cmonforton | October 10, 2015The criminal trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship began this week in Charleston, WV. The company’s Upper Big Branch mine was the site of the massive coal dust explosion in April 2010 which killed 29 coal miners. The Justice Department’s case against Blankenship involves conspiring to violate mine safety regulations and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the company’s compliance with safety regulations.
The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. and his colleagues have a website dedicated to the Blankenship trial. It offers readers regular…
kkrisberg | October 9, 2015Earlier this week, the White House hosted a Summit on Worker Voice, welcoming organizers from more traditional labor groups, such as unions, as well as voices from new worker movements, such as Fight for $15. At the summit, President Obama spoke about wages, the power of collective action and the growing “gig” economy.
Many of the summit remarks weren’t necessarily groundbreaking or even entirely surprising. But as the right to organize is increasingly under fire in Congress and in state legislatures — while at the same time, low-wage workers are finding new ways to band together and demand…
kkrisberg | October 6, 2015Americans with lower incomes and educational attainment often live shorter, sicker lives than their wealthier, more educated counterparts. Contributors to these disparities can include access to care, hazardous living conditions, nutrition in early childhood, and personal behaviors. But what about workplace conditions? Do certain groups of people get sorted into jobs that exacerbate inequalities in life expectancy?
That’s the question a study published in this month’s issue of Health Affairs confronted. The researchers noted that while previous research shows that a “variety of working…
kkrisberg | October 5, 2015Anyone who’s lived in a big, dense city is familiar with the sight of bicycle messengers weaving their way in between metro buses and taxi cabs, down side streets and around packed crosswalks, pedaling at impressive speeds and often with remarkable agility. Surprisingly, however, there’s little data on these workers, even though it seems they’d be particularly susceptible to injuries on the job.
To fill in that knowledge gap, a group of researchers from New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center decided to take a deeper look. Hypothesizing that those commercial…
cmonforton | October 2, 2015More than 1.5 million US farmworkers will be better protected in the years ahead because of a new regulations issued this week by the EPA. The agency’s Worker Protection Standard (WPS) addresses the hazards related to pesticide exposure for farmworkers. The WPS was initially adopted by EPA in 1992, but considered inadequate by many affected workers and public health experts.
“In my experience as a farmworker, I have seen many people affected by exposure to chemicals,”
explained Miguel, who provided comments to EPA during the agency’s rulemaking process.
“I have heard of [people needing] liver…
cmonforton | September 30, 2015I’m still shaking my head and asking out loud, “what were they thinking?” Am I getting this right?: Volkswagen installed software so its diesel-polluting vehicles would deceive EPA-mandated emissions tests. And buyers of the vehicles were deceived by Volkswagen. The company led them to believe they could get a car with power, performance, high miles per gallon, and “clean diesel,” while not suffering from sticker shock.
What those owners and the rest of us didn’t know was the price we were paying in terms of public health. Brad Plumer at Vox offers a back-of-the-envelope estimate on the air…
kkrisberg | September 29, 2015Collective bargaining and the fair-share fees that enable unions to negotiate for better working conditions that ultimately benefit all workers in a particular sector or workplace may truly be in peril, writes Lily Eskelsen García in The Nation.
In “Unions in Jeopardy,” García writes about the legal precedent upholding fair-share agreements and recent legal threats threatening to dismantle a core tenet of labor relations. She begins the article with the 2012 case Knox v. SEIU, in which she said the Supreme Court “went out of its way to cast doubt” on fair share representation fees. In…
lborkowski | September 28, 2015The death toll from last week's stampede at the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca has passed 700; on Saturday, Saudi Arabia's health ministry reported 769 deaths and 934 people injured. Basma Attasi reports for Al Jazeera that the stampede occurred when two waves of pilgrims collided -- but that there are conflicting reports about why that happened:
One crowd had just finished a ritual in which pilgrims throw pebbles at three stone columns representing the devil - a rite central to Hajj - when it ran into another wave of people heading to perform the rite.
Sources close to the government said…
kkrisberg | September 25, 2015The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers it one of five neglected parasitic infections in need of targeted public health action. And while its transmission is still considered rare in the U.S., it seems residents of Texas may be at greater risk than scientists previously thought.
The disease is American Trypanosomiasis, more commonly known as Chagas disease. Chagas is a vector-borne disease in which the parasite is transmitted to animals and people by blood-sucking insects known as “assassin bugs” or “kissing bugs” (here’s what the bugs look like). However, the parasite isn’t…
cmonforton | September 25, 2015The American Chemistry Council (ACC) has teamed up with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to push a bill in Congress to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA). We’ve written previously (e.g., here, here, here) about this flawed legislation (S.697). Regrettably, it has 55 Republicans and Democrats supporting it and the full Senate will likely be voting on the bill in the coming weeks.
