regulation
lborkowski | December 17, 2013On December 5, fast-food workers mounted one-day strikes in dozens of cities (between 100 and 130 cities, depending which tally you consult) to demand higher wages and the right to unionize without reprisal. The strikes follow walkouts that started in New York City in November 2012, and a series of multi-city actions this past spring and summer. The Nation's Allison Kilkenny shares the story of Mary Coleman, a worker who has participated in several of these actions:
Mary Coleman, known to her co-workers as Ms. Mary, works at a Popeye’s in Milwaukee for $7.25 an hour. Coleman, 59, lives with…
kkrisberg | December 13, 2013On average, eating healthy costs about $1.50 more per day than the least healthy diets, a new study finds. The extra cost seems insignificant at first — a small cup of coffee often costs more — but it all adds up to be a considerable barrier for many low-income families.
Researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health set out to find the evidence behind the conventional wisdom that healthier foods cost more, conducting the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of price differences between healthy and unhealthy foods. In examining data from 10 high-income nations, researchers found…
kkrisberg | December 6, 2013There are few factors that shape a person’s health as strongly and predictably as income. And while enforcing wage and labor laws may at first seem outside the purview of public health agencies, Rajiv Bhatia adamantly disagrees. In fact, he says that public health may wield the most persuasive stick in town.
Bhatia is the director of environmental health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) and is behind an innovative policy change that uses the agency’s existing regulatory authority to prevent wage theft and support basic labor rights among restaurant workers. Begun in…
cmonforton | December 5, 2013"I played by the rules. I worked to support my family. The unregulated industry virtually destroyed my life. These chemicals that are used on food in large-scale production must be tested, and proper instructions and labels supplied with their sale."
Those were the words of Eric Peoples at a congressional hearing in 2007. He testified about his experience working at a food-manufacturing plant where he was exposed to flavoring chemicals including diacetyl. Those exposures led to severe lung damage. At the time of his testimony, Peoples was awaiting a lung transplant.
Eric Peoples became one of…
lborkowski | December 3, 2013In May 2010, an explosion at the Black Mag gunpowder-substitute plant in Colebrook, New Hampshire killed employees Jesse Kennett and Don Kendall. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigated and issued 54 citations with penalties totaling $1.2 million. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Health and Safety, said at the time, "Even after a prior incident in which a worker was seriously injured, and multiple warnings from its business partners and a former employee, this employer still decided against implementing safety measures." Safety…
egrossman | November 26, 2013As Americans prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday and the White House gets ready for President Obama to pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday November 27 that will “reflect upon the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving,” let us take a moment to reflect upon the welfare of the men and women who process the millions of turkeys on their way to Thanksgiving dinners.
First, according to the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 220,000 people currently work in the poultry processing industry in the US, at an annual median wage…
kkrisberg | November 22, 2013This week, Houston became only the second major city in the U.S. South to pass a law to prevent and punish wage theft. It’s a major victory for all workers, but it’s especially significant for the city’s low-wage workers, who lose an estimated $753.2 million every year because of wage theft.
Passed unanimously by the Houston City Council on Wednesday, the new wage theft ordinance provides workers with a formal process to lodge wage theft complaints and puts in place real penalties for employers convicted of stealing workers’ wages. Businesses convicted of wage theft — either civilly or…
egrossman | November 21, 2013At least 1.7 million US workers are exposed to respirable crystalline silica each year, this according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These exposures occur in a variety of industries, among them construction, sandblasting, mining, masonry, stone and quarry work, and in the rapidly expanding method of oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. This exposure can lead to silicosis, an irreversible, and sometimes fatal, lung disease that is only caused by inhaling respirable silica dust. Silica exposure also puts exposed workers at…
cmonforton | November 21, 2013My public health colleague, Adam Finkel, ScD, MPP, received this month the 2013 Alumni Leadership award from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), as part of the school’s 100th birthday celebration. Finkel and I were co-workers in the mid-1990’s at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, where he was the Director of the Office of Health Standards. I learned more from him about risk analysis and risk assessment than in any semester–long course. Why? Because agency risk assessments are not academic exercises when they are used to inform regulatory decisions.
Finkel touched on…
cmonforton | November 18, 2013This week will mark the 90-day point of the Labor Department submitting for White House review one of its top priority regulations to protect coal miners' health. It's a rule to prevent black lung disease. The director of the office that conducts those reviews, Howard Shelanski, promised earlier this year during his confirmation hearing that timely review of agencies' regulations would be a top priority. Mr. Shelanski said:
“I absolutely share the concern you just raised about timeliness. ...I recognized that EO 12866 establishes the initial 90 day review process, and it would be one of my…
kkrisberg | November 15, 2013While homelessness among U.S. veterans is on the decline, significant housing challenges remain, according to a new report from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.
