A GE-brand appliance manufacturer faces a financial penalty and regulatory scrutiny for failure to comply with safety standards.
Haier US Appliance Solutions failed to de-energize equipment as required, according to a Department of Labor report, which resulted in the fatality of an employee.
The facility was located in Decatur, the largest city in Macon County, Illinois, and is the home of legendary president Abraham Lincoln. Haier Smart Home Company acquired the household name General Electric in 2016 and has a majority of investors and shareholders in China.
According to the incident report, a 58-year-old front-line supervisor received fatal injuries after attempting routine work on a door molding machine. The report further stated that this employee’s sad passing could have been avoided if the safety procedures had been in place, and followed.
GE-brand manufacturer fails to comply with safety standards
After a thorough investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that Haier allowed “workers to bypass the machine’s safety doors and did not use required procedures to prevent employee injuries in the carousel-like machine.”
The company has received over forty previous inspections, the first of which occurred in 2016. These inspections occurred at two Haier US Appliance Solutions manufacturing facilities in Louisville, Kentucky, and Decatur.
According to the OSHA records, they resulted in the finding of “many machine safety violations, including two repeated and two serious violations of lockout/tagout requirements cited after a 55-year-old worker’s fatality in Louisville in February 2019.”
The Louisville-based company manufactures household refrigerators and freezers and is responsible for the safety of 1,575 employees. The electronics company now faces the maximum penalty that OSHA can enforce, which is $193,585.
“Haier US Appliance Solutions could have avoided this tragedy but put production schedules and profit ahead of employee safety,” said OSHA Area Office Director Joel Batiz in Birmingham, Alabama. “This company’s troubling history of safety failures in its manufacturing process has posed a significant risk to the more than 1,500 workers at its Decatur location who rely on a safe and healthy workplace.”
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