Occupational Health & Safety
lborkowski | December 28, 2011While we're on vacation, we're re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on March 9, 2011.
By Celeste Monforton
"Death takes no holidays in industry and commerce," is how Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz described the toll of on-the-job death and disability for U.S. workers. The Secretary's remarks in 1968 were part of congressional hearings on legislation that ultimately established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He suggested that because most work-related fatalities and injuries happen one or two at a time, day in and day out…
lborkowski | December 23, 2011In iWatch News, Sasha Chavkin and Ronnie Greene report on a rash of kidney-disease deaths among sugarcane workers in Nicaragua. The workers generally don't suffer from hypertension or diabetes, so attention has turned to workplace factors, Chavkin and Greene write:
Some scientists suspect that exposure to an unknown toxin, potentially on the job, may trigger onset of the disease. Researchers agree that dehydration and heat stress from strenuous labor are likely contributing factors -- and they may even be causing the illness. Laborers, typically paid not by the hour or day but based on the…
cmonforton | December 21, 2011Ms. Madeline Loftus, 24, was just one of the 50 individuals who lost their lives on February 12, 2009 when Continental Flight 3407 crashed in a neighborhood near Buffalo, NY. The NTSB investigation and a frightening PBS Frontline investigation called "Flying Cheap" identified airline industry practices that compromise pilots' fitness for duty, including severe fatigue, as contributors to the disaster.
The Feb 2009 Pinnacle/Colgan/Continental airline disaster was not the first one in which fatigue was identified as a contributing factor in pilots' errors and poor performance. Following an…
lborkowski | December 19, 2011J. Freedom du Lac reports in the Washington Post that Army Spec. David Emanuel Hickman, killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on November 14th, was the 4,474th US servicemember to be killed in Iraq. With all the US troops now gone from Iraq, Hickman's death may well be the last servicemember fatality directly attributed to this conflict. The number of Iraqi deaths is much higher and much less precise; the Iraq Body Count website puts it between 104,122 and 113,700. And as a 2009 American Public Health Association policy statement points out, the consequences are greater than death alone. Here'…
egrossman | December 16, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
As Congress nears recess, legislative approval of the Keystone XL pipeline is still a possibility. Congressional Republicans and the American Petroleum Institute have said the Keystone XL pipeline could create 20,000 new jobs, as has the Teamsters union. House Speaker John Boehner has said "tens of thousands" of jobs would be created. The State Department estimate comes in at between 5,000 and 6,000, and a report from Cornell University's Global Labor Institute concludes that the pipeline could ultimately "kill more jobs than it creates," since most of the pipeline…
cmonforton | December 16, 2011[Updated 1/4/12 below]
The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. pointed me yesterday to the latest attack on working people. House and Senate negotiators have apparently come to an agreement on an FY 2012 spending bill (165-page PDF) which includes funding for the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Tacked onto the bill are a litany of favors to special interests, including this one for Big Coal:
MSHA is prohibited from spending any funds to complete its health standard to protect miners from developing black lung disease until the Government Accountability Office…
cmonforton | December 15, 2011Just before 8:00 pm local time, a powerful burst of rock exploded in an area where at least 20 miners were working in the Lucky Friday mine. All the miners escaped to safety but several remain hospitalized. This silver mine in the Coeur d'Alene region has been the site of numerous serious incidents this year, including two fatalities. The first on April 15, 2011, a cave-in at 6,000 feet that took the life of Larry "Pete" Marek, 53. The second, the November 17, 2011 incident that took the life of 26 year old Brandon Gray. Relevant to yesterday's catastrophic event, the mine operator…
cmonforton | December 13, 2011[Update 12/15/11 below]
It's been 3 1/2 years since Leah Nielsen lost her father from mesothelioma. "I took care of my father as he died an excruciating death. He died too young." This Utah resident wants to protect others from suffering the same kind of horrible death by banning the use and export of asbestos.
Pennsylania resident Barbara Mozuch feels the same way: "My mother died on June 18, 2011 from peritoneal mesothelioma, just seven weeks after being diagnosed!! Something needs to be done."
Heidi von Palleske of Ontario, Canada explains how asbestos ruined the health and took…
cmonforton | December 8, 2011The next time you hear someone claim that worker safety regulations and OSHA hurt job growth and hinder small businesses, remind them about Haasbach, LLC. On July 28, 2010, two workers (Wyatt Whitebread, 14, and Alex Pacas, 19) were killed at a grain handling facility owned by Haasbach, when the young workers were engulfed in corn. The boys, along with several others, were hired to do dangerous work----breaking up corn in a million bushel grain bin----and had not been given the training or equipment to do it safely. Haasbach's owners failed to ensure that basic safety procedures were…
cmonforton | December 6, 2011The U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) released today the findings of its 20 month-long investigation into the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion. The April 5, 2010 disaster killed 29 workers, seriously injured another worker, and left hundreds of grieving family members and friends. MSHA identified 12 violations of safety regulations that contributed to the cause or the severity of the disaster. Nine of the 12 contributory violations were classified as "flagrant" infractions which come with a $220,000 penalty each (for a total of $2.64 million). In…
lborkowski | December 6, 2011by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
Every year, the United Health Foundation (UHF) publishes America's Health Rankings. Today UHF released their 22nd annual report. Rankings are a useful gimmick for getting attention as everyone surely looks at his/her own state. I was particularly proud to find my state of Vermont at the top of the list. I also looked to see how the report, titled A Call to Action for Individuals & Their Communities, might reflect changing attitudes toward the health problems caused by workplace environments, a long-term concern of mine. What I found is discouraging.
