Single Citation Made in Bridge Collapse Probe

Maryland’s state OSHA issued a single fine to the construction contractor that lost six workers in the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.
The $2,100 penalty, which Brawner Builders is contesting, is for violating a fall protection standard.
Labor officials said the violation of a fall protection standard, while serious, did not cause or contribute to the deaths of six Brawner employees who were filling potholes on the Key Bridge when it collapsed in March 2024.
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The New York State Legislature has extended the effective date of the New York Retail Worker Safety Act from March 4, 2025, to June 2, 2025.
The amendment requires employers with 500 or more retail employees statewide to provide “silent response buttons” (SRBs) for internal alerts, adjusts training requirements for smaller employers, and mandates state model templates in multiple languages. (The effective date of the SRB requirement is still Jan. 1, 2027.)
The amendment extends the effective date for workplace violence prevention policies, training, and notice provisions.
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Maryland’s public safety department maintains an unsafe workplace that puts employees’ safety at risk and ultimately led to the May killing of a parole agent while he was checking in on a parolee.
A Jan. 28 citation from the Maryland Occupational Safety and Health office gives the state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services’ until March 3 to correct the “serious” workplace safety violations listed in the 10-page citation.
Those failures exposed its workers to physical threats “such as being shot, punched, kicked, scratched, stabbed, strangled, bit and/or spit on.”
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Workplace safety experts are warning that increased fear among immigrants at risk of deportation could prevent them from speaking up about health and safety threats on the job.
“Workers are the canaries,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a Georgetown University fellow and former federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration official under President Obama. “We need them to speak up if there are issues so that you prevent a pandemic. And nobody’s going to speak up because they’re scared that the company will call ICE,” according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
A 2021 report by Michigan’s W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that when U.S. counties participated in an immigration enforcement program in the past, the result was “substantially reduced complaints to government safety regulators, but increased injuries, at workplaces with Hispanic workers.”
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