public sector workers

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 20:15:39 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At Reveal, Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter investigate an increasing criminal justice trend in which defendants are sent to rehab, instead of prison. On its face, the idea is a good one, especially for people struggling with addiction. However, the reporters find that many so-called rehab centers are little more than labor camps funneling unpaid workers into private industry.

The story focused on one particular center, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery (CAAIR) in Oklahoma. Started by chicken company executives, CAAIR’s court-ordered residents work full-time at Simmons Foods Inc., a billion-dollar company that processes poultry for businesses like Walmart, KFC and PetSmart. CAAIR residents don’t get paid and aren’t covered by workers’ compensation; if they get injured on the job, they can be kicked out of CAAIR or sent back to prison. Harris and Walter write:

About 280 men are sent to CAAIR each year by courts throughout Oklahoma, as well as Arkansas, Texas and Missouri. Instead of paychecks, the men get bunk beds, meals and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. If there’s time between work shifts, they can meet with a counselor or attend classes on anger management and parenting. Weekly Bible study is mandatory. For the first four months, so is church. Most days revolve around the work.

“Money is an obstacle for so many of these men,” said Janet Wilkerson, CAAIR’s founder and CEO. “We’re not going to charge them to come here, but they’re going to have to work. That’s a part of recovery, getting up like you and I do every day and going to a job.”

The program has become an invaluable labor source. Over the years, Simmons Foods repeatedly has laid off paid employees while expanding its use of CAAIR. Simmons now is so reliant on the program for some shifts that the plants likely would shut down if the men didn’t show up, according to former staff members and plant supervisors.

But Donny Epp, a spokesman for Simmons Foods, said the company does not depend on CAAIR to fill a labor shortage.

“It’s about building relationships with our community and supporting the opportunity to help people become productive citizens,” he said.

The arrangement also has paid off for CAAIR. In seven years, the program brought in more than $11 million in revenue, according to tax filings.

“They came up with a hell of an idea,” said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. “They’re making a killing off of us.”

Read the full story at Reveal.

In other news:

NPR: Kathleen Masterson reports that Ben & Jerry’s has a signed a deal to help improve working conditions on Vermont dairy farms that supply milk to the ice cream company. Representatives from Ben & Jerry’s and Migrant Justice, a farmworker advocacy group, signed the agreement, which commits the company to paying higher prices to dairy farms that join the Milk with Dignity program. The ultimate goal is to source all of the company’s milk through the program, which ensures workers get adequate breaks, time off, paid sick days, safe job conditions and fair housing. Masterson quoted Enrique Balcazar of Migrant Justice: "This is the first expansion that we've seen from the model of worker-driven social responsibly that was pioneered by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the Florida tomato fields. It is a great victory and an honor for us dairy workers to expand that model to the dairy industry of Vermont."

Newsweek: Christianna Silva reports that “Trump’s anti-union Labor Department” has just released a study showing that nearly every union member — 94 percent — has access to employer-provided health coverage. On the flip side, 67 percent of nonunion workers don’t have access to employer-provided health care. The research, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that among workers who have access to employer-provided care, more union workers take advantage of the option. Access the full statistics here.

MassLive: Shira Schoenberg reports that members of the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill to extend OSHA protections to all public-sector workers. In 2014, state lawmakers expanded OSHA protections to cover all executive branch workers, but the protections didn’t cover those working for cities, towns and higher education. The new bill, which still has to get through the state House, would also establish a new Municipal Occupational Health and Safety Subcommittee. The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents reports that each week, about 28 municipal workers suffer injuries that keep them out of work for five days. Schoenberg quoted Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Steven Tolman: "When Massachusetts workers arrive on the job each day, their health and safety protections shouldn't vary depending on whether they work in the public sector or private sector.”

