Legal
kkrisberg | September 27, 2016In “The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry,” NJ Advance Media reporter Kelly Heyboer investigated conditions facing temp workers in New Jersey, which now has one of the largest concentrations of temp workers in the nation. She reports that growing demand for temp workers has led to the proliferation of “temp towns” — places with dozens of temp agencies and neighborhoods full of temp workers, many of whom report low pay, wage theft, racial and sexual discrimination, and unsafe workplaces.
Heyboer writes:
The temp agencies in New Brunswick are easy to…
kkrisberg | September 23, 2016Despite all the concern about shuttered businesses, fired employees and lost profits, a new report has found that New York City’s paid sick leave law was pretty much a “non-event” for most employers.
Released this month, “No Big Deal: The Impact of New York City’s Paid Sick Law on Employers” reported that in the years following the 2014 implementation of the paid sick leave law, the great majority of businesses surveyed said the law had no effect on overall costs. The report, authored by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Murphy Institute at the City University…
kkrisberg | September 14, 2016In a big win for workers, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court has ruled that state law allowing businesses to opt out of traditional workers’ compensation is unconstitutional.
At ProPublica, Michael Grabell writes that the ruling now leaves Texas as the only state that lets employers pull out of workers’ comp in favor of creating their own alternative plans. Last year, Grabell, along with Howard Berkes at NPR, investigated the new opt-out trend, finding that such workers’ comp alternatives typically come with fewer employee benefits, more restrictions and no independent oversight.
In reporting on the…
kkrisberg | September 9, 2016Earlier this week, we published our annual report, “The Year In U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2015 – Summer 2016,” chronicling the victories, setbacks and struggles taking place in the American workplace. But it was just about impossible to piece together a report like this without thinking about the strange — and often scary — election before us and its implications for workers.
So, when we were crafting the report’s concluding thoughts — a section we call “The Year Ahead” — it seemed almost logical to go down that “scary” road, to talk about the presidential election as if…
kkrisberg | September 6, 2016From the weakening of workers’ compensation to the lives of America’s nuclear plant workers, it was another year of stellar news reporting on worker health and safety.
Myself, along with Celeste Monforton and Roger Kerson, did our best to highlight such reporting, as well as new worker health research, in “The Year In U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2015 – Summer 2016,” which we released, appropriately, on Labor Day. Among the journalistic highlights, reporters at the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica and NPR continued investigative efforts into the dismantling of…
kkrisberg | August 30, 2016At KCRW (an NPR member station), Karen Foshay reports on occupational injuries among low-wage restaurant workers in California and the retaliatory barriers that often keep them from speaking up. She cited a 2011 Restaurant Opportunities Center survey of Los Angeles restaurant workers that found 42 percent experienced cuts, 43 percent experienced burns and more than half reported working while sick. Foshay writes:
At a recent meeting in Azusa (in eastern Los Angeles County), several workers showed off their appointment cards for clinics like Santa Adelina. Three men lifted their pant legs to…
kkrisberg | August 16, 2016At NPR, John Burnett reports on the conditions facing farmworkers in south Texas 50 years after a landmark strike in which farmworkers walked 400 miles to the capital city of Austin to demand fair working conditions. He writes:
A lot has changed since 1966, when watermelon workers in the South Texas borderlands walked out of the melon fields in a historic strike to protest poor wages and appalling working conditions.
They marched 400 miles to the state capital of Austin; California labor activist and union leader Cesar Chavez joined them.
The farmworkers succeeded in publicizing their cause…
kkrisberg | August 3, 2016At Slate, Gabriel Thompson writes about a little-used legal provision that could go far in helping farmworkers fight wage theft and other labor abuses. A part of the Great Depression-era Fair Labor Standards Act, the statute is known as the “hot goods provision” and it gives the U.S. Department of Labor the authority block products made in violation of labor laws from being shipped across state lines.
Thompson’s story begins with Felix Vasquez, who works in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, California, and had successfully worked with legal advocates to recover owed wages from his employer,…
kkrisberg | July 19, 2016At Mary Review, Mary Pilon writes about the experiences of women in the trucking industry, highlighting stories of sexual harassment and threats of violence that often get brushed to the wayside by industry employers and supervisors. The article notes that many women who seek out trucking jobs are in their 40s and 50s, are re-entering the workforce after a period away, and are attracted to a career that doesn’t require a higher education but can potentially yield a six-figure salary. Pilon begins the story with Cathy Sellars, who sought out a trucking job at age 55 after her divorce:
Cathy…
cmonforton | July 6, 2016The maximum civil monetary penalty for a serious violation of an OSHA regulation will increase on August 1 from $7,000 to 12,471. Congress directed this and other changes to OSHA’s penalty as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. The penalty amounts of other Labor Department agencies are also being updated. For willful and repeat violations of OSHA regulations, the minimum and maximum penalties are $8,908 and $124,709, respectively.
