Goodyear, Sinclair and Connecticut Schools: Top U.S. Employers by Serious OSHA Violations

A tire plant and an oil refinery lead, for very different reasons

THE GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER COMPANY sits at the top of the national table with 203 serious violations, drawn from 241 total citations and $2.63M in current OSHA penalties. Serious violations are not paperwork errors: OSHA reserves the classification for conditions where there is a substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result, and the employer knew or should have known of the hazard.

SINCLAIR WYOMING REFINING COMPANY follows with 161 serious violations and $1.30M in penalties. Heavy industry, tire manufacturing, petroleum refining, chemical processing, recurs at the top of the list because these workplaces combine high-energy equipment, hazardous materials, and around-the-clock operations, each of which multiplies the number of conditions an inspector can cite as serious.

Why public-sector employers cluster near the top

The third-ranked employer, CONNECTICUT TECHNICAL EDUCATION AND CAREER SYSTEM, points to a different pattern. Several of the highest serious-violation counts belong to public bodies, school systems, city and town governments, yet their penalty totals are a fraction of the industrial leaders'. CONNECTICUT TECHNICAL EDUCATION AND CAREER SYSTEM carries 146 serious violations but only $9K in penalties.

The gap is structural. OSHA can cite public employers in states that run their own OSHA-approved plans, but federal penalty schedules and the political reality of fining a taxpayer-funded school or town frequently produce token monetary penalties even when the underlying hazard counts are high. The violation count, not the dollar figure, is the better signal of on-the-ground risk for these employers.

What the leaders share

Across the top 10, two traits recur. First, scale and inspection frequency: every employer here has been inspected many times over many years, and serious-violation counts accumulate with each visit. Second, repeat exposure to the same hazard class - the willful and repeat citations in these records indicate hazards that were cited, were supposed to be abated, and resurfaced. A high serious-violation count paired with repeat citations is the clearest data signature of a sustained workplace-safety problem rather than a one-off incident.

Readers can pull any employer's complete record, inspection history, violation breakdown by severity, and penalty trajectory, from its profile on PlainWorker, and compare it against its industry and state peers.