Confined Space

Who's To Blame?

The big news yesterday was the release of the Columbia space shuttle disaster report. Check it out here. It makes for fascinating reading, especially Chapter 8, which was written by Dianne Vaugh, who wrote the classic work on the original Challenger disaster. In Chapter 8, "History as Cause: Columbia and Challenger" she explores the systemic failures of the NASA safety system and how the problems uncovered after the Challenger disaster reappeared to cause the Columbia's problems.

The most interesting parts of the report focuses on the management system problems rather than individual failures. Vaughn cautions however that

the Board's focus on the context in which decision making occurred does not mean that individuals are not responsible and accountable. To the contrary, individuals always must assume responsibility for their actions. What it does mean is that NASA's problems cannot be solved simply by retirements, resignations, or transferring personnel.

The footnote accompanying this paragraph states

Changing personnel is a typical response after an organization has some kind of harmful outcome. It has great symbolic value. A change in personnel points to individuals as the cause and removing them gives the false impression that the problems have been solved, leaving unresolved organizational system problems.

Which makes the following headline from the New York Times "interesting":

Human Error Likely Cause of Blackout, Timeline Says

So, let me get this straight. Does this mean that a simple human booboo resulted in the gigantic blackout that swept parts of eight states and eastern Canada, cost billions of dollars and darkened the homes of millions of people? And does this imply that a slap on the hand (or maybe even jail time) will fix the electrical grid problem?

The only "substance" behind that headline is a quote from an unnamed investigator:

"Had all of the existing policies been followed, this would not have developed into a cascading event," the investigator said. "What we see are institutional breakdowns, not a breakdown of the system itself."

Those who do incident investigations realize, however, that the fact that procedures were not followed are rarely due to human failure. It is far more likely that the procedures were confusing or didn't anticipate the situation that the operators found themselves in.

Some people also blamed the Three Mile Island accident on the plant operators: If proper procedures had been followed, the near-disaster would have been a small unnotable incident. But the failure at TMI can more accurately be blamed on the fact that the information that the operators had available to them at the time was confusing, conflicting and inaccurate, and they had not been trained to address the specific situation they were facing. In other words, given the knowledge they had, the "standard operating procedures" were almost useless.

It may be theoretically possible to trace everything that happens in the world to humans (or nature). But in reality, barring sabotage or horseplay, there are few, if any, cases where the root cause of an incident -- workplace injury, space shuttle disaster, or huge blackout -- could be blamed on "human error."

Human error may be one of the "direct causes" of an incident. A direct cause is the action that directly results in the occurrence, while root causes are usually management system problems which, if corrected, would not only have prevented that specific problem, but other similar problems as well.

Rather than focusing on the operators who make the errors, modern accident analysis looks for the conditions -- or root causes -- that made the errors possible.

And now check this out:

AK Steel suspends 11 workers after fatal accident

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio - AK Steel Corp. has suspended 11 workers in connection with an overhead crane accident that killed a worker last month at the company's Middletown Works mill, a union official said.

Now I don't know any more about the details of this incident that what you can read from this article, but let me just suggest that you go check out that footnote above again.

Labels: Blame the Worker

Union Health and Safety Programs: Organize and Die?

Last April, in one of my first postings, I opened a debate about whether the almost exclusive focus of several AFL-CIO unions on organizing was a threat to union health and safety programs.

The March 9 New York Times quote by John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (a union that has chosen not to have a health and safety program), sent shivers up the spines of union health and safety activists:

"the A.F.L.-C.I.O. was spread too thin and should devote more of its money and energy to organizing. Mr. Wilhelm said he would even consider ideas like eliminating the federation's respected health and safety department to channel more money into organizing.

"My view is that if we don't devote the largest possible amount of money to organizing and to political action that relates to organizing, we will go out of business," he said. "And if we go out of business, we can't help anybody's health and safety."

This statement has caused quite a bit of concern among union health and safety staff, as well as rank and file activists about the role of health and safety programs in unions, especially in the context of the obvious need to increase resources dedicated to organizing. Is there, or should there be a conflict between health and safety programs and organizing? Is it a zero-sum game?

Harold Meyerson has written an excellent article in the American Prospect entitled "Organize or Die" about the struggle within the AFL-CIO over organizing strategies. He highlights the labor movement's left wing organizing "stars:" SEIU's Andy Stern, Hotel & Restaurant Workers' John Wilhelm, and UNITE's Bruce Raynor, and also discusses the efforts of Carpenter's President (and AFL-CIO dropout) Doug McCarron and Laborers' President Terry O'Sullivan. Stern, Raynor and Wilhelm rose through the union ranks on their organizing successes and continue to show how to build a union even in these tough political and economic times:

SEIU under Stern has grown by a stunning 535,000 new members so that it is now, at 1.5 million members, the largest union in the federation. The SEIU has had notable successes organizing home-care, nursing-home and hospital workers, and has continued to organize the janitors who clean America's office buildings.

Meyerson discusses the debates within the federation about how best to organize (focusing on sectors as HERE and SEIU are doing, using students and outsiders as SEIU tends to do, or rank and file union members as CWA favors), the idea of complimentary unions working together (e.g. janitors and hotel workers) instead of fighting over the same territory (e.g. public employees), the success or failure of John Sweeney, etc . While health and safety issues are not mentioned in the text of the article, the debate over the role of labor health and safety programs in an "organize or die" environment can be read between the lines:

Just as notable as the SEIU's success is the way it's been achieved. At Stern's prodding, the union now devotes about half its budget to organizing. The SEIU has hired hundreds of young people off college campuses or from community organizing groups to staff its campaigns. As existing staffers have been reassigned to organizing, locals have often had to train members to do the work of servicing their fellow members that the paid staff had previously performed.

***

Indeed, no two presidents have more radically restructured their unions than Stern and McCarron. Both have reduced the percentage of resources spent on servicing existing members to free more resources for organizing new ones. Both have reshaped locals -- over considerable opposition, in McCarron's case -- into larger units more capable of organizing. Both are apostles of organizing to drive up market shares, and disdainful of organizing that doesn't accomplish that end.

Labor health and safety activists remember well that when Andy Stern took over SEIU he decimated one of the labor movement’s largest and most active health and safety programs, leaving only one Washington representative to address the giant union’s abundance of health and safety issues.

As mentioned above, Wilhelm has been quoted as advocating elimination of the AFL-CIO's health and safety department. At a 2001 AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting,

Wilhelm suggested reallocating federation resources to address the problem: 75 percent of the AFL-CIO's budget should be split equally between politics and organizing, with the remaining 25 percent allocated to other programs that contributed to those goals.

The suggestion went nowhere, but it was indicative of the strategic approach of Wilhelm's group. "Many of us feel that the AFL-CIO provides too many services that international unions should provide themselves and doesn't have enough focus to help unions with their strategic growth and politics," Stern says.

(Transferring services from the AFL-CIO to the individual unions is a rather ironic statement considering the cuts that Stern has made in SEIU's program and that Wilhelm has no health and safety program. Both unions rely on the AFL-CIO health and safety department for health and safety assistance.)

In addition to sowing fear into the hearts of those who have dedicated their careers to developing labor health and safety programs, this debate has forced to address one basic question: Why do unions need health and safety programs? Are they necessary for a vibrant labor movement or are they a remnant of the old “servicing model” of unions?

Aside from the obvious issue of saving lives and preventing injuries and illnesses, building the union and organizing new members is a pretty good reason to have a health and safety program. PACE activist Diane Stein discussed this issue on winning NYCOSH’s Silwood award,

People join unions because they need better work lives. Safety and health is a huge part of that struggle…. People join unions because they know that unions are the only institution who really put forward their agenda. We cannot abandon that agenda because we need resources for organizing. It simply doesn't make sense.

As one health and safety activist pointed out to me, fabled organizer Mother Jones’ famous line, “Mourn for the Dead, Fight like hell for the living” was all about workplace safety.

In other words, potential union members need a reason to join a union. Respect and better pay and benefits certainly lead the list of reasons in most cases, but saving lives and preventing injuries and illnesses are compelling reasons to to join a union in workplaces where health and safety problems exist.

Most health and safety staffers are anxious to get involved in organizing campaigns, but complain that it’s often difficult to convince the organizers that health and safety is a good organizing issue and to involve health and safety issues in the initial conceptualization of organizing campaigns.

On the other hand, some of the fault may lie within. When I first engaged in this debate last April, one long-time union health and safety activist responded that “Workers have always organized unions for better working conditions. This is not a diversion from organizing; it is its essence.” But she went on to criticize her (former) self and other health and safety “nuts” who had gotten so immersed in health and safety issues that they had “ gotten fat and lazy and forgot to organize.” These are problems

that we have failed to acknowledge and address. How are the structures we are building around health and safety building our unions? What role are the leaders who are first organized around health and safety issues taking in building bigger and stronger unions? What changes do we need to make to tie health and safety issues more closely to organizing a big, powerful and progressive Labor Movement?

Others are critical of many unions’ dependence on government grants which prohibit health and safety trainers from getting involved in organizing campaigns and tend to skew health and safety activities toward grant targets which may or may not be in tune with the union’s organizing targets. Although without the grant programs, many union health and safety programs would practically cease to exist.

Some unions have gotten the idea. AFSCME’s health and safety manual takes an organizing focus. Chapter 1, “ORGANIZING FOR A SAFE AND HEALTHY WORKPLACE” starts with the factors that make health and safety a good organizing issue:

· Health and safety affects all workers.
· Health and safety issues can be won.
· Health and safety concerns can move workers to take action.

Throughout the handbook, basic organizing principles are applied to health and safety problems.

UNITE’s organizing drive at Cintas is one of the few that integrates health and safety issues into the campaign. Unfortunately, campaigns like Cintas are more the exception than the rule, despite the efforts of union health and safety to integrate health and safety into organizing.

Aside from building the union and assisting in organizing campaigns, there are a few other reasons why unions need health and safety programs:

1. Health and safety programs save lives, prevent injuries and illnesses. If unions can’t save your life, what good are they? And when it comes to protecting workers’ safety and health, a knowledgeable, well-organized local union is better than all the regulations in the world. It’s hard to count workers who don’t die or who don’t get hurt or sick. But they exist.

While union activists may see unions as an inherently good things, most workers want some good, concrete reasons to organize and pay their dues to unions. For many union members, union resources that are used to train rank and file activists in how to investigate and organize around health and safety issues is a service well worth paying some dues money for. And some health and safety problems – fatality or health hazard investigations need the expertise provided by experts in a national union program. The “servicing model” of many unions may ultimately be a dead end, but that doesn’t mean that in some cases, workers don’t need services that only professional union staff can offer. (For information on how unions help to protect workers health and safety check out Hazards.)

2. Health and safety programs provide organizing and health and safety skills to rank and file activists. Local rank and file activists may run organizing campaigns and health and safety programs better than union staff, but many of the skills and much of the knowledge need by health and safety activists can be intimidating for newbies without training sponsored and conducted by union health and safety professionals.

3. Need for coordination between workplace conditions and local/national political battles. Forcing OSHA to issue health and safety standards or to enforce the law is no longer a simple administrative process. To be successful, unions need to organize massive grassroots political action campaigns. It takes coordination from the AFL-CIO and national unions, it involves organizing the victims of health and safety problems on the local and national level and it takes political action in Washington and in the states.

It took over a decade of nationwide organizing to get OSHA to issue its ergonomics standard in 2000, yet in a matter of hours, the labor movement was out-organized by the business community in Congress and the ergonomics standard was lost. To achieve future gains and to prevent future losses, health and safety issues have to be integrated with organizing and political action programs.

4. Union Health and safety programs stimulate and support research into illnesses and injuries caused by work. It is well known that workers are the proverbial canaries in the coal mines: Almost every major workplace health problem was initially discovered by workers and their unions, and then brought to the researchers and government regulators. The state of health and safety research in this country may not be as popular or well funded as we might wish, but imagine what it would be like without unions to detect the problems and provide the populations to study.

++++

These are not easy issues, but they need to be addressed by health and safety activists. Within a couple of years, the AFL-CIO may elect a new president. If it’s one of the organizing "stars," what will become of the AFL-CIO’s health and safety department, and departments in the individual unions? Can the case be made that health and safety programs are an integral part of organizing, rather than a costly distraction?

These are my thoughts. I encourage you to support or slam them. E-Mail me. Let me know if I can post your thoughts, and whether or not you want to remain anonymous if I decide to publish them.

Labels: AFL-CIO, Ergonomics

Successes of the Bush Administration

(Thanks to Mad Prophet for alerting me to this)

Attention Walmart Workers: Go to Hell

Good article in today's Washington Post by the American Prospect's Harold Meyerson contrasting Walmart encouraging the downward slide of wages in this country, as opposed to the effect of the early auto industry which pushed workers' wages up to the point where they could buy houses.

The nation's largest employer, with 3,200 outlets in the United States and sales revenue of $245 billion last year (which, if WalMart were a nation, would rank it between Belgium and Sweden as the world's 19th largest economy) doesn't pay its workers -- excuse me, "associates" -- enough to buy decent cars, let alone homes.

Actually, Meyerson doesn't go far enough. As other authors have pointed out, Walmart "associates" don't even make enough money to shop at Walmart.

Meyerson points out that Walmart's practices threaten not only the wages of Walmart workers and other service employees, but also the ability of workers to organize:

Wal-Mart's expansion into non-southern metropolitan areas, the company poses a huge threat to the million or so unionized clerks who work at the nation's major supermarket chains.

And finally, what does this say about democracy (economic and political) in America?

It may just be me, but I don't recall the moment when the American people proclaimed their preference for an economy driven by Wal-Mart to the one driven by General Motors. It is, after all, one thing to live in a nation where the largest employer wants workers to make enough to afford its cars; quite another to wake up in an America where the largest employer wants workers to make so little they'll be compelled to buy low-end goods in a discount chain. Indeed, polling has consistently showed that a clear majority of the American people have been dubious about the benefits of free trade -- but these are the only polls that the political elite, so poll-driven on other questions, has consistently ignored. By the same token, polling also shows that Americans believe workers should have the right to join unions free of intimidation, yet that has not been the case in the American workplace for at least the past three decades.

