kkrisberg | December 12, 2014The week of midterm exams is stressful for any college student. For San Francisco State student Michelle Flores, it was another stress-filled example of the unfair conditions she and millions of other retail workers face on a regular basis.
Flores, a 20-year-old labor studies and public policy undergrad, is a cashier at a national grocery store chain and usually works a 24-hour week, though she’d like to work more. Just before midterms, she found out her supervisor expected her to work 30 hours the same week as her exams — and he gave her just two days notice.
“I said I'd work them,” she said…
kkrisberg | December 11, 2014Feeling tired? You’re not alone. A new study finds that many U.S. workers aren’t getting enough sleep, which is essential to optimal health, and that people who work multiple jobs are at heightened risk of getting less than the recommended hours of nightly rest.
To conduct the study, which was published in the December issue of the Sleep journal, researchers examined the responses of nearly 125,000 Americans ages 15 years old and older and who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2011. They found that work was the dominant reason for reporting less sleep across nearly…
egrossman | December 9, 2014“Too many oil and gas industry workers are being hurt or killed on the job,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, David Michaels in remarks delivered to the more than 2,000 people who gathered last week in Houston for the 2014 OSHA Oil & Gas Safety and Health Conference. As part of efforts to address industry safety issues, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has announced a new effort to improve the safety of workers employed in the oil and gas industry.
Described as an “alliance,” the initiative involves a two-year agreement…
cmonforton | December 9, 2014Ricardo Ramos’ work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Michigan OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Hillshire Brands. The 49-year-old was working in May 2014 on the overnight cleaning crew at the company’s Zeeland, Michigan plant when he was caught and pulled into a piece of machinery. The facility prepares and packages Jimmy Dean sausage. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Inspectors with Michigan OSHA conducted an inspection at the Hillshire plant following Ramos’ death. The agency recently issued…
kkrisberg | December 9, 2014In ongoing public health efforts to curb the obesity epidemic, better menu and nutrition labeling is often tapped as a low-cost way to help make the healthy choice, the easy choice. And while the evidence on the effectiveness of such interventions is still emerging, a recent study found that educating young people on the calories in sugar-sweetened beverages did make a positive difference.
Published in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study focused on an experiment inside six corner stores located near middle and high schools within low-income, predominantly…
lborkowski | December 8, 2014Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration published a final rule that updates requirements for what prescription-drug information must disclose about potential effects for pregnant and breastfeeding women and their babies. Under the old labeling rules, drugs were placed in one of five categories -- A, B, C, D, or X -- depending on research findings (or lack thereof). An "A" designation meant that human studies did not find adverse effects in pregnant women or their babies, while and "X" designation meant that studies in humans or animals found a risk of problems to the baby and that…
cmonforton | December 5, 2014I took a little time this week to review the regulatory agenda of worker health and safety initiatives which was issued by the Labor Department. The November 21 document contains a mixed bag of unaddressed workplace hazards and slipped deadlines, as well as a few new topics for possible regulatory action. The fault for some of the slipped deadlines falls right on the doorstep of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), for example, has been working on a rule that would require machines used in coal mines to cut…
cmonforton | December 4, 2014Jesus Velazquez Mendizabal, 43, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Friday, November 28, while working for Formica Construction in Travis, NY located on Staten Island. SILive.com provides some of the details on the worker’s death:
“Mendizabal and three workers were dismantling the old [Dana Ford Lincoln] dealership…when the mezzanine gave out and collapsed to the ground."
Mendizabal was “trapped under the rubble. ...The other three workers escaped the cave-in unharmed.”
Mendizabal had been employed by Formica Construction for 10 years.
NY1.com reports:
"Officials say they received a…
kkrisberg | December 3, 2014As public health practitioners increasingly look upstream to identify the determinants that put people on a trajectory toward lifelong health and wellbeing, early childhood is often tapped as a pivotal intervention point. Now, a new tool is available that practitioners can use to measure neighborhood-level opportunity indicators that are fundamentally linked to children’s health.
In the November issue of Health Affairs, researchers presented the newly developed Child Opportunity Index for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The index covers three domains of opportunity: educational,…
kkrisberg | December 2, 2014“Cows don’t know holidays,” says Alfredo Gomez, a 56-year-old dairy worker in southeastern New Mexico. “Here, there’s no Christmas.”
That’s an opening quote from Joseph Sorrentino’s article on the conditions dairy farm workers face in New Mexico, where he reports that milk production topped $1.5 billion last year and the industry employs thousands of workers. Published yesterday in In These Times, the article chronicles the dangerous conditions that farm workers face as well as the lives of dairy farm animals. Sorrentino reports:
“There’s no training — you just start working,” says Gustavo…
lborkowski | December 1, 2014A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic: Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid
Danielle Paquette in The Washington Post: An Obamacare program helped poor kids and saved money. It was also doomed to fail.
