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Woolsey, Hare Assail Cintas Settlement

12/19/08
 
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Workforce Protections and Congressman Phil Hare (D-IL), a Subcommittee Member and a leading advocate of workplace safety, today released the following statements in response to the settlement reached between the U.S. Department of Labor and Cintas Inc. regarding the company’s repeat workplace safety violations, including one which lead to the death of a worker in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“While I am thankful that OSHA has finally reached an agreement to force Cintas to fix hazards that have resulted in repeated safety violations, I am deeply disturbed that the settlement does not specifically hold Cintas responsible and does not go far enough to prevent future accidents,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey.  “As documented by OSHA, Cintas has a history of repeated safety violations nationwide, and allowing them a full two years to address pre-existing and well documented hazards is unacceptable.  As the Chair of the Subcommittee on Workplace Protections, it will be one of my top priorities to reform OSHA, strengthen its oversight and enforcement capabilities, and hold employers more accountable to America’s workers.  I look forward to working with the President-Elect, as well as his newly announced Labor Secretary, my friend and colleague Hilda Solis, to ensure that workers are protected, and that companies who chose to threaten their safety through violations of labor laws are held accountable.”

“On its way out the door, the Bush Labor Department has granted serial offender Cintas a despicable pardon for their failure to protect its workers from hazardous machinery,” Hare said. “The death of Eleazar Torres-Gomez last year was tragic and preventable. In the Tulsa plant where he worked, Cintas failed to install the guarding necessary to prevent him from being dragged into a 300 degree dryer. Workers have complained of the same hazards across the country. Yet this settlement gives Cintas an unacceptably long window to make the necessary improvements, with many plants having up to 2 years.  How many lives will be lost before this company is required to gets its act together? Cintas and the Labor Department may have settled, but I will not rest until justice is served for Mr. Torres-Gomez and every other worker endangered by this company’s lackluster working conditions. I plan to bring this case to the attention of the incoming Labor Secretary and will work with my colleagues on the Workforce Protections Subcommittee to further investigate this matter and achieve a more appropriate resolution.”

“We are also upset that the Department of Labor has changed all of the willful citations to ‘unclassified citations,’ despite the fact that Cintas knew about these hazards and OSHA originally found the company to be negligent,” the members added. “There is nothing in the law that even allows unclassified citations and we are determined to take legislative action to prohibit the declassification of willful citations.”