Occupational health
kkrisberg | March 29, 2016At Slate, Michelle Chen writes about the experiences of hotel housekeepers in Miami during spring break. The story starts with Adelle Sile, a housekeeper at the four-star Fontainebleau Miami Beach:
Around this time of year, thanks to the influx of spring break and Easter break vacationers, the time (Sile) has to clean each room during her eight-hour shift gets squeezed as guests stretch their mornings to the final minutes before checkout. When she does finally get in, she sometimes opens the door to find vomit, empty bottles, crack pipes, marijuana buds, and makeshift mattresses of cushions…
kkrisberg | March 16, 2016At Vox, Sarah Kliff writes about the side of medical errors we rarely hear about — the doctors and nurses who make such errors and the mental health toll of living with that responsibility. In an article that explores whether health care workers are getting the support they need to deal with such experiences, Kliff begins with the story of nurse Kim Hiatt:
Kim Hiatt had worked as a nurse for 24 years when she made her first medical error: She gave a frail infant 10 times the recommended dosage of a medication. The baby died five days later.
Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what…
kkrisberg | March 8, 2016It seems obvious that workers with paid sick leave are more likely to stay home and seek out medical care when they or a family member is ill. But it’s always good to confirm a hunch with some solid data.
In this month’s issue of Health Affairs, researchers used data from the National Health Interview Survey to provide some clarity on the relationship between paid sick leave and health-related behaviors. They found that workers without paid sick leave were three times more likely to forgo medical care than workers who do get paid sick leave. Also, during 2013, both full- and part-time workers…
kkrisberg | March 1, 2016At The New York Times, writers Kim Barker and Russ Buettner report on the labor investigations being conducted at nail salons throughout New York in the wake of a 2015 New York Times article that exposed widespread wage and labor abuses. They report that all but a dozen of the 230 salons whose investigations were closed last year were found violating at least one labor law. More than 40 percent of the salons were violating wage laws. Barker and Buettner write:
But the details of the state inspections are perhaps most revealing about just how challenging it is to regulate a largely immigrant-…
kkrisberg | February 16, 2016At In These Times, reporter Joseph Sorrentino writes about the heartbreaking plight of uranium miners and millers as well as the history of uranium mining oversight and regulation. He spent a week interviewing uranium workers and their families in New Mexico — workers who are among the thousands who began working in the mines after 1971 and who don’t qualify for federal compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Sorrentino writes:
Cipriano Lucero worked in uranium mills from 1977 to 1982. He has pulmonary fibrosis, and one of his kidneys failed when he was 48,…
kkrisberg | February 10, 2016President Obama released his 2017 federal budget proposal yesterday, recommending funding boosts for a number of public health priorities. And even though his presidency is coming to an end and so this budget is probably dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress, it’s worth a peek inside.
Here are some of the highlights that seem particularly relevant to public health, health care and working families:
Health care access: The Obama budget would expand federal financing to cover the costs of state Medicaid eligibility expansions. That means the federal government would fully cover…
kkrisberg | February 2, 2016At NPR, reporter Howard Berkes writes about the failure of federal laws to protect workers who are left out of the workers’ compensation system. He begins his story with Kevin Schiller, a building engineer for Macy’s department stores for more than two decades. While working in a storage room in a Macy’s in Denton, Texas, a mannequin fell from 12 feet above, hitting Schiller and forcing him to hit his head on a shelf and then the concrete floor. Berkes writes:
Schiller has hardly worked since, given persistent headaches, memory loss, disorientation and extreme sensitivity to bright light and…
kkrisberg | January 19, 2016At Reveal, reporter Will Evans investigates discrimination within temporary staffing agencies, finding a pattern of racial, sexist and otherwise discriminatory hiring practices. He begins his story with Alabama-based Automation Personnel Services Inc., writing:
When its clients wanted to hire temp workers based on race, sex or age, Automation was happy to oblige, according to dozens of former employees.
Often, the practice was blatant. A manager at a Georgia manufacturing plant asked Christie Ragland not to send him “any black thugs,” she said. Ragland, a former Automation office manager…
kkrisberg | January 18, 2016Think about all the objects you use every day that are made with pieces of metal. Before that object got to you, a worker in the metal manufacturing industry used a machine to cut, saw, bend and assemble the metal pieces into the countless products that make our lives easier. But sometimes those machines break. And when they do, a simple and inexpensive procedure helps ensure both worker and machine can return safely to the job.
The procedure is known as lockout/tagout (LOTO) and it’s used to disable machinery and prevent the release of hazardous energy during servicing and repair. In other…
kkrisberg | January 12, 2016Scientists are finding that night shift work comes with a range of particular health risks, from heart disease to diabetes to breast cancer. This month, another study joined the pack — this one on the risk of traffic crashes among those who head home from work at sunrise.
