regulation
sb admin | December 4, 2007Elizabeth Williamson of the Washington Post has written powerful article on the failure of the regulatory system to ensure that amusement park âthrillâ rides donât kill or injure customers, primarily teenagers and children. She provides grisly detail on a topic weâve talked about here before: the inability and/or unwillingness of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect the public.
After describing one series of identical accidents that occurred several times on the same ride, Williamson notes
The CPSC has no employee whose full-time job is to ensure the safety of such rides. The…
sb admin | December 2, 2007A quick look at Blood Lead Concentrations Less than 10 Micrograms per Deciliter and Child Intelligence at 6 Years of Age by Todd A. Jusko, Charles R. Henderson, Jr., Bruce P. Lanphear et al., published online in Environmental Health Perspectives.
The current CDC definition of elevated blood lead in a child is 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (written as 10 μg/dL). However, there is increasingly compelling evidence that lower blood lead levels are associated with decreased performance on intelligence testing. At the same time, it has just been reported that the EPA has just…
lborkowski | November 30, 2007It's that time of year---time for the Secretary of Labor to issue her semi-annual regulatory agenda.  Look for its publication in the Federal Register around the second week of December.
I'll be curious to see OSHA's timetable for action on diacetyl, the butter-flavoring agent associated with severe lung disease in exposed workers.
Will OSHA list diacetyl on its reg agenda?
Will it provide a target date for publishing a proposed rule?
   I'll also be eager to see OSHA's latest schedule for proposed rules to address:
Hearing conservation for construction workers (who are not…
sb admin | November 28, 2007In today's Federal Register, OSHA published a proposed rule to protect construction workers from the hazards of working in confined spaces. This proposal--just a proposed rule at this point---has been 14 years in the making. It is something that OSHA promised to do as part of a 1994 settlement agreement with the Steelworkers. A rule has been in place since 1993 to protect workers in so-called âgeneral industryâ from working in confined spaces (e.g., storage tanks, sewers, silos) with requirements for measuring the air quality inside the space so that workers know whether…
sb admin | November 26, 2007Former NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani (R) is basing his presidential campaign on his so-called Twelve Commitments to the American People. A number of them make me particularly nervous, especially as we learn of the fragile state of some fundamental public health systems. Problems including lead-laced children's toys, coal mining disasters, e.coli 0157:H7-contaminated foods and unsafe pharmaceuticals come to mind. Candidate Guiliani says he plans to:
"Reduce the federal civilian workforce by 20% through attrition and retirement"
"Require agencies to identify at least 5% to 20% in spending…
sb admin | November 15, 2007Molly Selvin of the Los Angeles Times reports that California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) has issued a citation to a Hilton hotel at LAX airport for violations of the State's rules to protect workers from repetitive motion injuries. She quotes Len Welsh head of Cal/OSHA:
"'The LAX Hilton 'did not follow policies that other Hilton hotels followed,' Welsh said. He added that other chains had adopted a number of approaches to training housekeepers that could alleviate repetitive motion stress and had given workers leeway to break up tasks with rest time to prevent…
sb admin | November 15, 2007In my post yesterday "OSHA issues PPE rule: what took'em so long?" I forgot to mention that OSHA is giving employers six months to comply with it. Recall that this egregiously tardy rule simply clarifies when employers are supposed to pay for personal protective equipment (PPE). As Asst. Secretary Edwin Foulke repeated in his announcement yesterday, the rule: "only addresses the issue of who pays for PPE, not the types of PPE an employer must provide....the rule does not require employers to provide PPE where none has been required before..."
If the rule is only providing clarification…
sb admin | November 14, 2007OSHA's long-awaited rule on "who pays for personal protective equipment" has finally seen the light of day.  Assistant Secretary of Labor Edwin Foulke made the announcement today in a telephone press conference; workers and employers should be able to read the rule in the Federal Register on November 15. The Agency proposed this rule more than 8 years ago, and in today's statements, officials repeated that the final rule is very similar to the March 1999 proposal.Â
"...clarifications have added several paragraphs to the regulatory text."
Several paragaphs in 8 years???  Well then…
sb admin | November 13, 2007At last week's annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), the organization adopted more than a dozen new policy resolutions which will guide its work into the future. Included among them was a call for "Congress to fundamentally restructure the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA)" so that more attention is paid to the toxic and ecotoxic properties of chemicals in commerce.
 APHA's policy resolution on TSCA* describes the limitations of the existing law, echoing assessments made by other groups. In 2005 and 2006, for example, the Government Accountability…
sb admin | November 12, 2007Updated Below
I had thought that with the Democrats takeover of Congress, weâd be done with Congressional hearings convened so anti-regulatory groups like the US Chamber of Commerce would have a platform to present unscientific studies that purport to show the enormous damage done by federal regulatory policy. Sadly, I was wrong.
