Occupational Health & Safety
lborkowski | February 5, 2013Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which many workers still rely on to assure that they can return to their jobs after taking unpaid time off for a new baby or to deal with a serious illness - their own or a family member's. But, NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports, 40% of the workforce is ineligible for the leave, including those working fewer than 25 hours per week with an employer (even if they have multiple part-time jobs), workers at businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and those who want to care for a family member who doesn't meet the official "…
lborkowski | February 1, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Texas may boast a booming construction sector, but a deeper look reveals an industry fraught with wage theft, payroll fraud, frighteningly lax safety standards, and preventable injury and death. In reality, worker advocates say such conditions are far from the exception — instead, they've become the norm.
Such conditions were chronicled in a new in-depth report released earlier this week. Researchers, who surveyed nearly 1,200 construction workers in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and El Paso, found that one in five construction workers experienced a workplace injury…
lborkowski | January 31, 2013In a New York Times Opinionator column, SUNY Buffalo sociology professor Erin Hatton traces the development of the US temporary-worker industry, which added more jobs than any other over the past three years. Temporary workers generally earn low wages and face job insecurity, and often lack benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance and paid sick leave. Hatton explains that temp agencies offering such disappointing wage and benefits packages emerged in the years following World War II -- and did so despite the growing union power that characterized that era. They managed it, Hatton…
cmonforton | January 29, 2013[Updated below (6/24/2013)]
The Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson has a story today from the Kentucky coal fields that has my head shaking in disbelief. Reuben Shemwell, 32, says he was fired by Armstrong Coal after complaining about safety problems, including asphyxiation hazards and inappropriate respirators. As provided by the federal Mine Act (Section 105(c)), Shemwell filed a complaint with the U.S. Labor Department's MSHA for wrongful discharge. Now he finds himself being sued by his former employer in Kentucky state court. Armstrong Coal claims that Shemwell filed a "false…
cmonforton | January 28, 2013Could we have taken action earlier to prevent harm from tobacco, asbestos, and lead? That's the question at the core of the European Environment Agency's (EEA) collection of case studies, which was released this month as Volume 2 "Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation."
The publication features articles on those nefarious health hazards, as well as ones about beryllium, Bisphenol A, the pesticides DBCP and DDT, mercury, perchlorethylene, and vinyl chloride. Protecting ecosystem, including aquatic environments exposed to ethinyl oestradiol (synthetic estrogen used…
cmonforton | January 21, 2013We commemorate today the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the inspirational civil rights leader who was assassinated at age 39 in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Rev. King was visiting Memphis to support hundreds of city sanitation workers in their demands for safer working conditions and dignity on the job.
Martin Luther King Jr.
In an interview taped for the StoryCorps project, Mr. Elmore Nickelberry and Mr. Taylor Rogers describe their experience as Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.
Taylor Rogers: "Our day was awful. Everyday. We had these tubs that we had to put the…
lborkowski | January 18, 2013by Kim Krisberg
"To know you participated in building something in your city — it's just an experience, you know?"
Those are words from Austin, Texas, native Christopher McDavid, 22, a graduate of the city's newly established Construction Career Center. During his time at the center, McDavid got certified in flagger safety (flaggers direct the safe passage of traffic through construction areas), first aid and CPR, and basic concrete work and received his OSHA 10 certification, which he said "has opened my eyes to actually see the things that can be harmful to me."
Now, McDavid is looking for…
cmonforton | January 15, 2013In the weeks ahead, President Obama will announce his pick to replace Hilda Solis as the 26th Secretary of Labor. It's the Cabinet-level position with the resources and best platform to promote strong policies for the benefit of U.S. workers----from fair, living wages and safe working conditions, to job training and family leave benefits. I hope the President's nominee takes the time to read "At the company's mercy: Protecting contingent workers from unsafe working conditions," a new report by the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR). It describes how work arrangements that don't fit the…
lborkowski | January 14, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past.
"A lot of people are still developing cancer and dying from cancer due to workplace exposures, but only a small fraction of those are compensated, so people may think the magnitude of this problem is small," said Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Ontario, Canada. "I wanted to have better data."
And in just a few years, he will…
cmonforton | January 8, 2013With five days left in calendar year 2012, the Obama Administration released to the public its current plan for regulatory and deregulatory activities, including those affecting individuals exposed to hazards in their work environment. Executive Order 12866 (adopted in 1993) says the annual regulatory plan “shall be” published in October, and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (5 USC 602) says the semi-annual regulatory agendas “shall” be published in April (Spring) and October (Fall). The Obama Administration failed to meet either of these deadlines, and simply issued for 2012 one regulatory…
lborkowski | January 2, 2013While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier last year. This post was originally published on March 6, 2012. The final rule on home health workers has not yet been published.
