The Evening & Sunday Bulletin (Commission decision, September 28, 1979)

Plain-English summary

This is a settlement approval, and the operative order is a single sentence: the parties' Stipulation and Settlement Agreement dated August 1, 1979 is approved. The Commission decided no contested question, interpreted no standard, and assessed no penalty of its own. The citation and penalty in the case were resolved by agreement between the Secretary of Labor and the employer, and the Commission's role was to satisfy itself that the agreement was one it could bless.

The release does not name the panel. There is no "Before:" line, so this document does not establish which Commissioners sat, only that Commissioner Cottine wrote separately to concur.

What Cottine's concurrence adds. It is the only reasoning in the document, and it sets out the two things the Commission looks for in a settlement. First, the agreement has to comply with the requirements laid down in Dawson Brothers Mechanical Contractors, which is the Commission's foundational settlement case. Second, it has to be detailed and comprehensive enough that the Commission can actually make the initial determinations the Act requires of it, namely that the agreement furthers the public interest and is consistent with the provisions and objectives of the Act. The point implicit in the second requirement is that a settlement too thin to evaluate cannot be approved, because approval is a finding and not a formality. Cottine found this agreement sufficiently detailed on both counts and concurred.

His footnote cross-references his own separate opinions in two earlier cases, Boston Gear, A Div. of Murray Co. of Texas, Inc. (No. 76-967, 1979) and Western Electric Co., Inc. (No. 1536, 1978), which is where he had set out this position at length.

Affected employees were represented. The release lists Philadelphia Newspaper Printing Pressmen's Union, Local No. 16 as appearing for the employees. That is worth noting in a settlement case, because the employees' opportunity to participate is part of what makes a settlement approvable rather than merely agreed between the Secretary and the employer.

Docket number form. The caption and the body both give the docket unpadded, as 77-580. The index and this document's slug pad it to 77-0580. Both refer to the same case, and the zero is a padding convention rather than a discrepancy in the source.

A note on the text below. This release is a reporter-style rendering rather than the plain decision layout used elsewhere in the corpus: it carries structural headers the Commission did not write, including COUNSEL, OPINION and CONCURBY, and bracketed star pagination such as [1] and [2] marking page boundaries in the reporter. That pagination can land in the middle of a sentence or a citation. The replacement characters scattered through the text are places where a character was lost before OSHRC published the file, and they are transcribed as released rather than guessed at.

Decision snapshot

• Cited standard(s): None reached. The Commission approved a settlement and interpreted no standard.
• Outcome: The parties' Stipulation and Settlement Agreement dated August 1, 1979 approved.
• Key point: A settlement must both comply with Dawson Brothers and be detailed enough for the Commission to determine that it furthers the public interest and is consistent with the Act. Approval is a finding the Commission has to be able to make on the document in front of it.
• Also decided: Nothing further. The order resolves the case without reaching the merits of any citation item.
• Related: Cottine's footnote cites his separate opinion in Boston Gear, A Div. of Murray Co. of Texas, Inc. (No. 76-967, 1979), which is in this corpus as 76-0967-commission, and in Western Electric Co., Inc. (No. 1536, 1978).

Full text (OSHRC public release)

Docket No. 77-580

THE EVENING & SUNDAY BULLETIN

OSHRC Docket No. 77-580

Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission

September 28, 1979

COUNSEL:

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Baruch A. Fellner, Office of the Solicitor, USDOL

Marshall H. Harris, Regional Solicitor, U.S. Department of Labor

Mark S. Dichter, for the employer

Philadelphia Newspaper Printing Pressmen's Union, Local No. 16, for the employees

OPINION:

ORDER

The Parties' Stipulation and Settlement Agreement dated August 1, 1979, is Approved.
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CONCURBY: COTTINE

CONCUR:

COTTINE, Commissioner, concurring:

The settlement agreement filed in this case complies with the requirements set forth in Dawson Brothers Mechanical Contractors, 72 OSAHRC 5/B8, 1 BNA OSHC 1024, 1971-73 CCH OSHD P15,039 (No. 12, 1972).
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Furthermore, the agreement is sufficiently detailed and comprehensive to allow the Commission to make the necessary initial determinations that the agreement furthers the public interest and is consistent with the provisions and objectives of the Act. * Accordingly, I concur in the Commission's approval of the settlement agreement.

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• See my separate opinions in Boston Gear, A Div. of Murray Co. of Texas, Inc.,    OSAHRC   , 7 BNA OSHC 1414, 1979 CCH OSHD P23,595 (No. 76-967, 1979) and Western Electric Co., Inc., 78 OSAHRC 98/A2, 7 BNA OSHC 1020, 1978 CCH OSHD P23,158 (No. 1536, 1978).

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