safety
cmonforton | April 17, 2012Mr. Mitt Romney spoke this weekend at the National Rifle Association's (NRA) annual convention and kicked off his remarks applauding the gun-lovers group's defense of the 2nd amendment to the Constitution. "This fine organization is sometimes called a single-issue group," Romney said. "That's high praise when the single issue is freedom.
I love my freedom as much as the next person, but I sure don't believe that background checks on individuals purchasing guns and appropriate waiting periods are a gross assault on individual liberty. We in public health consider violence a preventable…
egrossman | April 11, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
While the US Supreme Court was debating the Affordable Care Act, the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee held a hearing to examine the current federal oversight of cosmetics and personal care product safety. The hearing revealed that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the more than eight billion such products now sold annually in the US, knows astonishingly little about these products' ingredients. This data gap - perhaps better described as a data chasm - is compounded by the inadequacy…
cmonforton | April 9, 2012The US Chamber of Commerce had a quaint little game on its website last month, complete with a YouTube video with fake sportscasters. The PR campaign called "Regulatory Madness" keyed off the annual NCAA's basketball tournament we know as March Madness. The cutesy idea was for business people to use the Chamber's pick of the 16 most "maddening" Obama Administration regulations, and fill in brackets to ultimately chose the most "maddening" one of all. They called it their "not-so-pretty Sweet Sixteen."
Their "top picks" included financial, health care and environmental regulations, such…
cmonforton | March 23, 2012Earlier this week, Lizzie Grossman reported here at The Pump Handle on revisions to OSHA's Hazard Communication standard which align the agency's 30 year old rule with a globally harmonized system for classifying and labeling chemical hazards. In "Moving from Right-to-Know to Right-to-Understand," we learn how the changes stem from a 2002 United Nations resolution and why they should help U.S. workers better protect themselves from chemical hazards in their workplaces.
I spent some time this week reading for myself the 858-page document, and by the time I got to page 20 it was clear that…
cmonforton | March 19, 2012The $109 billion transportation bill passed last week in the Senate has a title that doesn't even mention roads or highways. It's called the ''Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act'' (MAP-21) The 74 Senators who voted in favor of the bill (S. 1813), including 22 Republicans, described their support in terms of its potential to save and create nearly 3 million jobs, many in the construction industry.
One provision of the legislation fits especially well with the bill's title, with real potential to make progress on worker safety while we move ahead with transportation projects…
cmonforton | March 1, 2012Federal OSHA proposed a $283,000 penalty against an employer responsible for staffing a Hershey's chocolate packaging facilty in Palmyra, Pennsylvania for willfully violating workplace safety regulations. The agency's action followed a formal complaint lodged by workers at the plant, many of whom were foreign students employed under the State Department's J-1 visa program. A few hundred of them walked off the job last summer to protest the poor working conditions in the Hershey plant. The New York Times' Julie Preston reported at the time about workers' injuries related to heavy lifting,…
cmonforton | February 29, 2012The topics for my blog posts sometimes come from unusual places. This post is one of these. It popped in my head as I watched Natalie Portman announce the nominees for best actor during Sunday night's Academy Award broadcast. The snippet featuring Demián Bichir in "A Better Life" reminded me of a worker-fatality report that I bookmarked a few weeks ago, but never got around to reading. Like Bichir's character Carlos Galindo, I recall the report's abstract mentioned a day laborer who might have worked as a gardener.
I opened the bookmark yesterday to the report released in January 2012 by…
cmonforton | February 24, 2012On July 27, 2011, just a few miles from my home in San Marcos, TX, Mr. Margarito Guardado Resinos, 34, and Mr. Nelson Pineda were working together to erect a pre-engineered steel building frame on property owned by Thermon Manufacturing. The workers were employed by Jetka Steel Erectors of Katy, TX, a firm hired by Bailey Elliot Construction of Austin, TX, to perform certain aspects of the project. Just before noon on July 27, 2011 the metal structure collapsed, killing Mr. Resinos and injurying Mr. Pineda.
Federal OSHA safety officers investigated the fatal incident and issued citations…
cmonforton | February 23, 2012Agricultural exceptionalism is a term used to describe the special status awarded to employers and firms involved in agriculture. Proponents argue that the special status is necessary because (1) agricultural products contribute to broad national goals (e.g., providing safe and affordable food, preventing hunger); and (2) farming is inherently risky because of the uncertainty of weather and pests.
