A serious violation is not the highest penalty level. It's the highest that you can get (are likely to get) on the first pass. If you don't correct the flaw in

A serious violation is not the highest penalty level. It's the highest that you can get (are likely to get) on the first pass. If you don't correct the flaw in your operations, they can come back and give you a "Willful violation" which is an order of magnitude larger. Serious or even willful OSHA penalties on the scale of $7,000 or $70,000 are pretty insignificant to a large-scale operation. However, OSHA citations, used as evidence of negligence in a lawsuit, are enormously significant. That's why when OSHA gets involved at a jobsite, smart companies choose to immediately shut down the work in question until an outside contractor can verify that the flaw has been corrected. The OSHA inspector can be tasked with interviewing employees and getting court orders so that the courts can eventually shut down a facility, but you never, ever want it to go that far.