Update: Check out Carter Wright for more on Walmart's anti-union campaign.

Bill Moyers: Eve of Destruction?

Anyone who has seen Bill Moyers' show "Now with Bill Moyers" or read any of his articles knows that he is one of the only journalists in America who has the insight and courage to stand up to the Bush administration -- especially on environmental and workplace health and safety issues.

Check out this interview in Grist for more insight into (and inspiration from) Bill Moyers on environmental issues.

He first talks about the Bushies preference for "religious and political dogma" over facts:

Their god is the market -- every human problem, every human need, will be solved by the market. Their dogma is the literal reading of the creation story in Genesis where humans are to have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing ..." The administration has married that conservative dogma of the religious right to the corporate ethos of profits at any price. And the result is the politics of exploitation with a religious impulse.

Meanwhile, over a billion people have no safe drinking water. We're dumping 500 million tons of hazardous waste into the Earth every year. In the last hundred years alone we've lost over 2 billion hectares of forest, our fisheries are collapsing, our coral reefs are dying because of human activity. These are facts. So what are the administration and Congress doing? They're attacking the cornerstones of environmental law: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act]. They are allowing l7,000 power plants to create more pollution. They are opening public lands to exploitation. They're even trying to conceal threats to public health: Just look at the stories this past week about how the White House pressured the EPA not to tell the public about the toxic materials that were released by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

But, of course pure politics also factors in:

It's payback time for their rich donors. In the 2000 elections, the Republicans outspent the Democrats by $200 million. Bush and Cheney -- who, needless to say, are oilmen who made their fortunes in the energy business -- received over $44 million from the oil, gas, and energy industries. It spills over into Congress too: In the 2002 congressional elections, Republican candidates received almost $15 million from the energy industries, while the Democrats got around $3.7 million. In our democracy, voters can vote but donors decide.

The problem is that they're so good at it. Unlike the public bluster of Ronald Reagan's James Watt, these guys know that results are more important than rhetoric -- unless the rhetoric is used to lull the American people into believing that all is well:

They learned a big lesson from the Watt era. Not to inflame the situation. Use stealth. If you corrupt the language and talk a good line even as you are doing the very opposite, you won't awaken the public. Gale Norton will be purring like a kitten when she's cutting down the last redwood in the forest with a buzz saw.

But all is (hopefully) not lost. Moyers leaves us with a small bit of inspiration:

I once asked a friend on Wall Street about the market. "I'm optimistic," he said. "Then why do you look so worried?" I asked. And he answered: "Because I'm not sure my optimism is justified." I feel that way. But I don't know how to be in the world except to expect a confident future and then get up every morning and try in some way to bring it about.

Well, we may not all be Bill Moyers or have his acess to the media, but if we all "expect a confident future and then get up every morning and try in some way to bring it about," maybe we can start to turn this ship.

-- This is Pollyana Barab, signing off.

Sometimes it's nice to see that we can all get along and work together -- labor, enviros, native Americans -- and get some results.

Labor-Native American Coalition Confronts Taiwanese-Owned Company

Union members, Native Americans and local farmers have come together to confront Taiwanese-owned Continental Carbon Company with charges of environmental pollution, creating public health risks, and causing "economic havoc."

The problem is "carbon black dust that rains-down on their properties and in their homes. This pollution, they claim, has worsened since the company locked out members of Local 5857 of the PACE (Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers) International Union."

The Ponca Tribe, which was first detected by the Lewis & Clark Expedition, originally settled in Northern Nebraska. According to Tribe Activist Casey Camp, in 1876, they were forced to walk to Oklahoma in the winter for resettlement -- a trek in which one of three died. Today, approximately 2,500 of the 24,000 residents of Ponca City are members of the Tribe. "Where once we died from relocation, today we are being killed with pollution," she said "Our people are dying from cancer and suffering from asthma and congestive heart failure, and why? The answer is because companies like Continental Carbon value their profits more than the lives of our elders and children. The earth, air and water are sacred and too important to be polluted for business profit."

The workers have been locked out by the company for over two years.

Speaking on behalf of the PACE Union was Todd Carlson, the Chairperson of the Locked-Out Workers Committee. Carlson and 85 other employees, all members of PACE, were locked-out of their jobs after they refused to accept severe cuts in pay and benefits that would have cost each employee about $35,000 per year. "Continental Carbon has been allowed to assault the economic health of our community and our environment," he stated, "The reinstatement of a PACE-represented workforce would be a huge step in the right direction to rectify both situations."

Labor-Environmental Coalition Forces Steelworkers to Clean Up Its Act

A coalition of environmental, labor and community groups has forced a Portland steel mill to spend $105,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company repeatedly broke air-quality rules.

In an agreement filed last week in U.S. District Court, the Portland-based company said it would pay $55,000 to set up a system of air monitors around its North Portland steel mill and refinishing plant.

It also agreed to allow an independent monitor from PBS Environmental to make as many as 100 surprise inspections at its facilities during the next three years.

The settlement was a result of the work of a coalition of the U.S. Steelworkers, environmental and community groups:

The Environmental Justice Action Group, the United Steelworkers of America and the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment sued the company in 2001, alleging that the mill violated its state-administered air permits and the federal Clean Air Act about 100 times since 1995.

***

"When the government doesn't do its job of holding corporate polluters to the legal limits, citizens have to step in and seek enforcement of the law," said Dave Foster, local director for the Steelworkers union. Oregon DEQ officials admitted in 2000 that they mistakenly ignored the violations.

Daddy, Tell Me About That Statue

Fallen Ironworkers Honored

Twin Cities union ironworkers, who normally erect buildings, will this week erect a memorial to their brethren killed on the job.

The almost 8-foot-high bronze statue will be dedicated Tuesday outside of the ironworkers' St. Paul union hall.

Ironworkers Local 512, which has 1,350 members, gathered the names of 25 Twin Cities ironworkers killed on the job since the 1930s, when the St. Paul and Minneapolis Ironworkers locals were merged.

The names of the deceased will be inscribed on the memorial, which was designed by Art Norby, the Afton artist who sculpted the Minnesota Korean War Veterans Memorial on the state capitol grounds.

Save These Dates: AFL-CIO Safety & Health Conference

December 7-10, 2003

AFL-CIO National Safety and Health Conference:
Safe Jobs and Strong Unions, Keep on Fighting

Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center
Detroit, Michigan

Join union safety and health representatives and activists like yourself from across the labor movement. Plenary sessions and workshops will give you practical information on current safety and health problems and how to tackle them. Exchange experiences and discuss strategies with other safety and health representatives and activists on how to improve safety and health in your workplace while increasing union strength.

Detailed information will be available soon here and on the AFL-CIO Safety and Health web site.

Labels: AFL-CIO

Hotel Workers Suffer From Workplace Hazards

A US study has shown strong connections between working conditions and the health of Las Vegas hotel room cleaners.

A study of 941 workers found that ergonomic problems, increasing workloads, and time pressure were significant causes of work-related pain and injury. Overall stress levels also contributed to pain and injury, as well as increased levels of smoking among workers.

Over 60% of workers reported severe back pain, and 45% had been injured at work in the last year. But nearly half of these injuries went unreported to workers' compensation bodies, with many workers using their own leave for time off work after injury. (Source: Worksafe)

The information in this article is important and ironic considering that on March 9, 2003, John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that

"the A.F.L.-C.I.O. was spread too thin and should devote more of its money and energy to organizing. Mr. Wilhelm said he would even consider ideas like eliminating the federation's respected health and safety department to channel more money into organizing.

"My view is that if we don't devote the largest possible amount of money to organizing and to political action that relates to organizing, we will go out of business," he said. "And if we go out of business, we can't help anybody's health and safety."

Yeah, but on the other hand, if unions don't focus on workers' health and safety, they may have less reason to organize. And unless workers see political action as affecting their lives, why get involved? You can find more on this debate here.

The full Executive Summary of the report can be found here.

Workers Under Attack

Good article in the Denver Post about the Bush administration's attack on workers. The article highlights the war against worker health and safety, beginning with a discussion of Bush's refusal to issue a standard requiring employers to pay for their employees' workboots and other personal protective equipment.

President Bush and his administration are quietly implementing an aggressively pro-business labor strategy that focuses on voluntary compliance.

Since Bush's election in 2000, the Labor Department has yanked 41 worker-safety regulations in development off the books, including two addressing hazardous chemical dangers. The administration has frozen action on other rules, including one meant to prevent the spread of airborne diseases in the workplace. Bush has issued legally binding orders that weaken labor unions. The Labor Department now wants to rewrite rules governing who gets overtime pay.

Almost more depressing than the actual actions is the word "quietly" and the following sentence: "Most of the changes have escaped notice outside Washington." This is true even for those who are suffering the effects of these actions don't necessarily know that the Bush administration holds within its hands the ability to fix these problems and has deliberately chosen not to.

Aside: My wife was flying back from California yesterday and observed the new airport baggage procedures. Instead of just sliding (or lifting) the bags onto the conveyor where they are whisked away to be loaded on the plane, they're now taken to a station where they much be hefted onto a bomb exray machine. She observed an older gentleman (older than we are) lifting the heavy suitcases, twisting around and hefting them onto the x-ray machine where another worker reversed the procedure on the other side. She asked whether or not they had had any back injuries. He replied that "You wouldn't believe the number of people who are getting hurt." She told him the sad story of the demise of the OSHA ergonomics standard. It was new news to him. "Well we sure need OSHA in here."

Why this war, you may ask?

"Fundamental to Bush's political future is pleasing business," said Larry Sabato, political scientist at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

"The Bush people understand that the stronger labor unions are, the stronger the Democratic Party is," Sabato said.

Of course, even good reporters need a bit of education:

Bush's approach to labor became apparent in his first few months in office. Within two months, working with Congress, he repealed a Labor Department regulation requiring businesses to take specific steps to prevent repetitive stress injuries. A subsequent ergonomics standard released by the Bush administration relies on voluntary compliance by employers.

In fact, as you all know, the Bush administration has released no "standard." They have their "comprehensive approach" which consists of voluntary guidelines, compliance assistance and research on ergonomics issues that tells us nothing important that we don't already know -- In other words "Voodoo Ergonomics." And voluntary voodoo ergonomics doesn't seem to be helping the baggage handlers at the airport. Big surprise.

Read the article. It's good, but it's frustrating, because this is the kind of information that every American worker needs to know -- now and throughout the election process. They need to know why they're getting hurt and how the Republican politicians (and a few Democrats) are screwing them. They need to remember what happened to the ergonomics standard and they need to understand how voting -- in local and national elections -- affects everything in our lives, from health care, to public services, to coming home uninjured from work.

We've got work to do.

Labels: Ergonomics

LABOUR WEBSITE OF THE WEEK

Not to blow my own horn or anything, but Labourstart has named Confined Space this week's Labor Website of the Week.

Subtitled 'News and Commentary on Workplace Health & Safety, Labor and Politics', this is one of the first of a new generation of trade union websites that are blogs (web logs). These sites tend to be somewhat more personal, more updated, and in some cases even more content-rich than conventional trade union sites. This site is a particularly good example of what a blog can do, and if you're interested in health and safety issues, it should be one of your favorites/bookmarks.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Rather ironic, though, to come this week, when I've been in Knoxville and barely blogging.

Oh well, such is life in the Blogosphere.

Don't Rush In

Attached here is a tragic article about three electrocution deaths -- the original victim when the crane he was operating touched an energized electrical line, and two rescuers.

The death of rescuers is a tragic, but all too common event in confined space, trenching and electrical incidents. Everyone's first instinct is to jump in and rescue your buddy -- often with fatal consequences.

Of course it's not easy to sit and watch someone die -- even if you understand that you could just as easily become a victim:

"The crane was on fire and we had three fatalities laying on the ground," Telford Fire Chief Joseph Rausch said.

Paramedics, police and firefighters called to the plant had to stand by for 10 minutes until utility workers could shut off the power.

"It's tough standing here doing that," Rausch said. "We had to protect our guys. [The crane] was energized, so we couldn't just rush in here."

This reminds me of a story.....

A few years ago, humorist Dave Barry wrote a column making fun of OSHA for citing a company whose workers had jumped into a collapsed trench to (successfully) rescue workers from another company who had been trapped when the trench collapsed. Barry cited it as just another example of government stupidity.

Although I thought the OSHA citation in this case was probably unnecessary (and was later dropped), as it was another company's employees trapped in the trench, I sent a letter to Barry defending the principle of the citation and the OSHA standard, and describing the frequency of deaths among rescuers in confined space and trenching incidents. I also enclosed some news clips and a NIOSH report. He wrote me back almost immediately, replying "Yeah, well if it was your friend, I bet you'd jump in too."

Well, that's the point, Dave. I'd want to jump in. Which is why OSHA has standards (so that no rescue is needed in the first place) that require, among other things, that workers to be trained NOT to jump into a trench or confined space, and that employers need to be cited even if such attempted rescues seem like "good Samaritan" actions.

(Check out OSHA information on trenching here and confined spaces here.)

Here is a happier story where the men who helped rescue their co-worker from a trench were luckier.

Which reminds me of another story....

I was training a bunch of New England public works employees about trenching hazards around ten years ago. I asked for a show of hands how many of them had received safety training. Most of them raised their hands. I was surprised as most of them were from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, states where public employees don't have any OSHA coverage, and they didn't seem familiar with the OSHA regs.

But knowing from experience that there's training and there's training, I asked what their training consisted of.

"Sure, they train us," one of the local presidents replied, "They train us how to dig someone out when the trench collapses on them. And we've had to do it a bunch of times."

Two morals to this story: First, when you're trying to find out what kind of training workers have received, don't just stop with the question "Have you been trained?" What did the training consist of? How was it given? Did they train you about this? About that? Did you have an opportunity to ask questions? You get the idea.

