It gets by in Texas (and every other state) every day. Go watch a trade show or a convention load in. Particularly go watch a convention’s general session load in to some ballroom. I will bet you a doughnut it happens within 30 minutes of you walking into the room.
Which is the same reason that people do unsafe things all the time: they know that if they don’t, their employer can easily find someone else who will. And employers know that the penalties are worth the risk of getting caught, maybe even the risk of getting sued.
See that? That’s what your life is worth: $7,000. $70,000 if OSHA can prove that the employer knew about the situation and did nothing about it, or if the company has a history of being cited by OSHA for the same infraction.
But guess what? It almost never happens, even when the case seems cut-and-dried.
Look up the deaths of Richard Luzier & Travis Koehler at the Orleans in Las Vegas, or the death of Vincente Rodriguez, which happened his very first day on the job.
So not only did his employer place Rodriguez in an unsafe, perilous work environment, he had no training or experience at all doing the type of work he was assigned. Then, his employer and the company they were contracted to work for both failed to summon help in a timely manner. And what did it cost them? Less than the cost of a Prius. TOTAL. Assuming that was split down the middle, that’s barely the cost of a semester at college apiece.
And yet there are people who want to do away with OSHA entirely, on the argument that employers would police themselves. HAHAHAHA! They don’t police themselves adequately now; why would they without the threat of even these meager penalties? “The Free Market will take care of it” my ass.
Missed my own edit window, of course.
ETA: Sorry for the safety hijack. It’s a subject very important to me. I’ve been hurt at work, including nearly killed twice. I’ve had friends become permanently disabled due to injuries suffered on the job. My business is a lot of fun, but can turn deadly in a millisecond, and when people deliberately ignore safety guidlines and put themselves and others at risk knowing they are doing so, I tend to get chapped. Sometimes just talking about the subject does the same thing.
I now return you to the rest of the thread. 
No, not TOTAL. OSHA penalties ONLY. There would probably also be either a wrongful death claim or workmen’s comp claim against the hotel and/or employer, depending on the employment arrangements.
Could also be a products liability claim against the manufacturer/seller/lessor of the lift.
OTOH, I’d far rather see official fines and punishments from the proper regulatory bodies have some teeth in them. The sort of punitive awards you’re talking about are both somewhat random, and set up on an ad hoc basis. There is no systemic method to provide for consistent punishment. Further, OSHA fines can be imposed without a catastrophic incident to bring them down on the offending corporate entity. Which, if the fines were above what seems to be a figurative slap on the wrist, would have far more effect towards encouraging proper workplace safety. Also on point: jury awards can be hugely variable - a lawyer pointing out that the student worker should have refused to go up on the lift since he was convinced it was so unsafe may be able to sway a majority of the jury.
Another consideration may be: Where does the money come from for damages, vice where does money come from for fines. I suspect that any damage award would be paid for out of the various insurance policies carried by ND or their contractor. While a fine comes from actual operating funds from the affected organization. This doesn’t mean that the organization that faces a punitive award from a civil trial is unscathed by the punitive award, just that the effect on its bottom line isn’t as direct as it might seem at first glance.
In some ways, this seems reminiscent to me of the arguments that fines in the mining and petroleum industry are far too low - that the companies involved can make rational cost-benefit analysis based upon the fine levels that may be imposed, and decide that operating outside of the regulated safe or proper practices is cheaper than paying to upgrade the worksite to the required standards.
BTW, thanks to Snowboarder Bo for the look at the regulatory and safety background for this sort of work.
Except that what I was talking about was OSHA penalties. Nice try at taking what I said out of context, tho. Grats on that.
You’re right: higher-ups always make sure there’s someone under them who knows and follows the relevant standards, and never overrules the person below them that has the actual expertise.
There’s that line about how there’s nobody so like a god as a general on a battlefield. That probably applies far better to a football coach on a practice field: who the fuck is going to stand up to him?
The athletic department is starting to cover their asses by saying it wasn’t really all that windy that day but a freak gust caught the lift:[
](http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2845706,CST-NWS-notredame29.article)
Jason Whitlock says Brian Kelly and the AD should be fired immediately.
I agree. I know a head coach wears a lot of hats, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect him to ensure that the men under his charge aren’t exposed to unnecessary risks. This kind of negligence isn’t acceptable, and the coach and the AD should have to answer for it.
It was a horrible accident. I’m sure Brian Kelly does feel awful about it. He’s a human and a father, IIRC. It might have been a bone-headed decision to hold practice in 60 mph wind, but I doubt he ever dreamt that he was risking someone’s life. So I’m reluctant to denounce him straight to hell. Even though they did steal him from my alma mater, the Univ of Cincinnati.
I don’t know much about college football, but I do know that Kelly has been under tremendous pressure to turn ND football around. And I’m sure that that pressure played a part in his decision to hold practice. So I think the ND alumni have a little soul-searching to do about how important a stupid football team is in the grand scheme of things.
