Occupational Health & Safety
kkrisberg | June 19, 2015Even though farmworkers face serious hazards on the job and work in one of the most dangerous industries in the country, most young farmworkers in a recent study rated their work safety climate as “poor.” In fact, more than a third of those surveyed said their managers were only interested in getting the job done as quickly as possible.
Recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, the study was designed to capture perceptions of work safety climates on North Carolina farms that employ children and teens and the association with occupational safety and injuries. In partnering…
kkrisberg | June 16, 2015A recent agreement between striking farmworkers and big agribusiness in Baja California could be the “most significant achievement by a farm labor movement in recent Mexican history,” reports Richard Marosi in the Los Angeles Times.
Among the settlement details, daily wages for workers will go up by as much as 50 percent and workers will receive the required government benefits often denied by their employers. Marosi reports:
“This is a watershed moment,” said Sara Lara, a farm labor researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In decades of studying farm issues, Lara said she…
cmonforton | June 15, 2015Richard Johnson’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) in the agency’s citations against his employer, Southwest Fabrication. The 31 year-old was working in January 2015 at the company’s facility in Phoenix, Arizona. The initial press reports indicated that his clothes got entangled in a metal fabrication machine. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with ADOSH conducted an inspection at the facility following the fatal incident. The agency…
cmonforton | June 11, 2015John Dunnivant’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Kia Motors. The 57-year old was working in October 2014 at the company’s plant in West Point, Georgia. The initial press reports indicated that Dunnivant was crushed by a stamping machine in the steel-press section of the facility. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with federal OSHA conducted an inspection at the facility following the fatal incident. The agency recently issued citations…
lborkowski | June 9, 2015By Dan Neal
Ensuring that U.S. workers return home from work healthy and in one piece requires pushing OSHA and other agencies to do more at the state and national levels to improve standards and aggressively enforce them. Meanwhile, health and safety advocates and workers must speak out loudly for worker rights, especially to protect workers who simply report safety problems at their jobs and to protect whistleblowers who reveal criminal behavior.
Those points were discussed last week in Baltimore at the 2015 National Conference on Worker Safety and Health. More than 280 workplace safety and…
kkrisberg | June 5, 2015Back in 1970 when the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established, local policymakers could choose whether or not to extend OSHA protections to state employees. Unfortunately, Massachusetts took a pass. But decades later — and after years of advocacy, organizing and research on the part of worker advocates — employees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can now look forward to safer and healthier workplaces.
In June 2014, then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed legislation that expanded OSHA protections to executive branch employees — that’s more than 150,000…
cmonforton | June 3, 2015I’m getting tired of Members of Congress describing Obama’s Executive Order (EO 13673) for government contractors “blacklisting.” Merriam-Webster defines blacklisting as “ a list of persons who are disapproved of or are to be punished or boycotted." The Cambridge dictionary defines it as “to decide that you will not do business with an organization or person.”
That’s not at all what the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplace" Executive Order says and it’s not what is described in the guidance document to implement it. That guidance document was published in the Federal Register on May 28.
Yet the…
kkrisberg | June 2, 2015Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help.
Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
cmonforton | May 29, 2015The Labor Department released last week its semi-annual regulatory agenda and it’s full of disappointment for those expecting new worker safety regulations from the Obama Administration. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) doesn't expect to publish a proposed rule to protect mine workers from respirable silica until April 2016. Six months ago, the agency suggested the proposal was imminent. OSHA doesn't expect to convene a panel of small businesses to review a draft proposed rule to address combustible dust until February 2016. A year ago the agency said it would be ready for…
kkrisberg | May 26, 2015After 18 years as a professional house cleaner in the suburbs of Chicago, Magdalena Zylinska says she feels very lucky. Unlike many of her fellow domestic workers, she hasn’t sustained any serious injuries.