The second moral is that while "rescue" training is necessary in these cases (as often more unprepared rescuers are killed than original victims,) OSHA standard and the majority of our efforts need to be focused on prevention. Rescue is a sign that preventive measures have failed.

Labels: Trench Hazards

Reflections on Knoxville

As I wrote the other day, I've been taking a couple of classes in Knoxville this week.

(Knoxville being in Tennessee, Al Gore's home state, the state that he just took for granted in 2000, the state that would have put him over the top and saved us from this endless national nightmare. But I digress.)

I drove because I wanted to have my bike down here with me. Nothing worse than being trapped in a sterile hotel, in a strange city, not knowing anyone, without a bike. I tend to sit around, watch T.V., eat and get fat.

Some observations:

-- I'm taking two classes: Incident Investigation/Root Cause Analysis, and Human Factors. Good instructor, interesting classes. Most of the other students are corporate health and safety directors, not the crowd I usually hang out with. But they are, to a man (they're all men) very supportive of OSHA, and not outwardly hostile to unions (this even before I revealed my pedegree), even though none of their workplaces is organized. Some are even Democrats.

Admittedly, this was a self-selected group or else they wouldn't be in these classes in the first place. But it confirms my belief that the world would be a better place if the big corporations, and small-business associations like NAM and the NFIB let the health and safety directors (instead of the government affairs slugs) determine business' national health and safety agenda in Washington. (It would also be a better world if pigs could fly.)

Not that this is really much of a revelation. Many have heard me rant and rave about how, during the ergo wars, we would talk to company health and safety directors who thought that ergonomics was great and their ergo programs had saved their company millions, and how those nice boys and girls from OSHA had helped them put together a program -- only to get a fax from their corporate headquarters complaining that OSHA was rushing ahead on ergonomics before there was any science and an ergonomics standard would surely bankrupt them. If I was king of the world....

-- This part of Tennessee is beautiful. I drove up to the Smokeys yesterday and rode my bike around the 11 mile Cades Cove (twice) where I saw lots of deer with antlers and two bears. I also spent a couple of late afternoons doing my Lance Armstrong impersonation around western Knoxville. It took me a while to find out where the bikers ride. In riding around the less biked part of town, I also observed the quaint Knoxvillian custom of using bikers as target practice for beer cans flung from moving vehicles -- usually pickup trucks. Luckily, their aim is not great (probably because they had previously ingested the contents of the afore-mentioned beer cans.)

All in all though, it was a good idea to bring my bike.

-- 500 miles is a long way to drive -- even if you want a bike with you -- especially without the benefit of whiny, complaining, fighting kids and back-seat-driving wife (all of whom I love and miss terribly). What saved me was a tape of Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, which is about Great Britain. If you've never read anything by Bill Bryson, you should. He's not only informative, but extremely funny -- one of the few authors who can make me laugh out loud. (He's also written A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything) In addition to entertaining me, it had the added advantage of making me appear crazy to anyone passing me -- especially the ubiquitous, speeding, trying-to-stay-awake semi truckers who infest I-81 -- who warned each other on their CB's to stay away from the crazy guy in the Windstar.

I must get a book-on-tape for the trip home.

Update: My British correspondant, Rory O'Neill informs me that Bryson was a scab in the London Times newspaper dispute. Hmm. I guess I'll have to be more careful.....

What's a Blog?

Many of you think this is a web page. "Nice web page," you say. Actually, this is not a web page. It's a Blog. What's a Blog you ask? Read this article. Also note the picture of my blogger buddy, Susan Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla whom I read (and link) regularly for her wit, political wisdom and her ability to find good articles and blog postings. (She notes that she's a lot cuter than pictured. I can relate. I am also a lot cuter than I look.)

No More Overtime Rights: Try it, You'll Like It.

An AP article about the Bush administration's proposed overhaul of (take-away-our) overtime regulations is almost funny -- in a sick sort of way. The proposal would allow employers to take away overtime for millions of mostly white-collar workers.

What's so "funny?"

The Bush administration maintains that the new rules will merely give companies the option to cut overtime pay for certain workers. Many employers may choose to continue paying for work above 40 hours a week for other reasons, a Labor Department official said.

"Employers often want to retain the best employees to remain competitive," said Victoria Lipnic, an assistant Labor secretary. "So, just as the employers pay these employees well above minimum wage and provide many employee benefits ... they can choose to continue to pay them overtime."

Yeah, and they'll want to pay you more and give you health insurance and good pensions, and probably want you to join unions as well. Next thing, they'll pass a law "merely" giving companies the "option" not to provide a safe workplace. They can still choose not to kill their employees. And if the employer doesn't choose to pay overtime or minimum wage or provide a safe workplace, the employees can always walk right out the door and find a better paying, safer job. Right?

And then there's this:

The proposed rule changes also could eliminate overtime pay in a wide array of other occupations - from nurses to cooks to retail managers - if they are deemed to be "learned professionals" in the fields.

Now I'm sure many people would be happy to be considered "learned professionals" if it didn't mean getting paid less. Is this any way to encourage people to get more education and training?

This is so stupid, I'm (almost) at a total loss for words:

The rules do not offer workers exempt from overtime pay any guarantees of a 40-hour work week, said Alexander Colvin, an assistant professor of labor studies and industrial relations at Pennsylvania State University.

But Lipnic said they have other protections. For example, employees who do not qualify for overtime wages must be paid the same amount every week, even if they work less than 40 hours a week or the quality of their work is below standard.

So don't worry all of you nurses, corrections officers, and cooks. Even if you're working 60 hours a week and being paid for 40, you now have the theoretical "right" to work less and do a really bad job.

Vicky, Vicky, who are your press people? They're clearly working too many hours. One piece of advice. If Secretary Chao asks you to use these arguments to sell the new regs to an audience of actual workers, RUN LIKE HELL.

Take Back Your Time Day

But someone has a good idea: October 24 is Take Back Your Time Day. "TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY is a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."

Noting that we work longer hours now than we did in the 1950s nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) LONGER per year than our peers in Western Europe do, Take Back Your Time Day argues that:

Overwork threatens our health. It leads to fatigue, accidents and injuries.

It reduces time for exercise and encourages consumption of calorie-laden fast foods. Job stress and burnout costs our economy more than $200 billion a year.

Overwork threatens our marriages, families and relationships as we find less time for each other, less time to care for our children and elders, less time to just hang out.

It weakens our communities. We have less time to know our neighbors, supervise our young people, and volunteer.

It reduces employment as fewer people are hired and then required to work longer hours, or are hired for poor part-time jobs without benefits.

It leaves many of us with little time to vote, much less be informed, active citizens.

It leaves us little time for ourselves, for self-development, or for
spiritual growth.

It leads to growing neglect and abuse of pets. (Not to speak of our children and elders)

So what's happening on October 24?

On Friday, October 24, 2003, thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans will JUST SAY NO to the overwork, over-scheduling and overstress that threaten to overwhelm our lives. They'll take the day or part of it off work, and join in hundreds of activities to initiate a much-needed national conversation about work/life balance and how we can reclaim it.

The date falls nine weeks before the end of the year, making the point that we Americans now work nine weeks more each year than Western Europeans do.

So go for it. But remember, as Vicky Lipnic would probably remind you, you can only take part of the day off if you don't have a right to earn overtime.

Minneapolis Cab Driver Action Update

The Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote today that

about dozens of Somali cabdrivers drove in a caravan to the State Capitol to honor Salah and Ahmed Ahmed, a driver shot to death last month, and to meet with state and city officials.

Salah, 28, was shot in the head about 1:30 a.m. Aug. 8 at the intersection of 24th St. and 18th Av. S. in the Phillips neighborhood. He had called his pregnant wife to say he had several suspicious passengers.

Their action seems to have generated some promises of action. We'll see:

About 60 drivers -- joint lessors of about 30 taxis -- participated in Monday's caravan from the scene of Salah's death to the scene in north Minneapolis of the July 10 killing of Ahmed and on to St. Paul.

After a meeting with the drivers' leaders in the office of Gov. Tim Pawlenty, officials of the state and the city of Minneapolis vowed to seek ways to finance upgraded protection in taxis.

State Public Safety Commissioner Rich Stanek said that could involve equipping cabs with global positioning systems, video cameras or bullet-resistant shields between the front and back seats.

"I will look for federal and state funds to leverage for that," he told cheering cabbies wearing white T-shirts saying "Stop Killing Cabdrivers/We Serve But Not Protected." Pawlenty was in Indianapolis at the National Governors Association annual meeting.

But it also generated a slightly different response:

While most speakers at a rally at the scene of Salah's slaying focused on calls for government assistance, Minneapolis firearms dealer Mark Koscielski passed out leaflets offering a $40 discount for his state-certified handgun course, a prerequisite for a permit to carry guns in public.

"The Police Can't Protect You!" the leaflets said. "DON'T BE A VICTIM! ARM YOURSELVES, PROTECT YOURSELVES!" Many of the drivers picked up a copy.

On The Road

I'm in Knoxville this week taking a class, so blogging will be a bit on the low and slow side.

The Weekly Toll

The has been a particularly pathetic week with workplace fatalities ranging from the youngest (age 16) to the oldest (age 62) -- crushings, electrocutions, falls, confined space asphyxiations, traffic accidents, explosions. All in all, a typical work in America's workplaces.

To put this all in political perspective, check out the interview with AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director Peg Seminario. This sums up where we are:

We've got 2,000 job safety inspectors in the country responsible for overseeing and enforcing the safety and health laws in more than 6 million workplaces.

OSHA actually has fewer staff today than it did in 1980. The workforce and the number of workplaces has grown, but the agency's resources have not grown.

I missed this tragedy, which was picked up by Susan Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla:

Child labor laws fail boys killed on job

Three 16-year-old boys have died in work-related accidents in Washington this week, prompting calls for stronger enforcement of laws governing underage workers.

On Wednesday, 16-year-old Josh McMahon of Lynnwood was crushed to death at a wrecking yard.

Tyler Rausch and Cody Forrest, former teammates on the Jenkins High School football team, died Tuesday while they were working on the farm owned by Rausch's parents south of Colville.

The 16-year-olds were found dead in a silo filled with alfalfa "haylage" cattle feed.

"We need more field staff to work on consultation and enforcement of the law. Employers know the chances are too slim to be found out, so they continue to abuse the law," says Randy Loomans, the Washington Labor Council's education and safety director.

More here and here.

Hospital says investigation into doctor's death continuing

HOUSTON -- Large pieces of white plywood covered an elevator at Christus St. Joseph Hospital's patient tower Monday where a physician died this weekend when he became trapped in doors as the elevator moved.

***

Nikaidoh, of Dallas, was stepping into the second-floor elevator about 10 a.m. Saturday when the doors suddenly closed, pinning his shoulders. A portion of his head was severed when the elevator began rising.

A female hospital employee witnessed the accident and spent about 20 minutes trapped inside the malfunctioning elevator until firefighters rescued her.

Flores said the physician's body then fell down the elevator shaft to the basement.

Pearland worker killed while atop power lines

Nicholas Garland, 22, a North Houston Pole Co. employee, was performing routine maintenance on a high voltage line near NASA Road 1 and Sarah Deel about 9:30 a.m., Aug. 6, when he was shocked with about 130,000 volts of electricity.

Dump truck driver won't be charged in death of worker
Associated Press

GAFFNEY, S.C. - A dump truck driver who struck and killed a worker at a road construction site will not be charged, the Highway Patrol says.

Buford Phillips, 57, was backing up a state-owned dump truck hauling 8 tons of asphalt Monday morning when he hit 46-year-old David Allen Stapleton, a flag man for the state Transportation Department.

Phillips said the alarm that was supposed to sound when he backed the truck up was not working when he struck Stapleton.

Wayland man dies after fall from ladder

WAYLAND, MA -- A Wayland man died yesterday after he fell off a 20-foot ladder while working on the historic Grout-Heard House on Cochituate Road.

Police would not identify the victim, but Deborah McNeill said her husband, Richard A. McNeill, 52, of Matthews Drive, died working at the 12 Cochituate Road house yesterday.

****

Police said a preliminary investigation shows McNeill was on the ladder working on a second-floor gutter when he touched a power line and fell to the ground.

Auto Mechanic Crushed Under Car

BOULDER, Colo. -- A Boulder auto mechanic was crushed to death Thursday when he was caught beneath a vehicle on a service bay lift.

Officials said Gabrial Slagle, 23, was working at McCaddon Cadillac under a raised lift when a co-worker lowered the lift, killing Slagle. Investigators said the co-worker did not know that Slagle was under the lift when he lowered it.

OSHA investigating death at area oil field

Lawrence, KS -- Investigators from the Occupational Saftety and Health Administration and the Douglas County sheriff's department were at an oil field in southeast Douglas County Friday afternoon where a 33-year-old Osawatomie man died Thursday.

OSHA investigates carpenter's death

SAN ANTONIO -- A federal safety agency is investigating the death of a San Antonio carpenter.

Scott Phillip Fries, 32, was found on the ground Thursday in the 7000 block of Scotsdale where he and others had been working, according to a witness. He was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, police said.

Emergency personnel said Fries may have suffered a heart attack caused by electric shock, according to the preliminary report.

One killed, one injured in explosion at plant

The Associated Press, OCALA, Fla.
An explosion at a plastics processing plant killed one worker, left another hospitalized and forced the evacuation of dozens of other employees Monday, officials said.

The blast occurred about 8:30 a.m. in a hopper containing wood chips at US Plastic Lumber Ltd., which uses plastic waste to make building materials, furnishings, industrial supplies and other packaging materials.

Killed was Scott Stokes, 34, of Ocala.

Part of I-35 closed due to fatal crash

A portion of Interstate Highway 35 south of Des Moines was closed Friday as a crane involved in a fatal crash was removed.

Merlyn McIlrath, 61, of Roland, the driver of the crane, died in the accident near the Iowa Highway 92 exit at Bevington. (scroll down)

Labels: Weekly Toll

TB in MD on the UP

Sometimes I hate to be right.

