Michael Karl McNeil

The single word that decides what a Cal/OSHA citation costs is its classification. A general violation and a serious violation can describe the same condition on the same day and differ by an order of magnitude in penalty. Under the penalty schedule operative 1 January 2025, a general or regulatory violation runs up to $16,285, while a serious violation runs up to $25,000 from an $18,000 base, and a willful or repeat violation reaches $162,851. So the classification is where the argument belongs. And the law puts the employer on the back foot before it starts. The presumption Labor Code section 6432(a) creates a rebuttable presumption that a serious violation exists if the Division demonstrates that there is a realistic possibility that death or serious physical harm could result from the actual hazard created by the violation. Note how little that requires. Not that harm occurred. Not that harm was likely. A realistic possibility that it could result. In practice the Division...

One of the most useful facts in Cal/OSHA practice is also one of the least known: an employer contesting a citation in California does not have to be represented by a lawyer. California Title 8 section 378(a) of the California Code of Regulations says it directly: "A party may appear in person or through a representative who is not required to be an attorney at law." The representative files a written notice of representation with the Appeals Board's Sacramento office and serves the other parties. That is the whole mechanism. There is a second point worth making alongside it, because employers get it wrong constantly. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health issues the citation. The Occupational Safety and Health Appeals Board hears the appeal. They are separate bodies. Employers lose weeks arguing their case to the district office that cited them, under the impression that this is the appeal, and it is not. The federal rule In states where federal OSHA ha...

Employers who receive a Cal/OSHA citation tend to ask two questions in the wrong order. The first one asked is almost always "how much is the penalty." The one that should come first is whether the citation was issued in time at all. The statute Labor Code section 6317 says it in one sentence: "A citation or notice shall not be issued by the division more than six months after the occurrence of the violation." Read the operative words. The clock runs from the occurrence of the violation . It does not run from the inspection, from the closing conference, from the date the file was assigned to a compliance officer, or from the date the Division finished its paperwork. An inspection opened in month five over conditions that existed in month one does not buy the Division another six months. Why this gets missed Because the inspection date is the date everyone has in front of them. It is on the correspondence, it is what the employer remembers, and it is what g...

My name is Michael Karl McNeil. I work in environmental health and safety, industrial hygiene, emergency planning and forensic consulting, and I have been in occupational health and safety since 1989. This page is my own account of that record, written by me and kept current. Two careers, in order The first was the fire service — twenty-five years of it, ending as a Fire Battalion Chief. I came up through fire prevention, advanced to Fire Prevention Captain and then to Battalion Chief in a federal fire organization. Assignments took me across the country, most of them in the Western states, working under whichever state's rules governed the ground I was standing on. That is where the multi-state side of what I do now comes from: it is not a marketing radius, it is where I have actually worked. The qualifications from those years that still matter are the incident ones — hazardous materials specialist and hazardous materials incident commander, wildland qualifications c...