US Department of Labor cites Ohio commercial bakery for repeat, serious safety violations following investigation

When OSHA calls a violation “repeat,” it means the employer has already been cited in the past for a same or very similar hazard, and that earlier citation became a final legal order. If OSHA later inspects and finds a substantially similar condition again at any of the company’s locations, it can classify the new citation as a repeat violation, which allows much higher fines than for a first-time (serious) violation.

Lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedures are step‑by‑step rules for shutting down machines, isolating them from all energy sources (electric, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, etc.), and then applying locks or tags so they cannot be started or release stored energy while people are working on them. OSHA requires LOTO under its “Control of Hazardous Energy” standard because unexpected machine start‑up or release of stored energy during maintenance can crush, shock, or kill workers, and proper lockout/tagout greatly reduces those risks.

These terms describe different ways machines or objects can injure workers:

• Caught‑in / caught‑between hazards: When a person is squeezed, crushed, pinched, or trapped between two or more objects, or between parts of a single object (for example, being pulled into moving machinery or caught between a vehicle and a wall).
• Pinch‑point hazards: Specific spots where moving parts, or a moving part and a fixed object, come close enough that a body part can be caught or crushed (for example, between a conveyor belt and a roller or between a boom and the machine frame).
• Struck‑by hazards: When a worker is hit by a moving object, such as something falling from above, flying from a tool, swinging, or rolling (like a moving vehicle or load). These are among OSHA’s leading “Focus Four” causes of severe injuries and deaths.

OSHA starts by assigning each violation a “gravity‑based penalty” that reflects how severe the hazard is and how likely it is to hurt someone, up to a maximum amount per violation set by law and adjusted every year for inflation. It then adjusts that base figure using factors such as the employer’s size, past history with OSHA, and good‑faith efforts to follow safety rules, and may apply additional reductions for fast hazard correction; the total proposed penalty is the sum of all adjusted violations (in this case, adding up to $394,849). Penalties can change later if OSHA and the employer negotiate an informal or formal settlement, if OSHA reclassifies or groups violations based on new information, or if the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (on contest) affirms, reduces, or vacates the citations and penalties.

The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) is an independent federal agency, separate from OSHA and the Department of Labor, that functions like a specialized court to decide disputes over OSHA citations and penalties. To contest citations, an employer must send OSHA a written “notice of contest” within 15 working days after receiving the citation; OSHA then forwards the case to OSHRC, where an administrative law judge oversees discovery and a hearing and issues a decision, which can be reviewed by the three‑member Commission and ultimately appealed to a federal court of appeals. During this process, the type of violation, abatement dates, and penalty amounts can all be affirmed, modified, or vacated.

The OSHA establishment search page is at https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.html on OSHA’s website. It lets the public look up OSHA enforcement inspections by company name, location, industry code, or inspection number, and for each inspection it can show details such as the inspection date, type, standards cited, descriptions of violations, proposed and final penalties, and current case status.