It’s been more than two decades since the agency’s penalty maximums were adjusted for inflation. The last time was in 1990 pursuant to the Omnibus Budget…
kkrisberg | July 5, 2016At the Detroit Free Press, Jennifer Dixon and Kristi Tanner investigate Michigan’s workplace safety and oversight system and talk to the families of victims who say there’s no justice for workers who’ve been injured or killed on the job. During the year-long investigation, the reporters looked into more than 400 workplace deaths across the state, finding “a flawed system of oversight with penalties against employers so low they're not a deterrent.”
The article began with the story of Mary Potter, who worked at a group home for people with developmental disabilities. Dixon and Tanner write:…
kkrisberg | June 21, 2016At Reveal, Will Evans investigates how lobbyists for the temporary staffing industry squashed a legislative effort in Illinois to reform the industry’s widespread discriminatory hiring practices. Evans has previously reported on how the temp industry discriminates against workers of color, particularly black workers, using code words, symbols and gestures to illegally hire workers according to sex, race and age.
In Illinois, the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative developed legislation to confront such hiring practices. Illinois Senate Bill 47 would have required temp agencies to track the race…
kkrisberg | June 7, 2016At Reveal, Jennifer LaFleur writes about the U.S. veterans who witnessed the country’s many nuclear weapon tests, the health problems they’ve encountered in the decades since their service, and their fight for compensation. One of the “atomic veterans” LeFleur interviewed — Wayne Brooks — said: “We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us. They didn’t tell us what it was gonna do to us. They didn’t tell us that we were gonna have problems later on in life with cancers and multiple cancers.” LaFleur writes:
All of the atomic vets were sworn to secrecy. Until the secrecy was lifted decades…
kkrisberg | May 24, 2016At San Jose Mercury News, Louis Hansen reports on the “hidden” workforce of foreign workers that helped expand a Fremont plant for car manufacturer Tesla. The story begins with Gregor Lesnik, an unemployed electrician from Slovenia, who, according to his visa application, was supposed to work in South Carolina. Hansen writes:
The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job in Silicon Valley. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for one of the world’s most sophisticated companies, Tesla Motors.
Lesnik’s three-month tenure ended a year…
kkrisberg | May 23, 2016Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers.
About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a 10-minute rest break for every four hours of work. On its face, it seems like an incredibly simple and logical request, especially considering the…
kkrisberg | May 17, 2016Hardly a day goes by lately without another story on companies like Uber and their model of classifying workers as independent contractors while treating them more like traditional employees and sidestepping traditional employer responsibilities. It’s a model that has serious implications for workers’ rights and wages. However, there’s another form of employment that may be even more damaging to hard-fought labor standards: subcontracting.
In March, the University of California-Berkely Labor Center released “Race to the Bottom: How Low-Road Subcontracting Affects Working Conditions in…
kkrisberg | May 10, 2016At the Guardian, reporters Oliver Laughland and Mae Ryan report on working conditions inside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. Right away, the article notes that while the presidential candidate tours the country selling his job-creating skills, workers in his hotel say they get paid about $3 less an hour than many of Las Vegas’ unionized hotel workers, who also enjoy better health and retirement benefits. They write:
Earlier this month, following a protracted dispute with Trump and his co-owner, casino billionaire Phil Ruffin, the National Labor Relations Board officially certified a union for…
kkrisberg | April 27, 2016At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Raquel Rutledge follows up her in-depth investigation into diacetyl exposure among coffee plant workers with news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking into the hazardous exposures that some 600,000 people face as they work to roast, grind, package and serve coffee. Rutledge reports that in the wake of newspaper’s 2015 investigation, CDC is now conducting tests at facilities across the nation — in fact, the first test results from a coffee roasting facility in Wisconsin found very high levels of chemicals that have the…
kkrisberg | April 12, 2016At Reveal, Christina Jewett investigates the gaping holes in California’s workers’ compensation system that make it so vulnerable to fraud and leave workers in the dark about the bogus care being charged in their names. She begins the article comparing the workers’ comp system to Medicare:
When Medicare makes rules, it has a strong incentive to encourage doctors, pharmacists and others to follow them: money.
The purse strings are not held nearly as tightly in California’s workers’ compensation system, in which a division of power creates the first major hurdle.
Lawmakers make rules. The state…
cmonforton | April 6, 2016It’s been six years and one day since 29 men were killed by a coal-dust explosion at former Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine (UBB). Today, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger sentenced the company’s former CEO Don Blankenship for his practices that contributed to the disaster. Berger order him to serve one year in jail and pay a $250,000 penalty.
Early this morning, the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. reported
“…a crowd was already beginning to gather at the Robert C. Byrd U.S. Courthouse in Charleston. More than a dozen family members of the Upper Big Branch miners staked out seats when…