffing shortages create a form of de factor deregulation as many workplace abuses go undetected and unprosecuted.

Biden’s plan also briefly addresses another problem with workplace enforcement: artificially low penalty structures, especially at OSHA. The Administration calls for increasing these penalties but does not provide specifics.

The penalty situation at OSHA is not as bad as it used to be. Changes made during the Obama Administration, including 2015 legislation that extended inflation adjustments to workplace safety fines, helped raise penalty rates. The maximum for a serious violation is now $13,653 and the maximum for a willful or repeated violation is $136,532.

These maximum amounts do not tell the full story. As Death on the Job points out, the average penalty for a serious violation in fiscal year 2019 was only $3,717. The average for willful violations was $59,373 and for repeat violations it was $14,109. Even in cases involving fatalities, the median penalty was just $9,282.

The cumulative effect of low OSHA penalties can be seen in the data in Violation Tracker, which only includes fines of $5,000 or more. OSHA accounts for 37 percent of the cases in the database but less than 1 percent of the total penalty dollars. Numbers such as these cause too many employers to conclude that their bottom line is best served by skimping on workplace safety and paying the meager fines that may or may not be imposed by OSHA.

The Biden infrastructure plan could begin to change that.

The Battle Over Covid Safety on the Job

As the country reaches the sorrowful milestone of 100,000 dead from covid-19, there is much discussion of the unequal distribution of fatalities around the country. Instead of focusing only on which cities lost the most lives, we should also be analyzing what portion of the deaths occurred in the workplace. The latter is part of one of the biggest scandals of the pandemic: the extent to which employers are being allowed to put workers in high-risk situations, with little or no intervention from health and safety regulators.

Since the coronavirus crisis began, we have seen contradictory tendencies when it comes to at-risk workers. There has been an enormous amount of justified praise for front-line nurses, doctors, EMTs and others who have been helping covid patients. The nightly applause and other demonstrations of appreciation are important affirmations of the vital role these workers play.

Their efforts are all the more heroic in that most of these workers readily accepted the risk, seeing it as part of their professional responsibility to help those in need, despite the circumstances.

Potentially fatal workplace risk becomes a trickier matter for other occupations not usually regarded as hazardous. Prior to the pandemic, no one ever took a job in a supermarket expecting to put his or her life on the line. Warehouse and factory jobs have had higher accident rates, but in most cases they were still not viewed as deadly environments.

Now the calculus of workplace safety has become a lot more complicated, and the situation is being exacerbated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s abdication of its watchdog role. OSHA is performing very few covid-related inspections and reportedly has not proposed a single penalty against an employer.

The agency has claimed it plans to increase inspections, and it put out a statement affirming that employers are responsible for recording coronavirus illnesses among its workers. Yet it is unclear whether that data collection will have any enforcement consequences. The agency’s announcement states: “Recording a coronavirus illness does not mean that the employer has violated any OSHA standard. Following existing regulations, employers with 10 or fewer employees and certain employers in low hazard industries have no recording obligations; they need only report work-related coronavirus illnesses that result in a fatality or an employee’s in-patient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye.”

Perhaps the most disturbing workplace safety situation involves the country’s meatpacking plants, which have seen some of the worst clusters of covid-19. The Trump Administration, after resisting calls to make full use of the Defense Production Act to address the crisis regarding masks and ventilators, chose to invoke the law to compel meat plants to open even before the outbreaks were brought under control.

Rarely has a President made it so clear that the he was giving the well-being of workers lower priority than the desire to stimulate economic activity. What made things worse in this case was that the stimulus took the form of increasing the nation’s supply of ground beef and bacon strips.

In the decades following the creation of OSHA, annual workplace deaths sharply declined from around 17 per 100,000 employees to around 4 per 100,000. The Trump Administration’s two-pronged attack on safety threatens to reverse that trend.

There are already signs that people are resisting. We’ve seen increased militancy over safety at places such as Amazon.com distribution centers, and we’ve seen the filing of a class action lawsuit against McDonald’s. Widespread work stoppages are possible. One way or another, workers will defend their right to safety on the job.

Corporate America Wants Its Own Immunity Passport

It is unclear at the moment whether Mitch McConnell and other Congressional Republicans are backing off their demand that corporations be given protection from covid-19 lawsuits — or if they are maneuvering behind the scenes in favor of the proposal.

What I find amazing is that business lobbyists and their GOP supporters think they can sell the country on the idea, which would be a brazen giveaway to corporate interests.

There are numerous compelling arguments against immunity, but I want to focus on one: the track records of corporations themselves. Proponents of a liability shield imply that large companies normally act in good faith and that any coronavirus-related litigation would be penalizing them for conditions outside their control. These lawsuits, they suggest, would be frivolous or unfair.