Zylinska, 43, cleans residences in the metropolitan Chicago area five days a week. An independent contractor, she cleans two to three houses each day. Fortunately, she doesn’t do the job alone — she always works with at least one other person, so they can help each other with much of the lifting and other types of repetitive physical labor that can often lead to preventable injuries and…
cmonforton | May 23, 2015Milton “Tito” Rafael Barreto Hernandez work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Scott Materials (Central Rock Corporation/ Southwinds Express Construction.) The 22-year-old was working in October 2014 at the company’s concrete crushing facility in Scott, Louisiana. The initial press reports indicated Hernandez and a supervisor were trying to remove debris that was jamming up a conveyor belt. The equipment was turned back on and Hernandez was pulled into the machine. I wrote about the incident…
cmonforton | May 22, 2015Last week OSHA announced citations and proposed a $99,000 penalty against DuPont for safety violations related to the November 2014 incident that killed four employees at its LaPorte, TX chemical plant. Wade Baker, 60, Gibby Tisnado, 48, Robert Tisnado, 39, and Crystal Wise, 53 were asphyxiated by methyl mercaptan because of gross failures in DuPont’s systems to manage highly hazardous chemicals. OSHA’s proposed penalty stems from one repeat, nine serious, and one other-than-serious violation.
What baffles me is why OSHA didn’t propose the $70,000 maximum for the repeat violation. OSHA gave…
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…
cmonforton | May 14, 2015Selvin Antulio Lopez-Castillo, 43, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, May 4, 2015 while working at a residential construction site in Franklin Township, NJ. ABCNews reports:
The incident occurred around 4 pm at a site where a home was under construction.
Five other workers were nearby when the incident occurred.
NBCNY reports:
“The worker was about 8 feet down when the walls of the hole gave way. The other workers attempted to get him out but were unsuccessful.”
“Firefighters from Community, East Franklin, Somerset Fire and Rescue and New Brunswick Fire responded to the scene. They…
lborkowski | May 11, 2015[Update below (5/15/15)]
by Cora Roelofs, ScD
Kudos to Sarah Maslin Nir for shedding light on the working conditions faced by nail salon workers in her recent two-part New York Times exposé “Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers.” I and others across the country have been working to document and illuminate the effects of the systematic failures that produce the unhealthful conditions faced by these workers and, many times, their employers as well. As described in our investigation of nail salon conditions in Boston, despite tremendous evidence of bad conditions and symptoms related to work in these…
cmonforton | May 6, 2015I’ve heard dozens and dozens of examples of workers getting seriously injured on-the-job. Many times the tale ends with a remark like this:
“and the company never told OSHA.”
There was the guy on a moving crew in Milwaukee whose foot was crushed in a faulty freight elevator. A day laborer in Cincinnati who lost part of his finger in a chain saw. A painter in Houston who suffered a fractured pelvis and leg when his scaffold collapsed.
In every case, whether the worker himself or a co-worker told the story, they thought it especially important to tell me this: neither the boss nor anybody…
kkrisberg | May 5, 2015The U.S. Department of Labor is proposing a new rule that would prohibit coal companies from withholding medical evidence from workers with black lung disease who are seeking compensation, reports Chris Hamby at the Center for Public Integrity.
In its proposed rule, the agency cited the case of coal miner Gary Fox as part of its justification. Fox’s story was also featured in the Center for Public Integrity’s Breathless and Burdened series, which investigated how coal companies undermine sick workers’ benefit claims. Hamby, who authored many of the Breathless and Burdened reports, writes that…
cmonforton | April 29, 2015I can’t help but contrast last week’s release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of workplace fatality data,with the reports issued this week by community groups to commemorate International Workers’ Memorial Day (WMD). BLS gave us the sterile number: 4,585. That’s the government’s official, final tally of the number of work-related fatal injuries that occurred in the US in 2013.
But groups in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and elsewhere have already assembled workplace fatality data for 2014. Better than that, they’ve affixed names and stories to the numbers. The information comes in the…
kkrisberg | April 27, 2015Today, Maine’s legislature held a hearing on the Toxic Chemicals in the Workplace Act, a proposal to require employers to identify harmful chemicals in the workplace and replace them with safer alternatives. It’s the perfect example of state action on behalf of worker safety and exactly the kind of measure that might no longer be possible under two congressional proposals aimed at overhauling the federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
As Congress considers a number of legislative proposals to reform the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) — a law that hasn’t been updated since its passage…
cmonforton | April 24, 2015Researchers with CDC's National Institute for Occupational (NIOSH) report that nearly 16 percent of current asthma cases in US adults are work-related. The reported findings are based on data from the Behaviorial Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) Adult Asthma Call-back Survey (ACBS) and reported this month in Morbitity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The survey respondents, made up of adults from 22 states, answered "yes" to the question:
"Have you ever been told by a doctor or other health professional that your asthma was caused by, or your symptoms made worse by, any job you ever…