safety
cmonforton | July 17, 2012You'd think the chemical giants Dow, DuPont, and the 160 other firms who are members of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) would expect the association's lobbyists to get their facts straight when moaning to Congress about federal regulations. Last week the ACC claimed that the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was moving forward with a regulation on combustible dust. They claimed that the "proposed rule will only add onerous requirements to existing regulations." The ACC also made the ludicrous claim that OSHA had not "met its statutory obligation…
cmonforton | July 11, 2012When the deal was made five years ago, officials were proud to announce it was the first refinery expansion project in the U.S. in 30 years. Motiva Enterprises' CEO Bill Welte called it a "momentous occasion" for his firm and its owners Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco. The final product would be the largest refinery in U.S. It was projected to produce more than 12 million gallons of gasoline per day from crude oil shipped initially by tankers from Saudi Arabia to the Port Arthur, TX site.
Fast forward to the grand opening ceremony on May 31, 2012 where five executives including Shell's…
lborkowski | July 9, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren't members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country.
The workers reported multiple problems with the ExxonMobil subcontractor who hired them, including not being paid on time, not having enough water on site and no access to medical care in the event of an…
cmonforton | July 3, 2012[Updated (July 5, 2012) below]
"We're still in the dark," explained one family whose son was killed 27 months ago at Alpha Natural Resources (formerly Massey Energy's) Upper Big Branch mine (UBB). That comment came two weeks ago after learning that Alpha, one of the world's largest coal companies, provided its first progress report to U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin as required by the December 2011 Non-Prosecution Agreement. The report was dated June 4, 2012. The progress report is supposed to describe the firm's compliance with the agreement, which settled the U.S. Department of Justice's…
oracknows | July 1, 2012If there's a law that I view as a horrible, horrible, law, it's the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA of 1994). It is a law that blog bud and former ScienceBlogs blogger Dr. Peter Lipson has rightly called a travesty of a mockery of a sham, and, quite frankly, I think he has been too easy on it. Clearly, if there is a single instance of a massive triumph of the forces of quackery in the U.S. that I could point to, the DSHEA of 1994 would be it. This particular misbegotten law in essence opened the floodgates for the sale of dubious supplements and turned a relatively…
cmonforton | June 28, 2012Just two weeks ago, families of the 29 men who were killed on April 5, 2010 at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine traveled to Washington DC to urge lawmakers to improve our nation's mine safety law. The West Virginia natives met with Republican and Democratic Members of Congress and asked for four simple reforms targeted at the mining industry's bad actors. They weren't asking anything for themselves. Only for new laws to help deter unscrupulous employers from causing another disaster and causing other communities to suffer the same pain and loss the UBB families have endured.…
cmonforton | June 27, 2012It's not the first time that Kenneth Rosenman, MD has provided scientific evidence on the deficiencies in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annual survey of occupational injuries and illnesses, and it won't be the last. His latest study, written with Joanna Kica, MPA, with Michigan State University's (MSU) Department of Medicine ,reports that the Labor Department's methods for estimating work-related burns misses about 70% of them. Their analysis focused on cases occurring in the State of Michigan in 2009. The MSU researchers used data from the State's 134 acute-care hospital, which…
cmonforton | June 21, 2012It's been almost two years since Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr, 38, went to work at Barrick Goldstrike's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada, but never made it back home to their families. They were fatally crushed on August 12, 2010 in a mine shaft by tons of falling aggregate and pipe. As I wrote last year, management at this mine --- an operation owned by the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of tens of billions of dollars --- had jerry-rigged a reset button with a broom handle and failed to replace missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate…
lborkowski | June 18, 2012by Kim Krisberg
When most of us think of sustainability and construction, the usual suspects probably come to mind: efficient cooling and heating, using nontoxic building materials, minimizing environmental degradation — in other words, being green. But in Austin, Texas, a new effort is working to expand the definition of sustainability from the buildings themselves to the hands that put them together.
Launched about a year ago, the Workers Defense Project's Premier Community Builders program certifies major new developments as sustainable for workers. That means making sure construction…
lborkowski | June 11, 2012by Beth Spence
Carrying enlarged photographs of their lost loved ones, family members of three of the 29 miners killed in the 2010 explosion at West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine spent June 6-7 in Washington, D.C., pleading with lawmakers to take action to improve mine safety and to stiffen penalties for mining companies that knowingly, willingly and recklessly place miners’ lives at risk.
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) stands with Clay Mullins, Betty Harrah, Gary Quarles and AFSC staff member Beth Spence. Photo by Bryan Vana, American Friends Service Committee.
Betty Harrah’s photo showed…
cmonforton | June 8, 2012The Pump Handle reported on May 4, 2012 that the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) had scrubbed clean its website of documents on an abruptly withdrawn proposed regulation to protect young workers from being injured or killed in agricultural jobs. Two weeks later, a group of organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability wrote to Obama Administration officials asking them to
"re-post the documents online relating to now-withdrawn proposed rules concerning child labor in agriculture."
The DOL's Wage & Hour Division proposed in August 2011 a rule to prohibit children…
cmonforton | June 1, 2012by Laredo, golden retriever dog
A weird story appeared on my Facebook page today. It was written by somebody named "AP." The headline read: "Alpha introduces mine search-rescue dog in Va." I like working dogs just as much as the next canine, so I read the article. Says that "Ginny" is a two-year old dutch-shepherd dog who weighs 48 pounds.
Get this, Mr. AP's article says Ginny is:
"...the newest member of coal producer Alpha Natural Resources Inc.'s search-and-rescue team, trained to perform searches in both underground and surface mines. Equipped with an infrared camera and atmospheric…
cmonforton | May 31, 2012The Obama Administration's quest to appease business interests' claims about burdensome and outdated regulations awoke a giant in the form of the civil rights, public health and workers' safety communities. From the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Council of LaRaza, to the American Public Health Association and Nebraska Appleseed, the feedback is loud and clear: USDA should withdraw the regulatory changes it proposed in January (77 Fed Reg 4408) which would shift the responsibility for examining and sorting poultry carcasses with obvious defects from USDA inspectors to the…
cmonforton | May 24, 2012Six months after Maureen Revetta's husband, Nick, 32, was killed by an explosion at the U.S. Steel plant in Clairton, PA, she was still waiting to hear from the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The young widow, now a single parent with a two children under age 5, had received a condolence letter from OSHA shortly after the September 2009 incident. The letter indicated the agency was investigating the circumstances surrounding her husband’s work-related death. It didn't mention, however, that the statute of limitations for issuing citations was six…
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…
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…
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…
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…