lborkowski | July 29, 2010If you've got four minutes, go watch OSHA's video of Diane Lillicrap speaking on crane safety. Diane's son Steven Lillicrap, 21, was killed by a crane at a Missouri construction site in 2009. I wrote yesterday about the importance of OSHA's new crane rule, but Diane conveys it in a much more powerful way.
lborkowski | July 28, 2010Earlier today, OSHA published its long-awaited final rule on cranes and derricks in construction. We've been following this rule's slow progress for two years now, since a March 2008 crane collapse at a New York construction site killed six workers and a tourist. At the time, Celeste pointed out, "OSHA acknowledges that as many as 82 workers are killed each year in crane 'accidents,' and that the 1971-based crane safety standard is outdated."
OSHA actually looked like it was addressing this issue back in 2003, when it established a negotiated rulemaking committee (which included…
lborkowski | July 27, 2010The Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mounted a nine-month investigation into the global trade on asbestos, and teamed up with the BBC's International News Services to document the asbestos industry's activities in Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. What they found is deeply troubling:
Our investigation concluded that the industry has spent nearly $100 million since the mid-1980s to keep asbestos in commerce. The team's reporting reveals close relationships among the industry, governments and scientists, and…
egrossman | July 26, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
In mid-June most of the seafood shacks along the bayou roads between New Orleans and Grand Isle were closed. A seafood market that I stopped by on the western edge of New Orleans was virtually devoid of customers despite bins brimming with bright blue crab and tawny shrimp. Business was so slim that two women who should have been tending to customers were playing Yahtzee. "We've never done this on a workday before," they told me. Another woman unloading sacks of shrimp frowned at my notepad and said, "I blame the media. We've got plenty of shrimp and it's safe." She…
lborkowski | July 26, 2010In the New York Times, Abby Goodnough and Katie Zezima highlight the problem of "drugged driving," or driving while under the influence of a drug that impairs driving ability:
The behavioral effects of prescription medication vary widely, depending not just on the drug but on the person taking it. Some, like anti-anxiety drugs, can dull alertness and slow reaction time; others, like stimulants, can encourage risk-taking and hurt the ability to judge distances. Mixing prescriptions, or taking them with alcohol or illicit drugs, can exacerbate impairment and sharply increase the risk of…
cmonforton | July 22, 2010The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) are today's version of David, as in David and Goliath. CIW started in 1993 as a small group of southwest Florida farm workers discussing ways to better their lives. CIW has evolved into a 4,000 strong membership organization of Haitian, Mayan and Hispanic agricultural workers. They've tangled with industry giants like McDonald's, Burger King and Yum Brands through their Campaign for Fair Food, and secured a penny per pound wage increase for workers who harvest tomatoes used in Whoppers, Taco Bell tacos and the like.
CIW's latest effort is its Anti-…
lborkowski | July 22, 2010The Oregonian's Julie Sullivan has been following the story of the National Guard troops who were exposed to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium at the Qarmat Ali water plant in Iraq - which contracting giant KBR was tasked with rebuilding. (Oregonian stories are here; also see our past posts on the subject here, here, and here.) Now, Sullivan reports, US Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon has sent a "sharply worded" letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asking for details about an immunity deal that KBR reportedly struck with the Department of Defense. Twenty-six Oregon Army…
lborkowski | July 20, 2010by Elizabeth Grossman
"I want this seafood to be safe. But I want those workers to be as safe as those shrimp and I'm not just going for funny one-liner," said Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) at the conclusion of the July 15th Senate Appropriations Committee's Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee hearing on the use of chemical oil dispersants in the Gulf.
"One might say, 'Well, what's Commerce-Justice doing with public health?'" Mikulski asked rhetorically. "Well, we think [about] water quality, the impact on marine life and seafood and what these dispersants mean to…
lborkowski | July 20, 2010Last year, Atul Gawande wrote an interesting New Yorker piece that compares present-day efforts to control healthcare costs with early 20th-century efforts to increase US farming productivity. The quest for more farming productivity succeeded not because of any grand, sweeping reform, he explains, but because the government, through the USDA, invested in pilot programs, scientific extensions, and provision of information to farmers. Gawande summarizes the recipe for success:
The government never took over agriculture, but the government didn't leave it alone, either. It shaped a feedback loop…
cmonforton | July 18, 2010Congressman Tom Price MD (R-GA) is apparently offended by the suggestion that some companies are not model employers. During last week's hearing in the House Education and Labor Committee on a bill to modernize a few provisions of the OSHA and MSHA statutes, he seemed annoyed that asst. secretary of labor for OSHA, David Michaels, has characterized some employers as "unscrupulous." The Congressman said:"Secretary Michaels, you have talked a number of times about [quote] unscrupulouos employers [unquote]. Do you want to name any?"
