Sugar Plant Removed Safety Device 13 Days before Temp Worker’s Death

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Today’s post was shared by Gelman on Workplace Injuries and comes from www.propublica.org

ProPublica is running an extremely informative investigative series on the trials and safety risks of being a temporary worker. This post is another story in that series. It is both brutal and thought-provoking. Sympathies go out to all the families whose lives are changed as their loved ones who are just trying to work for a living die in unsafe work environments.

There are a whole lot of people without any job security at all. “The temporary staffing business has been one of the fastest growing industries since the end of the 2007-09 recession. It now employs a record 2.9 million people in the United States,” according to the ProPublica article.

In this particular warehouse in Pennsylvania, every employee, including the warehouse manager, was a temp worker! The warehouse manager told OSHA that he had “complained repeatedly to upper management about the dangers of becoming engulfed while unclogging the sugar hopper,” according to the article, including requesting “a safety device to prevent clogging.”

But after that screen was installed, it was removed by the plant manager, as it was “slowing down production.” Less than two weeks after that, temp worker Janio Salinas, 50, was “buried alive in sugar.”

Even though CSC Sugar had been inspected and fined before, the original fine for this incident of $25,855 was reduced to $18,098 after the plant made safety adjustments, according to the article.

Although Mr. Salinas’ family thought OSHA should have done more, “Jean Kulp, director of OSHA’s Allentown, Pa., office, told Univision that her agency doesn’t have the ability to shut down businesses and has limited criminal enforcement provisions.”

If you or a loved one are hurt at work, please contact an experienced workers’ compensation attorney to discuss your options. As was written in previous blog posts, in Nebraska and Iowa, most but not all, temporary employees are covered by workers’ compensation. A better solution continues to be a safer job environment and stronger training programs for all workers.

This story was done in collaboration with Univision.

Inside the sugar plant in Fairless Hills, Pa., nobody could find Janio Salinas, a 50-year-old temp worker from just over the New Jersey border.

Throughout the morning, Salinas and a handful of other workers had been bagging mounds of sugar for a company that supplies the makers of Snapple drinks and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. But sugar clumps kept clogging the massive hopper, forcing the workers to climb inside with shovels to help the granules flow out the funnel-like hole at the bottom.

Coming back from lunch that day in February 2013, one employee said he had seen Salinas digging in the sugar. But when he looked back, Salinas was gone. All that remained was a shovel buried up to its handle. Then, peering through a small gap in the bottom of the hopper, someone noticed what appeared to blue jeans.

It was Salinas. He had been buried alive in sugar.

As harrowing as the accident was, federal safety investigators recently discovered something perhaps even more disturbing: A safety device that would have prevented Salinas’ death had been removed just 13 days before the accident because a manager believed it was slowing down production.

After a series of gruesome accidents involving untrained temp workers, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has stepped up its enforcement of rules affecting temp workers. In recent cases, OSHA has held companies and temp agencies jointly responsible for training, and it…

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The offices of Rehm, Bennett, Moore & Rehm, which also sponsors the Trucker Lawyers website, are located in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. Five attorneys represent plaintiffs in workers’ compensation, personal injury, employment and Social Security disability claims. The firm’s lawyers have combined experience of more than 95 years of practice representing injured workers and truck drivers in Nebraska, Iowa and other states with Nebraska and Iowa jurisdiction. The lawyers regularly represent hurt truck drivers and often sue Crete Carrier Corporation, K&B Trucking, Werner Enterprises, UPS, and FedEx. Lawyers in the firm hold licenses in Nebraska and Iowa and are active in groups such as the College of Workers’ Compensation Lawyers, Workers' Injury Law & Advocacy Group (WILG), American Association for Justice (AAJ), the Nebraska Association of Trial Attorneys (NATA), and the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA). We have the knowledge, experience and toughness to win rightful compensation for people who have been injured or mistreated.

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