OSHA regs were called into play at a large local public boarding barn. The farrier was done with shoeing fractious, misbehaving, or sore horses on the slippery cement aisle. It was safe for neither him or the horses. Farriers are not known to be wimpy crybabies. Mats were installed.
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Wow. That’s kind of amazing.
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I would hope he tried to talk to the BO or BM about it first.
I would hope the BO or BM would have actually dealt with such a problem in a timely fashion rather than a) never be present to know about it, or b) com(effing)placent about it to the point where the farrier had to contact OSHA.
I mean, really who cares? There may be a place for manners. This is not it.
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Generally for a safety issue I agree. However, it would seem it was not a sudden one time occurrence. I think i would say “Hey do you think we could get some mats over here to make this a little safer” before calling in the feds.
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How many weeks between farrier visits? Surely that would be long enough to get some dang mats in?
Or maybe wait until someone gets seriously injured?
And no-one here knows whether anything was said, emails or texts were sent or anything. All we know is a farrier felt unsafe enough to have to make a call to OSHA.
Put the blame where it needs to be placed and NOT on the whistleblower.
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I’m not placing any blame on anyone…Actually I can’t imagine having a hard aisle in a barn without mats but apparently people do it.
usually there are proper channels and procedures that must be followed before these alphabet agencies get involved. They normally want to see that there has been some attempt at resolution before calling in the heavy artillery.
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Maybe there was. Maybe there were several. We don’t know the details.
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Please define “They” and please show us where proper channels and procedures were not followed before getting OSHA involved.
This pretty much tosses some blame at the farrier for not handling things the way you believe you would have followed them.
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It happened to me in 2015 with HealthNet. I herniated two disks bringing in water from a grocery delivery, and they wanted to know if it was during working hours, who was my employer, etc. I refused to answer, except for saying “this was not a work-related injury.”
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we don’t know any of those things. IME with dealing with things like grievances and so forth that have involved government agencies, they will tell you to travel “up the chain” with whatever your issue is before they will get involved. So once you have exhausted every avenue for relief, then they step in. I merely made a simple observation. Apparently you have not had your lunch today because you are just gnawing away on that bone.
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Is there still a time limit (5 yrs?) over which an equine business or boarding barn must show a profit, or it will become a hobby and not a business in the eyes of the IRS?
We have some weird discussions sometimes.
It’s likely that the farrier did try to remedy it, and didn’t get any help. Which is why OSHA was useful.
Those regulations exist for a reason and horse barns have historically been outside of them. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to pay attention to our industry. Of course that won’t cause things to get any cheaper, but man, some days I’d love an OSHA manual to figure out what I might be doing that is dumb and will hurt me - even though I do my best to try to remedy issues before they occur!
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Sometimes it can be hard to recognize when you’ve been rude, I get that.
You have absolutely no clue how the above situation played out, but assuming that appropriate channels were not followed because you believe what you would have done would have been completely different and much more acceptable than what you imagine happened is ridiculous.
Furthermore, how many occurrences of clear and present danger due to negligence do you believe need to occur before OSHA will step in? Couple of severed limbs? Two, three deaths?
I get the feeling you don’t understand how some agencies are (were, probably were at this point 
) meant to prevent issues rather than just bind people up in red tape and delays. Safety is (was ) serious business. Go into hospital with an injury and one of the first questions you’re going to be asked is whether it happened at work. If it did, things go VERY quickly from there from an employer’s point of view.
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You’re correct, I don’t know and neither do you. I just made a simple observation and you’re running all off in your huff with it, beating the dead horse that’s pulling it.
You can make all the assumptions you like about what i do and don’t understand. Keep running off down your rabbit hole of nothing.’
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You are 
correct (but you knew that 
), for a farrier to have to be the one to call OSHA the situation had to be ongoing and if great concern.
Why wait until some is injured? OSHA doesn’t just come in to investigate after someone is dead or injured. They do a great job at identifying problems and giving info to avert the problem.
What’s with the poster yelling about “the chain” and “exhausting every avenue”. That’s not how safety works. Unsafe conditions need to be stopped pronto, not paper pushed around.
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No one is yelling. Just relating my experience with filing complaints with federal agencies.
As a barn owner, I would appreciate being given an opportunity to rectify a problem before the feds showed up. As would anyone.
Barn manager (very well paid btw) was notified. Her solution to everything was to just pour money on a problem, instead of supervising and managing day to day issues. So the staff took action against her obvious lack of concern after a horse spread-eagled while the farrier was under it. Yap all you want, it was a dangerous condition.
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Oh definitely dangerous. . No one stated otherwise. I simply made a one sentence observation and a couple of posters as usual decided to grab the bit and run over a cliff with it.
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As a barn owner, you should rectify an identified problem well before someone, such as a contactor working at your barn, feels an imperative to call in the government authority with the legal power to rectify said problem. Common sense is, unfortunately, a very rare thing.
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