Judge Backs North Carolina in Case Over Safety Inspector Quotas

A lawsuit that accused North Carolina’s worker safety agency of unlawfully evaluating its inspectors based on inspection “quotas” has been dismissed by a federal judge.

The legal challenge, filed in 2021 by Industrial Services Group Inc. of Canton, N.C., alleged that the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Division had cited the company following a fatal fire because it incentivized inspectors to issue large numbers of citations.

But the company, also known as Universal Blastco, failed to prove the citations were issued because of the alleged incentives, Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the US District Court for the Western District ...