Washington Post Cited for Safety Violations

By: Jim Rosenberg The Washington Post Co. reached an agreement this week with the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry on resolving health and safety problems for which its Springfield production plant was recently cited.

A late-August inspection resulted in a Sept. 7 report on "serious" workplace-safety violations in the newspaper plant's packaging center. They included absence of guards on areas of bundling equipment where operators could be injured, failure to test lock-out on conveyors and failure to test emissions from heat-fused plastic strapping.

"The agency withdrew three of the six items that were originally cited ... as a result of a day-long inspection," Post spokesman Eric Grant said Wednesday afternoon. Grant said the Post fixed a fourth problem, which he would not identify, and the state agency agreed to the paper's plan to install guarding on two types of equipment in question.

The Post had until Wednesday to take corrective action or face fines of as much as $12,500. In the end, said Grant, the paper was fined $1,750.

The citations were made public late last Friday afternoon by the mailers' union and were covered in the next morning's edition of the Post. The paper's account noted that the mailers, a local of the Communications Workers of America whose contract expired last year, have been negotiating a new contract with the Post for 18 months. Local CWA spokesman Greg Kenefick said the state's occupational safety and health agency reported the results of its inspection to both the union and the Post.

"It's not clear why OSHA showed up," Kenefick told E&P, adding that reasons for the inspection may have originated with the agency or resulted from a request that the agency keeps anonymous.

"The issue of safety is an ongoing concern among the mailers ... in Springfield and College Park," said Kenefick, who was aware of no injuries related to the violations. An inspection at each plant resulted in $5,000-plus fines, according to the Post. The latter location is the Post's newer Maryland plant, where the tray system for bundle distribution is configured differently from that in Springfield, said Post spokesman Grant.

Announcing the violations, Mailers Local President John McInerney said, "we cannot rely on the Post to implement common-sense safety precautions on its own." The Post's Grant said his paper continually "evaluates equipment and operations" and remains "committed to safety."