Press Release

Attorney General Ellison sues to protect Minnesota workers

Joins multi-state lawsuit challenging federal rollback of workplace-injury and -illness reporting rules

March 6, 2019 (SAINT PAUL) — Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison today joined a coalition of attorneys general in suing to stop the federal government from implementing a new rule that would harm Minnesota workers and businesses by rolling back employers’ obligations to report workplace injuries and illnesses to the public.

Filed today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the lawsuit challenges an “illegal and unjustified” attempt by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) to roll back requirements it issued in 2016 for the electronic reporting of workplace-injury and -illness information.

“Part of helping Minnesotans afford their lives and live with dignity, safety, and respect means keeping them safe from injury and illness at work,” Attorney General Ellison said. “The federal government’s rollback of the OSHA reporting rule makes this harder by making it harder for employees to make sure they’re working for safe employers, for the State to do its job to enforce our laws that keep workers safe, and for Minnesota businesses to make sure their business partners are operating a safe workplace.

“My job is to protect Minnesotans. I’d rather not have to take the federal government to court, but when they abandon their responsibility to protect American workers, I will use the tools I have to protect Minnesota workers,” Attorney General Ellison concluded.

The lawsuit states that OSHA’s new rule harms Minnesotans because it “deprives workers of safety information that could help those workers select employers who maintain workplaces with superior health and safety records” and “deprives Minnesotan businesses of safety information related to both in-state and out-of-state entities,” which if publicly available, “could improve workplace safety in Minnesota by encouraging Minnesotan business to contract with businesses with superior health and safety records.”  

In 2016, OSHA touted the electronic reporting requirements as vital because they would help OSHA and states better target workplace safety enforcement programs, encourage employers to abate hazards before they resulted in injury or illness, empower workers to identify risks and demand improvements, and provide information to researchers who work on occupational safety and health.

Today’s lawsuit highlights that the current administration has disowned OSHA’s prior commitment to transparency.

The suit notes that the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires an agency to “provide a reasoned explanation” for its new rules.  Although OSHA now claims that the workplace safety information is not useful and that the electronic reporting might instead compromise worker privacy, the complaint alleges that OSHA has not “come close to justifying its views that the reporting of workplace injuries and illnesses had few benefits to states, workers and researchers, or that it puts workers’ privacy at risk.”

Because it lacks any valid rationale, the lawsuit argues, the new OSHA rule fails to meet APA criteria, has no legal basis and should be vacated by the court. The lawsuit also asks the court to order that “all aspects” of the original OSHA reporting rule promulgated in 2016 be implemented.

The 2016 rule was devised with input from private businesses, industry groups, labor unions, academics, state agencies, researchers, private citizens and others. It required all large employers — those with 250 or more employees — to submit to OSHA information from three different workplace injury and illness tracking forms that employers are required to maintain anyway.

At the time, OSHA took certain steps to reconcile its new reporting requirement with the need to protect privacy. For example, it elected not to collect data from certain fields on the reporting forms — such as employee names and the names of treating physicians — because collecting and publishing such data could create a privacy risk.

Today’s lawsuit notes that the Administration now dismisses “out of hand” the privacy protections OSHA devised and recommended in 2016, and is mounting a host of other “inconsistent” and “illogical” arguments to support its effort to ease the reporting obligation of large employers.

The multi-state lawsuit is led by New Jersey, and names U.S. Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as defendants, along with the Department of Labor and Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor Loren Sweatt. The states of Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York have joined the lawsuit, in addition to Minnesota.