cmonforton | September 19, 2013Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced last week the Safe Meat and Poultry Act (S. 1502). The bill would require USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) to take new steps to decrease foodborne pathogens, including authority to compel producers to recall contaminated meat and poultry.
The legislative text is 73 pages long, but one short paragraph caught my eye: a provision addressing the serious health and safety hazards to which meat and poultry workers are exposed. It's an issue that we've written about many times (e.g.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). It…
lborkowski | September 18, 2013Earlier this week, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed legislation that accepts the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion for his state, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has signaled his intention to do so if the federal government approves his proposed program changes. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff notes that if Pennsylvania does expand its Medicaid program, that will mean the majority of the states have adopted one of the main aspects of the Affordable Care Act. This is good news for the millions of low-income uninsured US residents who will gain health coverage from Medicaid.
Another…
lborkowski | September 17, 2013Earlier today, Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez announced that the Department of Labor has finalized a rule extending minimum-wage and overtime protections to home care workers. Starting on January 1, 2015, the wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act will apply to home health aides, personal care aides, and other direct care workers employed by agencies. The agencies will have to pay workers minimum wage ($7.25/hour in those states that haven't adopted higher minimum wages) and 1.5 times their regular wage for hours worked above 40 per week. In addition, workers who travel…
cmonforton | September 16, 2013A fourth official formerly associated with Massey Energy was sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison for conspiring to thwart federal mine safety laws. David C. Hughart, 54, appeared this week before U.S. District Judge Irene Baker for his sentencing hearing. Hughart plead guilty in February 2013, following charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
U.S. attorney Booth Goodwin’s staff have been investigating former Massey Energy personnel (the firm was purchased by Alpha Natural Resources in 2011) as part of DOJ's criminal investigation related to the April 2010 Upper Big Branch (…
lborkowski | September 13, 2013Days before the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the New York Times published an article about respirators. This protective equipment was intended to protect response and recovery workers at Ground Zero, but often failed to do so because of discomfort, inadequate training, or unsuitable equipment. Thousands were exposed to airborne contaminants, and many have become sick.
In the years since, federal agencies and equipment manufacturers have been working on developing new certification standards for respirator masks and assuring they can be used by workers responding to…
cmonforton | September 12, 2013The Environmental Defense Fund and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) both reported last week (here, here) on the Obama Administration’s decision to withdraw two actions being proposed under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Chemical manufacturers strongly opposed the measures. Now, advocates of environmental protection, public health and chemical right-to-know really are exasperated with the sheepish manner the Obama Administration behaves when pressed by powerful interests.
“It seems like a lifetime ago that the Obama Administration came to power and immediately ramped up the…
lborkowski | September 11, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Dorry Samuels Levine at National COSH: On 12th anniversary of September 11 attacks, more than 1,100 reported cases of cancer among responders and survivors
Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
Laura Helmuth at Slate: Fourteen Oddball Reasons You're Not Dead Yet
Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post's Wonkblog: How the cult of shareholder value wrecked American business
Lisa Schnirring at CIDRAP: CDC head: Global disease threats call for better tools
Steven Wilmsen at Reporting on Health: Immersive coverage of health issues…
cmonforton | September 10, 2013Occupational health hazards are often hidden, and may not even be appropriately disclosed to workers who are exposed. They are usually shielded from public view, meaning they don't get the attention needed to ensure protections are put in place to address them. But every once in a while, hazards to workers' health are right in front of you.
Yesterday morning, I was driving on FM 1626 in Kyle, TX and passed this scene: Two construction workers standing in a nasty cloud of dust. The men were working at the new campus of Austin Community College in Hays County, TX and were cutting stone…
egrossman | September 9, 2013Nearly 50 billion pounds of chicken (about eight billion chickens’ worth, or 37 billion pounds of poultry products) were processed in the United States in 2012 by about half a million workers, many of whom handle more than 100 birds per minute. This labor involves standing in chilled processing plant facilities, cutting, gutting, scalding, defeathering and hanging birds as they speed by on automated machinery, often at more than one bird per second. According to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), since 1975,workers in this industry have consistently suffered injuries…
lborkowski | September 6, 2013As Celeste and I were putting together The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2012 – Summer 2013 (released on Labor Day), we noticed that many of the year’s developments in occupational health and safety occurred in various parts of the food chain. From fields and silos to poultry plants to fast-food restaurants, workers are speaking up about unsafe and unjust conditions, and demanding improvements. Here are some of the highlights:
Agricultural hazards in the news: Investigative reporters have done a terrific job delving into the unsafe conditions agricultural workers face.…
cmonforton | September 5, 2013This week, Liz and I have been highlighting parts of our second annual review of U.S. occupational health and safety. The first two sections of the report summarize key studies in the peer-reviewed literature, and an assessment of activities at the federal level. In section three of the report we present high points---and a few low points---from state and local governments on workers’ rights and safety protections. These include:
New laws in Portland, Oregon and New York City requiring many employers to offer paid sick leave to their employees. With 22 percent of the U.S. workforce in…
lborkowski | September 4, 2013A regular contributor to The Pump Handle, Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA, and his co-editor Phyllis Freeman wrote the following editorial which is available at the Journal of Public Health Policy.
