Occupational Health & Safety
cmonforton | December 10, 2012[Updated 1/5/2013]
[Updated 8/25/2013]
The world's largest labor organization for airline flight attendants--- the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) ---says it took four decades of work, but now its members working in airplane cabins will finally have rights and protections provided by federal OSHA. In an on-line letter to members, the AFA-CWA calls the victory: "OSHA extended to our cabins."
For decades AFA has pursued legal and regulatory solutions to extend OSHA safety and health protections to workers in the airline industry. The roadblocks have been enormous, but our union…
lborkowski | December 7, 2012by Kim Krisberg
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. For all practical purposes, they work in regulation-free environments without the benefits of labor, wage and health protections or oversight. There are no HR departments in people's homes.
But a new survey released in November has pulled back the curtain on the conditions and experiences domestic workers face, documenting issues such as wage exploitation, preventable on-the-job injuries and the little — if any — power domestic workers have in improving…
lborkowski | December 7, 2012A fire last month at the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh killed 112 workers and injured many more. Now it's being reported that the fire department had refused to renew the factory's certification, and that only five of factory's eight floors were built illegally. The New York Times reports:
The Capital Development Authority could have fined Tazreen Fashions Ltd. or even pushed for the demolition of illegally built portions of the building, an agency official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. But it chose to do…
cmonforton | December 4, 2012[Updated 12/19/2012 below]
The Charleston (WV) Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. continues to provide updates (here, here, and aerial photos) on efforts to locate a worker caught on Friday, Nov 30 in the collapse of a massive coal slurry embankment failure in Harrison County, WV. The worker was operating a bulldozer when part of the embankment failed; he and the vehicle submerged into the pond of coal fines and chemical-laden waste water. Two workers in pick-up trucks were also caught in the collapse, but they survived and are being treated for their injuries.
The coal slurry impoundment is owned by…
cmonforton | November 28, 2012It's no secret that the U.S. has a weight problem. Nearly 36% of U.S. adults are obese and another 33% are overweight, with respective body mass indices of 30 or higher and 25 to 29.9. Strategies to address this public health problem rely heavily on individuals' changing their behavior, such as increasing physical activity and reducing calorie intake. These interventions are easier said than done, and may not be making a dent in the U.S. obesity epidemic. A result analysis suggests that by 2030, 51% of the U.S. population will be obese.
A new report explores the potential links between…
lborkowski | November 27, 2012By David Ozonoff
Annual Reports from governmental bodies aren’t often significant, much less classic, public health documents. By design they are confined to summaries of an agency’s work over a year’s time and they often don’t even appear until two or more years later. Such was the case for the Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories in Great Britain for the year 1947, which didn’t appear until 1949. Its author was the Chief Inspector himself, a pioneer in occupational health by the name of E. R. A. Merewether.
Originally a general practitioner, Merewether found his way into public…
lborkowski | November 26, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It's often said that hard work never hurt anybody. It's a cliché with which occupational health folks and thousands of injured workers would undoubtedly disagree. And while tragic and often preventable physical injuries may be the easiest to see and document, other work-related health risks are much harder to pick up on. One such risk is depression.
Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky, as such research is often based on self-reporting methods that can leave…
cmonforton | November 20, 2012
Shortly after taking office, the head of the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledged the troubling slow pace at which new worker safety regulations are put in place. In a February 2010 speech, David Michaels, PhD, MPH said:
"Some standards have taken more than a decade to establish, and that's not an acceptable response when workers are in danger."
In a March 2010 speech the OSHA chief added:
"Clearly the current system for issuing standards doesn't work well for those it's supposed to benefit - workers. When rulemaking takes years and even…
lborkowski | November 19, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle's Public Health Classics series.
By Sara Gorman
Does cigarette smoking cause cancer? Does eating specific foods or working in certain locations cause diseases? Although we have determined beyond doubt that cigarette smoking causes cancer, questions of disease causality still challenge us because it is never a simple matter to distinguish mere association between two factors from an actual causal relationship between them. In an address to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill attempted to codify the criteria for determining…
lborkowski | November 15, 2012My fellow blogger Celeste Monforton has been working for the past several months with the Houston worker center Fe y Justicia to respond to outrageous employer behavior that exposed construction workers to asbestos and raised questions about how the city selects contractors. Earlier this week, Jeremy Rogalski and his investigative team colleagues at KHOU 11 News released a news story documenting what occurred.
Last summer, a heat wave and drought in Texas dried out the soil so much that underground voids put pressure on Houston's aging water pipes. Six hundred water mains broke, creating an…
Worker loses scalp in unguarded machine, her first week on-the-job, employer contests OSHA violation
cmonforton | November 13, 2012In late July, David Moye of the Huffington Post reported on a horrific incident at JR Engineering of Barberton, Ohio in which Monica Thayer, 25, was pulled by the hair into a piece of machinery.
