The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced June 16 that snack food maker Hostess Brands faces $298,010 in proposed fines following a worker’s amputation injury.

The 29-year-old worker suffered an amputation of a fingertip while reassembling a pump at a Hostess facility in Chicago—an injury Hostess could have prevented by shutting down and locking out the equipment to prevent it from unexpectedly restarting during maintenance, OSHA’s investigation found.

Agency inspectors cited the company for one willful, one repeat, and five serious violations.

The agency noted Hostess also failed to ensure that shafts, sprockets, and moving parts on equipment such as coolers, dough mixers, icing and wrapping stations, and box stoppers had required machine guarding in place to protect workers from contact with pinch points and moving parts.  

OSHA has inspected Hostess facilities in Georgia, Illinois, and Kansas 12 times since 2018 and cited them for failing to protect employees’ safety and health. In some of its investigations, the agency identified some of the same hazards as those identified in the Chicago facility.

“OSHA frequently finds that amputations and other injuries occur when manufacturers fail to make sure machine safety procedures are followed and employees are trained properly,” Sukhvir Kaur, OSHA’s Chicago north area director, said in an agency statement. “Employers can spare their employees these kinds of painful injuries by complying with OSHA and industry-recognized safety standards.”

Lockout/tagout (29 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) §1910.147) and machine guarding (§1910.212) are two of OSHA’s top 10 most frequently cited standards. The lockout/tagout standard is the agency’s sixth most frequently cited standard, cited 1,977 times in fiscal year (FY) 2022, and the machine guarding standard is OSHA’s tenth most frequently cited standard, cited 1,370 times in FY 2022.

OSHA has a national emphasis program (NEP) for amputations in manufacturing, and its Region 5 office has local emphasis programs (LEPs) focused on food manufacturing in Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin. OSHA recently proposed $2,812,658 in penalties for an Illinois pizza manufacturer’s lockout/tagout violation and other violations following a 29-year-old sanitation worker’s fatal injury.

UHS cited again for workplace violence

OSHA announced June 15 that Universal Health Services, Inc. (UHS), has been cited for workplace violence violations at a Jacksonville, Florida, behavioral health and substance disorder facility. Workers at UHS’s Wekiva Springs Hospital were assaulted and confined by patients and suffered broken bones, concussions, and wounds from being scratched, bitten, punched, and kicked, according to the agency.

OSHA says workers endured regular and often intense incidents of workplace violence, with reports of 182 alleged incidents in 2022, nearly 70 percent of which required police response, during a 6-month period.

The agency’s investigators learned that workers reported the following incidents:

• A patient threw a chair at a mental health associate and three nurses in an attempt to leave the facility.
• A nurse on duty was kicked in the stomach by a patient.
• A mental health associate’s head was smashed into an air conditioning unit repeatedly and suffered a concussion at the hands of a patient who refused to be escorted to their room.

OSHA has cited other instances of workplace violence at other UHS facilities. An administrative law judge (ALJ) with the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission recently upheld OSHA’s citation of UHS for exposing employees to workplace violence without adequate protection at its Fuller Hospital in Attleboro, Massachusetts.

OSHA has voluntary prevention guidelines for health care and social assistance and currently cites employers under the General Duty Clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The agency also has a rulemaking to establish a federal workplace violence prevention standard for health care and social assistance—one of six economically significant rulemakings at the agency.