June 13th, 2016 by Thomas J. Henry

Ashley Furniture to Pay $1.75 Million to Settle OSHA Citations

According to Furniture Today, the Ashley Furniture Industry along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has reached a settlement for a number of safety and health citations issued to Ashley in 2015.

Ashley Furniture to Pay $1.75 Million to Settle Citations

In 2015, OSHA issued a claim to the Ashley Furniture home stores, after they conducted several inspections upon learning about injuries that occurred in the Arcadia, Wisconsin facility. Ashley furniture was then forced to resolve all of the citations they received as well as pay 1.75 million dollars in fines.

After reaching the settlement on June 9, 2016, Ashley furniture released a statement saying, “Safety is a key value and something that we at Ashley take very seriously. In the past five years we have spent more than $67 million on modern manufacturing equipment and safety initiatives with the goal of improving the working environment for our employees.”

Ashley also announced that they would be working cooperatively with the OSHA to not only build a better relationship, but to take extra steps to ensure the safety and health of workers within the industry.

Statistics on the Ashley Furniture Violations

  • Ashley reported about 880 individual cases of all injuries and illnesses during the three years from 2012 to 2014 at its Arcadia facility.
  • Less than one-in-four of these cases required any time away from work. While any injury or illness is unacceptable at Ashley, it is clear that a vast majority of the cases are relatively minor in nature, demonstrating our achievements to-date and our focus on continuous improvement across all aspects of our operations. The most common injury was muscle strains and sprains, which has been the focus of Ashley’s ongoing ergonomics programs.
  • Employees logged more than 22.5 million working hours in Arcadia during the last three years, which underscores the magnitude of our responsibility to employee safety and well-being.
  • In the past five years, Ashley has lowered our incident rate by 14 percent and our ‘days away, restricted or transferred’ rate by 28 percent.

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