temp workers
kkrisberg | September 27, 2017At the Toronto Star, reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh went undercover as a temp worker at Fiera Foods, an industrial bakery, to investigate why temp workers are more likely to get hurt on the job. Earlier this year, Canadian occupational health and safety officials brought charges against the company, whose clients include Dunkin’ Donuts, Costco and Walmart, for the death of 23-year-old Amina Diaby, who was strangled to death after her hijab got caught in a machine.
Mojtehedzadeh, along with Brendan Kennedy, write:
I get about five minutes of training in a factory packed with industrial equipment…
egrossman | November 4, 2016On a typical week, about 3 million people are on the job in the United States as temp workers, this according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In September 2016, just shy of 3 million people were working as temps – an all-time high. Numbers can vary depending on how temp work is defined, but according to the BLS, temp jobs now account for about 2.4 percent of all U.S. private sector jobs. Yet, said National Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) co-executive director Jessica Martinez on a call with reporters, “Temp workers represent almost 17 percent – or one out of…
kkrisberg | September 27, 2016In “The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry,” NJ Advance Media reporter Kelly Heyboer investigated conditions facing temp workers in New Jersey, which now has one of the largest concentrations of temp workers in the nation. She reports that growing demand for temp workers has led to the proliferation of “temp towns” — places with dozens of temp agencies and neighborhoods full of temp workers, many of whom report low pay, wage theft, racial and sexual discrimination, and unsafe workplaces.
Heyboer writes:
The temp agencies in New Brunswick are easy to…
lborkowski | September 26, 2016A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Maryn McKenna at National Geographic’s Germination: How We'll Tackle Diseases That Are Becoming Untreatable (“The United Nations just declared antibiotic resistance “the greatest and most urgent global risk.” Here’s what they’re going to do about it.”)
Kelli Garcia in US News & World Report: We Can’t Wait: With Congress unconscionably failing to act, states must move quickly to protect pregnant women from Zika
Kelly Heyboer at NJ.com: The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry
Alex Campbell and Katie J.M. Baker…
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…
cmonforton | November 2, 2015Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Thousands of researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the US and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. As "the water cooler for the public health crowd," The Pump Handle is reporting from Chicago. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s event courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Standing with temp workers: Rainy weather didn't stop advocates who took to…
kkrisberg | September 9, 2015Paid sick leave, new rights for temp workers, and extending OSHA protections to public sector employees were among the many victories that unfolded at the state and local levels in the last 12 months and that we highlight in this year’s edition of “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety.”
In California, a number of new worker safety laws went into effect. Among them, a new law that holds companies responsible if they contract with staffing agencies that engage in wage theft and fail to maintain workers’ compensation insurance. California health care workers gained new protections…
cmonforton | November 21, 2014Health and safety hazards encountered by custodians, palm tree workers, day laborers, nurses, and bakery workers are just some of the dozens of different occupations examined in research presented at this year’s annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). The association’s Occupational Health and Safety Section marked its 100th anniversary and members designed the first phase of an electronic timeline to memorialize key events in the Section’s history. A special scientific session explored the OHS Section’s history, starting with its founding co-chairs George Kober, MD…
kkrisberg | September 12, 2014For eight years, Dora worked at a frozen pizza factory in Romeoville, Illinois, called Great Kitchens. For eight hours a day — sometimes seven days a week — she assembled pizza boxes or arranged cheese and other toppings on pizzas. The consequences of years of such repetitive work surfaced in October 2012, when her hands would go numb and a painful cyst formed on her left wrist. She told her supervisor about the problem, but he said he couldn’t do anything about it — Dora was a temporary worker hired through a staffing agency and so Great Kitchens wasn’t responsible for addressing her injury…
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…
lborkowski | April 7, 2014At an appearance at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida last month, President Obama spoke about how the problems of stagnant wages and inadequate paid leave affect women workers:
Today, more women are their family’s main breadwinner than ever before. But on average, women are still earning just 77 cents on every dollar that a man does. Women with college degrees may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career than a man at the same educational level. And that’s wrong. This isn’t 1958, it’s 2014. That’s why the first bill I signed into law was called the…
lborkowski | January 10, 2014In case you missed it before the holidays, ProPublica's excellent "Temporary Work, Lasting Harm" piece is well worth a read. (Univision also produced and aired a version of the story.) Michael Grabell, Olga Pierce, and Jeff Larson tell the story of 21-year-old Day Davis, a temporary worker killed on his first day working at a Bacardi bottling plant, and others who died while on temporary work assignments. A ProPublica analysis of workers' compensation claims in five states found that temporary workers face a significantly greater risk of on-the-job injuries compared to permanent employees.…
lborkowski | March 28, 2013I wrote earlier this week about the excellent work NPR and the Center for Public Integrity did for an in-depth series on worker deaths in grain bins. Now there are even more stories on the subject, including a PBS segment and several pieces in the Kansas City Star. Plus, Salon has published "When workers die: "And nobody called 911"" by CPI's Jim Morris and WBEZ's Chip Mitchell. It's a chilling follow-up to the reporters' earlier piece, "They were not thinking of him as a human being," about temporary worker Carlos Centeno, who died from severe burns after plant managers refused to call 911…
lborkowski | March 19, 2013On Monday, President Obama nominated Thomas E. Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor. He introduced Perez by saying:
Like so many Americans, Tom knows what it’s like to climb the ladder of opportunity. He is the son of Dominican immigrants. He helped pay his way through college as a garbage collector and working at a warehouse. He went on to become the first lawyer in his family. So his story reminds us of this country’s promise, that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what your last name is -- you can make it if you try.
And Tom has made…
lborkowski | August 16, 2012We've written recently about two bills that had been passed by US and Massachusetts legislatures but not yet signed, so I wanted to close the loop and report that both are now law.
On August 6, President Obama signed into law the "Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012," which, among other things, provides that the Department of Veterans Affairs will give hospital care and medical services to veterans and their families who were exposed to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, from 1957 to 1987, and have developed conditions associated with TCE, PCE,…