regulation
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 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 18, 2015Congress continues to take key legislative steps to reform the 40 year old Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The latest move came last week in a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In a bi-partisan unanimous vote (21-0) on May 14, the Subcommittee on Environment and Economy reported out the TSCA Modernization Act. It is now ready for action by the full Committee.
We’ve reported previously on The Pump Handle about a TSCA reform bill making its way in the Senate. The Vitter/Udall bill (S.697) has 39 co-sponsors, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Kim…
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 30, 2015They’ve called it a failure and a broken law. That’s how the public health community, agency officials, some lawmakers and others have characterized the nearly 40 year old Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). When any of them are looking for a poster child to illustrate why TSCA’s a failure, they most often point to one toxic: asbestos.
EPA tried in 1989 to ban most uses of asbestos. But TSCA is so convoluted that the ban didn't withstand a lawsuit which was brought by producers and users of the deadly mineral fibers. So we are stuck with a law in which one of the most well-researched, and…
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…
kkrisberg | April 17, 2015In just a year, electronic cigarette use has tripled among American teens. And considering that no one really knows what the related health impacts are and any regulatory framework is lagging far behind the growing popularity of e-cigarettes, public health advocates say it’s time for action.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data from the 2014 National Youth Tobacco Survey finding that current e-cigarette use among high school students, which is defined as using at least once in the prior 30 days, nearly tripled — from 4.5 percent in 2013 to 13.4…
cmonforton | April 17, 2015The AFL-CIO outlined in an April 13 letter the “serious flaws and deficiencies” in a bill introduced by Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Tom Udall (D-NM) to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The country’s largest labor federation noted its deep involvement in the passage of TSCA in 1976, but its disappointment that the 40 year old law has “failed to provide meaningful and effective regulation” of toxic substances. (Even efforts to ban asbestos failed under the law.)
The labor federation has an important voice and perspective when it comes to chemical hazards. Workers are the…
cmonforton | April 16, 2015Ronald Lee MacKnight, 39, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, April 13, 2015 while working for Awnings and More Inc. in Farr West, Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
the incident happened "when a modular home [MacKnight] was helping to move fell on top of him”
the incident occurred "at the Westwood Village mobile home retirement community at 12:25 pm local time"
ABC4News reports:
MacKnight and a co-worker “had the home up on jacks” and they were underneath it.
"Either the jack failed or it came off of the jacks and it ended up coming down on top of him,” according to Lieutenant…
cmonforton | April 15, 2015(Updated below (5/1/2015))
There’s a lot of griping in Washington DC about businesses being burdened by too many federal regulations. The gripers and their friends on Capitol Hill have introduced legislation with snappy names, such as the SCRUB Act (Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome), the REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny) and the ALERT Act (All Economic Regulations are Transparent). But there's no doubt these laws are designed to put the skids on the rulemaking process. For some agencies, including OSHA, they’ve already been…
kkrisberg | April 10, 2015Today, nearly every state in the country has a law that bans texting while driving. But do these laws make a difference?
A group of researchers took on that question, comparing crash-related hospitalizations among states with a texting-while-driving ban and states without such a ban. And they found some encouraging results: Texting bans were associated with a 7 percent reduction in crash-related hospitalizations among all age groups, especially among those ages 22 to 64. To conduct the study, which was published in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers examined…
kkrisberg | April 7, 2015Americans increasingly want to know that their steaks were humanely raised or their produce was organically grown, but what about the people who picked that produce or cared for those cows? Where’s the concern for the workers behind our food? Reporter Stephen Lurie explored that question in an article published last week in Vox. He writes:
Organic and environmentally sustainable certifications lead consumers to supposedly wholesome products, but they hold no guarantees about the wholesomeness of the companies that produce those goods. Sitting down to a farm-to-table meal at a chic restaurant…
cmonforton | April 6, 2015Jeffrey Shannon, 49 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, March 30, 2015 while working at Sunoco’s Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in Delaware County, PA. 6ABC reports:
”It happened around 2:15 p.m. at Blue Ball Avenue and Post Road on the grounds of the refinery.”
NPR’s State Impact Pennsylvania reports:
"The worker died from multiple blunt force injuries after a 1200 foot pylon fell on him."
Mr. Shannon was a contractor at the site and he worked for the engineering firm AECOM.
The facility is being converted from an oil refinery to a natural gas storage and processing plant. "In…
cmonforton | April 2, 2015April 5, 2015 will mark the fifth anniversary of the coal dust explosion that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine (UBB). It was the worst disaster in 40 years in the US coal industry.
Since then, some things have changed in coal mine safety. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in particular, has focused much of its attention on ways to address failures identified by the UBB disaster. Browse through the agency’s press releases dating back to May 2010 and you’ll see quite a few with some connection to UBB.
You’ll notice, for example, recaps of the agency’s “…
kkrisberg | March 31, 2015For years, advocates have been calling on policymakers to reform the nation’s outdated chemical safety laws. Today, two such bills stand before Congress — one that advocates say better protects the public’s health and another that advocates warn is a dangerous step backward.
Introduced in the Senate earlier this month within just days of each other, each bill takes aim at the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which was enacted in 1976 and hasn’t been updated since. Under TSCA, which doesn’t require chemicals undergo health impact testing before being released into the marketplace,…