How do OSHA Safety Violations Affect Your Injury Case?

The Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration, or OSHA, is the government agency tasked with setting safety standards for workers in the workplace. Employers must follow OSHA guidelines, to keep employees from being injured on the job. But how do these regulations affect you if you’re injured by a property owner’s negligence?

Not Just for Employees

Let’s first assume that you do not work for the company or business which negligently caused you injury; you were a guest or client or customer.

You might assume that because OSHA regulates an employer’s safety standards for its employees, that OSHA regulations wouldn’t affect your case, because you’re not an employee of the company.

But that’s not exactly true.

Negligence Per Se

That’s because of what is known as negligence per se. Negligence per se is when someone is not just negligent, but injures you while also violating a law, rule, or statute, including a rule or regulation passed by OSHA, even if you technically aren’t an employee of the company.

Many industries have more OSHA regulations that you may even think exist. Some of those regulations, although they must only be followed by employees, are also designed to protect the general public.

As an example, your car mechanic must abide by strict OSHA laws about safety gear, warning systems, and who can or cannot go back where the cars are being serviced, rules that don’t just protect the workers, but the general public as well. The same applies when people are injured at or around construction sites; when the public is injured, there is often an OSHA related safety regulation that the companies doing the construction work, failed to abide by.

Powerful Evidence in Your Case

Evidence that a company injured you because it was ignoring an OSHA regulation, can be powerful and persuasive evidence to show a jury.

It can also be very threatening to the Defendant, because if it is unearthed in your injury case that the Defendant violated OSHA rules, that could lead to serious fines and penalties against the business, should OSHA decide to investigate further, as they often will when there is an injury caused by a safety mishap.

Inference of Negligence

If you have and can prove negligence per se, you get a big advantage in your injury case: you don’t have to prove that the other side did anything wrong, other than violate the OSHA regulation itself. Just proof of the violation, is, by itself, a presumption of negligence, so long as you have an injury that was caused by the violation.

That means you don’t have to show what a prudent person would have or would not have done, nor do you have to prove that the Defendant had enough advanced knowledge of the dangerous condition, the way you would in an ordinary negligence case.

If you’re injured on someone’s property, there are more laws protecting you than you might think. Call our Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Joseph Linnehan, Jr. today at 617-275-4200 for help.

Source:

osha.gov/workers/file-complaint