Criminal Charges for Industrial Fatatlies in Michigan

The State of Michigan has filed criminal charges against a masonry contractor at a University of Michigan construction project in the wake of the death of a worker who plummeted 40 feet off an unguarded scaffolding.  According to a report at AnnArbor.com, Davenport Masonry operates as a criminally dangerous contractor and yet it continues its work on the elite Michigan campus.

This is from Juliana Keeping's article:

"A Michigan masonry company has been criminally charged in the death of a journeyman who fell from scaffolding while working on a University of Michigan construction project.


In a felony criminal complaint filed in Washtenaw County District Court, the Michigan Attorney General's Office charged Holt-based Davenport Masonry with violating the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Act, causing the death of an employee.

[T}he complaint, filed in April, [alleges] the company failed to create hazard-free work place, which caused the February 2008 death of Leo Felty, Jr.  Felty died in February 2008 after falling 40 feet from scaffolding while working on the $42 million U-M Museum of Art addition. The Pinckney man stepped backward off an unguarded end of the scaffolding and died on impact, according to the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation report."
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It is rare that criminal charges are filed in occupational injury and fatalities although we should expect more of this after the astounding Massey Coal Mine and DeepWater Oil Platform disasters.  Any idea, why?

Let me suggest that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of non-regulation and the scaling back on civil remedies for injured workers and their families.  In OurState, the business-friendly legislature and Supremes steadily circumscribed the rights of injured workers to hold employers liable for near-criminal conduct.  When heinous injuries do occur community and societal outrage can only be expressed by resort to criminal prosecutions.  If civil remedies were available would there be the clamoring for the sorts of criminal prosecutions we now demand of BP, Massey Coal, and these contractors who find it convenient not to insist on basic safety procedures?  I doubt it.

Previously, on Bad Lawyer, I talked about my client who suffered severed electric shock while performing maintenance at an electrical substation.  The employer in that case killed two prior employees (including their own daughter!) through the same practices that maimed my client.  The legal liability under the law of OurState at this time required that we demonstrate that the practices that injured my client were "substantially certain to cause injury."  OurState's law-givers, in response to the business lobbyists including the Chamber of Commerce, thought this "intentional tort" law too onerous.  After several re-draftings were "stuck down" by the Supremes, OurState Big Business interests finally were able to buy enough Supreme Court justices to have the legislative reform of this statutory "reform" upheld in a recent ruling. 

I await the next scandalous killing of a worker by an OurState employer, let's see how long it takes for an angry electorate to demand criminal prosecution of the industrial culprit.  You see, in our system money is justice, or else.

Man Sucked Into Sausage Seasoning Machine

My pal Chris worked variously at advertising, public relations, film making, and a variety of glamorous sounding professions including newspapers.  To honor his experience, I customarily send along links to some of my favorite news headlines from the local news websites with the subject line, Bad Headline Alert.  Usually, the stories are not germane to what I write about at Bad Lawyer, so these items never make it onto my blawg, until this morning.  Over the weekend I came across the above-headline at the New York Daily News! I would have begun this post on a different note had this truly been some sort of tragic tale of industrial accident-woe, but it appears from the account at the Daily News that the worker at the DiLiugi Sausage Company was only partially "sucked" into the machine and that this Sausage Company maintenance worker suffered no real injury from the experience. 

It is amazing how often serious injuries do occur in workplaces, sometimes in the seemingly most innocuous situations while frightening accidents happen to people with little or no injury in other cases.  Despite some horrifying examples in recent weeks of fatal industrial accidents with a mine disaster and the oil platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico workers' compensation laws and OSHA safety rules have made the world a safer place.  Sometimes the rules and laws seen ridiculous but from the perspective of hindsight you can see that the work place has become less and less a place of disease, dismemberment and death.

West Virgina Mine Accident

Breaking news from the West Virginia Gazette reports that a mine explosion in a Massey Coal mine of Raleigh County, West Virginia has resulted in injury and death for Massey coal employees at Performance Coal's Upper Big Branch Mine (pic)-South near Namoa.  Massey Coal has been the focus of several posts at Bad Lawyer since the inception of this blawg for among other things buying the West Virginia Supreme Court, and the company's shining environmental record of doing such things as removing mountain tops to strip coal.   A.T.Massey figures centrally behind the scenes of those sunny slickly produced commercials touting "clean" coal technology=we environmentally ruin your environment.

We don't calculate the cost in human health and life in the energy debate about "clean" coal.  In my career I encountered survivors of life in the mines, these were hard lives.  The only evidence of my Father's father is a picture of him in coveralls with a crew of Kentucky coal miners.  I ascribe the fact that I have no actual memory of father's father to a life foreshortened by emphysema and other pulmonary illness attributable to life in the mines. 

My professional and financial life is in tatters, but my professional work did not physically kill me.  For many others there are still Dickensian-corners of our economy that we don't actually think about until something like this occurs.  Astonishingly, so many of these operators are engaged in practices that deliberately disregard the safety of the people who in their employ descend below the earth to mine coal to fire power plants and make the high tech gadgets that we kid ourselves into believing are so green.   There is a human and environmental cost to that fancy new IPad and the other electronics we crave. 

Industrial Death and Injury

Denise Ford, 57, was killed at the Pittsburgh Glass Works factory when a lift she was using triggered the collapse of stacked glass plate.  She was crushed to death.  the preliminary cause of death was blunt force trauma.

Being a Bad Lawyer has it benefits, for one thing my work environment rarely puts me at risk of sudden death from industrial machinery.  I don't risk an amputation loss or other types of maiming from using this laptop.

Over the last 30 years I've handled thousands and thousands of industrial injury claims including injuries involving sudden death.  Trust me, while disgrace, depression, is bad, I would not trade my position with most of the men and women I've known over time who still labor in the factories and foundries, who drive the trucks and fight the fires, and who abate the asbestos.   And as I've discussed, here, I've defended the employers, factories, foundries, power plants, and trucking companies on meritorious and bullshit workers' compensation claims.  I've seen both sides.

I intend to talk about this system some more over the next few weeks.  But for now, thank your lucky stars that you don't spend your work day trying to lift plate glass on warehouse stacks with a tow-motor lift.

See:  http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/11/22/WORKER21_ART_11-22-09_B3_J0FOQBG.html?sid=101