These people want to be free from the burdensome yoke of the federal government? Good. Just stop sending them any more federal money:
Around midnight on June 1, 2007, Tina Hall was finishing her shift in a place she loathed: the mixing room at the Toyo Automotive Parts factory in Franklin, Ky., where flammable chemicals were kept in open containers. A spark ignited vapors given off by toluene, a solvent Hall was transferring from a 55-gallon drum to a hard plastic bin. A flash fire engulfed the 39-year-old team leader, causing third-degree burns over 90 percent of her body. She died 11 days later.After investigating, the Kentucky Labor Cabinet’s Department of Workplace Standards cited Toyo for 16 “serious” violations and proposed a $105,500 fine in November 2007 [...]
The violations didn’t stick. Every one of them went away in 2008, as did the fine, after Toyo’s attorney vowed to contest the enforcement action in court. Last month, however, in a move thought to be unprecedented in Kentucky, the Department of Workplace Standards reinstated all the violations because, it said, the company hadn’t made promised safety improvements.
The case was another black eye for state-run workplace health and safety programs nationwide. In all, 26 states administer their own programs under federal supervision. Several have been criticized in recent years for performing subpar inspections and shutting out accident victims’ families.
Officials in Kentucky didn’t tell Harville and Hall’s husband that the Toyo violations had been dismissed. They found out in 2010 only because Ron Hayes, a fellow Alabamian who runs a nonprofit advocacy group for families of fallen workers, had taken an interest in the case.
Hayes---whose son, Pat, died in a Florida grain-elevator accident in 1993---lodged a formal complaint against Kentucky with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which concluded in 2011 that the state had erred.
“Deleting citations in their entirety sends a signal to employers that they need only contest to alleviate the burden of history,” OSHA’s regional administrator in Atlanta, Cindy Coe, wrote to Hayes [...]
Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, states that choose to regulate workplace health and safety must ensure that their programs are “at least as effective” as the federal one. OSHA pays up to half the costs of such programs and is supposed to keep tabs on them.
If I ran the zoo, there'd be no federal money---revenue sharing, grants-in-aid, transportation funds, Medicare/Medicaid disbursements, etc.---to be released to these assholes until they finally decided to stop waging the fucking Civil War and get in compliance with the 20th Century, let alone the 21st. There's more than one way to starve a beast, you know.
---Viteluus
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