At the end of May, OSHA trashed its proposed standard that would have protected workers against TB. OSHA Director John Henshaw justified OSHA's action by arguing that TB rates had fallen so much that the standard was no longer needed.

An article in today's Washington Post describes "A 17 percent rise in the number of active TB cases in Maryland last year -- with just a slight decline this year" that has put TB "back on the radar for public health officials."

After falling for a decade, the number of people infected with active TB in Maryland jumped from 262 cases in 2001 to 306 last year. This year, 140 cases were recorded through July.

Right now, Maryland public health authorities are practicing Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), sending nurses out to observe patients each time they take their medication. DOT not only increases the cure rate, but more importantly, by making sure patients take the complete course of medicine, prevents the development of antibiotic resistant TB.

Yet as Maryland grapples with a budget crisis, officials said spending for TB control probably would be cut by about $50,000 next year. The state plans to spend $2.28 million for TB control this year, including about $1.4 million in federal money.

"For a disease that we know how to diagnose and treat and prevent, it's ludicrous for the number of cases to be going up in Maryland. It's unacceptable," said Lee B. Reichman , executive director of the National Tuberculosis Center at the New Jersey Medical School, where many specialists have trained.

To repeat what I wrote in early June:

Ditching the TB standard probably could not have come at a worse time. The United States faced a near epidemic of multiple drug resistant TB in the mid-1980's and early 1990s because the public health system in this country let down its guard. According to the IOM:
Complacency led to neglect of basic public health measures including surveillance, contact tracing, outbreak investigations, and case management services to ensure that individuals completed treatments for latent infection and active disease. This neglect helped set the stage for the resurgence of tuberculosis when new circumstances emerged -- including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the increase in multidrug-resistant disease (largely due to incomplete treatment), and expanded immigration from regions of the world with high rates of tuberculosis.
In hospitals across the country complacency translated into inadequate isolation rooms, ventilation systems that were not maintained, isolation room doors left open, infectious patients left to wander the halls and no training to recognize symptoms in waiting rooms. In correctional institutions the level of knowledge and control measures was virtually non-existent.

Now we may be faced with a new complacency fueled by an "all-clear" message from OSHA, falling national TB rates, and a public health system stressed to the breaking point by new homeland security demands, huge state budget problems and the Bush tax cuts eating up any chance of significant federal assistance.

Union Bashing 101

I’ve spent some profitable times over the past couple of decades taking classes and teaching at various labor education centers and have always admired the work that they do – especially in health and safety. They are indispensable for training future union activists and supplementing union efforts to train their members in a variety of labor issues. Check out the projects and publications at LOHP at Berkeley or LOSH at UCLA.

Well you can imagine my surprise to find out that labor studies centers are evil, according to a Wall St. Journal article, “Picketing 101,” by Steve Malanga of the right wing Manhattan Institute.

“Under AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, these departments have defined their mission chiefly as supporting labor and its organizing effects rather than educating students.” (Some – like me -- would argue that “supporting labor and its organizing efforts IS educating students)

The Manhattan Institute is a think tank whose mission is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility. A longer article on the same topic can be found on their web site.

What examples to we have of the labor movement’s crimes in co-opting of academic departments and programs?”

-- U-Mass Amherst has an M.A. program in union leadership and administration – “in essence a school for union leaders.” (Horrors!) Amherst also has a course whose description, in part, reads “we live in ‘an era of crushing corporate power and aggressive opposition to unions.” (as personified perhaps by this article?)

-- Wayne State university provides technical support for “living-wage campaigns around the country which helped to spark successful efforts to raise the minimum wage for some workers in dozens of cities.” (What will they stoop to next?)

And if the subversive course material isn’t bad enough, labor programs go so far as to sponsor internships, which like the vampires of old, direct impressionable students “to do labor’s bidding.”

What do these possessed interns work on? Some help in organizing campaigns, and if hat isn’t bad enough, some of them are guilty of assisting campaigns that involve “forcing business to raise the sallies of some employees,” which somehow works “against the interests of taxpayers” (who are different from workers? I’m getting confused.)

In addition to warping their young minds and recruiting them into the union ~~cult~~ world, these programs also put out reports on “subjects key to the labor movement’s legislative agenda: free trade, globalization, living wage legislation, poverty…These reports, with their veneer of academic objectivity, appear to provide scholarly proof of labors most cherished contentions.”(Hear that John Ashcroft? Any more room in Guantanemo?)

But if it’s really tainted research he’s interested in, he should check out reports by the American Association of University Professors and the Center for Science in the Public Interest who have documented multiple examples of business-dominated university research programs.

The report also identifies more than 30 university-based research centers that draw substantial financial support from companies or corporate trade associations. Among those are several university centers on forestry funded by timber or paper industries and several centers on nutrition funded by food and agribusiness companies. All such centers let corporations put an academic sheen on industry-funded research, according to CSPI.

“People would be far more skeptical of a ‘Corporate Polluters Lobbying Association’ than an industry-funded ‘Harvard University Center on Important Issues,’” said [CSPI Director Michael] Jacobson. “Companies hope that a nonprofit’s or university’s good name will burnish their reputations. Call it ‘innocence by association.’”

More on the CSPI study here.

So what’s the goal of these subversive activities? “Labor programs state plainly that they exist primarily to promote unions and create a generation of activists. For example,

The labor program at UMass Lowell, for instance, uses its website to disseminate “action alerts” about local union campaigns, warning that a union local is under attack from a movie theater chain or imploring readers to assist an organizing effort at a local supermarket chain by downloading a form letter to send to the chain’s president. The labor studies program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, sponsors intensely partisan radio programs, dubbed “Heartland Labor Forum.”

Well, excuse me, but don’t business schools exist primarily to promote American business. Check out the Wharton business school web page: “Wharton is dedicated to creating the highest value and impact on the practice of business and management worldwide through intellectual leadership and innovation in teaching, research, publishing, and service.”

And last time I checked, it was still just as legal to organize a union or go out on strike as it is to form a business.

But isn’t labor studies just as legitimate as African American studies or women’s studies? Of course not. “Unlike gender or race studies (both disciplines strongly supported by the Wall St. Journal and the Manhattan Institute), labor studies undeviatingly promote the interests of a tiny constituency: the union” (Actually, labor studies promotes the interests of a slightly larger constituency: workers. But let’s not get too picky.)

The longer article on the Manhattan Institute website goes into a bit of labor history. It seems that labor studies programs once served a useful purpose (just as at one time unions themselves served a useful (purpose):

When labor studies programs arose just after World War II, mostly in the “extension” or continuing-education divisions of universities, their aim was modest: to help create a better-educated generation of union workers to combat mob control, corruption, and communist influence. “If labor leaders could be better educated, it was thought this would lead to fewer confrontations and fewer strikes,” says Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

In other words, as long as labor studies programs were teaching workers to accept their conditions, not to confront their employers and never strike, they were OK.

How things have changed. Now we have

Queens College of the City University of New York, professors developed a labor internship program, the Solidarity Project, with help from the university’s Education Center for Community Organizing, whose purpose is to stimulate social activism and community organizing in students.

And the last thing a democratic nation needs is more social activism and community organizing.

Ah, the good old days:

Back in the sixties and seventies, when labor bosses were culturally conservative, supported pro-growth policies, and sent their hardhats to battle long-haired students over the war in Vietnam, who would ever have thought the day would come when union leaders would co-opt the professors?

Or vice versa.

Malanga’s article is clearly an attempt by the Manhatten Institute to foment a taxpayer revolt against these publicly funded programs. Malanga quotes a small businessman viewing a Living Wage who was “shocked to learn that some of those out on street corners agitating in favor of the [Living Wage] law were fulfilling course requirements. ‘As a [California] taxpayer, I'm funding the U.C. system. This isn't the kind of activity I want to fund.’”

Of course, if taxpayers really want to revolt, they could look down the road a few miles from where I’m writing to the public George Mason University and its rabidly anti-union, anti regulatory Mercatus Center. Mercatus is best known for counting up the costs of regulations every year (leaving out the benefits) and for sponsoring anti-regulatory “studies” such as one I quoted a few months ago that argues that OSHA Kills.

So why is labor studies important? As California AFL-CIO President Art Pulaski, Executive Secretary- Treasurer of the California Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, says:

"We are in danger of becoming two Californias: the privileged, highly paid executives and professionals, and the rest of us -- the teachers, the construction workers, the farm laborers, the garment workers, the retail clerks, the child care and nursing home staff. Many of these people are immigrants and minorities who are having great difficulty making ends meet. The University of California should study these jobs and the problems of these workers and offer well-informed advice to policy makers in labor, business, and government. The result will be new policies, partnerships, and employment institutions that contribute to an economy in which prosperity is shared and opportunities are opened to all."

Update: Check out Tapped and the Joe Kenehan Center for other perspectives on this article.

Labels: Union Busting

Suicide by Work or Death by Stupidity?

Sometimes you gotta wonder…..Last January, NY subway conductor Janell Bennerson was killed when her head slammed into a fence as she leaned out of the cab. The New York Transit Authority has now determined that her death was her own fault because she leaned out too far and kept her head out longer than the TA requires to watch the platform.

The union is disputing this conclusion, noting that there had been trouble with the train's doors before the accident.

It is clear and undisputed from the evidence how conductor Bennerson was being diligent in observing the doors due to recurring door problems," said Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint. "It seems the TA can not restrain itself from instinctively blaming the victim and evading responsibility.

Oh yeah, and the report also notes that the steel fence was only 18 inches from the train's side and there was a near-blinding glare at the time of the accident. But those were only contributing factors. If she had just been more careful…

Even though it was her fault, “TA spokesman Paul Fleuranges denied that the agency was blaming Bennerson for her own death, calling it a ‘tragic accident.’”

Employer Cuts Pay to Workers At High Risk Of Violence

Here's a workplace where someone dies almost every day and management is trying to cut their pay. Go figure. I doubt if they'll strike, but this probably is not good for morale. More here.

More Workplace Stress, Less Profit

We all know that workplace stress is bad for you. But there is more and more evidence that it is costly to your employer and society as well.

It is estimated to cost U.S. industry a staggering $300 billion a year in absenteeism, health costs and programs to help workers manage stress as unemployment rises and companies cut staff.

I’ve written before about Americans’ vanishing vacation time. But get this: “An International Labor Organization study showed that Americans worked the equivalent of an extra 40-hour week in 2000 than they did 10 years earlier.”

Beyond Arnold: Californians Also To Vote On “Colorblind” Racial and Ethnic Policy

The recall of Governor Grey Davis is not the only initiative in the upcoming California election. Voters will also be asked to vote on the "Racial Privacy Initiative"

The measure would prevent state entities from sorting people by race. Approval would mean that no government agency in California would be allowed to ask for details of race, ethnicity, color, or national origin on job applications. And the state could not use such data to classify people involved in public education, public contracting, or public employment.

It is being pushed by Ward Connerly, the same University of California regent who introduced Proposition 209, which barred racial and gender preferences for all state institutions. It is opposed by state and national civil rights organization, as well as the American Public Health Association which states that

Racial and ethnic health disparities persist in a number of key health conditions, in access to health care and in the quality of health care delivery. If we are to address these disparities, we need the vital information currently collected by our public health agencies and other public institutions to better understand why these disparities occur and ways we can eliminate them.

***
People die prematurely because of inequalities in health care and health status. Knowledge of these differences provides important insight into ways to connect the problems, save lives and improve health.

As Jessie Jackson put it, “It's just really stupid. No one who can see would fight for the right to be blind.”

Hanford HazWaste Workers Worry About Their Health -- For Good Reason

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has a powerful, but frightening article about hazardous working conditions among the workers cleaning up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where 177 tanks hold 53 million gallons of A-bomb chemical and radioactive waste.

Many workers have complained about chemical exposures. But as in many workplaces in this country,

Many workers are afraid to come forward and complain, Hanford watchdogs and whistle-blowers say. Electricians such as Young can earn up to $90,000 a year, and work at the nation's largest nuclear cleanup site is steady.

But for some, the fear of being sickened by the gases has finally trumped the fear of losing their jobs. They're afraid the exposures are responsible for a suite of health problems, ranging from black tongue to numb gums. And there's the specter of hidden diseases that strike years later.

One of the more amazing sections describes workers having to fight to be able to wear respirators:

Earlier this year, one worker was sent to the hospital with a swollen, sore throat after breathing strong vapors. In May, another worker asked for leaking seals to be replaced at two tanks where employees have sought medical attention because of the gases. Officials said they're working on the problem.

CH2M Hill officials defend their policy not to provide masks to everyone whenever they want them, saying they can do more harm than good.

The masks can be hot, making workers in the Eastern Washington desert vulnerable to overheating. They can obstruct vision, inhibit communication, and make workers more prone to trips or falls.

To receive an air-purifying mask, workers must have a medical checkup, be properly fitted and get approval from an industrial hygienist.

"They may or may not be issued a respirator depending on the situation," said Rob Barr, manager of environment, safety and quality with DOE's Office of River Protection, which oversees the tanks.

Reading the article, I'd be nervous too, espcially with the assurances that "'The only health effects we see ... are immediate effects,' said Buffi LaDue, an epidemiologist with the foundation. 'It clears up within 45 minutes to an hour or so.'"

Now where have we heard that before?

Nevertheless, workers are encouraged not to worry:

The U.S. Department of Energy, which is responsible for overseeing the Hanford cleanup, and the contractor responsible for the project, CH2M Hill Hanford Group, insist that tank-farm workers are safe.

They say there is no evidence of long-term health effects from the gases, there is adequate monitoring of the vapors, and protective masks are available when warranted. A committee was created last year to answer questions about the vapors.

This is the Bush Department of Energy speaking. Are these people you would tend to trust about long term health effects, especially cancers, which can take 20 to 30 years to show up?

In the "lessons (not) learned" department, the article notes that

This spring, Hanford workers dating to the 1940s finally began receiving checks from the federal government to compensate them for radiation-related cancers and other debilitating ailments. So far, $5.3 million has been paid to 40 current and former workers, while more than 450 have had their claims denied.

