government
kkrisberg | May 6, 2014The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program has garnered praise from the White House to the United Nations for its innovative strategies to improve working conditions among farmworkers in Florida. The program, which began in 2010, works by getting big buyers to agree to only purchase tomatoes from farms that adhere to worker protection rules and ensure that workers are educated on their rights and responsibilities. Businesses that have signed on include Taco Bell, Chipotle and, recently, Wal-Mart, which according to a New York Times article chronicling progress on Florida farms,…
cmonforton | May 5, 2014Getting down and dirty with boots on the ground is one trait of a successful community organizer. It could also describe the work of the most-skilled epidemiologists. ATSDR scientist Frank Bove, ScD’s past experience with the first—an organizer from 1975 to 1982--makes him especially effective at the second.
Last month, Bove was recognized by the Boston University School of Public Health with the 2014 David Ozonoff Unsung Hero Award for his work. Bove has been the lead researcher in the Agency for Toxic Studies and Disease Registry’s (ATSDR) investigation of U.S. Marine Corps base Camp…
cmonforton | April 29, 2014“When workers get hurt in poultry plants, many employers try to just throw them away,” explained Tom Fritzsche a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “Companies assume workers won’t stand up for themselves. We are proud to represent a group of brave workers who want to keep these dangerous conditions from harming even more people.”
Fritzsche’s comment came after SPLC filed a complaint last week with the Labor Department on behalf of nine poultry workers from Wayne Farms’ facility in Jack, Alabama. The complaint alleges the firm violated a slew of OSHA standards---from…
cmonforton | April 24, 2014Labor Secretary Tom Perez announced yesterday a new regulation designed to reduce coal miners’ risk of developing coal mine dust lung disease (CMDLD). I’ve written about these regulations many times, on both the need for them and the snail’s pace at which the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) reviewed them. They are long overdue.
Depending on who you ask these new regulations have been in the works since 2009 (beginning of the Obama Administration), 1996 (following an advisory committee report and NIOSH recommendation) or as far back as 1991 (following a…
cmonforton | April 22, 2014[Updated: 3 hours after I posted it. See below]
Black lung----now referred to by experts as coal mine dust lung disease (CMDLD)--- was back in the news last week courtesy of the Pulitzer Prize. The Center for Public Integrity’s Chris Hamby received the prestigious recognition for his reporting on the steep hurdles faced by coal miners who seek black lung disability compensation. Hamby's piece focused on the back end of the problem. On the front end is preventing CMDLD in the first place. Coal miners wouldn’t have to maneuver the legal obstacle course for disability benefits if CMDLD became a…
cmonforton | April 17, 2014Going to a job and getting paid appropriately for your time is how it is supposed to work. Doing your job and getting ripped off by not getting paid is wrong and illegal. The economic consequences of wage theft for the victims and their families are profound: the threat and reality of losing utilities, food and housing. One of the single biggest risk factors for ill health is poverty. That makes wage theft a public health problem.
But catching and punishing employer-thieves is difficult. The federal and state enforcement agencies are under resourced and the laws weak. It’s also one thing to…
cmonforton | April 15, 2014I often find myself trying to reconcile a company’s description of its safety program with what I hear from workers. One worker I met summed it up this way:
“Yeah, we have safety talks, but a talk is where it ends. It’s all talk, not real action on safety problems.”
Two recent incidents brought his remark back to life for me. It started with a recent news release from OSHA. The agency announced a proposed penalty of $50,600 to Grede Wisconsin Subsidiaries LLC at the firm’s Browntown, Wisconsin iron foundry. Funny thing is, the firm was touting its safety record last month at OSHA’s public…
kkrisberg | April 11, 2014Unfortunately, it’s not too terribly surprising that diseases of the developing world don’t attract as much research attention as diseases common in wealthier countries. However, a new study not only underscores that trend, it actually found zero relationship between global disease burden and health research.
Designed to identify the reasons behind global health research disparities, the study compared the global disease burden (defined as healthy life years lost to disease or disability) of 111 diseases against relevant research articles using data from the World Health Organization and the…
cmonforton | April 10, 2014The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is one of those federal agencies that lies quietly in the background. It’s not one for making waves. It's more like bench scientist who minds her own business in the laboratory. But this week, NIOSH blew its top and created some waves.
In a pointed letter to the head of the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), NIOSH director John Howard, MD, said that FSIS was misinterpreting a NIOSH report released last month. The report presents the findings of a NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluation (HHE) performed at a Pilgrim’s Pride…
cmonforton | April 8, 2014The photos rolled across the screen. Photos of construction workers tuck-pointing the cement grout on a building, sawing brick, jack hammering a sidewalk, sanding drywall. Each photo, showing workers in clouds of dust, illustrated the multitude of ways they are exposed, and why they are at risk of silica-related diseases.
