Utah: Court Sets Aside 15 Percent Penalty for Alleged Safety Violation

It was proper for the Utah Labor Commission to determine that an employer had not willfully or deliberately bypassed a safety devise in violation of Utah Code Ann. § 34A-2-301(1)(d)(2015), where a manager credibly testified that he had not overridden the safety sensor on the machine in question and did not know how to do so. The court acknowledged that there was evidence that the manager had observed employees operating the machine with its access panels open—an unsafe condition—but the injured employee had failed to establish that the manager knew that it was necessary to bypass a safety sensor in order to operate the machine in that “panels open” fashion. Nor was there evidence that the manager had ever instructed the employees to operate the machine in that dangerous condition. The Commission properly set aside the 15 percent increase in benefits.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Rojas v. Labor Comm’n, 2017 UT App. 206, 2017 Utah App. LEXIS 217 (Nov. 16, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 105.06.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law