Afraid of becoming the next generation of casualties, Young and others want easier access to masks that filter air, or to have masks with air pumped into them or supplied in a tank.

Read the article. Then scroll down to the article on the European "precautionary principle" and ask yourself where you'd rather be working if you're interested in getting to know your grandchildren.

Nursing Home Fined For Unsafe Needles

"Safety is a Priority"

To OSHA's credit (and it's hard to find much to give them these days), they have issued an appropriate $102,000 "willful" violation to Beaver Valley Nursing & Rehabilitation Home in Beaver Falls, PA where

Managers required workers to use banned needles, exposing them to increased health risks from blood-borne diseases

According to OSHA,

A willful violation exists under the Act where the evidence shows either an intentional
violation of the Act or plain indifference to its requirements.

The employer committed an intentional and knowing violation if:

An employer representative was aware of the requirements of the Act, or the existence of an applicable standard or regulation, and was also aware of a condition or practice in violation of those requirements, and did not abate the hazard.

In this case

Even after acknowledging in internal safety meetings that the needles broke OSHA regulations, managers continued to require workers to use the banned needles, the agency said.

That represented "willful violation" of regulations requiring safer, protective needles, and resulted in a $70,000 fine, said OSHA spokeswoman Leny Uddyback-Forston.

"There were times employees would bring this up (that) they should be using safe devices and these safe devices were not used," said Edward Selker, assistant director of OSHA's Pittsburgh area office.

Unsafe needles weren't the only problem:

OSHA also cited the home for rejecting a union representative's request to view safety records.

"They told us they could not provide us with the information and that we were not entitled to that information," said Kevin White, organizer for Service Employees International Union District 1199P, which represents about 100 workers.

Health care facilities have been required since 1999 to use syringes with guards and sheaths, safeguards designed to prevent workers from "needle sticks" that could transmit such blood-borne diseases as Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C and HIV.

Other violations included improper training, inadequate medical counsel to workers after needle sticks and failure to replace overfilled needle disposal bins.

In its defense, facility administrator John Papasodero said in a faxed statement that safety is "a priority" at the Beaver Valley nursing home.

And I'm sure there are signs on the wall that prove it.

MSHA Issues Quecreek Mine Accident Report

The Mine Safety and Health Administration has issued a final report on the Quecreek Mine accident that trapped nine miners in the mine for 77 hours.

A federal report more than a year in the making concluded inaccurate, abandoned maps caused last summer's Quecreek Mine accident.

But the Mine Safety and Health Administration report issued Tuesday also cited the coal mine's owner, PBS Coals Inc., mine operator Black Wolf Coal and Musser Engineering for negligence. MSHA also castigated state permitting procedures for weaknesses that contributed to the accident that nearly killed 18 Somerset County coal miners.

Fines have not been determined yet, although

Unlike the state, which recently issued a report with no findings against the mine owners, their consultants or the mine operator, MSHA issued negligence violations against PBS, Black Wolf and Musser for failing to provide accurate, certified abandoned mine maps.

The report, which has not yet been seen by the United Mine Workers, is not without controversy:

MSHA also dismissed a Pennsylvania Deep Mine Safety engineer's contentions that PBS representatives showed him a more accurate map of the abandoned mine, but refused to file a copy of it with the state and consistently ignored his warnings that they had not provided a final certified abandoned mine map. Although the Pennsylvania Inspector General's Office issued a report stating that engineer Tom McKnight's statements appeared credible, Lauriski said his team could find nothing to support them.

Safety experts from the United Mine Workers said they had yet to see the MSHA report but were concerned that the Inspector General's report was getting short shrift. Lauriski, who noted his team was not given the Inspector General's report until the final days of its probe, insisted MSHA did everything it could to investigate it.

More here on the report and here is a previous report about the mine.

Preventing illness and environmental catastrophes instead of paying afterward, if ever.

First they play footsie with Saddam, then those Eurosocialist-surrender monkeys attack capitalism-as-we-know-it.

Here is yet another excellent article by Sam Lowenberg in the American Prospect about the European precautionary principle, "a doctrine enshrined in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty among European Union members, governments should protect their populations against risk, even before all the data are compiled," and how they're whipping American companies into shape. I've written about this before, but in a nutshell, those pinko Europeans are

Crafting legislation that by 2005 will require the industry to conduct extensive safety tests on 30,000 common chemicals. At least 1,500 are expected to be banned or severely restricted in their use as a result. The industry estimates that the testing alone will cost it more than $7.5 billion

The most interesting parts of the article are the descriptions of U.S. companies' futile attempts to use the same tactics that succeed here to kill the European regulations. Their problem begins with the whole precautionary principle:

The doctrine is a prescription for government intervention before harm occurs. By contrast, Washington generally doesn't pass broad regulatory overhauls unless there's concrete evidence of harm. U.S. laws that put new burdens on industry -- such as the Superfund or the recent accounting reform -- tend to be attempts to clean up disasters.

The Euros claim that prevention actually saves money:

Proponents claim that the chemical-testing legislation will save companies money in the long run. Dr. Michael Warhurst, who works on the issue for the World Wildlife Fund, argues that the tests will keep especially dangerous chemicals off the market and thus preempt many large lawsuits. He points out that product liability lawsuits cost U.S. industry about $180 billion a year, or 1.9 percent of the gross domestic product

Of course, American companies have another way to avoid spending money on product liability lawsuits: It's called "Tort Reform".

Another quaint cultural difference: The Europeans don't shy away from the fact that the regulations will be costly -- 14 billion and 26 billion euros by the year 2020.

But, by the Europeans' count, this is a small price to pay for the benefits gained. The European Commission estimates that the strengthened regulation of chemicals will result in a drop of 2,200 to 4,300 cancer cases per year, with a savings over 30 years of 18 billion to 54 billion euros in occupational health costs alone.

In America, on the other hand, we avoid such costly regulations by something called "cost-benefit analysis" where we only count the costs and not the benefits.
Clearly they have all of their priorities mixed up:

Last year, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Rockwell Schnabel, complained in a Wall Street Journal Europe op-ed that European regulators did not take enough business input into their decisions and that they were concentrating too much on environment and health at the expense of growth and trade.

Let me repeat that for those of you who spaced out for a minute: European regulators did not take enough business input into their decisions and that they were concentrating too much on environment and health at the expense of growth and trade.

OK. So what cultural psychopathology underlies this clearly deviant behavior?

The current conflict between corporate America and the European Union cannot be fully understood unless one considers that the bribery and corruption that have long plagued European politics are dwarfed by what is legal and accepted in Washington. In the United States, lobbyists can kill legislation at almost any point in its progress. They can keep it from ever being heard in committee and they can cut its funding after it's been passed. Whether the issue is tobacco, health insurance or nuclear power, corporate lobbying tactics in Washington are standard: Give tens of thousands of dollars to candidates, hire former officials who used to regulate the industry, and utilize mass mailings and front groups to produce an appearance of grass-roots support, known in the business as "Astroturf."

Read the article. It's important information that only rarely makes it into the mainstream press. And it gives us over here something to shoot for -- changing the mindset of the American public and the politicians that supposedly represent them, but who actually live in terror of being accused of "concentrating too much on environment and health at the expense of growth and trade."

P.S. You know what pisses me off? (Yeah, I know, everything.) In this country, the slightest whiff of regulation elicits immediate cries of "bankruptcy," "bad business climate," "suffering small businesses," etc. But you know what? When Europe finally issues all of these regs, the U.S. companies will happily participate and whine all the way to the bank.

Why? Because as Lowenberg points out, "they want to do business in Europe's 340-million-person market -- or in its half-billion-person market next year, when the European Union is slated to add 10 new member countries. "

On the other hand, these activities give me a bit of hope that conditions in the U.S. don't really have to be this crazy for all eternity. Even if it's a somewhat difficult these days to change things on this side of the Atlantic, it's at least good to know that an alternative reality exists on this earth and not just in our imaginations. (Oh give me a break, you idealistic twirp!) Blech! I gotta go....

Minneapolis Cab Company Agrees to Put Cameras in Cabs

Speaking of acting like a union....here we have a positive result of a tragedy -- a cabdriver shot to death -- and some good old fashioned organizing. Somali cabdrivers in Minneapolis are planning a one-day walkout on August 18 to honor the two cabbies who were fatally shot in the past month and to draw attention to their security concerns.

Mohamed Saleh's picture was prominently displayed Monday on a national Web site devoted to the nation's steady list of slain cabdrivers, the same day the Minneapolis company he drove for decided to install security cameras in its taxis as a safety precaution.

***
Such safety measures have been credited with a dramatic decrease in cabdriver deaths in other metropolitan areas, including Baltimore, Boston and New York, where the city partly finances cameras or shields in virtually all the city's 50,000 taxicabs. As a result, the number of annual cabbie slayings in that city plummeted from 40 "to close to zero,'' said New York-based transportation consultant Bruce Shaller.

Scroll down for the background story.

For more information on cabdriver safety, check out this website, as well as this one.

Labels: taxi drivers

More Holiday Shopping Tips

Check out www.seeyageorge.com for these T-Shirts:

Save the Environment: Plant a Bush Back in Texas

Like Father Like Son: One Term Only

One Nation...under surveillance.

Regime change begins at home.

Stop mad cowboy disease.

Somewhere in Texas...A village is missing its idiot.

The way you get a union is by acting like a union

Good story in In These Times about UNITE's Cintas organizing campaign. It's inspiring to see unions that really takes organizing seriously.

Since 1998 UNITE has quadrupled the number of unionized industrial laundry workers to 40,000. UNITE now represents about one-fourth of hourly employees in the industry. The union has boosted wages, won company-paid health insurance, expanded other benefits, and given workers a voice in the laundry industry through an aggressive organizing strategy. It has combined community pressure—mobilizing clergy, politicians, community groups, and customers—with vigorous employee organizing to demand “card check” recognition of the union. In other words, rather than go through the NLRB election procedures—which give employers greater opportunities to intimidate workers in anti-union campaigns and then to fight further over negotiating a contract if the union wins—UNITE typically fights to win promises of employer neutrality and, preferably, acknowledgement of the union on the basis of large majorities of employees signing union cards. Often workers strike, in conjunction with a comprehensive community support campaign, to win recognition. “The way you get a union is by acting like a union,” argues Liz Gres, who oversees the 30 organizers now focused on seven major Cintas markets.

The San Mateo Daily Journal has an article about a UNITE rally today at Starbucks, in order to pressure the company to fire Cintas as their apron, mat and linen service.

Cintas was cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for serious violations last month, said UNITE spokesman Jason Oringer.

Two Cintas workers have also died because of “illegal and unsafe working conditions,” according to a statement by the group. They also charge that Cintas is under investigation for more than 100 violations of federal labor law including illegally firing and retaliating against pro-union employees.

There are other stories about the Cintas campaign here and here.

Minneapolis Taxi drivers call for one-day walkout over health and safety conditions

I think we could all learn a lesson in direct action for Minneapolis's Somali cabdrivers

August 11, 2003 -- Somali cabdrivers in Minneapolis said Sunday they will stage a one-day walkout to honor the two cabbies who were fatally shot in the past month and to draw attention to their security concerns.

More than 40 cabdrivers met at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul and agreed to park their cabs for 24 hours Aug. 18. They said they plan to ask non-Somali drivers to do the same. There are hundreds of cabdrivers in Minneapolis.

During the two-hour meeting, cabbies also said they intended to drive their cabs in a procession to Gov. Tim Pawlenty's office at the State Capitol in hopes of meeting with him.

Taxicab driving is one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, according to a report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Drivers at Sunday's meeting say neither their employers nor the city of Minneapolis have done enough to make their jobs safer.

They are asking that bullet-proof partitions and security cameras be installed in their cabs. So far, cab companies have been unwilling to pay for such upgrades, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak made it clear Friday that public money wouldn't be provided for private businesses.

Cabdriver Mustafa Hussen said that parking the cabs is worth losing one day's pay to show the solidarity that exists among the drivers.

"The strike is to remember the two brothers we lost in the community of taxi drivers," Hussen said. "The strike will be an expression of concerns that have not been addressed."

More here and here and here.

Labels: taxi drivers

The Weekly Toll

State OSHA will investigate cannon death

August 8 -- The state office of the Occupational Safety and Health Division is investigating what caused a cannon to blow apart and kill a 16-year-old Aumsville boy at Camp Meriwether.

Christopher Kroker was employed as a counselor at the camp near Tillamook, so the death qualifies as a workplace accident.

Investigators will look into possible manufacturing defects, procedures, maintenance and training, said Steve Corson, spokesman for OR-OSHA.

OSHA Investigating Roofer's Lightning Death

August 5, 2003

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Lightning from Monday's storms produced a deadly outcome for a local worker, NewsChannel 4's Marshall McPeek reported.

The worker, 17-year-old Herman Harnandez Vasquez, was killed when he was struck by lightning. The accident is under investigation.

Vasquez was working on a roof in Hilliard when Monday's thunderstorms rolled in. He took a direct hit from the lightning bolt. Despite rescue efforts, he was pronounced dead a short time later.

There are more questions than answers at this point. Not the least of which is whether any safety regulations were violated. Did he have safety training? Should he have even been working this job? It's going to take a while for investigators to come up with answers.

"This is simply an act of God," said Mike Feazel of Feazel Roofing.

(Isn't it always?)

More here: The death of an underage worker struck by lightning while roofing this week underscores how immigrant workers are injured or killed at disproportionate rates, advocates said.

OSHA is investigating fatal accident at plant

Tuesday, August 5, 2003

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating a forklift accident that killed a Sanford man while he was working in Berwick on Friday.

Thomas Brown, 48, was operating a stand-behind forklift at Prime Tanning Co. Inc. on School Street when he backed into a storage rack.

He got pinned between a shelving unit and the forklift as he backed it up about 3:20 p.m., Berwick police said.

Instructor suspended over death of trainee
A firefighter instructor who allegedly failed to recognize a Pennsylvania trainee's fatal heatstroke symptoms has been suspended without pay for 30 days, a newspaper reported Thursday.

