OSHA
cmonforton | June 10, 2014Chris Williamson, 39, was electrocuted on Thursday, June 5 while making repairs to restore electrical service in the City of Florence, Alabama. Williamson worked for the city’s Electricity Department. Tom Smith with TimesDaily.com provides some initial information about the lineman’s death:
A storm earlier in the day caused a tree to fall on an electrical line in the Hickory Hills area of Florence.
Mayor Mickey Haddock said tree crews were dispatched to the scene to clear the fallen tree debris. Williamson was called upon to isolate the damaged line from the main feed.
Williamson was working…
cmonforton | June 5, 2014I’m not sure why I’m compelled to write each time the Labor Department releases its Spring and Fall agenda on worker safety regulations. The first time I did so was December 2006 and I’ve commented on all but one of the subsequent 14 agendas. But the ritual is largely disappointing.
On its regulatory agenda, OSHA will indicate its intention to make progress on a proposed or final worker safety rules. It will provide target dates to complete key tasks for each of those rules. But for the majority of the regulatory topics, by the time the next regulatory agenda rolls around six or more months…
kkrisberg | June 3, 2014Coal miner turned whistleblower Justin Greenwell is at the center of a Huffington Post article investigating how the mining industry cheats the worker safety system. Greenwell, who’s now in a legal battle to get back his mining job with Armstrong Coal, a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Armstrong Energy, tipped off federal mine inspectors that the company was submitting misleading coal dust samples to regulators. The samples are used to determine whether a mine is in compliance with safety and health standards designed to protect miners from black lung disease. According to a 2008 posting from…
kkrisberg | May 30, 2014The heath effects of occupational solvent exposure don’t always fade with time. A new study has found that years — sometimes even decades — down the road from their last workplace exposure, some workers are still experiencing very real cognitive impairments.
“Cognitive problems are pretty common at older ages and even though they are really common, we don’t know much about what causes them or how to prevent them,” said study co-author Erika Sabbath, a research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health. “There’s a large body of evidence that solvents are this group of occupational chemicals…
cmonforton | May 28, 2014[Update 9/4/14 and 11/20/14 below ]
Juan Carlos Reyes, 35, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Saturday, May 24 while working at a construction site located in Harlingen, Texas. News reports indicate:
A Marriott Hotel is being built at the site.
Reyes was on a [boom] lift moving supplies into a fourth floor window. Reyes fell to his death.
The general contractor of the hotel is Houston-based Matrix Builders.
The firm’s profile lists more than a dozen completed hotel construction projects in southeast Texas, including Comfort Inns, La Quinta Inns, Comfort Inn and Suites, and Candlewood Suites…
kkrisberg | May 20, 2014The Pump Handle’s own Celeste Monforton was quoted in an investigative piece on the tank cleaning industry and the dangerously toxic environments that its workers face. In an investigative article in the Houston Chronicle, reporter Ingrid Lobet found that even though industry workers are coming into contact with extremely toxic and often combustible chemicals, the methods that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration uses to track tank and barge cleaning operations is woefully deficient.
Lobet begins her story with the life and death of David Godines, a Houston tank cleaner found…
egrossman | May 14, 2014In 2012, the most recent year for which US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures are available, 375 people died on the job in California – an average occupational fatality rate of more than one person every day. At the same time, research by Worksafe and other California labor advocates shows that while California’s workforce has grown by about 22 percent in the last 20 years, the number of safety inspectors for the 17 million people employed in the state’s 1.34 million workplaces has decreased by about 11 percent. This leaves California – which has the largest workforce of any US state…
cmonforton | May 13, 2014[Update below]
Ricardo Ramos, 49 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Saturday May 10 while working at a meat processing plant located near Zeeland, Michigan. Garrett Ellison with MLive provides some initial information on Ramos’ death.
The facility is operated by Hillshire Brands. Workers there make Jimmy Dean sausage.
Ramos was working on the overnight shift. He was part of the crew that cleans and sanitizes the facility, including the equipment and conveyors. A co-worker said Ramos was pulled into a piece of machinery.
Ramos’ wife said her husband was working overtime to pay the household…
kkrisberg | May 9, 2014In New York, construction is the deadliest industry, with immigrant workers experiencing half of all occupational-related fatalities. Across the country in California in 2012, transportation incidents took the unenviable top spot as the leading cause of workplace fatalities. In Massachusetts in 2013, it’s estimated that upward of 500 workers died from occupational disease, at least 1,800 were diagnosed with cancers associated with workplace exposures and 50,000 workers experienced serious injury. In Wyoming, workplace deaths climbed to a five-year high in 2012, from 29 in 2011 to 35 in 2012.…
kkrisberg | May 6, 2014The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program has garnered praise from the White House to the United Nations for its innovative strategies to improve working conditions among farmworkers in Florida. The program, which began in 2010, works by getting big buyers to agree to only purchase tomatoes from farms that adhere to worker protection rules and ensure that workers are educated on their rights and responsibilities. Businesses that have signed on include Taco Bell, Chipotle and, recently, Wal-Mart, which according to a New York Times article chronicling progress on Florida farms,…
cmonforton | April 29, 2014“When workers get hurt in poultry plants, many employers try to just throw them away,” explained Tom Fritzsche a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “Companies assume workers won’t stand up for themselves. We are proud to represent a group of brave workers who want to keep these dangerous conditions from harming even more people.”
