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SEARCHA trucking company that was fined more than $1 million dollars earlier this month for firing employees who blew the whistle for its illegal activities says it will fight the decision.
A trucking company that was fined more than $1 million dollars earlier this month for firing employees who blew the whistle for its illegal activities says it will fight the decision.
Gaines Motor Lines says it is appealing a decision from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to award four of the trucking company’s former employees more than $1 million, according to the Hickory Daily Record newspaper in N.C.
Gaines says the decision by the Occupational Safety Health Administration is “factually flawed, based on unnamed sources and hearsay, depriving it of the right of confrontation and being completely arbitrary and capricious.”
OSHA ordered Gaines Motor Lines, along with company officials Tim Gaines and Rick Tompkins, to compensate four former truck drivers who were fired in violation of federal whistleblower laws and pay more than $1 million back pay wages, interest, compensatory and punitive damages.
The employees were terminated for participating in an inspection audit of the commercial motor carrier company’s facility in Hickory, N.C.. It also ordered three of the employees be immediately reinstated. One of the four employees died in May 2013.
More details are available from the Hickory Daily Record.
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