Whistleblowers
kkrisberg | July 30, 2014Fast food workers may have just received a huge boost, thanks to a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board.
Steven Greenhouse reports in The New York Times that the board’s general counsel has ruled that McDonald’s is jointly responsible for labor violations at its franchises — “a decision that if upheld would disrupt longtime practices in the fast-food industry and ease the way for unionizing nationwide,” Greenhouse writes. The article reports that of the 181 unfair labor practice complaints filed against McDonald’s and its franchises in the last 20 months, the board’s counsel decided…
cmonforton | July 9, 2014Testing to make sure a train’s brakes work properly shouldn’t be controversial. But some railroad employees have lost their jobs because they insisted on the safety checks. Oregon Public Broadcasting's Tony Schick explains the situation in “Rail workers raise doubts about safety culture as oil trains roll on.”
Schick profiles the experience of Curtis Rookaird, a BNSF train conductor. Rookaird was fired in 2010 after he raised safety complaints, including about the need to conduct air brake testing on a set of railcars. OSHA investigated Rookaird’s whistleblower complaint. The agency agreed…
kkrisberg | March 12, 2014When President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law in 2011, it was described as the most sweeping reform of the nation’s food safety laws in nearly a century. Public health advocates hailed the law for shifting regulatory authority from reaction to prevention. What received less attention was a first-of-its-kind provision that protects workers who expose food safety lawbreakers.
The law’s whistleblower provision, also known as Section 402, amends the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to provide “protection to employees against retaliation by an entity engaged in…
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…
lborkowski | May 28, 2013Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved immigration legislation that would overhaul US immigration laws. Alan Gomez reports in USA Today:
The bill was produced by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight. With four of those members on the committee, the bill survived 212 amendments over five lengthy hearings.
Left intact was the core of the bill, which will allow the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship, add significant investments in border security and fundamentally alter the legal immigration system of the future.
The…
revere | November 13, 2008Last spring NIH scientist Charles Natanson published a meta-analysis of studies on hemoglobin-based blood substitutes in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Natanson, C., Kern, S. J., Lurie, P., Banks, S. M. & Wolfe, S. M. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 2304-2312 (2008)). Blood substitutes are . . . well . . . blood substitutes. Like blood, they carry oxygen, but have long shelf lives, don't need refrigeration, don't require cross-matching and meet the need for situations where there is a shortage of fresh whole blood. A meta-analysis is a systematic summary, often expressed…
revere | September 4, 2008McCain wants to go full speed ahead for nuclear power (that's a maverick's way of dealing with climate change?) and Obama seems to feel friendly to it, too, as long as the waste disposal issue can be solved, satisfactorily (which it doesn't seem it can be, but that's another story). Everyone agrees that nuclear power has to be managed safely if we are going to rely on it to any extent and we are always given assurances that this is not only possible but what happens as a matter of course, no exceptions. To make sure, government plans are reviewed by independent experts. Too bad we can't see…
revere | August 14, 2008The headline was kind of strange: Doctor pays for 'letting polio out of hospital'. It sounded like a hospital doctor had negligently let an infectious polio case out into the community. But in fact the doctor was the hero of the story:
A Samundri Tehsil Headquarters Hospital child specialist, who spilled the beans of polio cases before the media, has been awarded suspension from service, Dawn learnt on Tuesday.
The district administration hastened to take the decision after the doctor informed journalists about the suspected cases of polio at Samundri's villages. (Dawn [Pakistan])
This sorry…
revere | March 6, 2008We don't especially like being anonymous on this blog but we feel it is prudent given the retributive nature of this administration. We don't care that much ourselves as we are pretty well established. But we worry that our students, our colleagues and our institution will become collateral damage in retribution for things we say here. It's not just that we read about this stuff in the news. We know the people involved personally. Last week we posted about Deb Rice, a scientist in the State of Maine health department who is also one of the world authorities on the health effects of the…
revere | April 23, 2007Lab accidents happen. Usually they happen because the technician, student or senior scientist thinks he or she is working with something safe. But they happen even if everyone knows there is dangerous stuff around. Like in a bioweapons laboratory. And when that happens, you don't want to publicize it. Even if you are required to:
An aerosol chamber mishap at Texas A&M University in February 2006 caused a researcher to be infected with the bioweapons agent brucella. Texas A&M University then violated federal law by not reporting the brucellosis case to the Centers for Disease Control (…
revere | April 3, 2007I'm an academic, where criticizing the management is common, although sometimes hazardous. I was also a long time department chair so I know what it's like to be on the other end. It's part of the job, both sides. That's not so true in government, even in those agencies where the culture is more like academia because the subject is science. Agencies like CDC and the FDA (h/t a pair of posts by Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal and my Wiki partner, DemFromCT). First, CDC.
Senator Charles Grassley (R., IndianaIowa, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee) has been on CDC Director…