Although EDF and ACC assert broad support for the legislation, I wish the Senators would pay attention to the 450 health, environmental and labor groups that oppose S.697. Their coalition is…
kkrisberg | September 24, 2015In the U.S., the gap in life expectancy by income is getting wider. To be even clearer: Life expectancy for people with higher incomes has gone up over time, while life expectancy for people earning lower incomes has actually declined.
In “The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses,” which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released last week, authors analyzed life expectancy patterns among Americans born in 1930 and compared them with projections among a group of Americans born in 1960. They found that top-…
kkrisberg | September 23, 2015For years, scientists have described climate change as a slowly emerging public health crisis. But for many, it’s difficult to imagine how a complex planetary phenomenon can impact personal well-being beyond the obvious effects of natural disasters, which climatologists say will happen more frequently and intensely as the world warms. That disconnect is what piqued my interest in a new study on old infrastructure, heavy rainfalls and spikes in human illness.
Drinking water quality is among the many adverse effects that climate change is expected to have on human health. But what exactly does…
cmonforton | September 23, 2015Alejandro Anguiana’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Indiana OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Markman Peat.
The 41 year-old was working in March 2015 at the company’s operation in Kingsbury, IN. The initial press reports indicated that Anguiana was pulled into a piece of machinery when his sweatshirt got wrapped around the power takeoff shaft. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with Indiana OSHA conducted an inspection at the workplace following the fatal incident. The agency…
lborkowski | September 21, 2015by Jonathan Heller
The dominant narrative in the United States is that, as individuals, we hold the key to our own success. We are told to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and that if we just try hard enough, we’ll succeed.
In the world of health, this translates into a focus on personal behaviors: eat well, get exercise, don’t smoke, and you’ll be healthy. The health care system becomes the solution to health problems: if we are sick, a doctor can fix our individual problem. There are, of course, exceptions to this way of thinking. But, by and large, this is our narrative of health.
We in…
lborkowski | September 21, 2015Last week, 203 business-school faculty members from 88 institutions across the US wrote an open letter to members of Congress stating, "It is time to ensure that the entire United States workforce has access to paid family and medical leave." The signatories urge our legislators to consider the Family and Medical Leave Insurance Act (FAMILY Act) as one solution. This bill, which I wrote about here when it was first introduced, would use a payroll tax of two-tenths of one percent to fund a "social insurance" system that would allow all workers to take up to 12 partially paid weeks off work to…
cmonforton | September 18, 2015It puts a smile on my face when I come across a worker who uses ingenuity to address a safety hazard.
I had a big grin yesterday as I was leaving a restaurant in Austin, TX. I was walking around the outside of the building toward the area where I’d parked my car. I saw one of the restaurant’s employees dragging a garbage can toward a dumpster. I looked away for just a minute and in that brief moment, he'd propped open the dumpster lid, like so:
Restaurant worker with gadget to keep dumpster lid open, Austin, TX (September 17, 2015)
It’s been quite a few years since I worked in a…
cmonforton | September 17, 2015Terry Leon Lakey, 51, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Wednesday, September 16, 2015 while working at Terex Services in Waco, TX. KCEN reports:
*The incident occurred at 5:40 am when “the victim was crushed by a piece of hydraulic equipment.”
The CSB affiliate in Waco was more specific, reporting:
*Mr. Lakey “was crushed by the hydraulic aerial lift that he was servicing.”
The Waco Tribune indicates:
*"Terex officials did not answer the phone Wednesday and did not return phone messages."
Terex is multinational firm that manufacturers and services industrial machinery and equipment. Its…
kkrisberg | September 16, 2015Investigative reporter Mark Collette at the Houston Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen former employees with a combined 213 years of experience on the production lines of Blue Bell’s flagship ice cream plant in Brenham, Texas, finding stories of routine food safety lapses and failures to protect worker safety. The company made headlines over the summer after a national listeria outbreak was traced back to the well-known ice cream manufacturer.
Among the former workers interviewed was Sabien Colvin, who lost parts of three of his fingers after a machine he was cleaning unexpectedly turned…
sgorman | September 16, 2015As most people in any empirical or scientific field know, the gold standard for experimenting and establishing causality is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In an RCT, subjects are randomly assigned to one of two conditions: an experimental group or a control group. The experimental group receives the intervention or drug and the control group receives standard care or a placebo (basically, the equivalent of the status quo). The idea behind the randomized controlled trial is to control the circumstances surrounding the experimental question as much as possible. This allows researchers…
cmonforton | September 15, 2015For the second time this year, OSHA has put a poultry company on notice for inappropriate medical treatment of injured workers. The agency sent a letter last month to Delaware-based Allen Harim Foods raising concerns about the company's use of emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to treat chronic injuries and practices that contradict the firm's written protocols for treating injured workers.
The agency’s letter is a follow-up to citations issued in June to Allen Harim Foods, a topic I wrote about in “Crippled hands, strained bladders.” OSHA's letter, dated August 7, 2015, contains themes…