Moving Metal

in his office and ordered that all work-related fatalities be investigated as potential homicides. When the Los Angeles district attorney’s office learned of the death, it launched a homicide investigation and executed a search warrant for the Vernon plant. Prodded by the Los Angeles Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a deputy district attorney filed criminal charges against Reliance and some members of its management team. The trial was held in early 1988 and the jury returned a guilty verdict. Nobody went to jail, but the defendants were placed on probation. Reliance was ordered to pay $60,000 to the Uni- versity of California Labor Occupational Health Program for the development and distribution of an industry safety program and to develop a model safety and health program for its own operations. The program included the employment of a full- time qualified safety and health professional, designation of a plant safety chairperson, the creation of a comprehensive joint employer-employee health and safety committee, the require- ment for a safety consultant to conduct a detailed job safety analysis for each piece of equipment, daily safety inspections, a prohibition on inserting cardboard into steel slitters, and detailed training requirements. Dave Hannah was responsible for collecting safety statis- tics at the time and remembered the accident and its aftermath well. “It was an awful experience,” he said, “and it was some- thing that we all learned a lot from. We thought we were serious about safety before, but we got really serious after that.” Reliance hired a full-time professional safety engineer. Today, the company has an entire department dedicated to promoting and improving safety in all of Reliance’s divisions and subsidiaries and has developed a safety program that is the benchmark for the entire metals service center industry.

Employee with hard hat, goggles, and gloves, actively “thinking and practicing safety” at Bralco.

Health Act (OSHA) of 1970. For years the city had complained that OSHA’s criminal sanctions were rarely applied and that even the most egregious violators received light punishments and little follow-up. Only a few months earlier, Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner had established an OSHA section

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