Occupational Health & Safety
kkrisberg | October 9, 2015Earlier this week, the White House hosted a Summit on Worker Voice, welcoming organizers from more traditional labor groups, such as unions, as well as voices from new worker movements, such as Fight for $15. At the summit, President Obama spoke about wages, the power of collective action and the growing “gig” economy.
Many of the summit remarks weren’t necessarily groundbreaking or even entirely surprising. But as the right to organize is increasingly under fire in Congress and in state legislatures — while at the same time, low-wage workers are finding new ways to band together and demand…
kkrisberg | October 6, 2015Americans with lower incomes and educational attainment often live shorter, sicker lives than their wealthier, more educated counterparts. Contributors to these disparities can include access to care, hazardous living conditions, nutrition in early childhood, and personal behaviors. But what about workplace conditions? Do certain groups of people get sorted into jobs that exacerbate inequalities in life expectancy?
That’s the question a study published in this month’s issue of Health Affairs confronted. The researchers noted that while previous research shows that a “variety of working…
kkrisberg | October 5, 2015Anyone who’s lived in a big, dense city is familiar with the sight of bicycle messengers weaving their way in between metro buses and taxi cabs, down side streets and around packed crosswalks, pedaling at impressive speeds and often with remarkable agility. Surprisingly, however, there’s little data on these workers, even though it seems they’d be particularly susceptible to injuries on the job.
To fill in that knowledge gap, a group of researchers from New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center decided to take a deeper look. Hypothesizing that those commercial…
cmonforton | October 2, 2015More than 1.5 million US farmworkers will be better protected in the years ahead because of a new regulations issued this week by the EPA. The agency’s Worker Protection Standard (WPS) addresses the hazards related to pesticide exposure for farmworkers. The WPS was initially adopted by EPA in 1992, but considered inadequate by many affected workers and public health experts.
“In my experience as a farmworker, I have seen many people affected by exposure to chemicals,”
explained Miguel, who provided comments to EPA during the agency’s rulemaking process.
“I have heard of [people needing] liver…
kkrisberg | September 29, 2015Collective bargaining and the fair-share fees that enable unions to negotiate for better working conditions that ultimately benefit all workers in a particular sector or workplace may truly be in peril, writes Lily Eskelsen García in The Nation.
In “Unions in Jeopardy,” García writes about the legal precedent upholding fair-share agreements and recent legal threats threatening to dismantle a core tenet of labor relations. She begins the article with the 2012 case Knox v. SEIU, in which she said the Supreme Court “went out of its way to cast doubt” on fair share representation fees. In…
cmonforton | September 23, 2015Alejandro Anguiana’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Indiana OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Markman Peat.
The 41 year-old was working in March 2015 at the company’s operation in Kingsbury, IN. The initial press reports indicated that Anguiana was pulled into a piece of machinery when his sweatshirt got wrapped around the power takeoff shaft. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with Indiana OSHA conducted an inspection at the workplace following the fatal incident. The agency…
cmonforton | September 18, 2015It puts a smile on my face when I come across a worker who uses ingenuity to address a safety hazard.
I had a big grin yesterday as I was leaving a restaurant in Austin, TX. I was walking around the outside of the building toward the area where I’d parked my car. I saw one of the restaurant’s employees dragging a garbage can toward a dumpster. I looked away for just a minute and in that brief moment, he'd propped open the dumpster lid, like so:
Restaurant worker with gadget to keep dumpster lid open, Austin, TX (September 17, 2015)
It’s been quite a few years since I worked in a…
cmonforton | September 17, 2015Terry Leon Lakey, 51, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Wednesday, September 16, 2015 while working at Terex Services in Waco, TX. KCEN reports:
*The incident occurred at 5:40 am when “the victim was crushed by a piece of hydraulic equipment.”
The CSB affiliate in Waco was more specific, reporting:
*Mr. Lakey “was crushed by the hydraulic aerial lift that he was servicing.”
The Waco Tribune indicates:
*"Terex officials did not answer the phone Wednesday and did not return phone messages."
Terex is multinational firm that manufacturers and services industrial machinery and equipment. Its…
kkrisberg | September 16, 2015Investigative reporter Mark Collette at the Houston Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen former employees with a combined 213 years of experience on the production lines of Blue Bell’s flagship ice cream plant in Brenham, Texas, finding stories of routine food safety lapses and failures to protect worker safety. The company made headlines over the summer after a national listeria outbreak was traced back to the well-known ice cream manufacturer.
Among the former workers interviewed was Sabien Colvin, who lost parts of three of his fingers after a machine he was cleaning unexpectedly turned…
cmonforton | September 15, 2015For the second time this year, OSHA has put a poultry company on notice for inappropriate medical treatment of injured workers. The agency sent a letter last month to Delaware-based Allen Harim Foods raising concerns about the company's use of emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to treat chronic injuries and practices that contradict the firm's written protocols for treating injured workers.
