cmonforton | August 23, 2013Marshall Turner, 55 and James "Bubba" Rains, 34 were part of an asphalt paving crew, working on I-55 in Crittenden County, Arkansas. On the evening of April 16, 2013, a pick-up truck driven by an Illinois man swerved into the closed-off construction work zone and struck Turner and Rains. Both men were fatally injured.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, on average, 110 workers are killed each year while working in roadway and highway work zones. In 2011, the most recent year in which data is available, the number of fatalities was 119. Thirteen of the deaths occurred in Texas,…
lborkowski | August 21, 2013In a recent article in Environmental Health Perspectives, Charles W. Schmidt takes on the topic of artisanal brick kilns, a major source of pollution in developing countries. The article focuses largely on Latin America, where the Swiss-funded group EELA (that's Eficiencia Energética en Ladrilleras Artesanales, which translates to Energy Efficiency in Artisanal Bricks) is working to "modernize artisanal brick making in Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico."
It takes a lot of heat to turn mud, clay, and other substances into bricks, so kilns are…
lborkowski | August 20, 2013By Veronica Tinney and Jerome Paulson
Children breathe more air, drink more water and eat more food per unit of body weight than adults. Therefore, if a child’s air, water or food is contaminated with chemicals, children receive a larger dose per unit of body weight than would an adult in the same situation. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) has been unable to regulate chemicals effectively, and new chemical legislation must consider these key physiological differences.
TSCA, which became law in 1976, gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limited authority to regulate…
lborkowski | August 19, 2013Wage theft – when employers fail to pay workers what they’ve earned – has been in the news lately:
In a lawsuit that could become a class-action suit, two former Apple store employees allege that the company failed to pay employees for time spent waiting for bag searches – time they say the employer required them to spend at the worksite, but for which they were off the clock and not paid.
In California, a joint enforcement action by the California Labor Commissioner’s office and CalOSHA (part of the multi-agency Labor Enforcement Task Force) at a Holiday Inn Express construction site has…
kkrisberg | August 16, 2013In their efforts to protect the most vulnerable workers from illegal workplace practices and conditions, worker centers have now attracted the million-dollar ire of formidable anti-union forces. And while advocates say it's a sign of worker centers' success, it's still a worrisome trend that's made it all the way to the halls of Congress.
In late July, a full-page ad ran in the Wall Street Journal accusing worker centers of being fronts for labor unions. The ad was paid for by a group calling itself the Center for Union Facts, a nonprofit with a $3 million-plus budget run by industry lobbyist…
lborkowski | August 15, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Osha Gray Davidson in Rolling Stone: The Great Burning: How Wildfires Are Threatening the West
Courtney Subramanian at TIME's Healthland blog: Rebranding Climate Change as a Public Health Issue
Harold Pollack at Washington Post's Wonkblog: 85 million Americans lack dental coverage. Fixing that requires more than just money.
Abraham Lustgarten at ProPublica: Unfair Share: How Oil and Gas Drillers Avoid Paying Royalties
Heather Rousseau at NPR's Shots blog: In Rural Uganda, Homemade Bikes Make the Best Ambulances
cmonforton | August 14, 2013My summer road trip took me through the scenic State of Oklahoma. As I drove heading north through the Sooner country, billboards line I-35. They didn't advertise restaurants, gas stations, insurance firms or country stores. Billboard after billboard promoted one or more casinos in the State. I wondered how it was possible for a rather sparsely populated locale could support what seemed like dozens of casinos. One particular billboard caught my eye. It read: "The only smoke-free casino in Oklahoma."
There are 94 casinos in Oklahoma owned by 33 tribes. Gaming is the second largest…
cmonforton | August 12, 2013More than 400 inspectors with the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) worked, on average, more than 120 hours each two-week pay period. Those were the findings of the agency's Inspector General in an report issued late last month. Their investigation covered FY 2012, and included field work conducted from November 2012 through February 2013.
FSIS inspectors are assigned to more than 6,000 meat, poultry and egg processing plants in the U.S. They are responsible for ensuring that the product sold by companies to consumers is safe and wholesome. These firms process tens of…
lborkowski | August 12, 2013The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun writes about Obamacare implementation, and finds that it differs greatly between Maryland and Virginia, which share a border but have very different attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. Both have large uninsured populations (around 800,000 in Maryland and 844,000 in Virginia), but Virginia’s opposition to the law means it’s getting far less federal money and leaving its poorest residents with fewer options for affordable insurance coverage.
The lawmakers who wrote the ACA included two main ways to help those without employer-sponsored health insurance…
cmonforton | August 9, 2013Federal OSHA announced this week a settlement agreement with Wal-Mart for serious safety violations found at its store on Chili Avenue in Rochester, NY. Lots of companies sign settlement agreements with OSHA, but few of them involve making safety corrections at multiple worksites controlled by the same firm. This settlement agreement will apply to 2,857 of Wal-Mart's 4,600 retail establishments in the U.S. The 2,857 stores are all of the stores located in States where federal OSHA has enforcement jurisdiction.
