Palmer Tapped for Second Mine Safety Stint

Wayne Palmer has been nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as Assistant Secretary of Mine Safety and Health at the Department of Labor.
He served in the first Trump Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Mine Safety and Health Administration
He recently was executive vice president of the Essential Minerals Association.
During the previous Trump administration, MSHA did not pursue a robust regulatory agenda but instead focused on reforms to how the agency functions, law firm Fisher Phillips noted in a blog post on Palmer’s nomination.
“During those years, mine operators saw a ‘blurring of the lines’ between coal and metal/non-metal, an effort aimed to make the agency more efficient,” the blog post read.
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Fabcon Precast LLC has pleaded guilty to a criminal charge in federal court in the Southern District of Ohio to a charge of willfully violating an OSHA rule related to an incident where an employee was killed when a pneumatic door closed on his head.
In the June 2020 incident, a broken discharge door on a mixer failed to close after releasing a batch of concrete. Because a valve was broken, Ledbetter could not perform the proper procedure to make the door safe to work around. When he attempted to free the door it closed on his head, trapping him. Eventually, he was freed and transported to a hospital where he died five days later.
Federal law makes it a class B misdemeanor to willfully fail to follow an OSHA safety standard, where the failure causes the death of an employee. The class B misdemeanor is the only federal criminal charge covering such workplace safety violations.
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An OSHA administrative law judge has vacated a citation against a New Jersey solar panel installation firm after determining no one saw where the worker was or what he was doing immediately before the fall.
A compliance safety and health officer (CSHO) from OSHA’s Parsippany, New Jersey, area office arrived approximately 40 minutes after the October 2022 fall to inspect the site. In April 2023, OSHA cited Trinity Solar with a repeat, serious violation of the fall protection standard.
OSHA contended it was “more likely than not” that the worker fell from the roof rather than the ladder despite the lack of eyewitnesses to the incident. The agency argued that the injured worker “must have been” climbing onto the roof without fall protection when he fell.
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With nail salon work expected to grow at a whopping 12% per year through 2033, the Michigan Healthy Nail Salon Cooperative has launched an online chemical exposure, safety training course.
Available in both English and Vietnamese, the course focuses on the use of chemicals in the five major tasks that a nail technician typically performs (cleaning nails, applying and removing nail polish, applying and removing artificial nails, sanitizing and sterilizing equipment and handling and storing equipment) and the OSHA Hazard Communication Standard (Labels and Safety Data Sheets).
Developed in collaboration with the University of Michigan School of Nursing, the Cooperative plans to promote it across the country.
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