Worker…
egrossman | December 2, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
The US may be fourth on the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) list of countries ranked by per-capita income, but persistently high unemployment has left many of this country's residents in poverty. The past year has seen a record increase in US children enrolled in free school meal programs, and the need is such that some districts are now serving not only lunch but also breakfast and dinner. In Chicago, Dallas and Newark school districts, 85 percent of children qualify for free meals, according to data analyzed by The New York Times. Given such a situation,…
cmonforton | December 1, 2011The US Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is preparing to issue next week its investigation report on the April 5, 2010 coal mine disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 workers. Ken Ward, Jr. at Coal Tattoo reports that MSHA will hold a media briefing at 3:00 pm (EST) on December 6 at its training academy near Beckley WV. The Charleston (WV) Gazette reporter reminds us that December 6 is an ominous date. It marks the 104th anniversary of the Monongah disaster, the worst mining disaster in U.S. history.
MSHA's investigation report will be the…
cmonforton | November 25, 2011Before too long the US Department of Labor (DOL) and other federal agencies should be issuing their annual regulatory plans and semi-annual agendas. These documents serve as official public notice of agencies' regulatory (and deregulatory) priorities. The Regulatory Flexibility Act and Executive Order (EO) 12866 direct agency heads to release these documents in April (agenda) and October (plan and agenda), but the Obama Administration doesn't have a good track record meeting those deadlines.
I'm not going to predict when the next agenda and plan will be issued or, as I did in the Spring, on…
cmonforton | November 18, 2011For U.S. workers, the risk of dying on the job is highest if you are employed in agricultural, fishing or hunting. These jobs are not just a little riskier than the average job, they are nearly 8 times more life-threatening. The fatality rate for all private sector workers is 3.5 per 100,000 workers; in agriculture, fishing and hunting, the rate is 26.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. Combine these statistics with age-specific fatality rates and it was time for the US Department of Labor (DOL) to review the adequacy of its safety regulations for children working in farming jobs. The rules…
lborkowski | November 17, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
We have learned from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request and released by the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that there are currently about 465 United States industrial facilities on what the EPA calls its "watch list." The list is made up of businesses EPA considers chronic violators of the Clean Air Act - but against which the agency has taken no formal enforcement action. An examination of these same companies' occupational health and safety records reveals them also to be chronic violators…
cmonforton | November 11, 2011[Updated 11/14/11 below]
Barrick Goldstrike is the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of $51.0 Billion. With that kind of wealth, one has to ask why workers at the company's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada were compelled to use a broom handle to keep a reset button depressed, so tons of aggregate rock would continue to flow down a shaft. That jerry-rigging along with the mine management's failure to correct other defects, such as missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate carrying pipe system, led to the death of Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr,…
lborkowski | November 9, 2011A rock burst at a coal mine in China's Henan province has killed a total of 10 miners. The explosion happened just after a minor 2.9-magnitude earthquake occurred nearby, and 45 workers were rescued after 36 hours underground - although two of those workers later died of their injuries.
Last month, a gas explosion at a coal mine in Hunan provice killed 29 miners, while six survived. (29 was also the death toll from the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster in West Virginia.) CCTV reported that the mine had lost its operating license earlier this year after failing to ventilate sufficiently, but…
lborkowski | November 2, 2011Something that's come up in a couple of the different sessions I've attended at the American Public Health Association annual meeting is the problem of inadequate definitions of success. It's important to set targets and measure progress against them - and missing targets can be a signal that it's time to revise the strategy. But if the targets are set without sufficient thought, a person or group can think they're succeeding when they're not really doing such a great job.
One example of this came up in the session "Getting from here to there: Promoting health and environmental justice…
lborkowski | November 1, 2011One of my favorite parts of the American Public Health Association annual meeting is the Occupational Health & Safety Section's awards lunch. It's always inspiring to hear about and from the award recipients, who bring dedication, creativity, and much-needed stubbornness to the cause of ensuring safe and healthy workplaces. The 2011 honorees are:
Alice Hamilton Award: Martin Cherniack of the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW), author of the book The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster
Lorin Kerr Awards: Lamont Byrd of the…