Fritzsche’s comment came after SPLC filed a complaint last week with the Labor Department on behalf of nine poultry workers from Wayne Farms’ facility in Jack, Alabama. The complaint alleges the firm violated a slew of OSHA standards---from…
egrossman | April 28, 2014Today is Workers Memorial Day. This post discusses one of the thousands of occupational fatalities that occur every year around the world.
On Sunday, April 20th, Shayne Daye, a 27-year old electrician and technician, died as a result of an injury sustained while working at Suncor’s Oil Sands site about 15 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta in western Canada. Suncor is one of Canada’s largest energy companies and credits itself as the first company to develop Canada’s oil sands. Company spokesperson Sneh Seetal said Daye – who’d worked for Suncor for seven years – was working on an…
cmonforton | April 15, 2014I often find myself trying to reconcile a company’s description of its safety program with what I hear from workers. One worker I met summed it up this way:
“Yeah, we have safety talks, but a talk is where it ends. It’s all talk, not real action on safety problems.”
Two recent incidents brought his remark back to life for me. It started with a recent news release from OSHA. The agency announced a proposed penalty of $50,600 to Grede Wisconsin Subsidiaries LLC at the firm’s Browntown, Wisconsin iron foundry. Funny thing is, the firm was touting its safety record last month at OSHA’s public…
cmonforton | April 8, 2014The photos rolled across the screen. Photos of construction workers tuck-pointing the cement grout on a building, sawing brick, jack hammering a sidewalk, sanding drywall. Each photo, showing workers in clouds of dust, illustrated the multitude of ways they are exposed, and why they are at risk of silica-related diseases.
The scrolling photo exhibit was the backdrop for testimony provided by representatives of the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA) on the final day of OSHA’s public hearing on its proposed silica regulation. The LHSFNA is a joint labor-management…
cmonforton | April 2, 2014That simple phrase “No dust, no silica,” was the way that Donald Hulk characterized his firm’s attitude about controlling respirable crystalline silica.
Hulk is the corporate safety director for Manafort Brothers based in Plainville, CT. His presentation was one of the highlights during last week’s nearly 40 hours of testimony. The other memorable moment came from six workers who traveled from Houston, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia to speak personally about working in silica dust. Their participation interjected a dose of reality. More below about their testimony.
Manafort’s Don Hulk…
egrossman | March 31, 2014In a February 11thnews bulletin, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) expressed concern “about the alarming increase in preventable injuries and fatalities at communication tower worksites,” and announced it was “increasing its focus on tower safety.” At that point, five weeks into 2014, cell tower work had caused four occupational fatalities for the year – the deaths of three cell tower workers and of one fire fighter. Now, just over a month later, three more cell tower workers have died on the job. On March 19th, a 21-year old from Maryland was killed while working on…
cmonforton | March 26, 2014Yep. “We’re not stupid” was just one of the many memorable moments at last week’s public hearing on OSHA’s proposed rule on respirable crystalline silica. The remark came from epidemiologist Robert Park of CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). He was compelled to respond to a comment made by Tony Cox, a consultant retained by the American Chemistry Council.
Cox, who was expounding on the OSHA’s peer-reviewed risk assessment, asserted that the agency has not demonstrated a causal link between silica and lung disease at OSHA’s proposed permissible exposure limit…
kkrisberg | March 24, 2014Thanks to a unanimous vote of California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board last Thursday, workers get to hold on to a robust chemical right-to-know rule that puts their health and safety first. The vote also means that California workers will reap the benefits of more meaningful right-to-know rules than those at the federal level.
“It’s a human right to know about the hazards of the work you’re doing,” said Dorothy Wigmore, occupational health specialist at Worksafe, a state-based organization dedicated to eliminating workplace hazards. “If employers don’t know about the…
cmonforton | March 19, 2014[Update below]
What would it take to get police departments to refrain from calling work-related fatalities “just an accident”? I read it all the time. A 60 year-old mechanic falls 50 feet through an unguarded floor opening, and it’s an “accidental death.” Or a 30 year-old production clerk gets pulled into a machine, and it’s a “tragic accident.”
The latest example I read involved a 23 year-old man, Erik Deighton, who was crushed a few weeks ago at Colonial Plastics. The small suburban Detroit manufacturing plant fabricates specialty parts for automakers. Shelby Township Police Captain…
cmonforton | March 17, 2014This week will mark the next big step in efforts to institute a federal regulation to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. Tuesday, March 18 will be the first of 14 days of testimony and debate about a proposed silica rule which was released in September 2013 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA). The “deadly dust” is associated with malignant and non-malignant respiratory diseases and other adverse health conditions. The hazard has been recognized for centuries, but the U.S. does not have a comprehensive rule on the books to protect the…