Pittsburgh Workers' Compensation Law Blog

A man has been killed in a Pennsylvania work accident, the second employee from his parent company to die in a two-day span. He worked for a company with a safety record that one could call questionable.

At the time of his death, the 24-year-old resident of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was working on a natural gas drilling rig site in Tionesta, located 80 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. As a team worked to join two pieces of pipe, one piece fell, crushing the man.

In a case that public transit authorities in Pennsylvania and other states will watch, a federal jury has awarded a railway employee more than $1 million in punitive damages.

The 48-year-old man said he was hurt on the job in April 2008. The real trouble started, he said, when the commuter railway disciplined him for reporting his injury. That discipline served as the basis of his suit. After reporting the injury, the man said he was fired and then rehired with the dismissal converted into a suspension. Workers should know that they should be able to report an injury without being punished.

In a complex case that has spanned seven years, judges of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania have overturned a decision of the Workers' Compensation Appeal Board, which had ruled that a woman was not entitled to wage-loss benefits and attorneys' fees related to her workers' compensation claim.

Any funds awarded will be granted to the estate of the woman, who died of unrelated causes in 2007.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined a contractor at a famed Pennsylvania candy manufacturer for failing to document 42 workplace injuries that took place at the plant. Luckily the workers walked off the job before anything worse happened, but people should be aware of their rights and know that they can turn to OSHA if an employer is disregarding safety.

According to OSHA, most of the 42 injuries at the Palmyra, Pennsylvania, plant occurred when employees lifted large boxes filled with chocolate candy products. Some of the boxes weighed as much as 60 pounds. The 42 cases represented 43 percent of the workplace injuries during a four-year span.