Center for Public Integrity

I’m not easily shocked to learn about injustice against workers. But my jaw hit the floor in fall 2013 when I read Chris Hamby’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning series on the lengths to which coal companies go to dispute that miners have coal-dust related lung disease (a.k.a. black lung.) My jaw hit the floor a second time when Hamby (then with the Center for Public Integrity) exposed that Johns Hopkins University and its employee Dr. Paul Wheeler where star players on the coal operators’ teams. The families of Steve Day, 67, and Junior McCoy Barr, 79, have now filed a lawsuit against the…

The fifth edition of “The Year in US Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2015 – Summer 2016” was released today, Labor Day 2016. This annual tradition profiles the most notable events over the past 12 months in worker safety and health policies, research, and investigative reporting. I wrote this fourth edition of the yearbook with Kim Krisberg and Roger Kerson, and received exceptional editorial assistance from Liz Borkowski, MPH. We are especially excited that the report features many photos contributed by colleagues in the OHS community or used with permission from news outlets that…

Our Labor Day tradition continues with the third edition of The Year in US Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2013 – Summer 2014. Liz Borkowski and I produce it to serve as a resource for activists, researchers, regulators and anyone else who wants a refresher on what happened in the previous 12 months on worker health and safety topics. We prepare it as a complement to the AFL-CIO’s excellent annual Death on the Job report which has been released each spring for the last 23 years. We divide the report into three sections: Happenings at the federal level, activities in state and local…

Earlier this month I wrote about the merits of policies that require conflict of interest disclosures. Last week, two items also about conflicts of interest landed in my in-box. They were just too juicy to not take a bite, and write about here. First came a commentary from the October 2013 issue of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene written by the journal’s chief editor Noah Seixas, PhD, MS.  The lead paragraph reads: "On 6 June 2013, a court in New York handed down a decision that calls into question the validity of research that was sponsored by Georgia-Pacific [GP] and published in eight…

Beau Griffing remembers how proud his mom Kristine, 52, was of the work she did at the Eaton Corporation's Kearney, Nebraska facility. He told a local reporter how she loved taking him and his siblings to the plant to show them where she worked. "She provided so much for us," Beau Griffing said. "She wanted us to be able to be whatever we wanted to be," added his brother, Christopher Griffing, 20. Not quite five months ago, Kristine Griffing was working on a Bliss 150 ton shear press at the Eaton Corp plant, making valves and gears for the auto companies. Neither the press itself nor the…