County commissioners in Frederick County, Md., suspended Jeff Coombe late last week in connection with the July 2002 death of Andrew J. Waybright, The Frederick News-Post reported, citing anonymous sources.

Worker died from head trauma, autopsy finds

Aug. 9, 2003

Racine - A fall from a great height and severe head trauma will most likely be listed as the the cause of death of a Milwaukee man who was involved in a construction site accident in Racine last week, Racine County Medical Examiner Thomas Terry said Thursday.

Robinson fell from scaffolding and was impaled on a 5-inch bolt at a construction site near Batten Airport at Mount Pleasant St. and South St. He was 55.

Worker dies after fall at former power plant

Aug. 09, 2003 APPLETON — A 29-year-old man died after falling about 20 feet from the roof of an old power plant.

The man was a member of a five-person crew from A&A Environmental, of Poynette. The group was removing asbestos from the roof.

Labels: Weekly Toll

Gary Hart on Chemical Plant Security

Former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart has followed my lead writing in the Washington Post about the Bush administration's rhetoric (and nothing else) on chemical plant security. He does a good job explaining the problems with the Inhofe bill:

Incredibly, the Inhofe bill provides for virtually no oversight or enforcement of safety requirements. Unlike Corzine's proposal, it would not allow the government to demand emergency action by companies that it has reason to believe are terrorist targets, nor would it insist on government review of facility security plans. (The latter failure is akin to the Internal Revenue Service's telling companies to fill out their tax forms but not to bother to file them.) The Inhofe bill prohibits the federal agency with the most expertise on chemicals, the EPA, from putting its skills to good use. And unlike the Corzine bill, the Inhofe bill would not require companies to replace dangerous chemicals -- which might pose tempting terrorist targets -- even when safer technologies are available and affordable. The chemical manufacturers say that they will consider making their processes safer. But we did not just ask airlines to simply consider improving security -- we made them do it.

If Inhofe's bill were to become law, only the chemical industry would breathe easier. But the Bush administration has an obligation to all Americans to do more than simply permit industry to write its own rules. We need legislation that keeps us safer by requiring chemical companies to reduce their risks and that ensures accountability through government oversight.

Labels: Chemical Plant Security

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire...

You know, I'm starting to think they just can't help it. They have a pathological compulsion to lie. It's not that they think they're doing anything wrong really, it's just that the facts keep getting in the way of the "truth." Facts or the "truth?" The "truth" or the facts. "Truth," facts, "truth" facts. Life in Washington is just so hard. First there's this:

IG Investigates Whether EPA Misled Public on Water Quality

The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general is investigating whether the agency is deliberately misleading the public by overstating the purity of the nation's drinking water, according to EPA officials and agency documents.

Seems the EPA was claiming that "94 percent of the population served by community water systems were served by systems that met all health-based standards," while the actual figure was "79 to 84 percent in 2002 -- putting an additional 30 million Americans at potential risk."

And then there was this....

White House Sway Is Seen in E.P.A. Response to 9/11

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 -- An investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general into official statements about air quality after the collapse of the World Trade Center has found that White House officials instructed the agency to be less alarming and more reassuring to the public in the first few days after the attack.

This is all about the EPA's almost immediate assurance to New Yorkers that the air was perfectly fine, even though they didn't have the information to support that. In fact, according to this report, EPA had originally intended to be much more cautious.

But the Inspector General got hold of EPA's original draft press release -- before the White House's Council on Environmental Quality got a look at it.

The report compares two news releases with their draft versions and concludes, "Every change that was suggested by the C.E.Q. contact was made."

The title for the original version of one news release was, "E.P.A. Initiating Emergency Response Activities, Testing Terrorized Sites For Environmental Hazards." In the final version, the second clause was changed to read, "Reassures Public About Environmental Hazards." In the same release, a section that said, "Even at low levels, E.P.A considers asbestos hazardous in this situation" was deleted and replaced with a section that read, in part, "Short-term, low-level exposure of the type that might have been produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is unlikely to cause significant health effects."

And then there was this unrelated article, except for the common theme of truth-challenged Administration officials...

Iraqi Trailers Said to Make Hydrogen, Not Biological Arms

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 -- Engineering experts from the Defense Intelligence Agency have come to believe that the most likely use for two mysterious trailers found in Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to make biological weapons, government officials say.

The classified findings by a majority of the engineering experts differ from the view put forward in a white paper made public on May 28 by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which said that the trailers were for making biological weapons.

***

The engineering team that has come to believe the trailers were used to produce hydrogen includes experts whose task was to assess the trailers from a purely technical standpoint, as opposed to one based on other sources of intelligence. Skeptical experts had previously cited a lack of equipment in the trailers for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production.

Bush administration officials have said the most compelling information that the trailers were used for making biological weapons has come from a human source, an Iraqi scientist who described the trailers and what he said was their weapon-making role to American experts months before.

So what do we believe? They eyes of our experts or an Iraqi scientist seeking to curry favor with the Americans?

For those of you who follow the wild goose chase for Weapons of Mass Destruction know that the fact that these trailers made weather balloons and not anthrax was available way back in May. For more information, you can read all about it at Daily Kos.

For my purposes, I thought the following paragraph was the most significant:

Senior administration officials have said repeatedly that the White House has not put pressure on the intelligence community in any way on the content of its white paper, or on the timing of its release.

No, of course not. Why would anyone ever suggest that the White House would put pressure on any agencies to hide truth or lie?

Christmas is just Around The Corner

And it's not to early to start your shopping.

Sharing the Stealth: They Lie About Science Too

Congressman Henry Waxman has put out a report detaling the Bush Administration's manipulation and distortion of the scientific process in a few issues like Abstinence-Only Education, Agricultural Pollution, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Breast Cancer, Condoms, Drinking Water, Education Policy, Environmental Health Food Safety, Global Warming, HIV/AIDS, Lead Poisoning, Missile Defense, Oil and Gas, Prescription Drug Advertising, Reproductive Health, Stem Cells, Substance Abuse, Wetlands, Workplace Safety, and Yellowstone National Park.

Not much on workplace safety and health except for blackballing qualified nominees for scientific committees because of their support for the OSHA ergonomics standard.

Labels: Ergonomics

Bush Administration Earns Failing Grade on Chemical Plant Security

Terrorists didn't need Saddam Hussein's mythical chemical weapons of mass destruction to launch a catastrophic attack against the United States. It turns out they can literally find all the ammunition they need right here -- thanks to the inattention of the Bush administration.

This is a subject about which I've written extensively here and here. But the situation does not seem to be improving, according to an article in yesterday's Government Executive:

Despite the Bush administration's public promises and alarms, the White House has taken almost no action to improve security at any of the nation's 15,000 facilities -- including chemical manufacturing plants, petroleum tank farms, and pesticide companies -- that contain large quantities of potentially deadly chemicals. For that matter, the administration has done virtually nothing even to assess those facilities' vulnerability, even though the dangers are far from theoretical: An accidental leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, immediately killed between 3,800 and 8,000 people in 1984 and, according to some reports, has since claimed an additional 12,000 lives. Closer to home, an accidental chlorine gas leak at a Honeywell refrigeration plant in Baton Rouge, La., on July 20 sent four workers to the hospital and forced 600 residents to stay indoors.

Counterterrorism experts shudder to think about the number of deaths an intentional release of a toxic chemical could cause. And the Bush administration's inertia heightens their worries.

"These chemical plants have a vulnerability which has a catastrophic characteristic ... that could approximate the World Trade Center," Rand Beers, a White House counterterrorism adviser for 30 years, told National Journal. Dissatisfied with the Bush administration's approach to security, Beers resigned in March and now advises the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

How real is the danger?

Based on reports from the 15,000 facilities required to submit that worst-case-scenario information, the EPA warned that a terrorist attack on any one of the 123 chemical facilities located in densely populated areas could expose 1 million people to toxic chemicals. An attack on one of 700 other facilities could threaten at least 100,000 people. And an attack at one of 3,000 other chemical sites could affect 10,000 people.

It's not that the issue hasn't been on Bush's radar screen. It's just that he keeps changing the channel. Like the proverbial hot potato, the EPA earlier this year backed down before threats of chemical industry lawsuits and tossed responsibility for regulating chemical plant security over to the Department of Homeland Security.

Still struggling to get on its feet, Homeland Security has no authority to require the chemical industry to adopt stricter security measures. It also doesn't have the money or personnel to inspect industrial plants for potential security problems.

True to form, the Bush administration is relying on the voluntary efforts of the chemical industry to protect the country even though "two-thirds of the facilities that use or store high volumes of toxic chemicals...don't belong to those groups, according to EPA officials."

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the chemical industry succeeded last year in killing Senator Jon Corzines chemical security bill after a unanimous vote from the Senate Committee considering the bill. Corzine's bill called for (gasp!) regulations that, among other things, would have required chemical facilities to move toward "inherently safer" production -- for example substituting safer chemicals for potentially hazardous ones and reducing the quantity of hazardous chemicals kept in the plant.

Corzine has resubmitted his bill this year, but instead of killing it outright again, the chemical industry has given luke-warm support to a much weaker bill introduced by Senator James Inhofe (D-OK)."Inhofe's bill would not require companies to submit vulnerability or security-improvement plans to Homeland Security. It also would not require companies to consider using alternatives to current chemicals and practices." Their theory is that we simply need to have more guns and higher fences, and keep the contents of chemical plants secret (as if!) -- which means keeping information away from those loose lips at EPA. (And, of course, this also means saying goodbye to citizens' post-Bhopal right to know what's brewing next door.)

Ironically, the Republicans' arguments end up supporting the philosophy behind Corzine's push for inherently safer processes:

Texas Republican Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, said that although he's monitoring the situation, he sees no need for tough new chemical security requirements in the aftermath of 9/11.

"The problem you have in an open society is that it's physically impossible to make any large industrial site terrorist-proof," Barton said in an interview. "If there are enough terrorists who are dedicated enough and equipped well enough, they're going to overwhelm everything that you put up short of some sort of Fort Knox -- which doesn't make much sense, given the cost and the relatively remote possibility that any specific site is going to be targeted."

But to requote myself from a previous posting

how much sense does it make to only commit resources to guard a target (with questionable effectiveness) when in most cases it's entirely possible to shrink or even remove the target completely? As outlaw Willie Sutton explained, they robbed banks because that's where the money was. Chemical plants are potential targets for terrorists because that's where the greatest potential for terror is. Take the money out of the banks -- or the catastrophic potential out of chemical plants -- and no one cares.

So how has the industry been doing with its voluntary efforts?

A July 9 survey by the Conference Board, a New York City-based business research group, found that since 9/11, U.S. companies have increased their spending on security an average of only 4 percent. Other studies by the Brookings Institution, Rand, the Congressional Research Service, and the Progressive Policy Institute also raised serious questions about security problems at chemical plants and other high-risk facilities with large amounts of hazardous material.

Newspapers repeatedly report reporters successful attempts to walk unchallenged right into chemical plants and the Government Accounting Office also has serious doubts about the industry's ability to guarantee its own security.

But hey, ultimately we don't need no stinkin' terrorists to blow up our neighborhood chemical plant. We can do it ourselves. At this point, the prospect of terrorist attacks against U.S. chemical facilities is scary, but it's hypothetical. What is real are the hundreds of workers who have died and communities that have been threatened from explosions caused by the very real hazards of reactive chemicals -- which, if you scroll down a bit -- you will see that the Bush administration also refuses to regulate.

The bad news is that we're perfectly capable of causing mass destruction without Saddam Hussein's weapons and without terrorists. But the good news is that the solution to all of these threats is the same: Inherently safer production, better and safer management of chemical plants, and regulations to make sure it all happens.

Labels: Chemical Plant Security

California:Who Does Labor Love?

Apparently no one. Good article by Harold Meyerson in the LA Weekly on labor's luke-warm support for Gray Davis -- not because they like Gray, but to prevent what could be a precident-setting theft of a democratic election.

Union chiefs tell horror stories of Davis’ reluctance to agree to last year’s bill providing arbitration in farm-labor disputes; they note his aversion to populist causes and add that Davis is so shy about touting the good bills he has signed that their members don’t credit him with any significant achievements.

But the prospect of Dianne Feinstein is worse.

In just the past several weeks, Feinstein has sided in committee with Orrin Hatch, and against all her fellow Democrats, to limit the recompense workers can collect from employers for poisoning them with asbestos. She has come out in favor of private-school vouchers within the District of Columbia. And who can forget her vote for Bush’s 2001 tax cut, the only one of the 12 Democratic senators to side with Bush who came from a solidly Democratic state?

Of course all of this was written before Arnold, Bustamante and Garamendi got in, and before Feinstein got out. So who knows which way is up at this point. Maybe Davis should just resign. Democrat Bustamante becomes Governor, the recall is off and the R's are left sucking their thumbs.

Privitization: If it works for the Army, it'll work for the rest of the federal (and state and local) government(s) too

This nugget was mined from Suburban Guerrilla:

More on outsourcing - this time, in Iraq - with disastrous results.
U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up, Army officers said.

Months after American combat troops settled into occupation duty, they were camped out in primitive, dust-blown shelters without windows or air conditioning. The Army has invested heavily in modular barracks, showers, bathroom facilities and field kitchens, but troops in Iraq were using ramshackle plywood latrines and living without fresh food or regular access to showers and telephones.

Even mail delivery -- also managed by civilian contractors -- fell weeks behind.

Though conditions have improved, the problems raise new concerns about the Pentagon's growing global reliance on defense contractors for everything from laundry service to combat training and aircraft maintenance. Civilians help operate Navy Aegis cruisers and Global Hawk, the high-tech robot spy plane.

Workplace Tragedies/Union Action Produce NJ Reactive Chemical Protections

The New Jersey rule to protect workers and communities against catastrophes caused by reactive chemicals that I wrote about a couple of days ago was a result of two workplace disasters and strategic organizing by unions and environmentalists.

Eight years after the notorious Napp Technologies explosion in Lodi and five years after another blast in Paterson, New Jersey is becoming the first state in the nation to regulate the potentially explosive chemicals blamed in both incidents.

