Occupational Health & Safety
egrossman | May 23, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
As it pursues its anti-regulatory agenda, the Republican-led House of Representatives appears to be setting its sights on a non-regulatory program, the National Toxicology Program’s Report on Carcinogens (RoC). The House Republicans’ scrutiny of the RoC coincides with industry objections to the Report’s listing of styrene as a possible carcinogen. It also follows a strategy common to previous debates over chemical regulation – that of sowing doubt about scientific findings in hopes of averting action on a hazardous substance.
For those not familiar with it, the RoC was…
lborkowski | May 18, 2012
Earlier this week, Ian Urbina reported in the New York Times that hundreds of oil and gas workers have been killed over the past decade in highway crashes. A CDC analysis found that one-third of the 648 oil field workers who died on the job between 2003 and 2008 were killed in these crashes. Workers falling asleep at the wheels of trucks after working long shifts are a major factor in this high rate of vehicle fatalities -- but, Urbina explains, the industry continues to enjoy exemption from federal rules designed to keep sleep-deprived truck drivers off the road:
Across all industries,…
cmonforton | May 18, 2012Members of and organizations affiliated with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) received an Action Alert today urging them to tell USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to withdraw his agency's proposed rule on poultry slaughter inspection (77 Fed Reg 4408.) As written here previously and by the Center for Progressive Reform's Rena Steinzor in "The Age of Greed," the USDA proposal was developed in response to President Obama's edict about regulations, and his call to agencies to eliminate "outmoded" and "excessively burdensome" rules. The change proposed by USDA involves shifting the responsibility…
cmonforton | May 15, 2012
After 35 years of service, Mr. Sherman Lynn Holmes, 55, retired from the Pine River School District. Before long though, he gave up the life of a retiree to work as a woodsman. It was his true calling and lifelong passion. He knew the woods and trees of northern Michigan like the back of his hand. He was well-known in the region as the go-to logger.
Mr. Holmes was working on February 1, 2011 for K & K Forest Products with two other men near Evert, Michigan. As he trimmed up a felled tree in a wooded area, his co-worker felled another large tree and it struck Mr. Holmes. He was fatally…
cmonforton | May 11, 2012[Updated 12/28/2014: see below]
Those were the first words out of the mouth of the Southwest Airlines' official when describing the incident on January 27, 2012 at Dulles International Airport that claimed the life of 25 year-old employee Jared Patrick Dodson. The five-year employee was driving a luggage cart when he was fatally struck by a three-story people mover used to transfer passengers across the airport tarmac.
Scott Halfmann vice president for safety and security said young Mr. Dodson was following all procedures correctly. He was in the proper travel lane. He stopped at all…
lborkowski | May 10, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
Norma Flores Lopez knows what it's like to be a young farmworker. She grew up in south Texas, migrating north with her family every year to places like Michigan and Iowa to pick produce. At 8 years old, she was accompanying her parents into the fields, and by age 12 she was officially on the books as a farm employee.
She knows first-hand what better safety regulations would mean for children and young people working in agriculture -- the country's most dangerous industry according to the National Safety Council. And only a few weeks ago, better working conditions did seem…
cmonforton | May 4, 2012
This time last week, many of us in the public health and workers' rights community were still in shock by the Obama Administration's decision to withdraw its proposed regulation to protect children who work on farms. Others weren't really surprised and simply chalked it up to the Administration caving into energetic attacks by the American Farm Bureau, Republicans in Congress (and some Democrats, too) and anti-regulation spinmaster radio hosts. The proposal recommended that children aged 15 years and younger---who are being paid as employees----be prohibited from doing some of the MOST…
lborkowski | May 3, 2012by Andrea Hricko, MPH
Rick Brown, PhD, a sociologist by training, was a world renowned champion of public health. Thousands of occupational health, children's health, and community health advocates who knew him are mourning his loss. Rick passed away two weeks ago of a stroke while lecturing in Kentucky.
His work on health care issues (especially the lack of health insurance for children) and his development of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) were just two of his major achievements. He was a longtime professor at UCLA School of Public Health, adviser to several U.S. Presidents,…
cmonforton | May 1, 2012Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail's pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., 24 in the 1980's and 23 in the 1990's), but during the 2000's, OSHA only issued 10 final rules. Although some of these regulations only affected a fraction of all U.S. businesses because the hazards are industry-specific (e.g., servicing of rim wheels, grain…
lborkowski | April 27, 2012By Rena Steinzor, cross-posted from CPRBlog
Yesterday evening, when press coverage had ebbed for the day, the Department of Labor issued a short, four-paragraph press release announcing it was withdrawing a rule on child labor on farms. The withdrawal came after energetic attacks by the American Farm Bureau, Republicans in Congress, Sarah Palin, and--shockingly--Al Franken (D-MN).
