The Bilingual Safety Guy

Some OSHA citations describe hazards that are hard to picture. This one isn't. At a Monro Inc. auto service center in Norwich, New York, federal inspectors found a four-post rotary lift — the kind that hoists an entire vehicle off the ground — with a broken safety latch cable that employees had rigged shut with a pair of vice grips. It's the kind of image that makes the underlying compliance failure easy to understand, and it's also why the U.S. Department of Labor treated it as a repeat violation rather than a routine one. What Happened The Department of Labor announced on July 13, 2026, that Monro Inc. had agreed to pay $174,000 in penalties to settle seven safety violations OSHA found during a July 2025 inspection of its Norwich facility. According to OSHA's news release, inspectors documented slip, trip, and fall hazards from engine oil and transmission fluid spilled on a storage room floor and from commercial trash, including tires, piled up in an exterior storage ...

If you run a motor carrier, the last few weeks of federal enforcement news should have your attention for a reason that has nothing to do with headlines about immigration or politics. On July 16, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced it is partnering with the Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to investigate roughly 75 entry-level driver training schools suspected of issuing improper certifications, falsifying training records, and pushing unqualified drivers through the CDL pipeline. It's the latest escalation in a purge that has already removed more than 9,500 training providers from FMCSA's Training Provider Registry since December 2025. For carriers, the real story isn't the schools under investigation — it's what a fraudulent training certificate sitting in a driver qualification file can do to your safety record and your liability exposure. What Happened FMCSA's Training Provider Registry (TPR) exists...