Delta Oil Receives Hefty Fines for Disregarding Employee Safety

As an employee in the Northern Mississippi or Memphis area, you trust your employer to provide a safe and friendly working environment in which you can thrive and be successful.

Sadly, not all employers take the steps necessary to secure a safe workplace, putting the wellbeing of their employees behind production and profits.

An example of this contemptible employer practice hit Mississippi very recently.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently cited a Greenwood, Mississippi company for twenty-five health and safety violations following injuries to a worker earlier in 2013.

OSHA said that it has proposed $83,415 in penalties for Delta Oil, a cottonseed oil producer, according to a recent report from WCMTV in Memphis, Tennessee.

A worker for Delta oil sustained a back injury after falling through a floor opening and landing on a powered industrial truck below.

After investigating the scene, OSHA listed twenty-two serious safety and health violations. These included failure to guard wall openings, open-sided platforms, and floor holes without a cover or standard railings. Delta Oil also failed to inform workers of the hazards they could potentially face before entering a railcar.

In addition to the serious violations, there were three non-serious violations.

As a personal injury and workers’ compensation attorney in Northern Mississippi, the blatant disregard of employee safety by Delta Oil is truly disheartening to me. I strive to help clients who have been similarly mistreated by their employers.

Employees are people, not capital. Behind every successful business, there are individuals that wake up early, work through the night, or even work overtime to make sure that the consumer gets the best possible product or service. These people deserve to be treated with respect by their company, a practice Delta Oil seems to have forgotten.

I sincerely hope other Northern Mississippi and Memphis companies will learn from these fines and will take the utmost precautions for employee safety in the future.