Employers Adjust to Tough Work-Safety Laws : Labor: New state regulations, called strongest in the nation, make injury-prevention programs mandatory and raise liability of managers who conceal dangers.

Unions and work-safety advocates will be holding “Worker Memorial Day” rallies throughout the nation this weekend, demanding that Congress rewrite the Occupational Safety and Health Act to more severely punish businesses that expose workers to dangerous conditions.

For businesses in California, however, there is already plenty to be worried about.

A new state law gives prosecutors the power to file felony charges against company managers who expose workers or the public at large to a “serious concealed hazard.” Thousands of anxious businesses have sent representatives to mass briefings on the 4-month-old California Corporate Criminal Liability Act, sardonically known in business circles as the “Be-a-Manager, Go-to-Jail” law.

In addition, a new Cal/OSHA regulation, due to take effect July 1, requires all California companies--regardless of size--to have detailed injury-prevention programs that stress individualized safety training.

For medium and small companies in particular, these requirements will change the amountof time management devotes to on-the-job safety and the degree it involves its employees.

Both new California laws are the strongest of their kind in the nation, experts from both labor and management say.

“They’re the wave of the future for occupational safety laws,” said Joseph Kinney, executive director of the Chicago-based National Workplace Safety Institute. “They get workers and managers talking about problems, and they criminalize the concealment of the problems.”

At one recent seminar for managers in Los Angeles, attorney Scott Wenner, who specializes in management-side regulatory law, told an audience of several hundred that the law requiring more thorough safety programs “is really an opportunity for employers to clean things up. . . . Depending on your view of the world, it can be helpful.”

The injury-prevention program requirement was part of a 1989 law passed by the state Legislature in an attempt to force Cal/OSHA, the state’s workplace safety division, to adopt more aggressive rules. Under the Administration of former Gov. George Deukmejian, Cal/OSHA suffered from staff cutbacks and more than a year in which the division was largely eliminated.

As of July 1, whenever Cal/OSHA inspects a workplace, inspectors must also check on whether the company is routinely training its workers about potential hazards. Larger, more sophisticated companies routinely do this, but many smaller ones do not.

Safety training must be given whenever a worker is hired, or given a new job assignment, or whenever the company introduces a new substance or equipment that carries hazards. The company must document every step of this training. Failure to train or to keep records carries civil penalties up to $10,000 per violation.

The new regulations also urge--but do not require--that companies establish labor-management safety committees, something that many companies, particularly non-union ones, do not have. It also strengthens existing laws that prohibit companies from harassing employees who complain of safety problems.

Although smaller companies will have a “tough time” complying with the training requirements, the introduction of more formal injury-prevention programs “can do nothing but have a positive effect on worker safety,” said William Van Cleve, manager of loss control services for Wausau Insurance Cos.’ San Francisco office.

Van Cleve and other safety experts are less certain about the implications of the California Corporate Criminal Liability Act, simply because no prosecutor has filed a case under the law. However, the fact that California is the first state to make a felony of failing to inform workers of a potential hazard has clearly caught the attention of the business world.

“There is great potential there for employer liability,” Van Cleve said.

The new law says a corporation or individual manager must notify Cal/OSHA and warn affected employees in writing immediately if management becomes aware of “imminent risk of great bodily harm or death.”

An individual manager who violates the law may be punished by up to three years in state prison and fines of up to $25,000. Corporations may be fined up to $1 million.

The law was drafted by Jan Chatten-Brown, special assistant to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner on work safety issues and the administrator of a 6-year-old program that specializes in filing criminal charges in the wake of on-the-job fatalities and serious injuries.

“As a hypothetical example,” Chatten-Brown said, “let’s say a piece of equipment doesn’t have the required guard (mechanism). The plant manager knows that the equipment was designed with the guard but it’s been taken off. That fact wouldn’t be readily known to a worker, and may constitute a serious concealed hazard.” In such a case, the manager can now be prosecuted for a felony.

Until a court settles the myriad semantic and legal questions surrounding the law, attorneys are advising caution.

For managers trying to prepare a legal defense, “it doesn’t help to be stupid. It doesn’t help to be ignorant. It doesn’t help to be uninformed,” said management lawyer Lester Jones. “The program administrator is on the front line. If you’re (the manager) troubled by it, then the statute has fulfilled its duty.”

Under his “rollout” program, Reiner has filed criminal charges--mostly misdemeanors--against corporations and individual managers in nearly four dozen cases of workplace death and injury. In the process, Los Angeles County has become nationally recognized as the leader in making employers accountable for such accidents.

Only a handful of other city or county prosecutors in the United States regularly prosecute such crimes. It is only in the past few years that federal courts have broken down the long-held belief that the federal OSHA act preempted state prosecution in work-safety cases.

Those few local prosecutors who do file charges in work-safety violations--and who support stronger state laws such as California’s--say they are attempting to compensate for the weakness of the federal OSHA system.

The 20-year-old law allows the Justice Department to file only misdemeanors against culpable managers, and even those charges can be filed only in cases in which willful safety violations lead to a death. Even a permanently disabling injury is not grounds for criminal charges.

Legislation in Congress to broaden circumstances in which corporations and managers could be prosecuted under the OSHA act was killed last year but has been reintroduced.