To conduct the study, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Liberty Mutual Research Institute recruited and examined the experiences of 16 night shift workers as they participated in two two-hour daytime drives on a closed test track. The study participants undertook one driving test after working a night…
kkrisberg | January 5, 2016At ProPublica, Michael Grabell expanded his “Insult to Injury” series on the dismantling of the nation’s workers’ compensation system with a disturbing look inside what he dubs the “workers’ comp industrial complex.” He begins his story in Las Vegas at the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo. And even though Grabell’s previous investigations exposed just how much injured workers must struggle to receive fair compensation and medical care, he details a conference draped in luxury and expense. He writes:
A scantily clad acrobat dangles from the ceiling,…
lborkowski | December 27, 2015During the holiday season, Kim, Liz and I are taking a short break from blogging. We are posting some of our favorite posts from the past year. Here’s one of them, originally posted on June 26, 2015:
By Kim Krisberg
A common hurdle in the field of occupational health and safety is delivering what can sometimes be life-saving information to the people who need it most. After all, not all employers are amenable to workplace health and safety education. But what if safety advocates could find and connect with the most at-risk workers out in the community? Perhaps even reach vulnerable workers…
lborkowski | December 24, 2015During the holiday season, Kim, Liz and I are taking a short break from blogging. We are posting some of our favorite posts from the past year. Here’s one of them which was originally posted on May 26, 2015:
by Kim Krisberg
After 18 years as a professional house cleaner in the suburbs of Chicago, Magdalena Zylinska says she feels very lucky. Unlike many of her fellow domestic workers, she hasn’t sustained any serious injuries.
Zylinska, 43, cleans residences in the metropolitan Chicago area five days a week. An independent contractor, she cleans two to three houses each day. Fortunately, she…
kkrisberg | December 22, 2015At the Center for Public Integrity, reporters Jim Morris and Maryam Jameel investigate the nation’s “third wave” of asbestos-related disease. The story begins with two photos of Kris Penny, who used to install fiber-optic cable beneath the streets of Florida.
The first photo is of Penny in April 2015, looking healthy and happy. The next photo is one taken just six months later. Penny looks dramatically transformed after being diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the abdominal lining that’s nearly always related to asbestos exposure. After talking with a lawyer, Penny…
kkrisberg | December 16, 2015In a recent study, Harvard public health researchers decided to test a few dozen types of electronic cigarettes for diacetyl, a flavoring chemical associated with a severe respiratory disease known as “popcorn lung.” The researchers found diacetyl in a majority of the e-cigarettes they tested. News outlets jumped on the findings, with some announcing that e-cigarettes could cause the often-debilitating respiratory disease.
But scientist Joseph Allen wants to be clear: His study doesn’t make a definitive statement about the effect of diacetyl in e-cigarettes. Instead, Allen said his goal was…
kkrisberg | December 14, 2015In 2010, Donna Gross, a psychiatric technician at Napa State Hospital for more than a decade, was strangled to death at work by a mentally ill patient. While on-the-job violence in the health care sector was certainly nothing new at the time, the shocking and preventable circumstances surrounding Gross’ death helped ignite a new and coordinated movement for change. Now, just a handful of years later, California is set to become the only state with an enforceable occupational standard aimed at preventing workplace violence against health care workers.
“Honestly, this (proposed rule) wouldn’t…
kkrisberg | December 9, 2015As world leaders are gathered in Paris to discuss international efforts to combat climate change, Michelle Chen writes that workers in the Global South will “need to build livelihoods that can mitigate ecological crisis — and leap ahead of the dominant fossil-fuel based economies, which historically have both controlled and stifled their development.” Reporting for The Nation, Chen starts her article with a report from the New Delhi-based Just Jobs Network, which notes that climate-driven migration has the potential to drive down wages and working conditions in urban areas. Chen writes:
But…
kkrisberg | December 3, 2015In 2011, a group of researchers embarked on a national study to measure burnout among physicians. They found that 45 percent of U.S. doctors met the criteria for burnout, which manifests as emotional exhaustion, a loss of meaning in one’s work, feelings of ineffectiveness, and a tendency to see people as objects rather than fellow humans. Less than a handful of years later, the problem has gotten significantly worse.
In a study published this month in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers report that more than half of U.S. doctors were struggling with professional burnout in 2014. More…
kkrisberg | November 24, 2015Maquiladora workers (manufacturing workers) in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, are at the center of a growing worker rebellion in border factories, which employ more than 69,000 people, are nearly all foreign-owned, and pay some of the lowest wages along the border, reports David Bacon in The Nation. In fact, manufacturing workers in Juárez typically make 18 percent less than the average manufacturing worker in one of Mexico’s border cities. Bacon reports:
Ali Lopez, a single mother at the planton outside the ADC CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. “…
7-Eleven workers organize against workplace violence: ‘Convenience store workers deserve to be safe’
kkrisberg | November 20, 2015In February 2015, a group of 7-Eleven night shift workers in Buffalo, New York, filed a complaint with OSHA. Sick of enduring regular bouts of verbal harassment, racial slurs and even death threats from customers — threats they often experienced while working alone with no security guard — they hoped OSHA could help bring about safer working conditions. Unfortunately, the agency decided not to investigate.
With no help from OSHA, the workers sought out guidance at the Western New York Worker Center, a project of the Western New York Council on Occupational Safety and Health (WNYCOSH). There…