worker safety
cmonforton | January 15, 2013In the weeks ahead, President Obama will announce his pick to replace Hilda Solis as the 26th Secretary of Labor. It's the Cabinet-level position with the resources and best platform to promote strong policies for the benefit of U.S. workers----from fair, living wages and safe working conditions, to job training and family leave benefits. I hope the President's nominee takes the time to read "At the company's mercy: Protecting contingent workers from unsafe working conditions," a new report by the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR). It describes how work arrangements that don't fit the…
lborkowski | January 14, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past.
"A lot of people are still developing cancer and dying from cancer due to workplace exposures, but only a small fraction of those are compensated, so people may think the magnitude of this problem is small," said Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Ontario, Canada. "I wanted to have better data."
And in just a few years, he will…
lborkowski | January 10, 2013Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis has announced that she is resigning her position in the Obama administration. Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity looks back at Solis's tenure at the Department of Labor:
Labor advocates credit her with restoring the department’s commitment to protecting workers, particularly vulnerable populations, and bringing stronger enforcement of worker safety laws. During her tenure, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration expanded initiatives to crack down on repeat violators of safety and health laws –…
cmonforton | January 8, 2013With five days left in calendar year 2012, the Obama Administration released to the public its current plan for regulatory and deregulatory activities, including those affecting individuals exposed to hazards in their work environment. Executive Order 12866 (adopted in 1993) says the annual regulatory plan “shall be” published in October, and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (5 USC 602) says the semi-annual regulatory agendas “shall” be published in April (Spring) and October (Fall). The Obama Administration failed to meet either of these deadlines, and simply issued for 2012 one regulatory…
cmonforton | December 20, 2012Last week, my home State of Michigan became the 24th one to enact "right-to-work" legislation. I'm sure the great labor leader Walter Reuther (1907-1970) rolled over in his grave when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed the anti-union bill into law.
Workers coming together to negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions created the middle class in America. Belonging to a union means workers can be more secure that they won't be fired arbitrarily, and have more power to receive skills training and guard against unsafe working conditions. This latter point is an underlying…
lborkowski | December 14, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Workers in Travis County, Texas, are celebrating what advocates are calling a landmark victory, after local leaders voted to ensure that economic incentive deals benefit both big business and workers.
In late November, Travis County commissioners approved a new living wage requirement for companies wanting to move into the county and take advantage of the generous tax breaks the region offers to lure new business. The requirement creates a new wage floor of $11 an hour for all employees, including construction workers. On the same day as the county vote, a committee of the…
cmonforton | December 12, 2012A recently published case-control study involving more than 2,100 women in southern Ontario, Canada reported a strong association between being employed in the automotive plastics industry and breast cancer. The researchers recruited the 'case' subjects between 2002-2008 among newly diagnosed breast cancer patients and the randomly-selected controls from the same geographic area. The researchers examined a variety of risk factors for breast cancer (e.g., reproductive history, age) and collected data on the women's employment history. Elevated odds of breast cancer were found among women…
lborkowski | December 7, 2012by Kim Krisberg
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. For all practical purposes, they work in regulation-free environments without the benefits of labor, wage and health protections or oversight. There are no HR departments in people's homes.
But a new survey released in November has pulled back the curtain on the conditions and experiences domestic workers face, documenting issues such as wage exploitation, preventable on-the-job injuries and the little — if any — power domestic workers have in improving…
cmonforton | November 20, 2012
Shortly after taking office, the head of the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledged the troubling slow pace at which new worker safety regulations are put in place. In a February 2010 speech, David Michaels, PhD, MPH said:
"Some standards have taken more than a decade to establish, and that's not an acceptable response when workers are in danger."
In a March 2010 speech the OSHA chief added:
"Clearly the current system for issuing standards doesn't work well for those it's supposed to benefit - workers. When rulemaking takes years and even…
lborkowski | November 8, 2012Cleanup and recovery from Sandy's devastation is a daunting task, and presents several hazards. Laura Walter at EHS Today describes several hazards in the cleanup work and ways to avoid them. The hazards include musculoskeletal injuries from lifting heavy watersoaked items, contaminated standing water, mold and mildew, electrical wires, and stress. An OSHA Hurricane Sandy Cleanup and Recovery page offers detailed fact sheets and quick cards on these and other hazards, with most offered in both English and Spanish.
Stephen Lee reports in Bloomberg BNA that labor and business groups have…
cmonforton | November 7, 2012Hurray! The Presidential election is over. Let's hope this means that Obama Administration officials will come out from under their beds and embrace their regulatory authority to issue some strong public health and environmental regulations. At the Labor Department (DOL) there's much work to do to expand workers' rights, ensure workers' lives and health are protected, and improve the information provided by its agencies. Leave a comment with your ideas for immediate action by the Labor Department.