Chemicals not regulated as hazardous materials were inadvertently mixed in a vat at Lodi plant, causing an explosion that killed five workers, injured 41, and forced 300 residents to be evacuated. Similarly, ingredients were incorrectly mixed at Morton International's dye manufacturing subsidiary, with the reaction injuring nine employees and rocking homes 15 blocks away.

Both catastrophes prompted calls from unions and environmentalists for regulation of such "reactive chemicals" - substances not considered hazardous on their own but which can become volatile if exposed to air or water, or mixed with the wrong ingredient.

As a result of these and other explosions caused by reactive chemicals, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has recommended that OSHA and EPA issue federal regulations. But the Bush administration has refused to act on the CSB's recommendations.

Without regulations like these, workers and people living in the surrounding communities are at risk from the kind of runaway reactions these kind of chemicals can have," Poje said.

Current regulation forces a company to give special training only to employees handling substances that are hazardous on their own, such as chlorine or ammonia.

So workers don't know the potential dangers of lesser-known chemicals such as ethyl nitrate and potassium hydrosulfite, "and they don't know to respond if there is an incident," Poje said. He noted that workers did not immediately evacuate after the accident at the Morton plant because the dangers were unknown to them.

Ergo Repeal Qualifies for Washington Ballot

This pretty much says it all

OLYMPIA, Wash. - An initiative to repeal the state's sweeping workplace-ergonomics rules qualified for the November ballot after a $350,000 campaign by homebuilders who called the regulations "an unnecessary job-killer."

The initiative would immediately repeal the ergonomics rules issued by the Department of Labor and Industries in 2000 in a bid to reduce worker injuries caused by repetitive motion, heavy lifting, and awkward working positions.
But the BIA didn’t just have money, they have the untruth (lies) on their side as well. See here and here and here.

(In case you want the true facts about the Washington State ergo standard, click here.)

The State AFL-CIO doesn't think much of the initiative either:

BIAW cash, lies land I-841 on ballot despite bogus signatures

Despite uncovering an extraordinarily high number of invalid and potentially fraudulent signatures, the Secretary of State's office announced Wednesday that the Building Industry Association of Washington's Initiative 841 to repeal our state workplace ergonomic safety rule narrowly qualified for November's ballot.

Time out for a little humor. Apparently the Associated Press headline writers don’t know their geography very well. Here’s the original headline about the Washington STATE ergonomics repeal:

Thursday, August 7, 2003 · Last updated 6:44 a.m. PT
Ergonomics repeal ready for D.C. ballot

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- An initiative to repeal the state's sweeping workplace-ergonomics rules qualified for the November ballot after a $350,000 campaign by homebuilders who called the regulations "an unnecessary job-killer."

Seen one Washington, you’ve seen ‘em all.

Labels: Ergonomics

Despair of the Jobless

Good Bob Herbert column in the New York Times today about the desperate unemployment situation in George Bush's America.

First, things are much worse than the official numbers show:

The official jobless rate, now 6.2 percent, does not come close to reflecting how grim the employment situation really is. The official rate refers only to those actively seeking work. It does not count the "discouraged" workers, who have looked for jobs within the last 12 months but have given up because of the lack of offers. Then there are the involuntary part-timers, who would like full-time jobs but cannot find them. And there are people who have had to settle for jobs that pay significantly less than jobs they once held.

When you combine the unemployed and the underemployed, you are talking about a percentage of the work force that is in double digits. That's an awful lot of lost purchasing power for a society that needs broad-based wage growth among its consumers to remain economically viable.

And the Bush Administration? Message: I don't give a shit.

The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the fundamental interests of workaday Americans. On the business side of this divide, increased profits are realized by showing the door to as many workers as possible, and squeezing the remainder to the bursting point. Productivity (based primarily on improvements in technology) is way up. Hiring, of course, is down. Part-time and temporary workers are in; full-time workers with benefits are out.

And then there's the ominous trend of sending higher-skilled jobs overseas to low-wage places like India and China, an upscale reprise of the sweatshop phenomenon that erased so many U.S. manufacturing jobs over the past quarter century.

Working Americans need jobs just to survive. But the Bush administration equates the national interest with corporate interests, and in that equation workers can only lose.

Glad the recession is over. Someone better let these people know.

Terminate Arnold

Arnold just announced that he was going to run against Grey Davis in the California recall. He took the opportunity to bash the labor unions as special interests.

I have to take this opportunity to repeat one of my favorite lines from Bill Maher about Arnold's candidacy: "Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German."

Think I can get my money back from Terminator 3? (Hey, my kid made me see it.)

Washington State Ergonomics Referendum Resolution

Although the Building Industry Association of Washington's Initiative 841 to repeal the workplace ergonomic safety rule has yet to be officially certified for this fall's ballot by the Washington Secretary of State's office, the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO is urging all labor organizations to adopt a resolution formally opposing the initiative.

Linked here is a draft resolution that can be used or adapted for this purpose. Even if you're not a resident of Washington State, I'm sure they'd appreciate the support. And don't forget that the bell tolls not just for them. If this turkey passes, it will make it all the harder to issue ergonomics protections on the federal level or in any other states.

Adopt the resolution and send it to them.

More information here and here.

Labels: Ergonomics

Subway Hazards

Two good articles in Newsday about the hazards to workers and passengers in the New York subway tunnels.

The MTA is shortchanging straphangers' and workers' safety with an antiquated tunnel system and limited employee training for emergencies, critics charge.

"I think what has happened is that the health and safety of the workplace in the subway has been given less consideration than other aspects of the system," said Davitt McAteer, former chief of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. He recently surveyed the system's tunnels for the city's largest transit union and found the situation for riders is worse than for miners.

The safety expert, lawmakers and union leaders want better marked exits, brighter tunnels, improved evacuation procedures and more employee training on helping passengers escape underground dangers

Emergency response procedures in the event of another terrorist attack are one problem:

Subway workers have complained they have been given conflicting lessons about what to do in a terror attack. Some say supervisors have told them to run, while others report being told to stay and help passengers. New York City Transit says workers are told to assist passengers and notify emergency personnel.

Frank Goldsmith, director of occupational health for Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, said of subway employees: "The problem that I feel, personally, is the lack of training and the lack of understanding. They simply are not being given proper training."....

The conductor of that F train said that in five years on the job, he had never been trained for a fire. He also said leaving the station in a dark tunnel was harrowing. "I couldn't see at all," said Florizel Gordon. "You're like a blind man, walking and feeling your way out."

The union said the smoke was worsened by fans operating in the wrong direction - a charge New York City Transit denies.

A tunnel in Queens where a worker was killed in 2001 still does not have enough light, union leaders say. Samuel McPhaul, 49, was killed when he tripped on the tracks and hit the third rail near the Grand Avenue station in Elmhurst. Union officials say better lighting would have made the tunnel safer.

And a rather chillilng article about what happened during a recent subway fire.

Subway conductor Florizel Gordon staggered through the smoky tunnel underneath York Street in Brooklyn, twisting his ankle and falling hard on the tracks. The feeble glare of his Transit-issue flashlight proved useless.

A passenger shouted to Gordon that another passenger was having a heart attack. Gordon picked himself up and walked over to an older man hobbling on a bad knee and experiencing chest pains.

"I told him to cover his face and put his hand over my shoulder, and I helped him out," Gordon, a conductor since 1998, said in the cadence and diction of his native Jamaica.

"Sir, you can't fall down on me," the 41-year-old conductor, himself barely able to stay up, told the stranger. "We have to get out of here."

This was the early-morning subway fire at the York Street station two Saturdays ago. As flames and sparks raged from underneath two subway cars, workers and passengers scrambled the more than 600 feet to the southern end of the platform on the F line before plunging into the dark, smoky tunnel. Now came a treacherous trek of several hundred feet over the tracks to the nearest emergency exit.

"There were no lights," Gordon said. "The tube was pitch black. ... The smoke was so thick. You're like a blind man walking and feeling your way through."

Subway worker safety is being investigated by President Clinton's former Director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration Davit McAteer. McAteer said he was shocked to see that the lighting in the subways was worse than lighting in coal mines.

Confined Space Fatalities

Earlier this week I wrote about a confined space incident that had a happy ending. Those workers were lucky. The ones I ran across today weren't:

Authorities in Hanover County are trying to determine what caused the death of a landfill worker. The accident happened Monday afternoon at a privately owned landfill.

Officials say two maintenance workers went into a manhole 18 feet deep to check on a sump pump. One of the men passed out and died before they could get him out. Investigators are not sure what caused the man to collapse. The man's name has not been released.

This is a confined space incident where the toxic gas was apparently introduced by the workers when they a gasoline-powered pump into a hole. This is an example of a poor or missing safety program and another where the rescuer almost ends up dead:

One city worker is dead and another was in serious condition this morning after an accident late Sunday afternoon that occurred while they were trying to repair a sewage pump station in Athens.

Mike Stanley, a 14-year city employee, was pronounced dead at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital, according to Athens Service-Safety Director Wayne Key.

Dave Carder was listed in serious condition this morning at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, a hospital spokesman said.

The two men were overcome, possibly by carbon monoxide, after responding to a maintenance problem at the Oakmont sanitary lift station. Worker Scott Lambert also was at the scene.

Key said an underground portion of the lift station had flooded, and the workers attempted to use a vacuum truck to pump it out. When that failed, they gradually lowered a gasoline-powered pump into the 20-foot-deep hole, emptying it as the pump was lowered.

Stanley then descended into the lift station, but became ill. Lambert left the immediate area to call 911, and while he was away Carder apparently went down into the pump station to try to rescue Stanley, Key said.

And the U.S. is not the only country with confined space problems, as well as higher injury and fatality rates among foreign workers. This is from Greece:

Dimitris Kolovos, 45, and Vasili Passa, 42, died when they were overcome by methane fumes in a sewer while carrying out a project for Acharnon Municipality at Menidi.

Dimitris Tsakalis, 32, first went into the sewer to measure its depth and was overcome by the fumes. His colleagues went in to save him and they too collapsed. They were pulled out a short while later by the fire department, but the two were dead and Tsakalis is being treated at Sismanogleio Hospital, where he is in critical condition. Labor Inspectorate officials said the three belonged to a small private team that was working on the area's sewerage system. They had not taken the necessary precautions, such as wearing gas masks, and no one was supervising them. If a supervisor was there, he had run away to evade arrest, officials said.

The accident underscored the dangers faced by foreign workers especially, as Passa and Tsakalis are Albanian citizens. Foreign workers are usually more likely to carry out dangerous work without objecting, are not union members, and often don't have the necessary training. Last year, 40 foreign workers died in work-related accidents, 38 died in 2001 and 20 in 2000.

Labels: confined space hazards

Workers Comp Notes

Insurance Company Rate Hikes Force Comp Cuts

Leaders Call for Insurance Reform

Around the country, insurance company rate hikes have forced states to cut workers’ compensation benefits, according to AFL-CIO and Workplace Injury Litigation Group (WILG) leaders attending a national Workers’ Voice meeting in San Francisco July 19. For more information, check out the AFL-CIO's Workers' Comp Notes.

Tysons Settles Wrongful Death Suit

This is an interesting story, as well as another confined space tragedy.

A wrongful death suit filed by the families of two Tyson Foods Inc. workers who suffocated at the company's rendering plant four years ago has been settled in federal court.

The families of the late James Dame Jr. of Slaughters and the late Michael Hallum of Madisonville settled their case against Tyson about a month ago.

The terms of the confidential settlement were sealed by the judge's order at the families' request.

Dame, who was 40, died July 22, 1999, after being overcome by fumes while trying to retrieve a forklift bucket that had fallen into a gas-filled pit at Tyson's River Valley Animal Feeds rendering plant near Robards.

Hallum, 24, perished trying to rescue his co-worker from the pit....

The families sought compensation for pain and suffering, medical and funeral expenses and loss of future earnings. Additionally, Dame's family sought $20 million in punitive damages.

Now I'm glad Tysons was forced to pay for these workplace killings, but I don't understand how they got around the "exclusive remedy" of Workers Compensation which generally prohibits workers or their families from suing their employers. Any attorneys out there who can explain this?

Oh, and one more thing. I'm awarding the "Sensitivity Award" to Tyson Attorney David Sarvadi (who in a previous life was also one of the leading anti-ergo extremists):

"This is a very sad occasion, a very tragic accident," David Sarvadi, a Tyson attorney, told the hearing officer, Thomas J. Hellman, in his opening remarks last November.

But, Sarvadi said, "The employees did not follow rules that had been established. They did not follow their training."

Got what they deserved, I guess.

Labels: confined space hazards

Illinois Governor Signs Pro-Labor Laws

From Nathan Newman

Governor Blagojevich signed 4 pro-labor bills yesterday, mostly aimed at easing organizing among public employees by eliminating delays in recognition by the state. Under the new system, when a majority of workers sign cards requesting union recognition-- they will get recognition without the delays and lawsuits they've faced in the past.

This is the model for labor law reform in the private sector -- unlikely for the foreseeable future since that will require national legislation. But the more states approve it for the public sector, the more compelling it will be as a model for labor law reform.

This is the type of action that should win Blagojevich and the Democrats much more labor support. Good move in a potential battleground state which also has one of the increasingly rare winnable Senate seats.

What I can never figure out, however, is why so many other Democratic Governors (and other politicians) don't automatically do everything the can to help unions organize -- considering that the Democratic party would completely dead (as opposed to being on life support) without labor. It's a basic law of current politics which too few seem to understand: More Labor Union Members = More Democratic Votes.

Civil War Brews over Ergonomics: OSHA vs. Anti-Ergo Industry

OSHA has been forced to face some SHOCKING truths lately. First, musculoskeletal injuries really do exist and implementing ergonomics fixes really does help. Second, just because a company (even a big, respected company) has a good program on paper, doesn’t mean it translates down to where people are actually working.

