Staffing buyer Marshall Ingredients LLC faces $300,062 in penalties after a temporary worker had a hand amputated during an industrial accident at the food ingredient manufacturer’s Wolcott, NY, facility, OSHA announced.
The penalties were reported last week, but the incident happened in July 2017. Marshall Ingredients has 15 business days from receipt of the citation to pay or contest them.
“This incident could have been prevented had adequate machine guards been in place,” said Chris Adams, director of the OSHA Syracuse Area Office. “Employers have a responsibility to implement and maintain safeguards to protect their employees from amputation hazards.”
The staffing supplier, People Ready, also faces penalties totaling $24,020 for lack of hazardous energy control and fire extinguisher training.
Safety has been a concern for temporary workers. Temporary workers from industrial staffing firms can be placed in settings where the physical nature of the work and machinery pose elevated risk, and they are less experienced with the specific work processes, according to a report by SIA Senior Research Manager Timothy Landhuis [1].
The research did find that frequency of lost-time workers’ comp medical claims across all job categories has declined since 1999 and are now half of what they were 10 years ago. However, that data tracked all jobs; temporary industrial workers could be seeing less of a reduction in their injury rate.
A separate study in Washington state found that temporary workers filed lost-workday claims twice as often [2] as traditionally hired workers.
In this case, Marshall Ingredients was cited by OSHA for failing to provide machine guarding to protect employees from contact with operating machinery; failing to develop procedures and provide training on how to prevent unexpected startup of machinery; and exposing employees to fall, confined space, chemical, mechanical, electrical and combustible dust hazards.