U.S. Senate Confirms Horace Thompson

On Friday, May 19, 2006, after more than a year of proceedings, the U.S. Senate confirmed Horace A. “Topper” Thompson III to serve as Commissioner at the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent Federal agency created to decide contests of citations resulting from OSHA inspections of American work places.

Sworn in on Friday, June 9, Commissioner Thompson’s long-awaited arrival fills a vacancy open since April 2005. He will serve alongside Chairman W. Scott Railton and Commissioner Thomasina Rogers.

With Thompson on board, the Review Commission now has the ability to perform at full-strength and more efficiently. He can provide the necessary tie-breaker vote to decide cases when Chairman Railton and Commissioner Rogers disagree.

Commissioner “Topper” Thompson, ready to get to work, said, “I am looking forward to working with Chairman Railton and Commissioner Rogers to build a consensus on the resolution of cases in order and to reduce the backlog that developed during the year that the Commission has been operating without a third Commissioner.”

Until joining the Commission, Thompson, a life-long resident of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, lived with his wife Susan in Pass Christian, Mississippi. During his entire 38-year career as an attorney, he concentrated his practice in labor and employment law, with a focus on occupational safety and health law.

From 2002 through 2006, Thompson served as Co-Chair of the Labor and Employment Law Practice Group of the Law Firm of Watkins Ludlam Winter and Stennis and held a resident position in the firm’s Gulfport, MS and New Orleans, LA offices.

Prior to that, he co-founded the Labor Relations and Employment Law Firm of McCalla Thompson Pyburn & Ridley and from 1980 through 2002 participated as a member of its management committee. From 1968 to 1980, Thompson was a member of the Labor Law Section of the New Orleans based law firm of Jones Walker Waechter Poitevent Carrere & Denegre.

Commissioner Thompson received his JD from Tulane University in 1968, and before that studied undergraduate engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In each year of its publication, Thompson has contributed to the United States Safety and Health Law Section of the ABA/BNA Treatise on International Labor Law. From 1979 to 1984, he served as Management Co-Chair of the Occupational Safety and Health Law Committee American Bar Section on Labor and Employment Law.