An employee’s right to complain is being safeguarded as never before by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).   The agency is interested in receiving information from workers about job-place hazards that are being ignored by their employers and in fact encourages them to come forward.    These “whistleblowers”, OSHA realizes, are vulnerable and must be afforded a special level of protection should their employers attempt to retaliate against them for their actions.

Relying on over 20 existing federal laws and numerous favorable court decisions that uphold whistleblower rights, OSHA has been able to help many employees regain their former jobs, receive retroactive back pay, and, in some cases, be awarded punitive damages.   For example, the following decisions are typical of OSHA’s many recent successes (Source: Occupational Safety and Health Administration):

  • . A federal appeals court has affirmed that Pan Am Railways, Inc. must pay $260,000 in punitive and compensatory damages to – and take corrective action on behalf of – an employee who was subjected to retaliation for filing a Federal Railroad Safety Act whistleblower complaint

 

 

  • A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has found that Lloyd Industries Inc. – a manufacturing company based in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania – and its owner William P. Lloyd unlawfully terminated two employees because of their involvement in a safety investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  The court will determine damages in the trial’s second phase

 

 

 

  • After an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has awarded $40,000 for lost wages, pain and suffering, and punitive damages to a former employee of Fairmount Foundry Inc. The employee claimed that the Hamburg, Pennsylvania, iron-casting company terminated him for reporting alleged safety and health hazards to OSHA.

 

The agency’s outreach and awareness raising programs for employees regarding their right to complain apparently have been successful since in the last five years complaints filed by whistleblowers have increased significantly, up 29 percent from 2014 (7,408) to 2018 (9,566).  

Any employee who has been terminated, threatened, intimidated, harassed, transferred without justification, demoted or otherwise punished for reporting an unsafe or unhealthy condition in their work environment may seek whistleblower protection from OSHA which will then investigate the allegations.   If found to have merit, it will then refer the matter to the US Department of Labor for litigation at no cost to the complainant.

For decades, employers have been responsible for providing and sustaining “a safe and healthful workplace” for their employees.  Implicit in this obligation is acknowledging and acting upon worker concerns regarding hazards and threats to their well-being. Turning a blind eye to these complaints or “blaming the messenger”, is not only illegal, it is indefensible in court as many employers have learned in recent years.

 

Data provided by OSHA, a federal agency under the purview of the U.S. Department of Labor, shows that the number of whistleblower complaints filed has increased by 29 percent over the last five years, from 7,408 complaints in 2014 to 9,566 complaints in 2018. In 2018, OSHA opened full investigations into 3,007 of those complaints. While the number of complaints has gone up, the number of OSHA investigators has declined. OSHA had 76 investigators at the end of 2018, down from 100 in 2014.

 

On March 4, 2014, in Lawson v. FMR LLC, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this whistleblower protection applies not only to employees of publicly owned companies, but also to employees of privately owned contractors and subcontractors of public companies.