Last week, the Chamber released the results of a "survey" of the costs to small business of compliance with the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, known widely as Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX. The Chamber tried to find small businesses…
sb admin | November 3, 2007The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward, one of the few reporters in the country who writes consistently about worker health and safety issues, is featured on EXPOSE: America's Investigative Reports. The episode entitled "Sustained Outrage" depicts Ward's approach to covering coal mine disasters like the 2006 Sago tragedy:
"When other reporters are zigging, I'm zagging,"
describing his talent for investigating these fatalities well beyond the headline and long after the cameras are turned off.  The 24-minute episode describes how Ken Ward created a database using information from …
revere | November 3, 2007I've been to plenty of scientific meetings sponsored by federal agencies in the last several years where we have either had to do weird back door stuff just to have coffee breaks as part of the program or if we are sponsoring it and inviting federal scientists and staff they have to go off and have lunch on their own nickel so they won't run afoul of conflict of interest regs. They would be taking a "gift" from us if they ate food we paid for. OK. I get the principle. Some of it is bureaucratic and dumb but where do you draw the line? Now I find out where the big guys draw the line:
The chief…
sb admin | November 2, 2007Workers dying from asphyxiation in a confined space is a senseless tragedy. When four men lose their lives in this way, with three of them dying in an attempt to rescue the other, it is a genuine disaster.  Yesterday, four men died inside a 12-foot deep sewer line at the Lakehead Blacktop Demolition Landfill in the Village of Superior, Wisconsin. County Sheriff Tom Dalbec said:
"One of the workers was trying to repair a pump or clear a blockage in the sewer line last yesterday when he was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. ...First one goes down and is overcome by gas and drops…
sb admin | November 1, 2007Three young widows of Harlan County are taking a stand against incumbent Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher (R). An op-ed by Claudia Cole, Stella Morris, and Melissa Lee appeared in the Lexington Herald Leader, with harsh words about the Governor's record on mine safety and rights for victims' families.
"Gov. Ernie Fletcher has disrespected our families and has not kept his word. ...[We] urge all Kentucky coal miners and their families to join us in voting against Fletcher in Tuesday's election. ...We refuse to support a politician like Fletcher who stands in the way of protecting…
sb admin | October 31, 2007The OSHA Fairness Coalition weighed in with some fightin' words yesterday, expressing "unequivocal opposition" to a mine safety bill scheduled for mark-up in the House Education and Labor Committee. This is the same group that opposed the "Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act" when it successfully moved through Congress in September. At that time, we wondered what the Messenger Courier Association of the Americas, or the Independent Electrical Contractors, or the Roofing Contractors Association had to do with butter-flavoring agents, but whatever, the Chamber of Commerce and…
sb admin | October 30, 2007We've been following the crescendo of stories illustrating the severe limitations of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (here, here, and here): CPSC lacks the resources to test products adequately, it canât levy hefty enough fines to deter corporate wrongdoing, and it can announce a recall only through a news release that it negotiates with the company involved .
Now, a bill is moving through the Senate that would boost CPSC funding, increase maximum penalties for violating product-safety laws to $100 million from $1.85 million, protect whistleblowers, and let the understaffed agency…
sb admin | October 26, 2007[Updated (10/30/07) below]
Representatives from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Chamber of Commerce met this week with White House Office of Management and Budget in a last-ditch effort to influence OSHAâs rule clarifying employersâ obligation to pay for workers' personal protective equipment (e.g., safety goggles, metatarsal boots, gloves). They likely repeated their claims that OSHAâs PPE payment rule is a case of
"â¦economic transference, not employee safety and health. â¦employers already pay for the majority of personal protective equipment used in the workplace…
sb admin | October 23, 2007In late September, Topps Meat Company recalled 21.7 million pounds of ground beef for possible contamination with E. coli O157:H7, which can leave consumers with bloody diarrhea and, in the worse cases, kidney failure and death. The recall put Topps out of business, but the problem goes beyond a single company. In todayâs New York Times, Christopher Drew and Andrew Martin report that safety problems existed at Topps for months prior to the recall, but federal inspectors failed to cite the company for anything besides cleanliness problems (which the USDA described as routine).
The specific…
sb admin | October 22, 2007Shawn Boone was only 33 years old in 2003 when he was fatally burned from several violent explosions at the Hayes Lemmerz plant in Huntington, Indiana. The plant manufactured cast aluminum automotive wheels.  These firey blasts, which also severely burned two other workers, were fueled by aluminum dust which had accumulated in the plant. That same year, chemical dust-fueled explosions at CTA Acoustics in Corbin, Kentucky and at West Pharmaceuticals in Kinston, NC took the lives of 13 workers and injured dozens of others. The death toll from these workplace disasters compelled…
sb admin | October 22, 2007The spin doctors have been hard at work on the EPAâs Superfund Program. The result is that the public and many lawmakers are misinformed about how the program works, along with the continued need for the program.
Last week, Professor Rena Steinzor of the University of Maryland School of Law testified at a Senate oversight hearing examining the Superfund Program. Steinzor described the âfive Superfund legends that have little relationship to history or reality:â
1. Few if any sites endanger public health.
2. Because EPA has only recently gotten down to the worst, most complex sites, cleanup…