In early July 2013, James R. Clapper, Jr, United States Director of National Intelligence apologized to the Chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for ‘clearly erroneous’ statements made during public testimony before the committee in March.1 In his testimony, he denied that the National Security Agency collected private data on millions of American citizens. In a television interview,…
cmonforton | September 3, 2013As Liz Borkowski noted yesterday, we are following up on a tradition that we started last year to mark Labor Day. We released our second annual review of U.S. occupational health and safety for Labor Day 2013.
Liz explained in her post our objectives in preparing the report. She also highlighted its first section which profiles some of the best research from the year published in both peer-reviewed journals and by non-profit organizations. Here’s a peek at section two of the report on activities at the federal level:
Sequestration and other budget cuts have affected our worker protection…
lborkowski | September 2, 2013Last year, Celeste Monforton and I started a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year. The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2012 – Summer 2013, the second edition in the annual series, is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each April…
kkrisberg | August 30, 2013For older workers, the most dangerous occupational move may be getting behind the wheel.
Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that among highway transportation incidents, which are the leading cause of occupational death in the country, the highest fatality rates occur among workers ages 65 years old and older. In fact, workers in that age group experienced a fatality rate three times higher than workers ages 18 to 54. The unfortunate trend was seen across industries and occupations and among most demographic groups, according to data published in…
sgorman | August 29, 2013In Los Angeles in 1924, after a series of mysterious deaths, Yersinia pestis, or bubonic plague, was swiftly identified as the culprit. Immediate quarantine of exposed people in selected areas helped to make the outbreak less than a devastating epidemic. But some public officials and newspaper reporters, in a desperate attempt to explain the origins of the illness, began equating the disease with people of Mexican descent. Panic quickly struck the city. Hotels and restaurants fired thousands of Latino workers. Health officials destroyed houses in low-income neighborhoods deemed “public health…
cmonforton | August 28, 2013President Obama's regulatory czar, Howard Shelanski, has been on the job for a month. During his confirmation hearing Shelanski expressed his commitment to transparency. He suggested it was one of his key priorities within the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) which is housed within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As noted, however, by CPR scholar Sidney Shapiro and his colleague James Goodwin, OIRA has a long history of secrecy with respect to its role in the centralized review of agencies' regulatory activities. Many in the open-government…
egrossman | August 28, 2013On July 5, James Baldasarre, a 45-year old a Medford, Massachusetts US Postal Service employee who had worked for USPS for 24 years, died from excessive heat. According to news reports, shortly before collapsing in the 95-degree heat, Baldasarre texted his wife to say, “I’m going to die out here today. It’s so hot.” On July 9, Juan Ochoa, a 37-year old farm worker in Tulare County, California about 35 miles north of Bakersfield, died from heat while checking on irrigation equipment in a lemon orchard. The temperatures that day reportedly climbed to 105º and 106ºF. According to his brother,…
kkrisberg | August 26, 2013Helping others isn't only the right thing to do, it's the healthy thing to do.
In a recent study published in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), researchers found that helping others was a predictor of reduced mortality because it buffers the relationship between stress and death. In other words, stress did not predict mortality among people who had helped others in the past year, but it did predict mortality among those who had not helped others.
In fact, study researchers found that their data, along with previous data, "indicate that help given to others…
cmonforton | August 23, 2013After more than 900 days of "review" by the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), OSHA announced it was publishing a proposed rule to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. It's a workplace hazard that causes the irreversible and progressive lung disease silicosis, and is also associated with lung cancer, autoimmune disorders and kidney disease. About 2.2 million workers are exposed to the fine dust in their jobs, many of which are employed in the construction industry. I've been writing here for about two years on the need for a…