“That buzzing noise over a construction site could be an OSHA drone searching for safety violations,” notes Littler Mendelson lawyer Tammy McCutchen in a piece for the Federalist Society. Quoting a U.S. Department of Labor memorandum from May of last year obtained by Bloomberg Law, McCutchen writes that “your friendly neighborhood OSHA inspector is now authorized by the Labor Department ‘to use camera-carrying drones as part of their inspections of outdoor workplaces.’”
What about the Fourth Amendment, you may ask? Well, court review is unlikely because current procedures call for the agency to obtain employer consent before sending the spycams aloft. Which makes everything okay, right?
Not really. As McCutchen writes, employers who refuse such consent “risk the ire of the DOL, with serious consequences. Nothing is more likely to put a target on an employer’s back for multiple and frequent future investigations than sending a DOL investigator away from your doors. Refusing consent will label you at the DOL as a bad faith employer that deserves closer scrutiny. This I know through experience practicing before DOL and as a former Administrator of DOL’s Wage & Hour Division.”
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/look-overhead-its-osha-drone
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