OSHA Fines Walmart for Post-Thanksgiving Sales Blitz Death
Ever been to a post-Thanksgiving sale? One of the really early ones where a crowd of people storm the doors at 6:00am and pick apart a store? I did once, and that was quite enough. . .
Well Walmart is now feeling the pain from their November 28, 2008 sales blitz. During this sales blitz Jdimytai Damour of an employee at a Valley Stream, N.Y. store was trampled to death and about 11 people sustained injuries, according to the DA's office.
Now OSHA doesn’t protect shoppers per se, their mission is to protect workers and in this case an employee died, so OSHA comes on board. Interesting enough, the 11 members of the public are not protected by OSHA but the pressure OSHA put on Walmart to create better crowd control policies and procedures will serve to protect employees and public alike.
OSHA's concluded employees were exposed to being crushed by the crowd of 2,000 because the store failed to implement reasonable and effective crowd management principles. OSHA maintained that the store should have provided its employees training and tools to safely manage that crowd.
"Effective planning and crowd management could have prevented this incident and its grave consequences," said Robert Kulick, OSHA's regional administrator in New York. "Wal-Mart must now take steps to ensure that a situation such as this one never happens again."
So the question begs to be asked: What foreseeable hazards exist in your workplace, and more importantly, what will you do to better protect the workforce?
Well Walmart is now feeling the pain from their November 28, 2008 sales blitz. During this sales blitz Jdimytai Damour of an employee at a Valley Stream, N.Y. store was trampled to death and about 11 people sustained injuries, according to the DA's office.
Now OSHA doesn’t protect shoppers per se, their mission is to protect workers and in this case an employee died, so OSHA comes on board. Interesting enough, the 11 members of the public are not protected by OSHA but the pressure OSHA put on Walmart to create better crowd control policies and procedures will serve to protect employees and public alike.
OSHA's concluded employees were exposed to being crushed by the crowd of 2,000 because the store failed to implement reasonable and effective crowd management principles. OSHA maintained that the store should have provided its employees training and tools to safely manage that crowd.
"Effective planning and crowd management could have prevented this incident and its grave consequences," said Robert Kulick, OSHA's regional administrator in New York. "Wal-Mart must now take steps to ensure that a situation such as this one never happens again."
So the question begs to be asked: What foreseeable hazards exist in your workplace, and more importantly, what will you do to better protect the workforce?
Labels: 10 Hour OSHA Card, Crowd control, Walmart, workplace safety
posted by David A. Casavant @ 11:58 PM
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