USA Today: Kevin Johnson reports on the directive from Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying federal civil rights law does not protect transgender people from discrimination at work. Not surprisingly, the directive rolls back Obama-era protections that stated the “most straightforward reading” of the law also protected transgender workers. Johnson quoted James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, who said: "Today marks another low point for a Department of Justice which has been cruelly consistent in its hostility towards the LGBT community and in particular, its inability to treat transgender people with basic dignity and respect.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg.

kkrisberg Tue, 10/10/2017 - 16:15

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 14:53:01 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At ProPublica, Michael Grabell expanded his “Insult to Injury” series on the dismantling of the nation’s workers’ compensation system with a disturbing look inside what he dubs the “workers’ comp industrial complex.” He begins his story in Las Vegas at the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo. And even though Grabell’s previous investigations exposed just how much injured workers must struggle to receive fair compensation and medical care, he details a conference draped in luxury and expense. He writes:

A scantily clad acrobat dangles from the ceiling, performing flips and splits as machines puff smoke and neon lights bathe the dance floor in turquoise and magenta. Dancers in lingerie gyrate on poles to the booming techno. Actors dressed as aliens pose for selfies with partygoers. There’s an open bar and waiters weave through the crowd passing out chocolate truffles.

It’s the closing night of the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo.

The party at Light, a Cirque du Soleil-themed club at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, capped off the workers’ comp industry’s biggest annual networking event. For three days in November, hundreds of vendors wooed insurers and employers with lavish after-hours parties, giveaways of designer handbags, photos with Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug, and free rides in orange Hummer limousines.

A top manager for a major insurance company recalled standing amid the hoopla a few years back when a company CEO turned to her and marveled: “All of this because somebody got hurt at work.”

In fact, Grabell reports that while workers’ comp conference attendees typically hear from all kinds of celebrities, such as Arianna Huffington or Pete Rose, they rarely hear from the very people they’re supposed to help: injured workers. He also reports that insurers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on cost-containment programs — for example, in California alone, the money insurers spent on cost containment grew from $197 million in 2005 to $471 million in 2014. With so much money in play that even private equity firms have gone on a “buying spree” within the workers’ comp industrial complex, it’s no surprise that workers are getting left behind. Grabell writes:

Increasingly, though, decisions to deny care aren’t being made by workers’ employers or insurers, but by these myriad claims administrators, managed care companies and cost-containment firms. Some industry observers say the firms have added a layer of cold bureaucracy to an already complicated system. CorVel — a managed care and claims-handling firm whose stock price has nearly doubled in the last three years — recently sent letters to the widows of two police officers killed in the line of duty, wishing their husbands a “speedy recovery.”

There’s even a Facebook group for injured workers who say they’ve been mistreated by Sedgwick (a company that processes claims for large employers).

“I don’t think we have created the savings intended and I think we’ve made the system a much more complex, difficult to navigate system,” said Bob Wilson, who runs the popular industry site, WorkersCompensation.com.

Wilson said he jokes that even though he’s been in the industry for 15 years, he still doesn’t understand what some people do. “No wonder injured workers are getting lost in the system.”

To read Grabell’s entire article, visit ProPublica.

In other news:

In These Times: S.E. Smith writes about Boston hotel employees who work in hotels that pointedly advertise to patients who come to town seeking help at the city’s many medical facilities. Some such workers have reported “carpets so soaked in blood that they squelched underfoot” as well as soiled linens and used needles. In fact, such complaints triggered an OSHA investigation — the agency charged Wyndham Hotel Group with failing to protect workers from biohazards as well as failing to isolate contaminated laundry, among other citations. Smith reports: “It’s a striking set of penalties that should be putting other hospital hotels on notice, as well as a sign for the health care industry that something is going very wrong at some of the hotels they’re recommending to patients and family.”

Atlantic Monthly: With the new year, comes new wages. Bourree Lam reports that with the ringing in of 2016, minimum wage raises went into effect in 12 states. Minimum wages will also rise in Maryland and Washington, D.C., in July, and inflation adjustments will take place in Colorado and South Dakota. Lam writes: “The next battleground, for both proponents and critics, is likely the debate over raising the federal minimum wage — a debate that’s likely to feature prominently in speeches from 2016’s presidential hopefuls.”

Chicago Tribune: Deanese Williams-Harris reports that OSHA is investigating the death of a worker at the Ford Motor Company’s Chicago Assembly Plant. A concrete wall collapsed and killed John Jaloway, 45, and seriously injured another worker. At the time of the incident, Jaloway was removing a section of the wall to make room for a new door. According to Williams-Harris, OSHA has opened an investigation into Litgen Concrete Cutting & Coring Company.