This depiction of large companies as innocent victims of unscrupulous trial lawyers is a long-standing fiction that business lobbyists have used in promoting “tort reform,” the polite term for the effort to limit the ability of victims of corporate misconduct to seek redress through the civil justice system. That campaign has not been more successful because most people realize that corporate negligence is a real thing.

In fact, some of the industries that are pushing the hardest for immunity are ones that have terrible records when it comes to regulatory compliance. Take nursing homes, which have already received a form of covid immunity from New York State.

That business includes the likes of Kindred Healthcare, which has had to pay out more than $350 million in fines and settlements. The bulk of that amount has come from cases in which Kindred and its subsidiaries were accused of violating the False Claims Act by submitting inaccurate or improper bills to Medicare and Medicaid. Another $40 million has come from wage and hour fines and settlements.

Kindred has also been fined more than $4 million for deficiencies in its operations. This includes more than $3 million it paid to settle a case brought by the Kentucky Attorney General over issues such as “untreated or delayed treatment of infections leading to sepsis.”

Or consider the meatpacking industry, which has experienced severe outbreaks yet is keeping many facilities open. This sector includes companies such as WH Group, the Chinese firm that has acquired well-known businesses such as Smithfield. WH Group’s operations have paid a total of $137 million in penalties from large environmental settlements as well as dozens of workplace safety violations.

Similar examples can be found throughout the economy. Every large corporation is, to at least some extent, a scofflaw when it comes to employment, environmental and consumer protection issues. There is no reason to think this will change during the pandemic. In fact, companies may respond to a difficult business climate by cutting even more corners.

The two ways such misconduct can be kept in check are regulatory enforcement and litigation. We have an administration that believes regulation is an evil to be eradicated.

This makes the civil justice system all the more important, yet business lobbyists and their Congressional allies are trying to move the country in exactly the opposite direction. They want to liberate big business from any form of accountability, giving it what amounts to an immunity passport. Heaven help us if they succeed.

Getting Tough on Corporate Killing

The lead story on the front page of a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal was about the former chief executive of a Brazilian mining company not widely known in the United States. The Journal’s editors probably realized their readers would be shaken by the news that Fabio Schvartsman has been charged with homicide in the deaths of 270 people in a mining dam collapse last year.

The decision by prosecutors in the state of Minas Gerais to bring such charges against Schvartsman as well as other former executives at Vale SA shows the depth of anger in Brazil at the giant iron ore company over the accident in which a torrent of waste swept away people, submerged houses and created a large toxic wasteland (photo).

Vale and a German consulting company, five of whose officials were also hit with homicide charges, are alleged to have long known about a critical safety flaw in the tailings dam but failed to act.

Although Brazil does not have a death penalty or life sentences for civilian offenses, the filing of homicide charges against corporate executives is an aggressive measure that has rarely been applied in that country or anywhere else.

There are more precedents when it comes to corporate manslaughter, which is the idea that a business entity can be prosecuted for causing the death of employees or other persons. For example, in 2007 the United Kingdom enacted the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, though that law has not been enforced as rigorously as many advocates had hoped.

In the United States there is no such federal statute, though the principle of corporate criminal liability is well-established, and numerous companies have faced criminal charges, though they frequently end with deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements.

The Violation Tracker database has more than 1,600 criminal cases (compared to 395,000 civil matters). Many of these are financial in nature or involve violations of environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act that are deemed negligent or deliberate but usually don’t involve loss of life.

A much smaller number involve corporate killing, including notorious cases such as BP’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the Upper Big Branch disaster at a coal mine owned by Massey Energy.

In these matters, however, the corporations, as in civil cases, mainly paid financial penalties and their executives faced no personal liability. One exception was former Massey CEO Don Blankenship, who was convicted of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards and was sentenced to a year in prison. Otherwise, the Justice Department has shown little interest in prosecuting corporate executives for environmental or workplace fatalities.

There has been a bit more of such activity at the local level, especially on the part of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. It has brought criminal charges against both companies and individuals in connection with workplace and other accidents. For example, in November 2019 a building owner, a plumber and a contractor were convicted of manslaughter by causing a 2015 explosion resulting from unauthorized natural-gas connections installed in a rental building.

Three years earlier, the Manhattan DA won a conviction against a construction supervisor accused of ignoring warnings about unsafe conditions on a building site that resulted in a fatal accident.

The approach of the Manhattan DA and the prosecutors in Brazil points to a promising way forward in the handling of corporate misconduct that results in serious harm or death. If they know they may end up behind bars for a long time, corporate executives and managers may become more serious about their responsibility to abide by health and safety laws.