Dr. Michaels responded with one example:"a certain oil…
cmonforton | July 16, 2010In an amazing and comprehensive report entitled "Picked Apart," the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante and the International Human Rights Law Clinic of American University College of Law reveal the ugly, dark side of the Maryland crab industry. Some employers are skirting the law and exploiting workers hired under the H2-B guestworker program. Many of these workers are women from Mexico who've traveled thousands of miles in a bus to remote villages on Maryland's eastern shore. They'll work during the Blue crab harvesting season, to pick the meat by hand. The H2-B program allows employers…
lborkowski | July 15, 2010Kyle Hopkins of McClatchy follows up on the question of how we learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster about long-term health effects experienced by cleanup workers. In short, we have no peer-reviewed studies on this important topic, even though occupational health experts called for long-term monitoring of workers. Hopkins writes:
Exxon has consistently maintained that there's no evidence spill workers experienced any adverse health effects as a result of the cleanup. Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she isn't aware of any long-term study the company conducted on its own.
"The challenge is…
cmonforton | July 14, 2010Thanks to Frank Gallagher blogging at FireDogLake for providing us the quote of the day courtesy of WYMT-TV in eastern Kentucky. In "US Chamber of Commerce goes astroturfing to sink miner safety bill," he writes about the front-group sponsored by the Chamber and other business groups to oppose legislation to improve federal worker safety laws. (I blogged yesterday about the goup.) Gallagher writes:
WYMT-TV, out of Kentucky...covered the proceedings and featured Mr. Snare in their story, identifying him as not as a representative of the Coalition For Workplace Safety, but instead as a…
cmonforton | July 13, 2010I happened upon a statement issued last week by the Labor Department saying that OSHA was seeking a first-ever "enterprise-wide" remedy to compel the US Postal Service (USPS) to fix electrical hazards in its 350 processing and distribution (P&D) centers. Twenty-nine of the 350 P&D facilities are designated as OSHA VPP sites, but we don't know if any of those sites are plagued with these electrical hazards. In the statement, OSHA Asst. Secretary David Michaels said:"Even though it was aware of the hazards, USPS failed to institute the necessary measures to protect its workers. The…
cmonforton | July 13, 2010The web address is "working for safety.com" but the Coalition for Workplace Safety is just another well-funded attempt by the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, and more than 20 other industry groups to oppose fundamental improvements to the 40 year old OSHA law. Despite their catchy web address, I was hard pressed to find any information about actual workplace safety. For example, descriptions of hazards and how employers should correct them. It's the law, after all, for employers to provide a workplace free of recognized hazards.
The Coalition takes…
lborkowski | July 12, 2010For the first few weeks after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on January 12th, Haiti seemed to be on everyone's mind. Six months later, many of us think little about the quake survivors who are still struggling. In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive of Haiti and Bill Clinton, co-chairs of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, report, "only 10 percent of the $5.3 billion pledged by governments at a United Nations conference in March has been disbursed to the Haitian government. Without reliable schedules for disbursement, the commission is unable to plan…
lborkowski | July 9, 2010Back in March of 2009, President Obama delighted advocates of scientific integrity when he signed a memorandum that stated:
The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific…
egrossman | July 8, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"I've never seen anything like it," says David Willman, who has nearly 15 years' experience captaining supply boats that support oil rigs and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. "We're seeing pods of whales and dolphins out in the oil and lots of dead things," he tells me. "Things I've never seen before coming up from the deep that look like sea cucumbers floating dead. Man o' wars floating dead with shriveled tentacles." Willman is captain of the Noonie G., an 111-foot supply boat owned by Guilbeau Marine, a company based in Cut Off, LA. He's been working out of…
cmonforton | July 7, 2010OSHA and Imperial Sugar reached an agreement this week stemming from the agency's investigations following a February 2008 dust explosion that ultimately claimed 14 workers' lives. OSHA originally issued more than 100 willful citations for violations at the company's Port Wentworth, GA (site of the disaster) and Gramercy, LA plants, and proposed a total of $8.8 millions in civil penalties. At the time, OSHA chief Ed Foulke said:"I am outraged that this company would show a complete disregard for its employees' safety by knowingly placing them in an extremely dangerous work environment.…
lborkowski | July 7, 2010ScienceBlogs has made a distressing move: they've given PepsiCo a blog. It's called Food Frontiers and will feature content written by PepsiCo scientists. For now, I'm not going to get into PepsiCo's contribution to public health problems or what kind of content we might expect to see on the blog. Instead, I want to focus on how ScienceBlogs works and what readers expect and are entitled to.
ScienceBlogs, a venture of Seed Media Group, is a business. It looks for bloggers who are writing interesting science-related content and offers them a spot as part of the ScienceBlogs community. Bloggers…