worker safety
cmonforton | June 10, 2013The way some companies operate, it's no wonder that thousands of workers in the U.S. are lead poisoned each year.
In January, federal OSHA issued 14 willful and 11 repeat violations to Panthera Painting for exposing its employees to lead. The workers were using abrasive blasting equipment to remove lead paint from several bridge structures over the Pennsylvania Turnpike and along Interstate 81. The OSHA inspector described how the Panthera crews didn't have the proper equipment or training to do their jobs in ways to minimize exposure to lead dust. Their exposure to lead exceeded OSHA's…
lborkowski | June 7, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Every Tuesday night, the Austin-based Workers Defense Project welcomes standing room-only crowds to its Workers in Action meetings. During the weekly gatherings, low-wage, primarily Hispanic workers learn about their wage and safety rights, file and work on wage theft complaints, and organize for workplace justice.
Once a month, a representative from the local OSHA office would join the Tuesday meeting, giving some of Texas' most vulnerable workers the chance to meet face-to-face with the agency charged with protecting their health and safety on the job. Unfortunately, due to…
lborkowski | May 14, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers wrapped up their latest legislative session. And nearly 500 miles south of Tallahassee in Miami-Dade County, workers' rights advocates breathed yet another sigh of relief.
Ever since Miami-Dade adopted the nation's first countywide wage theft ordinance in 2010, it's been under attack. For the first two years after its passage, state legislators tried to pass legislation to pre-empt local communities from passing their own wage theft laws; this last legislative session, they tried again but included a carve out for Miami-Dade and for…
“Enough is enough” – Asian labor rights advocates call for change as death toll mounts in Bangladesh
egrossman | May 10, 2013By Elizabeth Grossman, reporting from Bangkok, Thailand
As bodies of workers continued to be pulled from the wreckage of the collapsed Rana Plaza factory complex outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, pushing the death toll past 900, and news was breaking of at least seven deaths in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh on May 9, labor rights advocates meeting in Bangkok called for changes in the system that has led to disasters that have killed more than 1300 workers in the past eight months. “Events of the last 8 months have clearly demonstrated a complete failure of the CSR [corporate social…
cmonforton | April 25, 2013USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack seems determined to implement a new poultry slaughter inspection system, despite strong calls from the food safety and public health communities for him to withdraw it. At an April 17 congressional hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittees on Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies, Vilsack indicated that the new regulation would be completed soon, according to Congressional Quarterly.
Opponents say the proposal will do little to improve food safety, at the same time reducing USDA's ranks of poultry inspectors and shifting their food-…
lborkowski | April 19, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Eric Rodriguez and his colleagues at the Latino Union of Chicago quite literally meet workers where they're at — on the city's street corners. Many of the day laborers who gather there during the morning hours are hired to work construction at residential housing sites. Work arrangements are hardly formal, to say the least, and day laborers are frequently subjected to unnecessary and illegal dangers on the job. Unfortunately, worker safety is often kicked to the curb in the street corner marketplace.
For years, Rodriguez, who started as an organizer and is now the union's…
cmonforton | April 16, 2013An analysis by Mine Safety and Health News (MSHN) finds that nearly $70 million in delinquent penalties are owed to the U.S. Treasury by mining companies for violations of federal mine safety and health regulations. One of the top offenders is James C. Justice II, the owner of the Greenbriar Resort in White Sulphur Springs, WV. He owes more than $1.33 million in delinquent penalties.
MSHN notes that his net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine to be $1.7 billion. MSHN's analysis shows 60 mine operators have racked up more than $100,000 in delinquent penalties, and there are seven who each…
Cracking down on deadbeat bosses: Wage theft victory a milestone in Chicago's worker center movement
lborkowski | April 15, 2013by Kim Krisberg
For Angel Nava, Chicago's newly adopted wage theft ordinance is particularly personal.
Until recently, Nava had worked at the same car wash business in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood for 14 years. The 55-year-old employee did it all — washing, detailing, buffing — for about 50 hours each week. Then, his boss decided to stop paying overtime.
In fact, Nava didn't receive the overtime he was owed for the last four years he worked at the car wash. He told me (though a translator) that none of his co-workers were receiving overtime either — "everyone was very upset." Nava said he…
cmonforton | April 5, 2013Three years ago today, April 5, 2010, at approximately 3:02 pm (ET) a coal dust explosion ripped through Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia. Twenty-nine miners were killed by the blast, suffering fatal injuries from the explosion itself or from carbon monoxide poisoning. They were:
Carl Calvin "Pee Wee" Acord, 52
Jason Atkins, 25
Christopher Bell, 33
Gregory Steven Brock, 47
Kenneth A. Chapman, 53
Robert E. Clark, 41
Cory Thomas Davis, 20
Charles Timothy Davis, 51
Michael Lee Elswick, 56
William "Bob" Griffith, 54
Steven "Smiley" Harrah, 40
Edward Dean Jones,…
cmonforton | March 20, 2013A funny thing happened when representatives of U.S. foundries met on March 12 with White House officials to complain about a not-yet-proposed worker safety regulation. The industry group seemed to forget that the targets of their complaints are contained in their own best practices publication.
