Notes on federal workplace enforcement, joined across agencies.
Latest issue
Federal OSHA inspections fell 13.5% year-over-year in April–September. Over the same window, state-plan inspections rose 5.3%. The decline is a federal phenomenon, not a national one. Issue 2 of The FastDOL Monthly examines where federal enforcement went when it retreated — into reactive cases and into the state programs federal OSHA does not control.
8 earlier issues
A white-liquor tank ruptured at Nippon Dynawave's pulp mill in Longview, Washington on May 26, killing at least eight workers. Judged on its workplace-safety record alone — about $3,400 in OSHA fines since 2021 — the plant looked unremarkable. Its environmental record, sitting in entirely separate databases, tells a very different story.
OSHA doesn't pick a number out of the air. Every penalty follows a formula in the Field Operations Manual, Chapter 6 — gravity score, dollar-amount table, percentage reductions for size and good faith. This post walks through the actual calculation step by step, then uses 28,827 real Q1 2026 citations to show what the rules produce at scale.
OSHA cited Revoli Construction with 57 violations totaling $4,699,362 after a worker was killed in a trench collapse on a Yarmouth, Massachusetts sewer project. It's the single largest OSHA enforcement action in Q1 2026 — and it follows a Revoli safety record that runs back three decades.
OSHA willful and repeat citations have averaged 372 per month since October 2025, down 31% from the prior baseline of 540 per month. The inaugural issue of The FastDOL Monthly examines the federal workplace enforcement decline using FastDOL's structured datasets across 16 agencies and 2.31 million employers.
USDA's proposed rule lifts poultry-line speeds from 140 to 175 birds per minute. The political fight is about line speed. The agency's own contracted study identified piece rate — a function of staffing, not speed — as the variable that actually tracked musculoskeletal-injury risk. Cross-agency enforcement data corroborates the staffing-pressure framing.
I ran enforcement records on half a million US employers from every major federal compliance source. The interesting finding isn't one number — it's what the data looks like when you stop treating each agency's records as a separate search and start treating them as a single picture.
Five workers died in a 2017 corn dust explosion at Didion Milling. The enforcement record shows 18 serious violations in a single inspection seven years earlier — a pattern visible across multiple federal agencies but hidden by the way each one reports independently.
A step-by-step guide to looking up any employer's OSHA inspection history, violations, penalties, and safety record using free public data — and what each agency's portal actually shows you (and doesn't).
Findings from federal enforcement data, methodology notes, and the occasional industry deep-dive. No spam, no marketing — just the data.