Even as it waits for President Trump to nominate a new secretary of Labor, the Department of Labor is rolling back policies meant to prevent worker safety violations, says The New York Times.
“In a sharp break with the past, the department has stopped publicizing fines against companies. As of Monday, seven weeks after the inauguration of President Trump, the department had yet to post a single news release about an enforcement fine,” says the Times. The Obama administration, which pointedly used public announcements to shame companies into compliance, posted an average of about 460 news releases a year on infringements.
“Jillian Rogers, a spokeswoman for the Labor Department, declined to comment when asked why OSHA (i.e. the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency within the Labor Department that manages workplace safety) had not issued any such releases. But she said that the agency’s enforcement efforts were unchanged and that such efforts were ‘reflected across various media channels,’ like newsletters and social media,” says the Times.
OSHA has notoriously complicated rule-making procedures and any new policies can take years or decades to implement. To give the agency more heft, last year Congress agreed to double the fines on companies that violated labor rules. The agency went hard after certain repeat offenders, including the meat industry. “Among other things, [OSHA] levied fines last year as high as $317,000 against several poultry producers like Tyson Foods, Koch Foods and Birdsboro Kosher Farms,” says the Times.