For more than 50 years, Kentucky has been one of many states that operate their own program to protect worker health and safety under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). House Bill (HB) 398 in the 2025 General Assembly would severely hinder the state’s ability to enforce these laws and weaken the rights of workers to have safety problems addressed. In a state where fatality and injury rates exceed the national average, the extent of the proposed changes could lead to a federal takeover of Kentucky’s OSHA program.
HB 398 threatens worker safety in several ways, including by:
Prohibiting the state from enforcing existing worker safety laws above and beyond the federal standards. This ban adds to a 2021 law that prevents the state from issuing any new worker safety regulations. According to a letter from the Education and Labor Cabinet, “Kentucky’s workforce and industries, including tourism, would lose protections and guidance in areas such as high voltage electric lines, bulk hazardous liquid unloading, and employee exposures to hazardous materials protections should state-specific OSH regulations be revoked.”
Threatening the state with financial penalties for enforcing safety laws, including allowing a court to make the state pay employer expenses like court costs and attorneys’ fees with no limit on costs. This change incentivizes employers to contest more citations — even for deadly hazards — and postpone fixing unsafe working conditions. This provision is clearly designed to intimidate the state from issuing citations.
Taking away the ability of a worker’s parent or other family member, clergy, attorney or community organization to request a safety inspection on a worker’s behalf. This change eliminates a right that exists in every other state.
Further restricting the time in which an employee can file a complaint for being fired or discriminated against for a worker safety allegation, as well as the time in which the state must issue a citation for those actions. Because of serious understaffing of investigators to handle these retaliation complaints, cases will be dropped. This limitation fails to recognize the role of company stall tactics and the complexity of certain cases that may take longer to resolve. It will signal to employers they can act with impunity.
Federal law requires that states operating their own OSHA programs must be “at least as effective as” federal OSHA. The severe limitations in HB 398 would endanger the state’s ability to continue operating its own plan.
That would leave Kentucky workers at the mercy of the more-distant federal government to investigate and enforce worker safety. Rather than Kentucky employees running the state’s office, which allows for quicker investigation and response to incidents, laws would be enforced by a less-resourced federal government, whose office that would cover Kentucky is in Birmingham, Alabama. Federal OSHA only has the inspectors to investigate each workplace once every 186 years, worse than the state’s already insufficient capacity level.
HB 398 is a further weakening of longstanding worker safety protections that will mean more Kentuckians face dangerous conditions on the job that threaten their lives and health.
