City of Houston

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 18:18:27 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

Maquiladora workers (manufacturing workers) in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, are at the center of a growing worker rebellion in border factories, which employ more than 69,000 people, are nearly all foreign-owned, and pay some of the lowest wages along the border, reports David Bacon in The Nation. In fact, manufacturing workers in Juárez typically make 18 percent less than the average manufacturing worker in one of Mexico’s border cities. Bacon reports:

Ali Lopez, a single mother at the planton outside the ADC CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. “The only way a single mother can survive here is with help from family or friends,” she says. Lopez has two daughters, one 13 and one 6 years old. “I can’t spend any time with them because I’m always working. When I leave in the morning, I leave food for the older one to warm up for lunch. Childcare would cost 200 pesos a week or more, so I can’t afford it.”

A cold winter has already descended on Ciudad Juárez, close to freezing at night. Parents worry that children at home alone with a heater for warmth risk fire in highly flammable homes of cardboard or castoff pallets from factories. “We just have enough money to eat soup and beans,” she explains. “We don’t eat meat.” Lopez’s wage is 600 pesos a week (about $36). “No one can live on this. A fair wage would be 250 pesos a day. In the United States people make in one hour what it takes us all day to earn.”

Bacon reports that the new worker movement began in August, as anger over workplace conditions began to boil over. For example, at the company CommScope, supervisors reportedly charged 50 pesos a week to put a worker’s name on the list for overtime. A CommScope worker who complained was sent to a special work area known as “the prison,” according to a worker interviewed in the story. In mid-September, nearly 200 CommScope workers filed a request for an independent union. However, the company began retaliating, eventually firing 171 workers in October. Bacon reports:

This new wave of worker protests, therefore, is breaking the fear and terror that has gripped working-class neighborhoods for over a decade. Elizabeth Flores has been director of the Pastoral Center for Workers, a center within the Catholic diocese of Ciudad Juárez that has advocated for the welfare of maquiladora workers for the past 15 years. According to Flores, “Each week a woman comes through our center looking for her daughter. At the same time, parents have lost hope that any better future awaits their children other than a job in the maquiladora. And young people themselves don’t want to go to work there. Spend their lives—for what?”

Nevertheless, she says, “People are tired of the abuse, which has been terrible. They had to lose their fear to protest, but desperation and anger are potent antidotes to fear.”

Read the entire article at The Nation.

In other news:

ABC13 News Houston: Reporters Ted Oberg and Trent Seibert investigate whether OSHA has the capacity to keep workers in Houston safe, noting that no other OSHA office is responsible for more refineries than the Houston South office. In addition, Houston is home to the highest rate of new construction in the country. Currently, OSHA has 24 compliance officers to cover the entire Houston area. Oberg and Seibert write: “Interviews with attorneys suggest that companies — armed with teams of attorneys — can chip away at big OSHA fines until the firms are paying just pennies on the dollar. ‘OSHA has to move on,’ attorney Lance Walters said. ‘There are over 4000 deaths a year in Texas. They have other cases they have to worry about. When they're limited in manpower and resources there's only so much they can do.’”

The Hill: Reporters Tim Devaney and Lydia Wheeler write that congressional Republicans are unveiling the National Labor Relations Board Reform Act, which would roll back the agency’s ability to oversee workplace disputes and slash its budget.

In These Times: Bruce Vail reports that the Fight for $15 has landed on the doorsteps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Cooks and waiters working for a catering company that operates the Senate restaurant are calling for better wages and the right to form a union. In fact, Vail reports that 34 members of the Senate are standing in support of the campaign. In a letter to members of the Senate who oversee the catering contract, chef James Powell wrote: “I’ve worked as a Senate chef for 5 years, but I only make $13 an hour. I’m a single father and it’s hard to support my son on a poverty wage. The cost of living in Washington is so expensive that I recently ended up homeless. I lived in an abandoned house for nearly two months. That’s how long it took me to save up enough money to rent a bedroom in an apartment. I often had to skip meals to save money.”

