Temporary worker crushed in robotic cell at Ajin USA plant in Cusseta

What happened

Ajin USA, the trading name of Joon LLC, stamped and assembled metal parts for Hyundai and Kia vehicles at a plant in Cusseta, Alabama, that employed about 700 people. Roughly 250 of its workers were supplied by two staffing agencies. The worker who died had been placed at the plant through one of them, Alliance Total Solutions.

According to OSHA, the assembly line stopped on June 18, 2016. The worker and three colleagues went into a robotic station to clear a sensor fault. The robot had not been de-energized. It restarted abruptly and crushed her inside the machine.

The system involved

OSHA describes the equipment as a robotic station, or robotic cell, on an automotive parts assembly line. The agency did not publish the robot’s make or model. Its findings center on energy control: the robot remained powered while people were inside the cell, workers were not given safety locks, and machine guarding was inadequate.

Investigation and response

OSHA announced citations on December 14, 2016. Ajin USA received 23 willful, serious and other-than-serious citations, 19 of them egregious instance-by-instance willful violations, covering failure to use energy control procedures, allowing workers into a robotic cell with hazardous energy present, failure to provide locks and improper machine guarding. Staffing agencies Alliance Total Solutions and Joynus Staffing Corp. each received two serious citations. Proposed penalties totaled $2,565,621. David Michaels, then head of OSHA, said he had warned Hyundai and Kia executives in 2015 about hazards at their suppliers and criticized production targets that he said led suppliers to cut corners. The Associated Press reported that calls to the plant and to Joon LLC were not answered that day.

Ajin contested the citations. In a separate criminal case, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama in September 2020 ordered the company to pay a $500,000 fine and $1 million in restitution to the worker’s estate after it pleaded guilty to a willful violation of an OSHA standard. On February 10, 2023, an administrative law judge of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission upheld the majority of the violations, and OSHA announced on March 8, 2023, that Ajin USA would pay more than $1.3 million in penalties.

What is not established

OSHA’s news releases give the date as June 18, 2016, while OSHA’s fiscal year 2016 fatality list records the case under June 19, 2016. OSHA’s 2016 release counts 23 citations against Ajin, while its 2023 release refers to 51 violations including 48 willful; the releases do not explain the difference in counting. What caused the robot to restart has not been described publicly beyond the absence of lockout.