chemical facilities
kkrisberg | August 30, 2016At KCRW (an NPR member station), Karen Foshay reports on occupational injuries among low-wage restaurant workers in California and the retaliatory barriers that often keep them from speaking up. She cited a 2011 Restaurant Opportunities Center survey of Los Angeles restaurant workers that found 42 percent experienced cuts, 43 percent experienced burns and more than half reported working while sick. Foshay writes:
At a recent meeting in Azusa (in eastern Los Angeles County), several workers showed off their appointment cards for clinics like Santa Adelina. Three men lifted their pant legs to…
kkrisberg | March 1, 2016At The New York Times, writers Kim Barker and Russ Buettner report on the labor investigations being conducted at nail salons throughout New York in the wake of a 2015 New York Times article that exposed widespread wage and labor abuses. They report that all but a dozen of the 230 salons whose investigations were closed last year were found violating at least one labor law. More than 40 percent of the salons were violating wage laws. Barker and Buettner write:
But the details of the state inspections are perhaps most revealing about just how challenging it is to regulate a largely immigrant-…
kkrisberg | January 19, 2016At Reveal, reporter Will Evans investigates discrimination within temporary staffing agencies, finding a pattern of racial, sexist and otherwise discriminatory hiring practices. He begins his story with Alabama-based Automation Personnel Services Inc., writing:
When its clients wanted to hire temp workers based on race, sex or age, Automation was happy to oblige, according to dozens of former employees.
Often, the practice was blatant. A manager at a Georgia manufacturing plant asked Christie Ragland not to send him “any black thugs,” she said. Ragland, a former Automation office manager…
kkrisberg | May 19, 2015An injured worker who was featured in the ProPublica/NPR investigation on the dismantling of the workers’ compensation system recently testified before lawmakers in Illinois, cautioning them against making the same drastic workers’ comp cuts as his home state of Oklahoma. Michael Grabell, who co-authored the original investigation, writes that John Coffell, who lost his home after hurting his back at an Oklahoma tire plant, was part of an eight-hour hearing on workers’ comp before the entire Illinois state assembly. Grabell writes in ProPublica:
Coffell told the legislators that after…
egrossman | June 12, 2014Following the deadly April 17, 2013 explosion at the West, Texas West Fertilizer Company plant that killed fifteen people and injured hundreds – and a series of other catastrophic incidents involving hazardous materials – President Obama issued Executive Order 13650. It directed federal agencies to improve the safety and security of chemical facilities to reduce risks to workers, communities and first responders. To do so it established a working group, led by the Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Homeland Security, that would report back to the…
lborkowski | August 5, 2013Fast-food workers in several Midwestern cities and New York held one-day strikes last week to protest poverty wages. Jeff Schuhrke reports for In These Times, with a focus on the Chicago protests:
Hundreds of fast-food and retail workers in Chicago are on strike today and tomorrow, joining thousands of other workers walking off the job this week in at least seven cities across the country, including New York, Detroit and St. Louis. For most of these cities, this is the second time in recent months that low-wage employees—primarily in the fast-food industry—have staged single-day walkouts…