By Liz Borkowski
Back in December, the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division published a proposed rulethat would extend minimum-wage and overtime pay protections to the home care workers who assist elderly and disabled patients with their daily needs. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that nonexempt workers be paid minimum wage (currently $7.25 per hour) and 1.5 times their pay for hours…
lborkowski | December 31, 2012While we're on vacation, we're re-posting some of our past content. Kim Krisberg's series of posts on worker centers in Texas is well worth a second read (or a first read, or a third read ...):
Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren’t members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state…
lborkowski | December 27, 2012While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on May 31, 2012.
By Celeste Monforton
The Obama Administration’s quest to appease business interests’ claims about burdensome and outdated regulations awoke a giant in the form of the civil rights, public health and workers’ safety communities. From the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Council of LaRaza, to the American Public Health Association and Nebraska Appleseed, the feedback is loud and clear: USDA should withdraw the regulatory changes it proposed in January (77 …
lborkowski | December 24, 2012While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on April 12, 2012. The silica rule still has not come out.
By Celeste Monforton
More than 425 days—-that’s 14 months—-have passed since the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a draft proposed regulation designed to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. The hazard is one of the oldest known causes of work-related lung disease, yet OSHA does not…
lborkowski | December 21, 2012The Center for Public Integrity's excellent Hard Labor series continues with two more stories about workers killed on the job. In "'They were not thinking of him as a human being,'" Jim Morris writes about Carlos Centeno, who died after suffering from burns to 80% of his body. Centeno had been assigned by a temporary staffing agency to the Raani Corp. plant in Bedford Park, Illinois, and he was scalded by an eruption of of a citric acid solution. According to federal investigators, factory bosses refused to call an ambulance, even as Centeno screamed in pain. More than 90 minutes after being…
cmonforton | December 20, 2012Last week, my home State of Michigan became the 24th one to enact "right-to-work" legislation. I'm sure the great labor leader Walter Reuther (1907-1970) rolled over in his grave when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed the anti-union bill into law.
Workers coming together to negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions created the middle class in America. Belonging to a union means workers can be more secure that they won't be fired arbitrarily, and have more power to receive skills training and guard against unsafe working conditions. This latter point is an underlying…
cmonforton | December 18, 2012McClatchy Newspapers' Lindsay Wise reports in two stories today (here and here) on the USDA's proposal to "modernize" the poultry inspection process. The proposal, part of the Obama Administration's offerings in the name of eliminating burdensome regulations, will eliminate hundreds of Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors, allow line speeds to increase to 175 birds per minute, and cede to the poultry companies the task of spotting diseased and defective birds. USDA estimates the financial benefits to the poultry industry will exceed $250 million annually. Without those pesky…
lborkowski | December 14, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Workers in Travis County, Texas, are celebrating what advocates are calling a landmark victory, after local leaders voted to ensure that economic incentive deals benefit both big business and workers.
In late November, Travis County commissioners approved a new living wage requirement for companies wanting to move into the county and take advantage of the generous tax breaks the region offers to lure new business. The requirement creates a new wage floor of $11 an hour for all employees, including construction workers. On the same day as the county vote, a committee of the…
lborkowski | December 13, 2012Celeste wrote earlier this year about a study by health J. Paul Leigh of University of California Davis (published in the Milbank Quarterly) that calculated the economic of work-related injuries and illnesses in the US: $250 billion in 2007 alone. Celeste and I requested that he return to the data behind that estimate and calculate the medical and productivity costs of injuries to the low-wage US workforce. With funding from the Public Welfare Foundation, he produced the white paper Numbers and Costs of Occupational Injury and Illness in Low-Wage Occupations, estimating that injuries and…
cmonforton | December 12, 2012A recently published case-control study involving more than 2,100 women in southern Ontario, Canada reported a strong association between being employed in the automotive plastics industry and breast cancer. The researchers recruited the 'case' subjects between 2002-2008 among newly diagnosed breast cancer patients and the randomly-selected controls from the same geographic area. The researchers examined a variety of risk factors for breast cancer (e.g., reproductive history, age) and collected data on the women's employment history. Elevated odds of breast cancer were found among women…