Released this week just a day after Veterans Day, the report finds that in 2011, more than a quarter of the nation’s 20 million veteran households experienced a housing cost burden (defined as spending more than 30 percent of income on housing costs and utilities) and more than 1.5 million veterans were severely cost burdened (spending more than half of their incomes on housing costs and utilities). Within those numbers,…
cmonforton | November 5, 2013The Obama Administration's USDA continues to insist that their proposed rule to "modernize" poultry slaughter inspections will improve food safety. Just last week, Secretary Vilsack's office said it is sticking with their plan, saying:
"comprehensive effort to modernize poultry slaughter inspection in ways that will reduce the risk for American families."
For the last 18 months, however, the USDA Secretary has heard loud and clear that his agency's proposal is certain to do much more harm than good. Advocates for and experts on food safety, workers safety, consumers, animal rights, and even…
kkrisberg | November 4, 2013It takes time to change social norms, so it'll probably take many, many years until it's as socially unacceptable to text or use a cell phone while driving as it is to start the engine without first buckling a seat belt. In the meantime, researchers say, smart policies are needed to address the increasing share of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths attributed to distracted driving.
According to a new study published in Public Health Reports, the rate of distracted driving-related fatalities per 10 billion vehicle miles traveled went up from 116.1 in 2005 to 168.6 in 2010 for pedestrians and from…
egrossman | October 31, 2013According to a new report from the Center for Effective Government, American workplace health and safety is suffering from – and as a result of – a serious lack of resources. While the number of US workplaces doubled between 1981 and 2011 and the number of US workers increased from 73 million to 129 million during this time, during the same 30 years, the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors has declined. Instead of one inspector for every 1,900 workplaces, there is now only one inspector for every 4,300 workplaces (or, measured in other terms, one…
cmonforton | October 30, 2013A marriage of public health science and civil rights is one way to describe the lifework of John Froines, PhD, professor emeritus at UCLA School of Public Health. After a 50-year career in academia and public service, and the untolled contributions from it, Froines was recognized this week by the internationally renowned Collegium Ramazzini.
The nomination letter submitted to the Collegium by his colleagues captures many highlights of Froines’ impact over several decades, such as:
His high-profile role in the 1960’s anti-war and civil rights movements
His position with the Vermont State…
cmonforton | October 28, 2013Earlier this month I wrote about the merits of policies that require conflict of interest disclosures. Last week, two items also about conflicts of interest landed in my in-box. They were just too juicy to not take a bite, and write about here.
First came a commentary from the October 2013 issue of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene written by the journal’s chief editor Noah Seixas, PhD, MS. The lead paragraph reads:
"On 6 June 2013, a court in New York handed down a decision that calls into question the validity of research that was sponsored by Georgia-Pacific [GP] and published in eight…
kkrisberg | October 25, 2013Wages in the highly profitable fast food industry are so low that more than half of families of front-line fast food workers are enrolled in and depend on public assistance programs to make ends meet. In other words, that seemingly inexpensive burger and fries not only comes with a secret sauce, but a secret cost.
According to "Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast Food Industry," which was released last week, the cost of such public assistance is nearly $7 billion every year, with Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program costs accounting for more than…
cmonforton | October 17, 2013Roger R. King, 62, in West Virginia. Robert Smith, 47, in Illinois. Mark Christopher Stassinos, 44, in Wyoming. Larry Schwartz, 59, in Indiana.
Four coal miners, working in four different States, employed by four different mining companies, all fatally injured on the job during the first eleven days of the government shutdown. King was employed at CONSOL's McElroy mine, Smith at Alliance Resources' Pattiki mine, Stassinos at PacifiCorp's Bridger mine, and Schwartz at Five Star Mining's Prosperity Mine.
I didn’t learn of these deaths from anything posted on the Mine Safety and Health…
cmonforton | October 15, 2013"Es ridículo,” was the reaction of a poultry plant worker when he heard of the USDA's proposal to "modernize" poultry slaughter. The agency's January 2012 proposal (77 Fed Reg 4408) would allow companies to increase assembly line speeds from about 90 to 175 birds per minute, and remove most USDA inspectors from the poultry processing line.
The Obama Administration should have heard the loud and clear opposition from civil rights, food safety, public health and the workers’ safety communities to the USDA’s proposal. When the public comment period closed in May 2012, the Southern Poverty Law…
lborkowski | October 14, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
A recent editorial in the New York Times, "Rolling the dice on food-borne illnesses," focused on just one of the many health dangers related to the federal government shutdown. The editorial reminded me of developments in Vermont almost forty years ago, when I was the State Health Commissioner.
Vermont's House Appropriations Committee was threatening to cut the Health Department's budget. After telling the Committee members that they would be hurting the Department’s ability to protect the public, including from foodborne and waterborne illness, I suggested…