The American Foundry Society (AFS) requested the meeting with the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to discuss a draft proposed rule by the Labor Department's OSHA to protect workers exposed to respirable crystalline silica. AFS argued that…
lborkowski | March 1, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Texas construction workers who've lost their lives on unsafe worksites may be gone, but they certainly haven't been forgotten. Earlier this week, hundreds of Texas workers and their supporters took to the streets to demand legislators do more to stop preventable injury and death on the job. They took their demands and the stories of fallen workers all the way the halls of the state capitol.
Just two days ago, workers from every corner of the Lone Star state made their way to Austin to take part in the Day of the Fallen, a day of action to memorialize construction workers…
lborkowski | February 22, 2013by Kim Krisberg
For many migrant farmworkers, the health risks don't stop at the end of the workday. After long, arduous hours in the field, where workers face risks ranging from tractor accidents and musculoskeletal injuries to pesticide exposure and heat stroke, many will return to a home that also poses dangers to their well-being. And quite ironically for a group of workers that harvests our nation's food, one of those housing risks is poor cooking and eating facilities.
A group of researchers and advocates recently decided to take a closer look at such facilities among migrant farmworker…
lborkowski | February 19, 2013by Kim Krisberg
After nearly three decades as a USDA food safety inspector, Stan Painter tells me he now feels like "window dressing standing at the end of the line as product whizzes by."
Painter, a poultry inspector with the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) stationed in the northeast corner of Alabama in the town of Collinsville, is a first-hand witness to USDA's recently proposed rule to speed up poultry inspection lines while simultaneously reducing the number of federal food inspectors and turning over much of the food safety oversight to plant employees, who could have little…
cmonforton | February 12, 2013It's one thing to say your agency is committed to environmental justice, but actions speak louder than words. That's why I'm eager to see how USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and his Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) respond to the environmental justice concerns raised about the agency's proposed regulation to "modernize the poultry slaughter inspection system" (77 Fed Reg 4408.)
A disproportionate share of workers employed in poultry slaughter and production are Latinos and women. Many earn poverty-level wages. Their work environment----which is already associated with adverse health…
cmonforton | February 6, 2013Greg Byers, 43, worked underground at Arch Coal/ICG's Pocahontas Coal Mine in Beckley, WV. On the afternoon of July 31, 2012, he suffered a serious crushing injury. He died later that day.
Byers was a U.S. Marine who'd been working as a coal miner for five years. His employment at the Pocahontas mine, which employs nearly 300 workers, began about a year earlier. His job was "scoop operator." He used a hefty vehicle to scoop up the loose coal from the mine floor after the mining machine had done its work. When there's no coal to scoop, the equipment operator is often given other tasks,…
lborkowski | February 1, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Texas may boast a booming construction sector, but a deeper look reveals an industry fraught with wage theft, payroll fraud, frighteningly lax safety standards, and preventable injury and death. In reality, worker advocates say such conditions are far from the exception — instead, they've become the norm.
Such conditions were chronicled in a new in-depth report released earlier this week. Researchers, who surveyed nearly 1,200 construction workers in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin and El Paso, found that one in five construction workers experienced a workplace injury…
cmonforton | January 29, 2013[Updated below (6/24/2013)]
The Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson has a story today from the Kentucky coal fields that has my head shaking in disbelief. Reuben Shemwell, 32, says he was fired by Armstrong Coal after complaining about safety problems, including asphyxiation hazards and inappropriate respirators. As provided by the federal Mine Act (Section 105(c)), Shemwell filed a complaint with the U.S. Labor Department's MSHA for wrongful discharge. Now he finds himself being sued by his former employer in Kentucky state court. Armstrong Coal claims that Shemwell filed a "false…
cmonforton | January 23, 2013In the month's preceding the deadly explosion in April 2010 that killed 29 coal miners, Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine had racked up hundreds of serious violations of safety standards. In 2009 alone, this included 48 orders from federal mine inspectors to withdraw workers from the UBB mine because of dangerous conditions. But Massey knew how to game the system. Mine managers would make a couple tweaks, correct the immediate problem, and it was back to mining coal. usually within an hour or so. There was no real consequence for their or other mine operator's repeated…
cmonforton | January 21, 2013We commemorate today the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the inspirational civil rights leader who was assassinated at age 39 in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Rev. King was visiting Memphis to support hundreds of city sanitation workers in their demands for safer working conditions and dignity on the job.
Martin Luther King Jr.
In an interview taped for the StoryCorps project, Mr. Elmore Nickelberry and Mr. Taylor Rogers describe their experience as Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.
Taylor Rogers: "Our day was awful. Everyday. We had these tubs that we had to put the…
lborkowski | January 18, 2013by Kim Krisberg
"To know you participated in building something in your city — it's just an experience, you know?"
Those are words from Austin, Texas, native Christopher McDavid, 22, a graduate of the city's newly established Construction Career Center. During his time at the center, McDavid got certified in flagger safety (flaggers direct the safe passage of traffic through construction areas), first aid and CPR, and basic concrete work and received his OSHA 10 certification, which he said "has opened my eyes to actually see the things that can be harmful to me."
Now, McDavid is looking for…