Review of Indian reservation workplace deaths denied

Citing the sovereignty of the Indian reservations, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday denied a review of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission’s dismissal of safety fines issued to a fisheries company whose employees drowned in a boating accident.

 

A capsized fishing boat owned by Red Lake Nation Fisheries Inc., which operates under tribal law on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota and whose employees are members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, resulted in the deaths of two employees in 2017, as chronicled in documents in Eugene Scalia v. Red Lake Nation Fisheries Inc., filed in St. Louis.

 

Inspectors with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration subsequently entered the reservation and issued the fishery two citations for failure to require use of personal flotation devices and failure to report death of an employee within eight hours, and proposed a total penalty of $15,521.

 

The fishery successfully contested the citations,  and the Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia subsequently filed a complaint with the review commission, which the fishery moved to dismiss. In 2019, an administrative law judge granted that motion citing the sovereignty of Indian reservations. On further appeal, the Secretary of Labor argued the judge “erred because the OSH Act applies to tribal businesses unless Congress says otherwise.”

 

The appeals court disagreed, denying the petition for review, writing that “Red Lake [is] perhaps the most insular and nonintegrated reservation in the United States; it has also preserved for the band an independence not experienced on other reservations,” adding that “(e)ven if OSHA applied to Indian activities in other circumstances, OSHA does not apply to an enterprise owned by and consisting solely of members of perhaps the most insular and independent sovereign tribe.”