Last year, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: "Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America." "Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is…
cmonforton | April 26, 2012Gabriel Thompson writes today in The Nation about a summer job he had a few years back, working on the assembly line at a Pilgrim's Pride poultry plant in Alabama. The chickens flew by on hooks at 90 birds-per-minute as he sliced and cut the meat non-stop. It didn't take long for him to meet co-workers who suffered from painful and debilitating musculoskeletal disorders caused by the high-speed, repetitive work. Thompson writes:
"One was unable to hold a glass of water; another had three surgeries on her wrists; a third had discovered, after a visit to the doctor, that her thumb joint had…
lborkowski | April 23, 2012by Elizabeth Grossman
One might assume that when a government agency awards a private company a contract to do construction work - for bridge or sewer work or other public utility repairs, for example - evaluating the company's safety and health record would be a prerequisite. This is, however, not the case. As the government watchdog organization Public Citizen details in a new report, numerous government contracts have been awarded to companies with chronic poor health and safety records. In a number of cases, such contracts have gone to companies with long histories of serious workplace…
cmonforton | April 19, 2012Beau Griffing remembers how proud his mom Kristine, 52, was of the work she did at the Eaton Corporation's Kearney, Nebraska facility. He told a local reporter how she loved taking him and his siblings to the plant to show them where she worked.
"She provided so much for us," Beau Griffing said. "She wanted us to be able to be whatever we wanted to be," added his brother, Christopher Griffing, 20.
Not quite five months ago, Kristine Griffing was working on a Bliss 150 ton shear press at the Eaton Corp plant, making valves and gears for the auto companies. Neither the press itself nor the…
lborkowski | April 18, 2012April 28th is Workers Memorial Day, and groups California to Nebraska to Kentucky are planning events -- see a complete list at the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) website. Events in Washington, DC are happening in advance of Workers Memorial Day: On Thursday, April 19th at 10am, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the failures of the OSHA standard setting process. On Friday, April 20th at noon, several groups are holding a Worker Memorial Day event in front of the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters (1615 H Street NW),…
cmonforton | April 17, 2012Mr. Mitt Romney spoke this weekend at the National Rifle Association's (NRA) annual convention and kicked off his remarks applauding the gun-lovers group's defense of the 2nd amendment to the Constitution. "This fine organization is sometimes called a single-issue group," Romney said. "That's high praise when the single issue is freedom.
I love my freedom as much as the next person, but I sure don't believe that background checks on individuals purchasing guns and appropriate waiting periods are a gross assault on individual liberty. We in public health consider violence a preventable…
cmonforton | April 12, 2012More 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 have a comprehensive, protective standard on the books to address it. In the last few decades, epidemiological studies have also found a strong association between silica exposure and…
egrossman | April 11, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
While the US Supreme Court was debating the Affordable Care Act, the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee held a hearing to examine the current federal oversight of cosmetics and personal care product safety. The hearing revealed that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the more than eight billion such products now sold annually in the US, knows astonishingly little about these products' ingredients. This data gap - perhaps better described as a data chasm - is compounded by the inadequacy…
cmonforton | April 9, 2012The US Chamber of Commerce had a quaint little game on its website last month, complete with a YouTube video with fake sportscasters. The PR campaign called "Regulatory Madness" keyed off the annual NCAA's basketball tournament we know as March Madness. The cutesy idea was for business people to use the Chamber's pick of the 16 most "maddening" Obama Administration regulations, and fill in brackets to ultimately chose the most "maddening" one of all. They called it their "not-so-pretty Sweet Sixteen."
Their "top picks" included financial, health care and environmental regulations, such…
lborkowski | April 6, 2012At an American Public Health Association annual meeting session a couple of years ago, I learned from the panelists that green jobs aren't always safe jobs -- for instance, energy-efficient buildings and wind turbines can be designed without proper consideration for how workers constructing or servicing them will be protected from falls or assured adequate ventilation in confined spaces. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's Prevention Through Design program is addressing these issues and others related to green jobs, but there's still a lot of progress to be made.…
cmonforton | April 5, 2012"When the world came to an end" is how Joshua Williams described being inside the Upper Big Branch coal mine at 3:02 pm on April 5, 2010. He knew several crews of coal miners were much deeper inside the dark tunnels than he. An ominous feeling. Coal dust explosions are powerful and deadly. Eight days later, after all the worker-victims were removed from the mine, the death toll was 29.
What's happened in the two years since the disaster? Here's a brief recap:
Eighty-four mine workers at other U.S. mining operations have been killed on-the-job since the April 2010 Upper Big Branch…