Walmart wins workplace injury appeal

When this employee worked for Walmart, merchandise fell about 40 feet from shelving above her, causing serious physical injuries. OSHA fined Wal-Mart $10,864, claiming the store violated the Secured Storage Standard under the federal regulations, which require big-box stores to store materials in a way that does not create a hazard. For Walmart, this is not much money, but Walmart challenged the fine anyway. The Court of Appeals vacates the fine.

The case is Walsh v. Walmart, Inc., issued on October 4. It all happened when someone was retrieving a pallet from the highest level of racking with a forklift, causing containers of crescent rolls. Something went wrong, and the merchandise struck another employee, Saltzman, on the head. While the Occupational Safety and Health Commission (a federal office) said Walmart had breached the Secured Storage Standard, the Court of Appeals disagrees, based on its interpretation of the regulation.

The Commission ruled against Walmart. Under the rules, “Bags, containers, bundles, etc., stored in tiers shall be stacked, blocked, interlocked and limited in height so that they are stable and secure against sliding or collapse.” The Commission interpreted "tier" to mean "a row, rank or layer of articles" and "one of two or more rows arranged one above another," focusing on the word "layer" even though the word "layer" does not suggest whether objects must be placed directly on top of each other. In fact, dictionaries published at the time the regulation was adopted in 1969 suggest that  "tier" has a broader definition than what the Commission found. "Nowhere does the definition of 'tier' include the notion that the materials must be stacked immediately on top of each other," the Court writes. 

The Secretary of Labor challenges the Commission's interpretation The Second Circuit (Pooler, Lohier and Nardini) credits the Secretary's interpretation of the regulation, stating

As a general matter, the Secretary argues that the purpose of the standard was to prevent stored materials from falling and striking those below. The Secretary reasonably interprets the plain language of the standard to apply to material arranged one above another vertically, including on shelves, not just materials stacked directly on top of another. As the Secretary points out, if we followed the Commission’s interpretation, “even the storage of items on patently unstable shelving unit that was subject to toppling over would be exempt from the standard’s coverage simply because the items on the shelves were not ‘stacked directly upon one another with nothing in between.’” Such an interpretation is not consistent with the text or the purpose of the standard.