My Fox Memphis: Chris Higginbottom, 39, a single father of twin boys, was killed while working at a FedEx hub in Memphis. The death is the shipping company’s third in five years. According to the news report, Higginbottom died after crashing a large vehicle used to move merchandise to and from FedEx airplanes and the warehouse. OSHA is conducting an investigation. The article reports: “After looking through previous OSHA investigations, FOX13 discovered similar reports and incidents in the past. In each case, an employee either fell off of heavy equipment, or heavy equipment fell on top of the employee.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

kkrisberg Tue, 11/24/2015 - 13:18

Houston excavation company risks workers' lives, now it should lose government contracts

cmonforton — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:58:46 +0000

Houston excavation company risks workers' lives, now it should lose government contracts

How is it that a construction firm that specializes in underground utility work and excavation can be so dense when it comes to knowing the fundamentals of protecting workers from cave-ins? Or is it that they know the fundamentals but just choose not to apply them.

The Houston-area excavation firm SER Construction Partners was cited last month by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for willfully failing to comply with standards for safe excavation practices. The OSHA news release announcing the sanction appropriately, noting:

"A cave-in can turn into a grave in a matter of seconds. Failing to protect workers from cave-ins is simply unacceptable."

What's really appalling is that it's not the first time this company has been caught breaking federal worker safety rules for excavation and trenching (i.e., 29 CFR 1926.651 and 29 CFR 1926.652.) For these rules alone, the firm received citations from OSHA in:

September 2009 for a SERIOUS violation (and paid a penalty of $765)
September 2010 for a REPEAT and a SERIOUS violation (and paid a penalty of $8,000)
December 2010 for a REPEAT violation (and paid a penalty of $5,300) and
November 2012 for a REPEAT violation (and paid a penalty of $25,987)

The most recent OSHA citation explains:

"an employee was exposed to cave-in hazards while working in an excavation without an adequate protective system"

which would simply entail proper sloping, shoring or shielding of the underground area. The penalty proposed by OSHA is $70,000.

Since 2008, SER Construction Partners has also received citations from OSHA for other worker safety violations. And it gets worse. OSHA has also conducted inspections of this company's worksites following serious injuries that led to worker deaths. One of those incidents occurred in October 2007 and another in April 2011. After all this, I wonder if another sort of sanction---one that really hits their pocketbook----would force this company to drastically change their operations.

SER Construction Partners receives millions of dollars of revenue from local government contracts. In just the last 10 months, under contracts for public works projects, the firm has received nearly $20 million in revenue from the City of Houston. Repeat, $20 million in just the last 10 months from just the City of Houston.

A company brochure lists a slew of other Texas municipalities---from Laredo, League City and Pasadena, to Sugar Land and Corpus Christi----which are current or former clients of SER Construction Partners. What if these government contracts dried up, or were made void based on SER's poor safety performance? Maybe that's the incentive needed for a firm like this to stop gambling with workers' lives in a cave-in.

Last month, Maryland lawmakers introduced a bill in the State legislature to do something just like this. If adopted, the law would require the State's Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation to establish a safety rating system and safety questionnaire to qualify firms to bid on a State public works project. The rating system would include a variety of factors, including the company's history of:

citations and penalties issued by occupational safety and health agencies
stop work orders
workers' compensation experience modification rates

As well as the firm's methods for:

involving on-site employees in the identification hazards and solutions to address them
communicating safety information and training employees
protecting whistleblowers
evaluating subcontractors' safety performance
and more.

A firm that provides false information to this safety rating system would be prohibited, for up to 3 years, from qualifying to bid on a State public works project.

The sponsors of this Maryland legislation see that it's no longer enough for government contracts to simply say "Contractor shall comply with all federal and state safety rules and regulations." If adopted, firms will need to demonstrate in multiple ways their high-bar safety performance and compete against other firms with strong safety management systems.

SER Construction Partners has a history of repeatedly violating federal safety standards designed to protect workers from excavation cave-ins. Prequalifying based on safety performance may not be on the books in Houston or other Texas municipalities, but this most recent OSHA citation against SER Construction Partners should set off some red flags for government officials who make decisions about public works contractors.

cmonforton Tue, 03/05/2013 - 10:58