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I took a minute to look. $14,502 is the highest fine for an accidental violation, however you can also be charged that amount per date for failure to fix the vi

I took a minute to look. $14,502 is the highest fine for an accidental violation, however you can also be charged that amount per date for failure to fix the violation, and the penalty increases 10x to $145k for violations that are willful or repeated. This seems fair-ish to me. Accidents happen, and we want to disincentivize them, but we want to disincentivize negligence even more. To make monetary disincentives effective, I would argue that it'd be better to assess penalties as a % of profit rather than as a flat fee, so big companies pay more than small companies. But we have the same issue with traffic citations. Someone rich pays the same speeding fee as someone poor, so it's not as effective as a disincentive. More importantly, we should keep in mind that it's not like OSHA violations are the only possible monetary compensation. For example, SpaceX may be liable for a civil lawsuit from the victim or his family.

deepzn 4y ago
Should really also reflect the company involved. That is peanuts to SpaceX, fine should be in the millions. But, your point on possible civil lawsuits makes sense. As a legal fine, though for a corporation last worth $100B, not enough.
bell-cot 4y ago
> I would argue that it'd be better to assess penalties as a % of profit rather than as a flat fee, so big companies pay more than small companies. On the day when that rule goes into effect, Wall Street's lawyers & financial engineers will have already shuffled all the even-slightly-risky jobs into a maze of little break-even subcontractors, shell companies, and subsidiaries.
- csallen 4y ago
  Yeah that kind of stuff is always going to happen. It's super tough to plug every single loophole and stop every single infraction, so we have to accept that that's not the goal. Hell, when you make murder illegal, murders commit their crimes in secret. Still, you accomplish the goal of making it much less common, and that's a win.
lazide 4y ago
So if the company doesn’t make a profit on paper, no penalties for OSHA violations? I can feel the reorganizations as we speak!
- csallen 4y ago
  I mean you could pretty easily do a minimum amount plus a percentage. We're just talking about the upper limits here, the maximum fines.
jjk166 4y ago
It's worth noting a bigger company typically has more potential osha violations. A 10 person shop might be ruined by a single willful violation, but you have to screw up pretty bad to get that willful violation. On the otherhand if you have a 10,000 person company and only one or two things are wrong, you're clearly making a serious effort to comply. If the cost of a single violation scaled with company size, then in practice organizations above a certain level of complexity would just not be possible to operate. Maybe there is something to be said for discouraging overly large corporate entities that can't keep track of of all their constituent parts, but it's very different from a trust fund baby paying to turn off speed limits.

deepzn 4y ago

Should really also reflect the company involved. That is peanuts to SpaceX, fine should be in the millions. But, your point on possible civil lawsuits makes sense. As a legal fine, though for a corporation last worth $100B, not enough.

bell-cot 4y ago

> I would argue that it'd be better to assess penalties as a % of profit rather than as a flat fee, so big companies pay more than small companies. On the day when that rule goes into effect, Wall Street's lawyers & financial engineers will have already shuffled all the even-slightly-risky jobs into a maze of little break-even subcontractors, shell companies, and subsidiaries.

csallen 4y ago
Yeah that kind of stuff is always going to happen. It's super tough to plug every single loophole and stop every single infraction, so we have to accept that that's not the goal. Hell, when you make murder illegal, murders commit their crimes in secret. Still, you accomplish the goal of making it much less common, and that's a win.

lazide 4y ago

So if the company doesn’t make a profit on paper, no penalties for OSHA violations? I can feel the reorganizations as we speak!

csallen 4y ago
I mean you could pretty easily do a minimum amount plus a percentage. We're just talking about the upper limits here, the maximum fines.

jjk166 4y ago

It's worth noting a bigger company typically has more potential osha violations. A 10 person shop might be ruined by a single willful violation, but you have to screw up pretty bad to get that willful violation. On the otherhand if you have a 10,000 person company and only one or two things are wrong, you're clearly making a serious effort to comply. If the cost of a single violation scaled with company size, then in practice organizations above a certain level of complexity would just not be possible to operate. Maybe there is something to be said for discouraging overly large corporate entities that can't keep track of of all their constituent parts, but it's very different from a trust fund baby paying to turn off speed limits.