Here's my short version of my wish list for major DOL activities for the next 6 months:
MSHA…
cmonforton | October 16, 2012For some reason the news story stuck in my memory. The headline read:
"Oil rig explosion near Marshall in north central Oklahoma was caused by blowout, company attorney said."
Maybe it was because I'd been reading so many stories about the natural gas boom, that a news story about an oil rig caught my attention. It happened January 20, 2012 at the Logan Rig #7, operated by El Dorado Drilling, an affiliate of Kirkpatrick Oil. Maybe it was the news headline's word "blowout" which stirred memories of the Deepwater Horizon Maconda rig's infamous "blowout preventers." Maybe it was the lead…
cmonforton | October 10, 2012Planning a conference is a pain in the neck. There are loads of details to attend to and the only time you get a little relief is when you can cross tasks off that long, long to-do list. Now imagine learning that clergy, women's groups, labor organizations, immigrants' rights networks and others are urging individuals to boycott the venue where your conference is scheduled. You signed that hotel contract ages ago, paid that hefty deposit and crossed that item off your list. What a dilemma. It's the exact one faced in the last few weeks by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO…
lborkowski | September 21, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It really is a chemical world, which is bad news for people with asthma.
According to a recent report released in August, at this very moment from where I write, I'm fairly surrounded by objects and materials that contain chemicals that are known or suspected asthmagens — substances that can act as asthma triggers if inhaled. There's formaldehyde (it's in office furniture, wood flooring, curtains and drapes); maleic anhydride (it's in interior paint and tile flooring); hexamethylene diisocyanate (it's in metal storage shelving and decorative metal); and diisodecyl phthalate (…
cmonforton | September 12, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the number of major regulatory actions taken by OSHA during the Presidential election years 1984 to 2012. I was exploring the popular notion that OSHA's regulatory activities always slow down during a Presidential election year. I learned that the number of final rules, proposed rules, and advanced notices of proposed rules issued by OSHA slowed substantially over the last 28 years, but I needed more data to discern whether the number of these actions actually slowed during Presidential election years. The chart below provides that data.
In five of the…
cmonforton | September 6, 2012As Liz Borkowski noted on Tuesday, we started a new tradition this year to mark Labor Day in the U.S. We published The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2011 - Summer 2012. The 42-page report highlights some of the key research and activities in the U.S. on worker health and safety topics.
We know that many advocates, reporters and researchers look forward every April to the AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report with its compilation of data on work-related injuries reported, number of federal and state inspections, violations cited, and penalties assessed. We set out to…
lborkowski | August 31, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's Tuesday evening and as usual, the small parking lot outside the Workers Defense Project on Austin's eastside is packed. The dusty lot is strewn with cars and pick-up trucks parked wherever they can fit and get in off the road. I've arrived well before the night's activities begin, so I easily secure a spot. But my gracious guide and translator, a college intern named Alan Garcia, warns me that I might get blocked in. It happens all the time, he says.
It was the first of two August evenings I'd spend observing the project in action and meeting the workers who help lead its…
cmonforton | August 28, 2012I'll be the first to admit I've criticized the Obama Administration's OSHA for failing to issue or even propose many new worker safety and health standards. As I wrote earlier this month, under President Obama and Secretary Solis, OSHA has only issued three new worker safety rules, two of which were safety standards affecting discrete industries and the third, a rule broadly endorsed by big business. Some colleagues and commentators attribute this mediocre record to regulatory resistance in the White House, pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill, too few staff in the OSHA standards…
'An issue that affects all of us': Young workers center takes on wage theft in the Rio Grande Valley
lborkowski | August 27, 2012by Kim Krisberg
For six months, Jorge Rubio worked at a local chain of tortilla bakeries and taquerias in the cities of Brownsville and San Benito, both in the very southern tip of Texas. Rubio, 42, prepared the food, cleaned equipment, served customers. Eventually, he decided to quit after being overworked for months.
On his last day of work this past January, his employer refused to pay him the usual $50 for an 11-hour workday. The employer told Rubio that sales were too low to pay him. A couple months later, Rubio was referred to Fuerza del Valle, a young workers center in Texas' Rio…
cmonforton | August 22, 2012As first reported yesterday by Chris Hamby at the Center for Public Integrity's IWatch, an internal report on the agency's Voluntary Protection Program (VPP), submitted in November 2011 to OSHA chief David Michaels is now public.
Over the months, I'd made my own inquiries to OSHA's public affairs office wondering when the public might be able to read this report. I never received a response, but understand it appeared on OSHA's website on Friday, August 17. Thanks to Hamby for bringing it to our attention.
OSHA's VPP dates back to 1983, and recognizes worksites that, in OSHA's words "…