EXCLUSIVE: Oregon OSHA Can't Prove Salon Owner Is an Employer, Proceeds With $14k Fine Anyway
Jeff Reynolds

[pjmedia.com]

In an exclusive interview with PJ Media, salon owner Lindsey Graham, of Salem, Ore., said that she had a hearing with Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) in her ongoing fight against fines for reopening Glamour Salon. OSHA fined her $14,000 for creating an unsafe work environment, despite being unable to prove that she has employees. As a salon owner, she leases stations to hairdressers who qualify as independent contractors. Despite having no proof, OSHA said they would fine her anyway.

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Graham has fought back since May 2020, when she defied Democrat Oregon Governor Kate Brown and her executive orders shutting down “non-essential” businesses to slow the spread of the CCP coronavirus pandemic. Graham has faced withering harassment by the state, including OSHA inspectors, fines, and even a spurious investigation opened against her family by Child Protective Services (CPS).

OSHA granted Graham and her attorney a hearing last week to discuss the $14,000 fine. In that hearing, her attorney asked the agency to produce the evidence in her file showing that Glamour Salon had employees, thus granting OSHA jurisdiction to levy fines for creating an unsafe working environment. Graham has fought the fines since May, as she doesn’t have employees and shouldn’t be under the jurisdiction of OSHA. When asked to produce the evidence in the hearing, OSHA hemmed and hawed and could not come up with anything.

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Graham told PJ Media that not one case of COVID-19 has been traced to her salon, despite continual operation since she defied the initial shutdown order in May. “It’s fantastic for me,” she said, “to let the time go by and just let science prove that there is no hazardous workplace. My salon never was hazardous and no one is testing positive for COVID.”

OSHA attempted a compromise, Graham said, by allowing her to pay her fine in installments. “No, I’m not paying the citation,” she said. “I’m going to keep fighting it. It’s costing me a ton in attorney fees, but I don’t care, because if they are going to abuse their authority, according to their own guidelines and rules, there’s nothing stopping them from doing this in the future.”

Judges appointed by Democratic governors and legislatures could thwart her plans, of course. “Hopefully we get a judge that has a conscience and has a moral obligation to uphold the law,” Graham said. “There is no evidence that I was acting as an employer, and also, the wrong statute has been cited on the citation and it doesn’t apply to me. And so there’s two humongous reasons to have this thrown out.”

Graham compared the heavy-handedthat is regulations over the CCP coronavirus pandemic to an abusive relationship. “I have a theory about what the government is doing to us,” she said. “Having been a woman who’s been in a physically abusive relationship, I could tell you the steps that abusive partners take to make sure that that person stays in the cycle with them. They tear you down emotionally, physically, mentally. They make sure that you are aware that you are a lesser person. And therefore you are bound to this person no matter how they treat you. You don’t have the fight in you because you know that you couldn’t go do something better. You don’t even know what you’re fighting at this point. That is exactly what the government is doing to us.”

OSHA is clearly dragging this out, Graham says, because she’s just one person with a small business and a family, and they’re hoping to drain her resources. “I’m just a mom with a salon,” she said. “They basically, I think, expected me yesterday to say I’m just going to pay the citation and be done with this, but I’m not I’m not done. It’s draining. Not draining enough for me to say that for the rest of our American lives and our children’s American life, they can do what they did to me, and they can do it to anyone else, and no one’s going to stand up. And so I just have to keep fighting it, whether I want to or not.”

Her opponents have resorted to ridicule, which Graham has used to her advantage. A critic referred to her as Patriot Barbie on social media, so Graham decided to turn that into a URL and an apparel line. The website, PatriotBarbie.com, links to her 501c3, where she takes donations for her legal fight as well as donations for other businesses that fight back against Kate Brown’s arbitrary lockdowns. She also has an apparel line, the proceeds of which she will donate to charity.

You can hear the whole interview with Lindsey Graham at the Behind the Curtain podcast here.

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