"She was in the Barberton factory cleaning a machine that cuts steel tubing when her long brown hair, which was pulled back, got caught and yanked her face first into the device. 'My biggest fear was that I would be moments away from getting rescued, and then it would start-up and kill me,' she said in a report that aired on Fox affiliate WDAF-TV. 'The next thing I realized, it had sucked me up and…
lborkowski | November 12, 2012It's fitting that the US dedicates a day each year to honoring veterans, but ensuring that veterans get the care and services they merit is year-round work. In recent years, we've seen the federal government increase recognition of, and resources for, the mental health conditions that many veterans suffer from. Yet, as US Representative and combat veteran Charlie Rangel points out in a USA Today column, we haven't done enough:
In the United States, suicide has become the seventh leading cause of death for men and the fifteenth for women. Every year, there are nearly a million suicide attempts…
cmonforton | November 7, 2012Hurray! The Presidential election is over. Let's hope this means that Obama Administration officials will come out from under their beds and embrace their regulatory authority to issue some strong public health and environmental regulations. At the Labor Department (DOL) there's much work to do to expand workers' rights, ensure workers' lives and health are protected, and improve the information provided by its agencies. Leave a comment with your ideas for immediate action by the Labor Department.
Here's my short version of my wish list for major DOL activities for the next 6 months:
MSHA…
egrossman | November 6, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
A new study has been added to the growing body of literature reporting on the potential health effects of low-level exposure to widely used pesticides. In this study, a pesticide (triflumizole, or TFZ) used on leafy greens, apples, cherries, strawberries, cucumbers, grapes, watermelons, and other food crops has been identified as an obesogen in mice. An obesogen is a chemical that promotes obesity by prompting the growth of more and larger fat cells, often doing so through prenatal exposure and setting the stage for metabolic disease later in life.
Since the…
cmonforton | November 5, 2012At last week's American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting its Governing Council adopted about a dozen new policies to guide the Association's advocacy activities. Over APHA's 140 year history, these resolutions have covered a variety of public health topics, from the 1950 policy supporting fluoridation of public water supplies, the 1960 policy supporting compulsory pasteurization of milk, the 1969 policy calling for American forces to be withdrawn from Vietnam, to the 1982 policy condemning the apartheid policy of the Government of the Republic of South Africa, and the 2009…
lborkowski | November 1, 2012It was easy to miss with all of the Sandy coverage, but an article by John M. Broder in Sunday's New York Times gives some of the wrenching details about teenage boys dying in grain bins. Broder begins with the story of Tommy Osier:
STERLING, Mich. — Tommy Osier, 18, a popular but indifferent student, was still a year from graduating from high school, and that was no sure thing. Farm work paid him $7.40 an hour, taught him discipline and gave him new skills. He had begun talking about making a life in farming.
But he hated the chore he drew on Memorial Day of last year, working inside the…
lborkowski | October 30, 2012As Sandy's high winds and water subside, many of us are feeling profoundly grateful to the emergency responders who've been putting themselves in harm's way to keep the rest of us safe. Although their jobs by definition involve working in hazardous situations, there's a lot their agencies and incident commanders can do to protect response workers. Earlier this year, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health released the Emergency Responder Health Monitoring and Surveillance (ERHMS) system, which provides guidelines for protecting emergency responders in a wide variety of…
cmonforton | October 29, 2012"Never say where you're calling from" is one lesson learned by journalist Andrew Marantz during his summer working at a Delhi, India call center. Before getting the job, Marantz and the estimated million job seekers in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry complete weeks of training. The classroom sessions include pronunciation drills to shed their "mother tongue influence" and culture training.
Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be…
lborkowski | October 18, 2012The US workers' compensation system isn't so much a system as it is a collection of state programs with varying rules and requirements. The basic idea is that employers purchase workers-compensation insurance, and when a worker is injured or made ill on the job, the insurer will cover medical costs and, if the worker misses more than a few days on the job, pay wage-replacement benefits. It's intended to avoid high-stakes litigation in which employers and workers fight over who's at fault; instead, it's supposed to compensate anyone with a work-related illness or injury.
In practice, many…
cmonforton | October 16, 2012For some reason the news story stuck in my memory. The headline read:
"Oil rig explosion near Marshall in north central Oklahoma was caused by blowout, company attorney said."
Maybe it was because I'd been reading so many stories about the natural gas boom, that a news story about an oil rig caught my attention. It happened January 20, 2012 at the Logan Rig #7, operated by El Dorado Drilling, an affiliate of Kirkpatrick Oil. Maybe it was the news headline's word "blowout" which stirred memories of the Deepwater Horizon Maconda rig's infamous "blowout preventers." Maybe it was the lead…