Trump’s War on Workers

Donald Trump’s blue-collar supporters may like what they are seeing on Fox News, but when they arrive at work the MAGA revolution is nowhere to be found. Far from empowering labor, the Trump Administration’s employment policies are heavily skewed toward management.

The aspect of this I’ve been focusing on lately are wage and hour issues. Recently my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project and Jobs With Justice published Grand Theft Paycheck, a detailed look at wage theft by large corporations. We found that major employers in a wide range of industries continue to pay out large sums in collective action lawsuits, which indicates that they continue to violate the Fair Labor Standards Act by compelling employees to do off-the-clock work and denying them proper overtime pay.

Such litigation may soon be a thing of the past. There are signs that collective actions are failing in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Epic Systems ruling, written by Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch, affirming the right of employers to use mandatory arbitration to block group lawsuits. For example, a federal judge in California told a group of Domino’s Pizza drivers that they had to use arbitration rather than litigation to resolve their claims against franchise owners.

At the same time, instead of intensifying enforcement by the Wage and Hour Division, Trump’s Labor Department is promoting a new approach based on corporate self-audits and fewer fines. Allowing employers to operate on the honor system is just another way of weakening enforcement.

A new report from the National Employment Law Project shows that the Trump DOL is also reducing enforcement of workplace safety and health rules. NELP found that OSHA enforcement activity in FY2017 was down compared to the previous year. The decline was even more pronounced during the first five months of FY2018, when the number of enforcement units (the measure used by OSHA) fell by more than 7 percent. This trend is likely to worsen, since NELP notes that the number of OSHA inspectors has been declining.

Federal workers are facing an assault of their own. Trump recently announced plans to overhaul rules affecting more than two million employees, making it easier to discipline and fire them. The move also includes an attack on federal unions through stricter limits on the amount of time grievance officers and other activists can spend on union activity during working hours.

The next blow will come in the Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a decision soon in the Janus case that blocks the ability of public sector unions to collect fees from employees who decline to join but still benefit from collective bargaining agreements and other protections negotiated by those unions. Such a ruling could have a devastating financial impact on public unions.

As bad as all this sounds, it could boomerang on Trump and his corporate allies. More workers may follow the example of the teacher wildcat strikes and put their faith in self-organization rather than a demagogue.

Workplace Hazards in the Tech Economy

The titans of the tech economy want us to believe that among their achievements is the transformation of the workplace into a more humane and nurturing environment. This accounts for the frequent stories about headquarters campuses with endless amenities and flexible work arrangements.

It’s often another story when you look beyond those glittering complexes to the more mundane sites where the routine work is done. The manufacturing, distribution and customer service facilities that prop up the tech companies have a lot in common, in a bad way, with their old economy counterparts.

The latest indication of that reality comes in the 2018 edition of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s Dirty Dozen list of employers that put workers and communities most at risk. The council is a federation of local COSH groups that for nearly 50 years have been promoting safer workplace practices.

This year’s Dirty Dozen includes two new-economy corporations that work hard to portray themselves as enlightened: Amazon.com and Tesla Motors.

Amazon makes the list because of a series of fatal workplace accidents at its warehouses over the past five years. The report points out that the facilities create hazards by demanding that workers maintain a dangerously intense pace of work in order to service the company’s rapid delivery system. One Amazon center in Pennsylvania became infamous for having paramedics stationed outside full-time to deal with the frequent cases of dehydration and heat stress.

Violation Tracker’s summary page for Amazon lists 17 OSHA fines totaling $208,675 – but most of those come from its Whole Foods subsidiary. Amazon’s distribution and fulfillment centers don’t have more entries because many of their workers are technically employees of temp agencies and leasing firms.

Tesla makes the Dirty Dozen list because National COSH found that its injury rate was 31 percent higher than the rest of the automotive industry and its rate of serious injuries was 83 percent higher. The report cites a series of articles about the safety problems at Tesla, including a Los Angeles Times story stating that Tesla had an accident rate greater than notoriously unsafe industries such as sawmills and slaughterhouses, despite being much more automated.

Tesla’s reported accident rate may actually be understated. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal project found that Tesla failed to include some of its serious injuries on legally mandated reports.

Among the reasons Amazon and Tesla have been able to get away with their unsafe practices is the absence of unions in their U.S. facilities. Both companies have succeeded, so far, in beating back labor organizing campaigns by employing the argument that workers at a supposedly enlightened company do not need a third party to represent them.

The truth, of course, is that unions are not really third parties but instead an expression of the desire of workers to present a united front in dealing with management. When it comes to employers such as Amazon and Tesla, that collective action may be the only way to ensure that workers can get through the day in one piece.