This exceptionalism allows employers, for example, to provide lesser protection and benefits to their workers compared to what is given to workers employed in non-agriculture industries.…
cmonforton | February 8, 2012The Boston Globe's Megan Woolhouse reported earlier this week on a civil lawsuit against construction contractors and Walmart for the wrongful death of Romulo de Oliveira Santos, 47. The Brazilian immigrant and a crew of other workers were assigned to tear down the ceilings and walls on the night of September 8, 2008 at a Walmart in Walpole, Massachusetts. The workers weren't made aware of the live electrical wires, and Santos was electrocuted and fatally burned. Woolhouse writes the victim's family seeks: "$5 million in damages from Walmart and two subcontractors, alleging the conditions…
cmonforton | February 6, 2012The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued citations last week to Zaloudek Grain Co. in Kremlin, Oklahoma for safety violations identified in its investigation of the August 4, 2011 incident in which two young workers each lost a leg. The citations listed six serious violations and a proposed penalty of $21,500. Two of the violations were assessed the OSHA maximum $7,000 penalty amount, one for inadequate guarding around the auger (1910.212(a)(2)) and the other for failing to train the young men (1910.272(e)(2)). The other safety regulations violated by the…
cmonforton | January 30, 2012The Labor Department provided an update on January 20, 2012 to its regulatory agenda, including revised target dates for improved workplace safety and health standards. Several of the rules OSHA now expects to publish in 2012 are regulations the agency previously said would be issued one or two years ago. Missed deadlines, however, are nothing new for OSHA---an agency that has only issued two new major health or safety standards in the last 10 years.
To put these new projections from OSHA in perspective, I'll refer to forecasts made previously by the Obama/Solis Administration in 2009 and…
cmonforton | January 23, 2012A previously confidential report prepared by the California Bureau of Investigations (BOI) reveals a reckless disregard for worker safety by a UCLA chemistry professor (and the university itself) which led to the 2009 death of research assistant Sheri Sangji, 23. Sangji was a new employee in a UCLA chemistry lab. She was hired primarily to set up lab equipment, but on Dec. 29, 2008 she was assigned to use a highly reactive liquid that spontaneously ignites when exposed to air. The BOI report calls into question UCLA's claims that the young woman was a trained and experienced chemist.
The LA…
cmonforton | January 20, 2012Money talks, as the saying goes, and a recently published paper on the annual cost of work-related injuries and illnesses should get policymakers to listen up. The number is staggering: $250 Billion, and it's a figure on par with health conditions like cancer, coronary heart disease, and diabetes that attract much more attention and research funding.
The author, J. Paul Leigh, PhD, a professor of health economics at University of California Davis, assembled data from more than a dozen sources to estimate the annual economic burden of occupational injuries and illnesses. Using data from 2007…
cmonforton | January 11, 2012Washington State becomes the first in the nation to adopt specific workplace safety rules to protect healthcare workers who are potentially exposed to anti-neoplastic drugs and other hazardous medications. The new rule, issued earlier this month by the State's Department of Labor & Industries, stems from legislation passed in April 2011 and signed into law by Governor Chris Gregoire. The rule applies to healthcare facilities in which employees are "reasonably anticipated" to have "occupational exposure to one or more hazardous drugs." The CDC's National Institute for Occupational…
cmonforton | January 6, 2012Sheri Sangji, 23, earned a bachelors degree in chemistry from Pomona College in 2008, and dreamed of being an attorney. While awaiting word on her admission to law school, Sangji took a job in October 2008 as a research assistant in the laboratory of UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran. Three months later, Sangji was dead. She suffered severe burns on December 29 while working in Harran's lab with tert-butyllithium (tBuLi), a substance that will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Despite expert care provided at the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks, Sangji succumb to her…
cmonforton | January 5, 2012A federal advisory committee is urging HHS Secretary Sebelius and Labor Secretary Solis to proceed expeditiously with new worker safety regulations. In letters sent recently to these Cabinet-level officials, the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, (NACOSH) the committee used phrases such as "deeply distressed," and "concerned and disappointed," to characterize the Obama Administration's stalled efforts to advance new worker health and safety regulations.
NACOSH was established by Congress in 1970 as part of the law that created federal OSHA. The 12-person…
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…
cmonforton | December 19, 2011Last week's violent rock burst at the Hecla Mining's Lucky Friday mine was just one of several catastrophic events this year at the deep underground silver mine in Mullan, Idaho. Another rockburst occurred a month earlier, and just one day before another incident in which 26 year old Brandon Gray was engulfed in muck as he and a co-worker tried to dislodge it in excavation bin. Mr. Gray, a contractor employed by Cementation, Inc., died two days later.
Brandon Gray's death was the second this year at the Lucky Friday mine. In April, Larry "Pete" Marek, 53, and his brother Michael Marek…
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…