Kelly had the option of moving practice inside the Loftus Center, which he’d done the day before, but according to the link in the OP, he hates doing that.
Much as I despise the view of far too many well-heeled alumni that the fundamental purpose of their alma mater is to field winning football and basketball teams, I can’t see how to stick them with the blame for Kelly’s failure to take practice inside.
Googling “brian kelly contract” shows that he had been getting well over $1,000,000 a year at Cincinnati, so the same was true at Notre Dame too, I’m sure. It wasn’t like he wasn’t in a position to say ‘no’ to the alumni if he felt that their demands were forcing him to take undue risks with the lives or health of his players and workers. He wasn’t going to starve if he got fired. I have to believe he was doing what he would have been doing anyway, pressure or no pressure.
Interesting
[quote]
(http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2010/10/27/sports/nh3212679.txt) from Jim Tressel the day before this accident at Notre Dame:
You said TOTAL. You were wrong. If you only meant OSHA penalties, you should not have used TOTAL.
As one of those alumni, I’m going to take offense at this. I haven’t seen ANYTHING short recognizing what a horrible tragedy this is from any of my fellow alumni. Your comment is disgusting.
I said that the pressure that the alumni association puts on its coaches to perform may have led Kelly to work his team harder than he might have had he still been working someplace else. I stand by my comment.
This statement has little resemblance to what I quoted earlier (and with the amount of qualifiers you put in it, is relatively meaningless). Care to retract the implication that individual alumni have any direct responsibility for a student dying merely because they like to watch a football team win games? Because that’s how I read what I originally quoted, and it remains deplorable.
Then someone up there is smoking crack. There were straight-line winds gusting to over 81 MPH (Story [URL=“http://www.theindychannel.com/weather/25533563/detail.html”]here](http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2845706,CST-NWS-notredame29.article)) that day. I live in Indiana, and my husband was driving back from a business trip to Chicago. He wasn’t terribly comfortable driving because of the wind, and not much scares him on the road. There is NO way that kid should have been up there, and I hope they figure out soon whose ass is on the line. :mad:
No, I don’t care to retract anything because I didn’t imply anything about individual alumni having direct responsibility for a student dying. As an association, however, the UND alumni wields way more power over the football program than the average student alumni association, a point which I daresay you’ll agree with. And do you deny that with the money and prestige of coaching a “legacy” program comes intense pressure to bring a winning team onto the field? Not immediately, but shortly after immediately.
Parallel: White Star Director reportedly put pressure on the Titanic’s captain to break the record for crossing the Atlantic. Ultimately, the captain had the responsibility for keeping his ship safe, and it was his failure to slow down that was mainly to blame for the accident. However, it’s perfectly fair to theorize that the pressure from White Star might well have contributed to his risky decision-making.
BTW, when a group of us were lamenting the incident over lunch, an engineer piped in with this: “Well, now they have a good reason to get rid of Kelly, in case losing to Navy wasn’t reason enough.”
Yeah.
Like it or not, you’ve got a reputation for being cut throat there in North Bend.
I absolutely agree that there is more pressure on a head coach from the alumni at Notre Dame than most places. But frankly, I think it’s unfair to levy that on the alumni as a body. There’s a number of huge assumptions being made:
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We have no idea (right now) who was responsible for this student being up there. It very well could have been Kelly - it also could have been a totally different division in the Athletic Department or a different department at the university altogether. I know for a fact that this kid worked for a video department that worked for a number of different departments throughout the school - the Alumni Association sent out a facebook post yesterday saying that the kid had done work for them before. That could have been work directly from the football office, the athletic offce, or some other office - we don’t know (yet).
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If it was Kelly responsible (and frankly, I have a hard time seeing why that would be the case), we don’t know if he would have done the exact same thing at Cincinnati, Central Michigan or anywhere else he’s coached.
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The alumni got over demanding at least a 10-2 season every year about a decade ago. There remains a lot of pressure, but the audible outcry from the alumni when I was in school there in the 90s was omnipresent. That is simply not the case any more.
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I, personally, know very fucking well where in “the grand scheme of things” a student’s life is over a couple football wins. My enthusiasm for the football program doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with that accident, and your bullshit attempt to connect the two remains contemptuous. Do you think Ohio State, USC, Alabama or Michigan fans are going to think, “Gosh - we sure do put a lot of pressure on our coach - we better dial it down a notch in case a kid gets killed” because of this? If not, why not? They are every bit as involved and demanding of excellence from their football program as the Irish are.
Hey, jackass. Did you actually read my post? Did you see this:
That’s the part that’s right above the quote from me. You know, the one you took out of context. Twice now. Fucking asshole. And a lying asshole, at that. Twat.
I was not wrong; you are.