OSHA Max fine $15625 if you're killed in the workplace

What's the argument for outsourcing workplace safety to individual lawyers? Bumping the max fine up by 10x or 20x would still leave room for excess liability while simultaneously guaranteeing actual repercussions for negligent companies. In the current setup, if the estate decides not to pursue a lawsuit since it's a horrible process that will take several years, the company basically gets off free?

This post starts by saying “most” civil liability claims are impossible where workman’s compensation exists, which is true, but then the rest of the post seems to suggest it’s a hard and fast rule. It is not. If you are injured at work, seek advice from a professional.

One exception: willful misconduct.

Either way I could see OSHA dropping a fine - because either the equipment wasn't working correctly, which is a violation, or the policies weren't correct, which is a violation, or they had an employee who would do stupid things, which is a violation.

I'm more curious about this "Don't approach a plane until the beacon light turns off" system. Is this standardized or widely used? Because it sounds like a terrible design.

If you've got one signal light to signal the state of a system it should turn on when safe and off when unsafe, so when the light is obscured or the lamp fails someone doesn't walk into a running jet engine.

To be clear I don't have any information that's not in the article. I don't know if there was a system failure or what the nature of that failure might be. All I'm saying is that the description of a procedure where a people approach jets when the you're-in-mortal-peril-light goes out gives me goosebumps. My entirely uninformed opinion is that OSHA might feel the same way.

From what I recall reading about the incident when it happened, the airplane did have the usual red beacon lights that normally indicate that the engines are running, and the crew that the woman was a part of had received multiple briefings about both safety around running engines, and this specific airplane.

The airplane had a non-functional APU, so they kept the engines running longer on the ground until they could get connected to ground power. Normally with an APU operable, the flight crew could start shutting down the engines much sooner, such that it would not have been nearly as hazardous to the ground crew. That's probably what any sort of civil suit will go after -- if AA had spent the time and money to have the APU fixed sooner, the dangerous situation could have been prevented and the woman that was killed might still be alive.

> What was AA supposed to do aside from refusing to open the door to let ground crew outside?

Sure, that's a pretty reasonable option. Have someone be on door duty, and they keep it locked until the plane is shut off. Better yet would be some kind of interlock where the doors automatically lock while the turbines are running, but hardware changes are hard to make in aviation. Maybe give the pilot the responsibility to unlock those doors somehow as part of the offboarding procedures.

> She got TWO briefings not to approach the plane.

Sure, and yet we still put railings around high ledges although it would be obvious even without them that falling off would be bad. Circular saws come with guards on them, even though it's self-evident that the blade is the dangerous bit. Those robots that assemble cars in factories have a big cage around them.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a device that can suck someone in and blend them from a substantial distance probably needs better safety guards than a lecture and a light bulb.

People come to work tired, or with allergies, or sick, or hungover, or just out of it because personal issues and they forget to check that lightbulb that's always off by the time they get there anyways.

i was a pilot for many years, the precautions taken were inadequate and the safety culture sounds “problematic at best.”