Kentucky’s workplace safety agency is still a long way from fixed

I appreciate the commitment from Kentucky’s acting Labor Secretary David Dickerson to clean up the state Labor Cabinet which is a hot mess. I hope he has the courage, backbone and fortitude to complete the monumental task.

Dickerson said information in recent news articles was cherry-picked. That is incorrect. Only a small portion of the hundreds of documents, case files and damaging evidence was published. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration special task force that investigated two years of fatalities in Kentucky looked at only 44 cases and concluded that all 44 were mishandled. This is consistent with how Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health has operated for many years.

Federal OSHA should take some of the blame, because it let the Kentucky agency get away with these problems. Just look at the past five years of Federal Annual Monitoring and Evaluation reports, and you will see how the deficiencies continue.

By law, a state OSHA plan must be equal to or better than the federal OSHA plan, but Kentucky’s falls way short. I believe Kentucky’s plan is the nation’s worst.

The problems include lack of training, improper file management (many mistakes: wrong names, information and dates; unreadable files; lack of proper documentation) manipulation of files, lack of witness statements — so many deficiencies that it’s hard to believe that there is a legitimate report of what really happened in any case.

Untrained and unprofessional staff and poor management contribute to the problems. For example, in an email that was released to the family of a victim of a back-over truck accident, a supervisor said “that the man should have zigged when he zagged” and also “be careful these families are getting tricky.” Unprofessional and hurtful.

If Dickerson needs more cherry-picked information, I have lots.

If you have had a case investigated in the past five years, know that it was not handled properly. If you would like to help improve this plan, contact me through the FIGHT Project at 251-391-8560 or fightwron@mediacombb.net.