Fifteen years ago, a little-known federal judge named Brett Kavanaugh argued that the country’s top workplace regulator overstepped when it cited an aquatic theme park for a gruesome worker death because viewers enjoy seeing “these amazing feats of competition and daring.”
Now Kavanaugh is a US Supreme Court justice, and the workplace-safety agency wants to codify his argument into law. The move would strip basic workplace safety protections from potentially hundreds of thousands of employees.
In July, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced a proposal to exclude “inherently risky professions,” including those in sports and entertainment, from the agency’s General Duty Clause. The agency explicitly references Kavanaugh’s dissent in the proposal, saying it “preliminarily concurs with the dissent’s concerns.”
The proposed rollback came amid dozens of agency proposals to curtail worker protections. These include proposals to rescind requirements for adequate lighting on construction sites, eliminating medical evaluations for employees using respirators, and reducing coordinated enforcement for migrant farmworkers, among others.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has issued a “Regulatory Freeze Pending Review,” effectively pausing several other pending regulations — including prior rulemaking that would have strengthened workers’ heat injury protections and illness prevention.
As the Lever has documented, helming OSHA is David Keeling, a former safety executive at UPS and Amazon. Under his leadership, the two companies were fined a collective $2 million for more than three hundred workplace safety violations.
The General Duty Clause serves as a catch-all provision under the 1970 OSH Act, which first established a federal workplace safety program.
It requires employers to provide a safe and healthy workplace for their employees when no specific standard is in place. To enforce a violation of the clause, the…
Auteur: Brock Hrehor