Richard Florida at CityLab: This Holiday Season, Let's Turn Retail Jobs Into Middle-Class Ones
Gabrielle Glaser at ProPublica: Twelve Steps to Danger: How Alcoholics Anonymous Can Be a Playground for Violence-Prone Members
Emily Eakin in The New Yorker: The Excrement Experiment: Treating disease with fecal transplants
cmonforton | November 27, 2014The goofy Thanksgiving tradition took place at the White House again this year: the pardoning of a turkey. Two gobblers, “Mac” and “Cheese,” were competing for the Presidential dispensation which was determined by votes on Twitter. Wednesday morning, I received a White House news alert inviting me to watch a live feed of the pardoning ceremony. I tuned in, faintly hoping that the President would use the lighthearted event---which gets plenty of news coverage each year---for a serious purpose. Would the President raise up and thank the workers who grow, tend, harvest and pack much of the food…
kkrisberg | November 26, 2014Children who have the opportunity to attend full-day preschool programs, versus part-day programs, tend to score higher on school readiness measures such as language, math, socio-emotional development and physical health, according to a recent study. So, why is this finding important to public health? Because education has literally been described as an “elixir” for lifelong health and wellbeing.
When it comes to the upstream factors that can put people on a lifelong trajectory toward longer life expectancy, greater health and less chance of disability and disease, educational achievement is…
kkrisberg | November 25, 2014Months before the first case of Ebola was diagnosed in Texas, the state’s public health laboratory had begun preparing for the disease to reach U.S. shores. And while the virus itself is an uncommon threat in this country, the response of the nation’s public health laboratory system wasn’t uncommon at all — in fact, protecting people’s health from such grave threats is exactly what public health laboratorians are trained to do.
“Having that preparedness background, we’re always ready to get that call at 3 in the morning,” said Grace Kubin, director of the Laboratory Services Section at the…
cmonforton | November 24, 2014(Updates made 11/26/15 appear in [ ])
The Houston Chronicle’s Lise Olsen and Mark Collette continue their reporting of the November 15 incident at DuPont’s La Porte, TX facility that killed four workers. Wade Baker, 60, Gilbert "Gibby" Tisnado, 48, Robert Tisnado, 39, and Crystle Rae Wise 53, were asphyxiated by a release of methyl mercaptan [related to a faulty valve . A faulty valve may have been part of the problem. Alexandra Berzon at the Wall Street Journal reported the trouble may have started with a blockage in the methyl mercaptan line, and that the operation was not properly vented…
cmonforton | November 21, 2014Health and safety hazards encountered by custodians, palm tree workers, day laborers, nurses, and bakery workers are just some of the dozens of different occupations examined in research presented at this year’s annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). The association’s Occupational Health and Safety Section marked its 100th anniversary and members designed the first phase of an electronic timeline to memorialize key events in the Section’s history. A special scientific session explored the OHS Section’s history, starting with its founding co-chairs George Kober, MD…
cmonforton | November 20, 2014Juan Carlos Reyes’ work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Angel AAA Electric, LLC. The 35-year-old was working at a construction site in Harlingen, TX for a new Marriott hotel. He suffered fatal traumatic injuries in May 2014 when he fell from scaffolding while moving supplies into a fourth floor window. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press.
Federal inspectors out of OSHA’s Corpus Christi, TX office conducted an inspection of the worksite following Reyes’…
egrossman | November 19, 2014Often unwatched by all but policy-wonks yet key to determining policies put forth by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Boards. These boards consult with the EPA on the science that influences regulations, particularly on individual chemicals – science that’s used to protect the public from chemical hazards. On Tuesday the House passed a bill, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2013 or H.R. 1422, that would change how the EPA selects Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) members. The White House, in a statement from the Office of Management and…
kkrisberg | November 18, 2014They take care of our most precious resource and yet most of them have to rely on public assistance just to make ends meet.
Katie Johnston at the Boston Globe wrote about a new report from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, which “found that difficulties child-care workers face in making ends meet create high levels of stress that can affect their performance. Recent research has found that adverse interactions with caregivers early on can alter a child’s genetic chemistry, impairing memory, the immune system and mental health.” On average,…
lborkowski | November 17, 2014On Saturday, Healthcare.gov opened for enrollment in 2015 health insurance plans, and so far it’s proceeding without the horrific technical problems that greeted would-be enrollees last year. This year, as will be the case in future years, the enrollment window is just three months long. People can renew the coverage they had last year or choose a new plan. Those with incomes of between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (in 2014, $11,670 - $46,680 for a one-person household, $23,850 - $95,400 for a household of four) are eligible for subsidies to help them afford premiums.
The Obama…