The agency’s letter is a follow-up to citations issued in June to Allen Harim Foods, a topic I wrote about in “Crippled hands, strained bladders.” OSHA's letter, dated August 7, 2015, contains themes…
kkrisberg | September 10, 2015When it comes to protecting workers, advocates often turn to science. Whether it’s research on the effectiveness of an intervention, new injury surveillance data or novel methods for pinpointing particularly vulnerable workers, science is key to advancing workplace safety. In our fourth edition of “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” we highlight some of the most interesting and noteworthy research of the past year.
On the topic of occupational asthma, researchers examined state-based trends and if patients talk with their doctors about whether their asthma is related to work…
kkrisberg | September 9, 2015Paid sick leave, new rights for temp workers, and extending OSHA protections to public sector employees were among the many victories that unfolded at the state and local levels in the last 12 months and that we highlight in this year’s edition of “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety.”
In California, a number of new worker safety laws went into effect. Among them, a new law that holds companies responsible if they contract with staffing agencies that engage in wage theft and fail to maintain workers’ compensation insurance. California health care workers gained new protections…
cmonforton | September 8, 2015In the fourth edition of “The Year in US Occupational Health & Safety,” which we released on Labor Day, we recap some of the key activities that occurred at the federal level in the previous 12 months. One of the most noteworthy events was the Ebola virus epidemic, which brought worldwide attention to the need for appropriate equipment and training for health care workers. We devote a section of the report to recapping the government’s response following transmission of the virus to nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson. We describe some of the efforts by National Nurses United, the…
kkrisberg | September 4, 2015The ride-hailing mobile app Uber is desperate to prove it’s nothing more than a technology platform that connects drivers and passengers. As long as it can classify its workers as independent contractors, it can sidestep a whole host of labor and wage laws. But a court ruling issued earlier this week could open the door to change all that.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in San Francisco granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Uber’s classification of workers as independent contractors. The decision doesn’t rule on the question of whether Uber drivers should be classified as…
cmonforton | September 1, 2015Norberto Galicia Romero’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Thomas Concrete.
The 49-year-old was working in February 2015 at the company’s plant in Marietta, GA. The initial press reports indicated that “someone was trapped inside a concrete silo.” I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with federal OSHA conducted an inspection at the workplace following the fatal incident. The agency recently issued citations to the firm for two serious…
cmonforton | August 26, 2015It was paltry. It was a pittance. It was pathetic. That’s what I thought of OSHA’s proposed $99,000 penalty to DuPont for safety violations related to the November 2014 death of four of its employees. OSHA dinged the company for one repeat and nine serious violations. Wade Baker, 60, Gibby Tisnado, 48, Robert Tisnado, 39, and Crystal Wise, 53 were asphyxiated by methyl mercaptan because of gross failures in DuPont’s systems to manage highly hazardous chemicals.
The penalty amount is so insignificant it wouldn’t even appear on a DuPont financial statement. $99,000 is less than 0.0003% of…
kkrisberg | August 25, 2015Reporter Anna Merlan at Jezebel chronicles the stories of women truck drivers who experienced severe sexual harassment and rape after enrolling in a training program. Her story begins with Tracy (who asked Merlan not to use her last name), who attended a driving school that contracts with Cedar Rapids Steel Transport Van Expedited (CRST), which is among the largest trucking companies in the country. During her training, Tracy was matched with a seasoned trucker who was supposed to help her safely accrue the training hours she needed before she could drive a truck on her own. Merlan reports:…
kkrisberg | August 20, 2015More than 1,000 U.S. workers have died due to job-related events in the first seven months of 2015, according to new data from the U.S. Worker Fatality Database. Researchers estimate that total fatalities will likely reach 4,500 by the end of the year, which would mean that the nation’s occupational death rate experienced little, if no, improvement over previous years.
The database, which launched last year and represents the largest open-access data set of individual workplace fatalities ever collected in the U.S., also breaks down 2015 data by state. So far, Texas leads the pack, followed…
cmonforton | August 19, 2015Davide Nascimento, 28, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Friday, July 31, 2015 while working at a construction site in Longmeadow, MA. WFSB.com reports:
The incident happened at a sewer project on Hazardville Road around 7:45 a.m.
Nascimento “…was trapped inside a trench that began rapidly filling with water.”
“The man was employed by Ludlow-based construction company A. Martins and Sons. They were contracted by the town for the project. “
Masslive.com notes:
The trench was part of an ongoing sewer-line replacement project in Longmeadow.
The incident occurred at the corner of Tedford…
kkrisberg | August 18, 2015The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is no stranger to budget cuts — the agency is already so underfunded that it would take its inspectors nearly a century, on average, to visit every U.S. workplace at least once. In some states, it would take two centuries. Unfortunately, appropriations bills now making their way through Congress don’t bode much better for OSHA.
Earlier this month, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) and Public Citizen, along with 74 fellow organizations that care about worker health and safety, sent a letter to…