How will OSHA monitor Wal-Mart's compliance with the settlement agreement? In…
egrossman | August 8, 2013“If you don’t understand why something is harmful, the best you can do is stay away from it,” Paul Anastas said to me a few years ago, explaining the basis of the United States' risk-based chemicals management policies. “We currently deal with chemical security through guns, guards and gates rather than by redesigning materials,” continued Anastas, who directs Yale University’s Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering and served as Assistant Administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development from 2009 to 2012. “Protection measures…
lborkowski | August 7, 2013After years of hearing about alarming increases in states' obesity rates, it was nice to get some good news: CDC reports that the percentage of low-income preschool children classified as obese has declined in 19 states. (Height and weight data came from 11.6 million children aged 2-4 participating in the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System, which monitors the nutritional status of low-income children. Children whose body mass index was at or above the 95th percentile on CDC's growth charts were classified as obese.)
Improvements among obesity rates of school-aged children have been…
cmonforton | August 6, 2013Here we go again. Worker killed on-the-job. The employer decides---after the fact----it would be smart to install a piece of safety equipment that likely would have prevented the death. That's what happened after coal miner John Houston "Hollywood" Myles, 44, was killed on-the-job.
Myles worked at the Metinvest's Affinity Mine in Raleigh County, WV. The veteran of Operation Desert Storm (1991) had worked as a coal miner for a total of four years, one of which at the Affinity mine. On February 19, 2013, Myles was shoveling loose coal and material from the mine floor. In an adjacent entry…
lborkowski | August 5, 2013Fast-food workers in several Midwestern cities and New York held one-day strikes last week to protest poverty wages. Jeff Schuhrke reports for In These Times, with a focus on the Chicago protests:
Hundreds of fast-food and retail workers in Chicago are on strike today and tomorrow, joining thousands of other workers walking off the job this week in at least seven cities across the country, including New York, Detroit and St. Louis. For most of these cities, this is the second time in recent months that low-wage employees—primarily in the fast-food industry—have staged single-day walkouts…
kkrisberg | August 2, 2013Fair working standards for construction workers and financial profit for developers aren't incompatible, according to a new report from Texas' Workers Defense Project. In fact, consumers are actually willing to pay more to live in places built on principles of safety, economic justice and dignity.
Released this week in collaboration with the University of Texas' Center for Sustainable Development, "Green Jobs for Downtown Austin: Exploring the Consumer Market for Sustainable Buildings" studied consumer attitudes toward sustainable construction jobs and explored the market for certification…
cmonforton | August 1, 2013Finally! After far too much hullabaloo about the cost of regulations, there was a U.S. Senate hearing today on why public health regulations are important, and how delays by Congress and the Administration have serious negative consequences for people's lives. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the hearing entitled "Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis," the first one conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee's newly created Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights and Agency Action. The witnesses included a parent-turned advocate for automobile safety, AFL-CIO…
lborkowski | July 31, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Two Nature news features on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by Maryn McKenna and Beth Mole, respectively: Antibiotic resistance: The last resort and MRSA: Farming up trouble
David Leonhardt in the New York Times: In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters
Jim Morris at the Center for Public Integrity: Industry muscle targets federal 'Report on Carcinogens'
Stephanie Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle/ Reporting on Health: Poverty, health struggles in scenic Mendocino
Charles Kenny & Justin Sandefur in Foreign Policy: Can Silicon Valley Save the World…
cmonforton | July 30, 2013Pilgrim's Pride can't seem to get its act together safely handling highly toxic and explosive gases. The firm---the second largest poultry producer in the world with annual net sales of $8.1 Billion---received citations again from federal OSHA concerning its failed safety management of anhydrous ammonia.
OSHA announced this month $170,000 in proposed penalties for 9 serious, 1 willful and 1 repeat violation at the company's De Queen, Arkansas plant. All of the alleged violations involve requirements under OSHA's process safety management standard for control of highly hazardous chemicals…
lborkowski | July 29, 2013Celeste wrote earlier this month about a public meeting at which the US Chemical Safety Board would vote on whether to label several of their outstanding recommendations to OSHA as having seen unacceptable progress. I attended the day-long meeting, and thought the CSB staff and board members made a strong case for the “unacceptable” designations, which the board unanimously voted to adopt. Throughout the meeting, the CSB was careful to acknowledge the progress OSHA had made in addressing the hazards, the factors that impede effective OSHA action, and the preventability of explosions and other…
kkrisberg | July 26, 2013With immigration at the forefront of national debate, Jim Stimpson decided it was time to do a little more digging.
"There's a lot of rhetoric around immigrants' use of public services in general and health care specifically, and I thought with impending federal immigration reform it would be useful to have some sort of contribution about the facts of unauthorized immigrants' use of health services in the United States," said Stimpson, a professor within the University of Nebraska's School of Public Health and director of the university's Center for Health Policy.
So together with colleagues…