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Wage theft in South Florida: Nation’s first county with wage theft protections reports on progress and perils
Posted by The Pump Handle on May 14, 2013 Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers wrapped up their latest legislative session. And nearly 500 miles south of Tallahassee in Miami-Dade County, workers’ rights advocates breathed yet another sigh of relief.
Study: Peer-to-peer training can improve safety, knowledge among Hispanic construction workers
Posted by The Pump Handle on April 19, 2013 Eric Rodriguez and his colleagues at the Latino Union of Chicago quite literally meet workers where they’re at — on the city’s street corners. Many of the day laborers who gather there are hired to work construction at residential housing sites. Work arrangements are hardly formal and day laborers are frequently subjected to unnecessary and illegal dangers on the job. Unfortunately, worker safety is often kicked to the curb in the street corner marketplace.
Worker safety provisions in Senate immigration reform bill
Posted by Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH of George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services on April 17, 2013 A quick review of the bi-partisan Senate immigration reform bill reveals a few provisions related to workplace safety.
Transparent Recruitment Charade
Posted by Martin R on April 17, 2013 2009. University of Lund publishes the PhD thesis Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Created Agricultural Wetlands, dealing with biological diversity and ecosystem services in ponds in the agricultural landscape (and commented on here). 2013: Same department advertises a post-doc in the field “Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services in Ponds in the Agricultural Landscape”. Because in…
Cracking down on deadbeat bosses: Wage theft victory a milestone in Chicago’s worker center movement
Posted by The Pump Handle on April 15, 2013 For Angel Nava, Chicago’s newly adopted wage theft ordinance is particularly personal. Until recently, Nava had worked at the same car wash business in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood for 14 years. The 55-year-old employee did it all — washing, detailing, buffing — for about 50 hours each week. Then, his boss decided to stop paying overtime.
Growing gap between wages, rents means healthy housing is increasingly out of reach
Posted by The Pump Handle on March 29, 2013 In California, a minimum wage worker has to work at least 98 hours in a week to afford a two-bedroom unit at fair market rental prices. In Texas, that worker would have to work between 81 and 97 hours in a week, and in North Carolina it’s upward of 80 hours per week.
Hundreds of Texas workers protest in memory of fallen construction workers
Posted by The Pump Handle on March 1, 2013 Texas construction workers who’ve lost their lives on unsafe worksites may be gone, but they certainly haven’t been forgotten. Earlier this week, hundreds of Texas workers and their supporters took to the streets to demand legislators do more to stop preventable injury and death on the job.
New study lifts the lid on unhealthy kitchen conditions in migrant farmworker housing
Posted by The Pump Handle on February 22, 2013 For many migrant farmworkers, the health risks don’t stop at the end of the workday. After long, arduous hours in the field, many will return to a home that also poses dangers to their well-being. And quite ironically for a group of workers that harvests our nation’s food, one of those housing risks is poor cooking and eating facilities.
Help Wanted: Adjunct Physics Faculty
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 22, 2013 We’ve got calls out to the local grad programs, and I’ve mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, but it can’t hurt anything to post it here as well: we’ve got a huge overabundance of first-year engineering students that is forcing us to open extra sections of our intro physics classes to accommodate them.…
A food safety inspector’s warning about chemicals and bacteria under USDA’s proposed poultry inspection “modernization”
Posted by The Pump Handle on February 19, 2013 After nearly three decades as a USDA food safety inspector, Stan Painter tells me he now feels like “window dressing standing at the end of the line as product whizzes by.”