The New York Times: Jesse McKinley reports that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a plan this week to raise the minimum wage for state university workers to $15. The plan would impact about 28,000 workers, including students who have work-study jobs that help pay for tuition while they attend school. When fully enacted by 2021, the wage raise will cost the state $28 million and will be drawn from the state university budget. McKinley writes: “At a rally in Manhattan, the governor framed the action as part of a larger push on his part to increase wages in New York and to add momentum to a national effort to narrow the gap in income between the rich and the poor.”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for nearly 15 years.

kkrisberg Tue, 01/05/2016 - 09:53

Labor Day yearbook highlights worker safety at the state and local levels

kkrisberg — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 15:36:44 +0000

Labor Day yearbook highlights worker safety at the state and local levels

Paid 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 as well, with a new state regulation requiring hospitals to implement safe patient handling programs. Also, a new sick leave law went into full effect in July 2015 and which applies to nearly every employer in California, with no exception for small businesses or employers with less than a particular number of employees. In San Francisco, local officials passed the nation’s first Retail Workers Bill of Rights, which takes on fair scheduling practices and job retention. Within the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA), officials tightened standards to protect workers from heat illness. In addition, employers who are cited for violations by Cal/OSHA will now no longer be able to avoid fixing the problems while filing endless appeals.

Across the country in Massachusetts, worker safety advocates and their partners celebrated the extension of OSHA protections to public sector workers — an issue advocates have been working toward for years. Also in the previous year, Massachusetts public health officials released new recommendations for the prevention of work-related injuries among health care workers. Following last November’s successful ballot initiative, a new sick leave law took effect in the New England state, benefiting nearly 1 million workers who were previously unable to accrue time off to care for themselves or their loved ones.

In Arizona, new safety measures aim to better protect firefighters — measures that were inspired by the deaths of 19 firefighters in 2013. Public sector workers in Maine welcomed new OSHA-approved safety protections, while advocates and workers in Washington state celebrated a court ruling that requires employers to pay farmworkers during their rest breaks. In Wyoming, advocates teamed up with policymakers to draft legislation that would assess a non-negotiable $50,000 fie against a firm that “willfully and knowingly” violates safety laws, resulting in an occupational fatality. Unfortunately, that legislation didn’t make it to the governor’s desk.

In addition to new rules and protections at the state and local levels, reporters at local media outlets chronicled the lives of workers who experience injury and illness on the job. Among the many notable pieces we cover in the report was James Gordon’s piece in the Dallas Morning News, “Death on the Job,” which found that a worker in Texas is 12 percent more likely to be killed on the job than workers performing the same task in a different state. At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Raquel Rutledge told the story of coffee roasting workers who became seriously ill after being exposed to the flavoring chemical diacetyl. And at the New York Daily News, Greg Smith exposed injuries among workers at the World Trade Center site, finding more than two-dozen incidents that were not reported to OSHA.

We write about these news stories and many more state and local activities in this year’s report, which we released on Labor Day. As we mentioned earlier this week, we hope you’ll share the report with your colleagues and partners. Also, add your own comments to this post below — what’s happening in your community or state to advance or threaten worker safety? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, which will highlight some of the previous year’s most notable peer-reviewed literature in occupational health and safety.

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 Wed, 09/09/2015 - 11:36

Study: Black workers in public sector hit hardest by job loss during the recession

kkrisberg — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 17:32:09 +0000

Study: Black workers in public sector hit hardest by job loss during the recession

Sociologist Jennifer Laird was researching unemployment among Mexican immigrants when she came upon some interesting numbers on black workers in the public sector and employment effects of the Great Recession. It piqued her interest and so she decided to keep digging.

She found that while public sector employment had long served as a source of stable employment among black Americans, often enabling mobility into the middle class, downsizing during the Great Recession disproportionately hurt black workers and resulted in greater racial disparities in the public sector. Specifically, Laird, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, found that black public sector workers were more likely to become unemployed than their white or Hispanic counterparts. And even though blacks are considered over-represented in the public sector from a purely statistical viewpoint and relative to overall population numbers — and so they would naturally be more affected by public spending cuts — Laird still found that black public sector employees lost their jobs at a higher rate than their white counterparts.

“It’s not just that unemployment rates were higher,” Laird told me. “It’s that these were really good jobs with really transparent promotion ladders that were high-paying relative to the private sector, so it has direct implications for the black middle class and upward mobility for black workers.”

To conduct the study, Laird used Current Population Survey data between 2003 and 2013 to examine changes in public sector employment. Among her many findings, Laird discovered that black women experienced a particularly strong impact — the black-white employment gap for women increased almost sixfold during the years following the recession, growing from less than a percentage point in 2008 to more than 5 percentage points in 2011. And even after public sector employment for black men returned to their pre-recession levels in 2013, public sector employment among black women was more than 4 percentage points lower than it was in 2008.

