Discount retail chain Dollar General entered into a corporatewide settlement agreement with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), agreeing to make significant workplace safety improvements in stores nationwide, the agency announced July 11.

Dollar General agreed to pay $12 million in penalties and implement corporatewide changes that would make employee safety a priority, according to OSHA.

The settlement agreement resolves citations contested before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission and open federal OSHA inspections involving alleged violations such as blocked emergency exits, blocked electrical panels, blocked fire extinguishers, and unsafe storage.

“This agreement commits Dollar General to making worker safety a priority by implementing significant and systematic changes in its operations to improve accountability and compliance, and it gives Dollar General employees essential input on ensuring their own health and safety,” Douglas L. Parker, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, said in an agency statement.

“These changes help give peace of mind to thousands of workers, knowing that they are not risking their safety in their workplaces and that they will come home healthy at the end of each day,” he continued.

Agreed-upon improvements include the following:

• Establishing and maintaining an expanded safety structure and a robust safety and health management system, including hiring additional safety managers;
• Significantly reducing inventory and increasing stocking efficiency to prevent blocked exits and unsafe material storage; 
• Providing safety and health training to both leadership and nonmanagerial employees; and 
• Developing a safety and health committee and encouraging employee participation.

The agreement also requires Dollar General to ensure prompt abatement of any future violations related to access to electrical panels and fire extinguishers, blocked exits, and improper material storage at its stores during the agreement term. The company must correct such hazards, generally within 48 hours, and submit proof that it did so. Failure to correct the hazards subjects Dollar General to monetary assessments of $100,000 per day of violation, up to $500,000, as well as OSHA inspection and enforcement actions. 

According to OSHA, Dollar General has taken the following steps toward compliance:

• Retained a third-party consultant to identify hazards and analyze enterprisewide contributing factors;
• Retained a third-party auditor to perform unannounced compliance audits annually at all covered stores to assess egress (exit routes), access to electrical panels and fire extinguishers, electrical hazards, and storage conditions;
• Created a new Safety Operations Center to detect store hazards and support safety performance; and
• Maintained an anonymous hotline for employees and the public to report safety concerns.

Dollar General, headquartered in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, operates more than 19,000 stores nationwide, according to OSHA.

Last year, OSHA reached a settlement agreement with Dollar Tree Stores, Inc., Dollar General’s competitor and the operator of discount retailers Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores. Dollar Tree agreed to conduct a comprehensive, nationwide assessment of the root causes of violations that OSHA had cited at multiple locations, with a plan to identify causes and make operational changes to correct them within a 2-year period.

The agency reached a settlement agreement with the Target Corporation in 2020, resolving violations that included blocked or obstructed access to emergency exits and fire exit routes and/or unsafe storage of materials in stores’ backrooms and storage areas at Target stores in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.