CALIFORNIA LEADS IN MAKING EMPLOYERS PAY FOR JOB DEATHS: …It happened at the Aguiar-Faria & Sons dairy, a sprawling farm of some 1,700 cows operated by one of Gustine’s leading families. Two dairy workers, illegal immigrants from Mexico, drowned in a deep, dark sump hole filled with manure and wastewater. The coroner’s report succinctly cataloged their struggles in life and in death: Between them, they had eight pennies and one dime in their pockets; their lungs, however, were packed with bovine excrement.

The people of Gustine saw one more hard, cruel stroke of fate.

Roy Hubert saw a golden opportunity. In January, in a place where dairy is king, he methodically assembled enough evidence to persuade a grand jury in nearby Merced to indict the farm’s general manager and its herdsman for involuntary manslaughter and other felonies.

Just like that, both men were looking at nearly five years in prison.

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…California stands alone in the United States in its willingness to prosecute employers who kill or harm their workers by violating safety laws.

Long before Congress created the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, California had its own workplace safety standards, and it is one of 21 states that run their own versions of OSHA. Its powerful labor leaders and big-city district attorneys have long been adept at using headline-grabbing workplace deaths to win ever-stronger enforcement powers for the state agency, known as Cal OSHA.

Under federal law, it is a misdemeanor to commit safety violations that kill workers. The maximum penalty is six months in jail and a $500,000 fine. But after a deadly refinery explosion in 1999, California adopted one of the nation’s first laws making that same offense a felony. In California, conviction carries a sentence of up to three years in prison and a $1.5 million fine.

Every workplace death or serious injury in California is investigated with an eye to potential prosecution. That work is done by a special Cal OSHA unit, mostly former police officers, whose members are required by law to refer every death to local prosecutors if there is credible evidence of a deliberate safety violation.

Federal law sets a far more exclusive standard: only the most egregious workplace deaths–those caused by an employer’s “willful” safety violations–can be referred to the Justice Department. But as The New York Times found in an eight-month examination of workplace death in the United States, in even those worst cases, the federal OSHA only rarely seeks prosecution.

It is largely the same story in the other states that run their own workplace safety programs. California has prosecuted more employers for safety violations than all of those states combined, The Times found. At the same time, its workplace death rate is substantially lower than that of the rest of the nation. [Eve’s emphasis]

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Via Amptoons and Confined Space.