“I was surprised to the extent that the public sector wasn’t operating the way we assumed it would,” Laird said. “I had always assumed that public sector employment provided a certain amount of protection, so it was surprising to see how (black employment) fell, particularly for black women.”

The study also found that among unemployed public sector workers, black women were the least likely to find private sector employment and most likely to exit the labor market. Laird, who presented her findings during the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting earlier this month, writes:

My results point to a post-recession double disadvantage for black public sector women: they are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are substantially more likely than other public sector workers to be without work. These two trends are a historical break for the public sector labor market. Among public sector workers, black women are the most likely to enter unemployment and the most likely to exit the labor force. I find that race gaps in public sector employment cannot be explained by differences in education, occupation, or any of the other measurable factors that are typically associated with employment.

Traditionally, working in the public sector is thought to have a protective effect on employment. But Laird found that protective effect “decreased substantially” for black workers, and especially for black women, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, even while white workers remained relatively insulated from job cuts. The data Laird used in her study doesn’t point to the reasons why black workers were hit disproportionately by recession-related job cuts. However, she had a few educated guesses.

She told me that in some instances, the rapid pace of public sector reforms might have contributed. In other words, if public sector management was under extreme pressure to reduce the size of their workforces quickly, layoffs might not have happened in the fairest manner.

For example, in the study, Laird points to Wisconsin, which enacted “sharp and immediate” budget cuts for municipalities in 2011. In the aftermath of such cuts, public sector employment among black residents in Wisconsin continued to decline into 2012, while such employment was rebounding in other states. Laird also hypothesized that as public sector jobs were eliminated and then recreated, jobs that had previously only required a high school education might have now demanded college degrees — “the reclassification of jobs could have had unintended consequences,” she said.

Overall, Laird told me the big takeaway from her study is that cuts in public spending and their related effects on public employment can have inadvertent consequences for certain populations. In turn, she hopes her study will encourage decision-makers to carefully consider how changes in public sector spending affect different communities.

In conclusion, her study suggested “that without a course correction, further efforts to dismantle the public sector will most likely have a negative effect on the workers who have historically gained the most from public sector employment.”

For a full copy of Laird’s study, visit http://students.washington.edu/jdlaird.

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 Fri, 08/28/2015 - 13:32

Massachusetts extends OSHA protections to state workers: It’s about ‘creating an infrastructure that supports health and safety’

kkrisberg — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 17:22:46 +0000

Massachusetts extends OSHA protections to state workers: It’s about ‘creating an infrastructure that supports health and safety’

Back in 1970 when the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established, local policymakers could choose whether or not to extend OSHA protections to state employees. Unfortunately, Massachusetts took a pass. But decades later — and after years of advocacy, organizing and research on the part of worker advocates — employees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can now look forward to safer and healthier workplaces.

In June 2014, then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed legislation that expanded OSHA protections to executive branch employees — that’s more than 150,000 workers. The law, which went into effect in March, requires that the new executive branch safety and health measures be at least as protective as OSHA standards. Advocates estimate that the new protections will not only save lives and avert preventable injury, illness and disability, it could save the state significant costs in medical care and workers’ compensation. While current Gov. Charlie Baker proposed $500,000 in funding to support the state Department of Labor Standards in implementing the new law and establishing safety standards, community advocates will continue to play a central role in making the law an on-the-ground reality.

“I think (the law) will save numerous lives and it will certainly save the Commonwealth money, some of which can be reinvested in preventing illness and injury,” Margaret O’Connor, associate director of health and safety at the Massachusetts Nurses Association, told me. “This whole process is about creating an infrastructure that supports health and safety.”

Nurses employed by state hospitals are among the thousands of executive branch workers who will benefit from the OSHA extension, as will highway engineers, electrical workers, community college employees, law enforcement officers, custodial personnel and many more occupational sectors. Before the new law, state employees weren't covered by the same worker protection standards as their peers in the private sector, with each state agency addressing workplace health and safety on its own.