The scrolling photo exhibit was the backdrop for testimony provided by representatives of the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA) on the final day of OSHA’s public hearing on its proposed silica regulation. The LHSFNA is a joint labor-management…
cmonforton | April 2, 2014That simple phrase “No dust, no silica,” was the way that Donald Hulk characterized his firm’s attitude about controlling respirable crystalline silica.
Hulk is the corporate safety director for Manafort Brothers based in Plainville, CT. His presentation was one of the highlights during last week’s nearly 40 hours of testimony. The other memorable moment came from six workers who traveled from Houston, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia to speak personally about working in silica dust. Their participation interjected a dose of reality. More below about their testimony.
Manafort’s Don Hulk…
cmonforton | March 26, 2014Yep. “We’re not stupid” was just one of the many memorable moments at last week’s public hearing on OSHA’s proposed rule on respirable crystalline silica. The remark came from epidemiologist Robert Park of CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). He was compelled to respond to a comment made by Tony Cox, a consultant retained by the American Chemistry Council.
Cox, who was expounding on the OSHA’s peer-reviewed risk assessment, asserted that the agency has not demonstrated a causal link between silica and lung disease at OSHA’s proposed permissible exposure limit…
kkrisberg | March 24, 2014Thanks to a unanimous vote of California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board last Thursday, workers get to hold on to a robust chemical right-to-know rule that puts their health and safety first. The vote also means that California workers will reap the benefits of more meaningful right-to-know rules than those at the federal level.
“It’s a human right to know about the hazards of the work you’re doing,” said Dorothy Wigmore, occupational health specialist at Worksafe, a state-based organization dedicated to eliminating workplace hazards. “If employers don’t know about the…
cmonforton | March 19, 2014[Update below]
What would it take to get police departments to refrain from calling work-related fatalities “just an accident”? I read it all the time. A 60 year-old mechanic falls 50 feet through an unguarded floor opening, and it’s an “accidental death.” Or a 30 year-old production clerk gets pulled into a machine, and it’s a “tragic accident.”
The latest example I read involved a 23 year-old man, Erik Deighton, who was crushed a few weeks ago at Colonial Plastics. The small suburban Detroit manufacturing plant fabricates specialty parts for automakers. Shelby Township Police Captain…
cmonforton | March 17, 2014This week will mark the next big step in efforts to institute a federal regulation to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. Tuesday, March 18 will be the first of 14 days of testimony and debate about a proposed silica rule which was released in September 2013 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA). The “deadly dust” is associated with malignant and non-malignant respiratory diseases and other adverse health conditions. The hazard has been recognized for centuries, but the U.S. does not have a comprehensive rule on the books to protect the…
kkrisberg | March 12, 2014When President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law in 2011, it was described as the most sweeping reform of the nation’s food safety laws in nearly a century. Public health advocates hailed the law for shifting regulatory authority from reaction to prevention. What received less attention was a first-of-its-kind provision that protects workers who expose food safety lawbreakers.
The law’s whistleblower provision, also known as Section 402, amends the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to provide “protection to employees against retaliation by an entity engaged in…
egrossman | March 11, 2014“The United States is facing an industrial chemical safety crisis,” Chemical Safety Board Chairperson Rafael Moure-Eraso told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on March 6th. He spoke at hearing held to discuss President Obama’s August 2013 Executive Order on chemical facility safety, which Obama issued following the catastrophic incidents at the West, Texas fertilizer plant and Louisiana petrochemical facilities. In the wake of the Freedom Industries chemical release in West Virginia, improving the nation’s chemical safety has taken on a new urgency. Yet while the Senate…
egrossman | March 3, 2014“For us it’s personal,” said Jeannie Economos, Farmworker Association of Florida Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator. “It’s a daily issue for us. Every day with a weaker protection standard is another day a worker is exposed to pesticides,” she said.
On February 20th , the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced proposed revisions to its Worker Protection Standard for agricultural pesticides, the first since the existing standard was established in 1992 – and the second proposed update to the standard since its introduction in 1974. EPA has called the…
kkrisberg | February 28, 2014It’s probably no surprise that people who experienced foreclosures during the Great Recession may have also experienced symptoms of depression. However, researchers have found that the mental health effects of foreclosure go beyond the individual to the community at-large.
“For the most part, discussion of foreclosure has focused on the individual experience, the people who are in this circumstance, who are at risk of losing their homes, of losing that nest egg,” said Kathleen Cagney, a professor within the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. “But we wanted to think about…
cmonforton | February 27, 2014The billion-dollar poultry industry chews up its workers and spits them out like a chaw of tobacco. One of those workers is in Washington, DC this week to make a plea to the Obama Administration. For 17 years, Salvadora Roman, 59 worked on the de-boning line at a Wayne Farms poultry processing plant in Alabama. The production line ran at an incessant pace that forced her (and her co-workers) to make tens of thousands of repetitive motions on each and every work shift. Her hands and wrists eventually became so swollen and painful that she requested to be moved to a less hand-intensive task.…