COTTON
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OSHA Pushes The Envelope With Enforcement Actions
plate 3/7/14 3:26 PM Page 1
It has been almost a year and a half since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued two violations for noise in South Texas. Two cotton gins were cited for noise levels, and OSHA is saying it wants these ginners to require all workers in their plants to wear hearing protection. This is in spite of the fact that OSHA’s hearing protection standard does not apply to agriculture and that cotton gins are considered agriculture by OSHA. The fact that the cotton gins were following OSHA’s own guidance to agriculture related to noise does not seem to help either. The big issue here is that OSHA has never set a noise level for agriculture. Exposure time and duration are very important when determining noise limits, and agriculture is simply too seasonal for OSHA to have picked a level in the past. Under today’s OSHA, their inspectors have changed tactics. Rather than go through the work of developing a noise standard for agriculture, they simply issue two citations despite having no standard, and the two companies were actually following OSHA’s own guidance on the subject. In the citation, OSHA says that the gins are too loud and under the general duty clause, it believes hearing protection is necessary.
First Noise Citation For A Gin Fighting these types of citations is expensive, and a company typically will settle rather than go through the time, expense and strain of an OSHA hearing. In this case, however, the ginners feel strongly that they cannot settle. If OSHA wins this case, it will have successfully cited an agricultural operation for noise and may decide to start citing them for noise more often. As far as I know, this is the first noise citation we have ever seen in a gin, but make no mistake – OSHA is not just interested in cotton gins. If OSHA wins this case, it can use the same logic for any agricultural operation. These cases have also moved further than any OSHA case I have seen. Each case has been scheduled on the docket to be heard by a judge, and both cases are scheduled to be
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