But with 150 state agencies, the process was not terribly effective and many agencies simply lacked the technical expertise to implement and keep abreast of ever-evolving worker safety science and standards. In essence, the fragmented system was primarily reactive, not proactive. In contrast, the new law centralizes the work of protecting executive employee health and safety, takes full advantage of OSHA’s evidence-based practices and protocols, and prioritizes prevention.

Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH), described the new law as “groundbreaking.” MassCOSH was part of a broad coalition of employee organizations, labor unions and safety advocates that spent years working with state labor officials on the issue of extending OSHA protections. A pivotal point in the process was the 2009 signing of Executive Order 511, which established the Massachusetts Employee Safety and Health Advisory Committee and charged it with examining safety among state workers and making recommendations to prevent further injury and illness. The order also established individual worker health and safety committees within state agencies. Overall, the order called for the “creation of an infrastructure that will allow for on-going assessment and improvement of health and safety conditions for Commonwealth employees on the job.”

“At the time, there was a complete inconsistency in safety protections (for executive branch workers),” Goldstein-Gelb, a member of the advisory committee, told me. “But to have so many stakeholders united on this front was so exciting.”

In March 2014, the state advisory committee released its report, finding that the state spends about $31 million every year on direct medical care and workers’ compensation wage costs associated with work-related injuries and illnesses within the executive branch and about $48 million across all branches of state government. However, when including lump sum settlements, rehabilitation, lost time, replacement worker costs, reduced productivity and administrative time, the costs doubled to $62 million for the executive branch and $96 million across all state agencies.

Based on reported claims between fiscal years 2010 and 2012, the report found that more than 3,000 state workers experienced job-related injuries serious enough to require time off from work and four workers died. The three agencies with the most lost-time claims were the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, where, for example, nurses face high risks of ergonomic injuries as well as assault by violent patients; the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, whose employees are at high risk of motor vehicle injuries; and the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, where workers also face the risk of workplace violence. The report reads: “There is a clear need for full use of the technical worker protection standards, such as the OSHA standards, as well as a health and safety management system. Both are needed in concert to protect the Commonwealth’s workforce from preventable injuries and illnesses.”

Goldstein-Gelb provided me with a memo from the state’s Department of Labor Standards comparing the cost of workplace injury to the cost of prevention. Here’s just one insightful example: During fiscal years 2010 through 2012, there was an average of more than 1,000 injuries per year across the executive branch in the lifting/moving/walking category. To date, the cost of such injuries neared $77,000. The cost of investing in prevention? About $50 per employee to receive training in proper lifting techniques. Also, the same year former Gov. Patrick signed Executive Order 511, MassCOSH and Massachusetts AFL-CIO released a report on work-related fatalities in conjunction with Workers’ Memorial Day that highlighted the death of a state electrical worker. In investigating the death, state officials found the incident might have been prevented if certain OSHA standards had been in place.

The state advisory committee report issued a number of recommendations in response to Executive Order 511, including implementing a statewide policy that all agencies use nationally recognized worker safety standards and formalizing the role of health and safety committees. Goldstein-Gelb told me that while some policymakers were initially uneasy about the cost of extending OSHA protections, the report made it clear that closing safety gaps would not be prohibitively expensive and would likely save money in the long term.

“It certainly took a lot of effort, but in the end, many (decision-makers) were very receptive,” she said.

In addition to extending OSHA protections to executive workers, the new law also codified the advisory committee, which is now known as the Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Board. The board includes a representative from MassCOSH, four labor representatives, a representative from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and representatives from the administration. The advisory board will have a central role in implementing the law, including training, technical assistance and enforcement.

Goldstein-Gelb said the state Department of Labor Standards promulgated regulations related to the new law late last year, effectively adopting most OSHA standards. However, she said one OSHA standard is notably missing from the new Massachusetts protections — Section 11(c) of the OSH Act, which protects workers against retaliation for speaking up about unsafe or unhealthful workplace conditions.

Today, MassCOSH is working with public employee unions and state officials to educate state agencies on the new OSHA protections and continues to advocate for the funding necessary to effectively implement the law. Goldstein-Gelb said MassCOSH also recently launched an effort to bring workplace health and safety to municipal employees as well.

According to O’Connor at the Massachusetts Nurses Association, the new OSHA protections bring the science of prevention to the lives of executive workers.

“I think this is, without a doubt, one of the most important pieces of legislation that the Commonwealth has seen in years,” she said.

To learn more about the new OSHA protections, visit MassCOSH.

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 Fri, 06/05/2015 - 13:22