The Labor Department's account of two worksites run by the same employer:
carpenters and general construction laborers were installing roof rafters and roof sheeting without fall protection, exposing them to falls of up to 25 feet.
The citations
The employer is Martin Araujo, doing business as Araujo Construction Corp., of Calumet City, in residential construction and carpentry. Thirteen citations across the two sites:
| Class | Count | For |
|---|---|---|
| Willful | 2 | no fall protection at height, one per worksite |
| Repeat | 9 | no head and eye protection; no stairway handrails; ladders not extended three feet above the landing |
| Serious | 1 | no safe access to a platform |
| Other-than-serious | 1 | missing training certifications |
Proposed penalty: $265,868, combined. The department describes the inspections as following "its continued failure to provide fall protection for workers"; it does not say what the earlier citations were.
What happens next: 15 business days from receiving the citations to comply, ask for an informal conference with OSHA's area director, or contest before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. Until that runs, the penalty is proposed rather than owed.
Notably, the release quotes no official at all, which is unusual for an OSHA enforcement announcement, and it gives no inspection dates, no worksite addresses, no count of workers exposed, and no detail of the earlier citations that the nine repeat violations rest on.
A year out of the H-2A program
The day before, the department debarred Jevon Natali, described as a Calcasieu Parish farmer trading as Jevon Natali Farms, near Lake Charles, Louisiana, from the H-2A visa program for a year.
H-2A, in the department's own words, "allows agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor of a temporary or seasonal nature." The job order is the document that states what the employer promised.
The findings: the employer "misrepresented the actual terms and conditions of employment on its submitted job order"; failed to pay time-and-a-half for non-agricultural work beyond 40 hours in a week; and failed to give workers pay stubs with the required information.
Troy Mouton, the Wage and Hour Division's district director in New Orleans: "Employers who abuse the H-2A program should expect to be held accountable for their actions." The debarment, the release says, applies "because of the seriousness of the violations."
What the release does not say: any civil penalty, any back wages, how many workers were affected, what the job order promised versus what the work was, what the non-agricultural work consisted of, when the debarment starts, or what happens to workers already employed there. The subheading says the farm "denied overtime pay," and no remedy for that unpaid overtime is described.