But the business associations, especially the National Coalition on Ergonomics, spawn of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, are having none of it. To ward off potentially precident-setting (for Republicans) ergonomics citations, NAM and NCE are considering forming a legal defense fund and taking legal action against OSHA, according our underground investigative reporter who knows all (one of my many valuable correspondents who, for reasons of homeland security, are forced to remain anonymous.)

And that’s OSHA’s third unpleasant revelation. Your friends may not remain your friends if you don’t join them in fantasyland.

The first reason the business associations are upset is because OSHA had the temerity to level a general duty clause ergonomics citation against a Coca-Cola bottling facility in Ohio.

OSHA also cited a Missouri SUPERVALU warehouse for ergonomics problems.

The evaluation of this manual lifting task indicates that employees are exposed to hazards that are causing or likely to cause MSDs, including low back pain (LBP) and shoulder related MSDs, as shown by a review of the company's injury and illness records from 1998 to the time of the inspection, which document that a significant number of MSDs have been caused by exposure to stressors; including 6 shoulder surgeries in 2001 and 2 shoulder surgeries in 2002.

Seems like it's hard to argue with shoulder surgeries. So what has the industry's undies in such a twist? A couple of things.

First, the Coca Cola citation involves truckers and the trucking and delivery industry (American Trucking Association and U.P.S., for example) were among the most rabid foes of the Clinton ergonomics standard. It's one thing if OSHA cites a couple of wimpy nursing homes, but it's quite another when they go after the big boys.

Industry mouthpieces point out that both Coca Cola and SUPERVALU have extensive ergonomics programs in place and note that OSHA Administrator John Henshaw had stated many times, including a recent speech to the American Occupational Health Conference that

We are not going to focus our enforcement efforts on employers who have implemented effective ergonomic programs or who are making good-faith efforts to reduce ergonomic hazards.

Clearly his industry buddies assumed they had a blank check. As long as companies had something decent on paper, reality (as in shoulder surgeries and other injuries) didn't count in individual facilities that may not be taking ergonomics problems as seriously as they need to.

Apparently that kind of enforcement strategy didn't pass the laugh test even in George Bush's OSHA.

Oh please don't give me a ticket, officer. Even if I was going 120 in a school zone, my parents have immaculate driving records and I got an "A" in drivers ed.

(And particularly embarrassing for OSHA and SUPERVALU, SUPERVALU’s Corporate Director of Risk Control James Koskan is a member of OSHA’s National Advisory Committee on Ergonomics.)

In response to this outrageous (and unusual) display of enforcing the law, the National Coalition on Ergonomics is considering forming a legal defense fund, presumably to aid in the defense of other mom and pop type businesses like Coke and SUPERVALU from violations of their purity by OSHA's gestapo agents....Even if they're Republican gestapo agents.

Don't you just hate it when the children fight?

Footnote: Coca Cola, incidentally, is no virgin when it comes to OSHA citations. The Atlanta Business Journal revealed that

Last year The Coca-Cola Co. and its network of bottlers were cited for 222 violations of federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration standards and fined $156,831.

In 2001, OSHA cited Coke (NYSE: KO) and its bottlers for 212 violations and fined them a total of $170,091.

Over the past decade, the companies have been cited for 2,264 violations.

A list released by OSHA in February that identifies 14,200 U.S. facilities that had accident and illness rates at twice the national average of about three illnesses or injuries for every 100 workers included 96 facilities owned by Coke bottlers.

Labels: Ergonomics

Worked to Death

Dr Sid Watkins died when his body could no longer stand his "crazy" working hours. Stressed out teacher Pamela Relf killed herself. So did mental health nurse Richard Pocock. And postal worker Jermaine Lee. All died because their jobs were just too much to bear.

These weren't recorded as job-related deaths. And that's the topic of a new page of Hazards magazine -- Worked to Death -- assembled by British workplace safety activist, Rory O'Neill.

I've written here a number of times over the past several weeks about the dwindling vacation time and increasing work hours of American workers. Well, as Worked to Death makes clear, overwork is not just a nuisance, it's a killer.

When I was at AFSCME and at OSHA I would often receive reports of workers' deaths "by natural cause" in the workplace. These would never be investigated. Probably bad eating habits, overweight, or it was "just their time." I wish I had access to this web page back then. This information would have come in handy and maybe have saved some lives:

The British Trades Union Congress TUC research shows that stress is Britain’s number one workplace health hazard. Now the ‘modern workers health check’ reveals worldwide evidence of employees being worked into the ground:

-- Workers with stressful jobs are more than twice as likely to die from heart disease.

-- An individual’s mental health deteriorates when a change in workload results in higher demands, less control and reduced support. Poor management planning and organisation can lead to heart disease.

-- Working for unreasonable and unfair bosses leads to dangerously high blood pressure.

-- Workers are smoking, drinking and ‘slobbing out’ to deal with workplace stress.

-- Long-term work-related stress is worse for the heart than aging 30 years or gaining 40lbs in weight.

Check out the accompanying "Drop Dead" fact sheet as well as a fact sheet featuring an interview with workplace stress authority Paul Landsbergis about work-induced heart attacks.

So next time you hear that a worker has died on the job from a heart attack, look at the working conditions a little bit more carefully.

New Jersey Adopts Reactive Chemical Regulation

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced expansion of New Jersey's Toxic Catastrophe Prevention Act (TCPA) program to add reactive chemicals to the list of extraordinarily hazardous substances that trigger risk management planning requirements of TCPA.

These chemicals can explode when accidentally exposed to air or water, or when they are improperly mixed with certain other chemicals. The force of the explosion can kill or permanently disable people outside the facility.

New Jersey will require companies handling reactive chemicals to prepare accidental release prevention plans and examine safer technologies to prevent industrial incidents like the tragic ones that occurred at Napp Technologies in Lodi in 1995 and at Morton International in Paterson in 1998. The Napp and Morton International accidents were the result of reactive chemistry interactions.

The U.S. Chemical and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) recommended last year that OSHA revise its Process Safety Management standard to add reactive chemicals. The Bush Administration withdrew a plan to begin rulemaking on reactives last year and the agency has not yet responded to the CSB's recommendation.

"New Jersey is the first state in the nation to address reactive hazards," said Charles Jeffress, chief operating officer of the CSB. "The Chemical Safety Board is very pleased by this step forward to protect residents and workers from chemical accidents."

Much of the credit for this rare (these days) progress in workplace safety and health goes to the Rick Engler and the New Jersey Work Environment Council who who led the way, along with other allies, including Paper, Allied- Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union Local 2-943 (representing workers at DuPont, state’s largest chemical plant) in planting the seeds for this measure.

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

Democratic Presidential Debate Wrapup

The AFL-CIO Presidential Candidate debate was interesting and occasionally inspiring. Some candidates looked better than others. (Some looked much better than others), but on the whole, I'd take any of them over the current resident of the White House (although I'm leaning toward Bob Edwards who hosted the event.)

Rather upsetting to us Confined Space groupies was the almost complete and total absence of any mention of health and safety issues (beyond a few token words by Kucinich and Kerry).

I mean, OK, maybe I'm a member of that wierd workplace health and safety cult (and so are you or you wouldn't be reading this), but what was the first major piece of legislation signed by George W. Bush? Yes, repeal of the federal ergonomics standard.

Not that I would ever think of criticizing the powers-that-be at the AFL-CIO....and there were lots of important issues discussed (jobs, health care, labor rights, corporate corruption, pensions, etc), but for many of these issues you just got the predictable platitudes that didn't particulary challenge the candidates (I mean, who was going to oppose workers' right to organize?)

A discussion of some actual workplace issues -- health and safety, overtime, living on less than a living wage, etc -- would have not only revealed the candidates' real understanding of workers' lives, but might also have been educational for the non-union members that may have been watching.

And a discussion of Bush's ergonomics crimes might have reminded people of some of the early misdeads of this administration that continue to affect millions of workers every day.

So fellow groupies and cultists: Now is the time to start thinking about how to make workplace health and safety a campaign issue in the coming elections (That's elections -- plural.) Ideas are welcome. Talk among yourselves. Then e-mail me.

Labels: AFL-CIO, Ergonomics

AFL-CIO Presidential Forum Tonight

Tonight, Tuesday Aug. 5, the nine Democratic presidential candidates working to beat President Bush in next year's election will join thousands of union members at the AFL-CIO's Working Families Presidential Forum in Chicago.

You can watch the entire forum when it is broadcast LIVE on C-SPAN beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

So far Gephardt has the most union endorsements, but it will be hard for any candidate to get to the two-thirds necessary for a national AFL-CIO endorsement.

Labels: AFL-CIO

Confined Space Close Call

I figure being as this Blog is called Confined Space, I should occasionally write about confined spaces.

This story has a happy ending -- barely -- unlike most of the confined space incidents that make the papers.

Two workers were rescued from the bottom of a Cape Coral manhole Friday after apparently succumbing to toxic fumes, emergency crews reported.

Rodney Jones and Michael Radford of the Cape Coral company Reliable Divers were taken to Cape Coral Hospital. Radford was treated and released, a hospital nursing supervisor said.

The conditions were not unusual for this type of incident:

One of the men apparently passed out from a combination of low oxygen levels and hydrogen sulfide and methane fumes, said Tom Tomich, operations chief for the Cape fire department. Both gases are a byproduct of sewage and are found in sewage pipes.

NIOSH reports that more rescuers are killed in confined space incidents than original victims. We almost had an example here.

Tomich said the two men were inside the shaft apparently fixing a leak. One of the men passed out and fell part of the way down the 12- to 15-foot shaft. Tomich didn't know how far the man fell.

The other man went down to help him; he also began feeling the effects of the gas and fell.

Luckily, the fire department got there fast and ventilated the pipes to provide life-saving air to the workers before rescuing them. Many workers and rescuers aren't so lucky.

One more rather disquieting note:

Tomich said people often pass out after working in such tight quarters in sewage shafts. The sewer pipes weren’t hooked up yet, he said, but apparently there still were fumes.

People often pass out? Hello? Doesn't that tell you something about your program? One person passing out is a pretty frightening "close call" from which serious lessons should be learned. But often?

And one more thing. As the article says, oxygen deficiency, hydrogen sulfide and methane gas are "byproducts of sewage." But they are also byproducts of any decaying organic material -- plant material like weeds or grass, dead animals, whatever. So, as Tomic notes, there can still be fumes, even if the pipes aren't hooked up. Lesson: Assume any sewer line is a potentially deadly confined space. Always follow the OSHA standard: monitoring, ventilation, training, proper procedures and equipment, and safe rescue preparations.

More confined space information here.

Labels: confined space hazards

Ground Zero Syndrome

Nearly two years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, half of the emergency workers who responded to the tragedy are ill, many suffering from respiratory problems. Some wonder whether workers were given enough information and equipment to protect them.

Linked here (scroll down) is an excellent National Public Radio story on the plight of the workers and the measures that weren't taken to protect them. Also featured is NYCOSH Director Joel Shufro who was warning from the first that workers needed better protections and that OSHA standards needed to be enforced.

Labels: 9/11 World Trade Center Workers

The Unbearable Heaviness of Industry

Postcards From China's Industrial Caldron

Check out this article in the NY Times today about an excellent photo exhibit about Chinese workers and working conditions by photographer Zhou Hai. The images are reminiscent of American labor photographer Earl Dotter and photographers of America's early industrial period.

"As our society has developed, so many workers have been marginalized, and fewer and fewer people care about them," Mr. Zhou said last month at the 798 Photo Gallery, appropriately housed in a renovated factory space in northeast Beijing. "So I felt a need to record this era and these people."

More pictures can be seen on Zhou's Web site: www.zhouhai.com.)

The Weekly Toll

Worker killed in trench collapse
Official: Walls lacked required supports at Dixie Highway site

Kentucky safety officials are investigating a trench collapse that killed a 35-year-old worker yesterday.

Eric R. West, of Bedford, Ky., died at the scene. An autopsy will be performed today, said Jefferson County Deputy Coroner Rick Siclari.

And a warning to those tempted to rush in an rescue trench collapse victims:

Pleasure Ridge Park Fire Chief Doug Atwell said he doesn't recommend that people try to rescue others who are trapped in a trench, because they risk becoming trapped themselves in another collapse. He said the trench's walls collapsed twice more yesterday as emergency workers labored to recover the body, but no one was hurt.

Contractor Cites 2nd Death In Fla. In The Past Week

TAMPA - A road construction worker helping to rebuild the downtown interchange of Interstates 275 and 4 was killed Tuesday night when a crane hit his head, authorities said. It was the second fatal accident in Florida this week for the contractor and the third since December.
James David Hall, of 125 Weeping Willow Road, Winter Haven, died a day before his 37th birthday, police said. ...

It was the second fatal accident in Florida in one week involving a Granite Construction employee.

A U.S. 98 bridge project in Panama City claimed the life of a worker July 23 when a scaffolding collapsed, dropping him and four others 50 feet into the water.

Electrocution accident kills two locals

PHENIX - Two men were killed and a third seriously wounded after they were electrocuted in an accident at 22 Pleasant St. in West Warwick yesterday.

Thomas D. Walker, 24, of Coventry and Jared D. Gendron, 18, of Hope, died when 7,200 volts of electricity penetrated their bodies. Kyle D. Moffat, 19 of Coventry was admitted to Kent County Memorial Hospital and is listed in good condition.

According to Narragansett Electric Vice President of Public Affairs Fred Mason "some workers were doing some shingling or siding trying to erect some staging. Using big, tall aluminum poles that would hold the planks that go across, the aluminum pole somehow came in contact with the electrical line. "

Truck fire claims life of painter; 12 critical

Greenwood man, 30, suffered 3rd-degree burns over 90 percent of his body; cause of blaze is unclear

One man has died as the result of an inferno that may have reached 1,000 degrees when it erupted in the back of a truck loaded with 13 painters, but authorities Wednesday were only beginning to understand the origin of the blaze.

The worker died at 10 p.m. Tuesday, about eight hours after the fire started, and his 12 companions all were listed in critical condition with second- and third-degree burns today.

More here

Albany man killed in junkyard accident

PORTLAND — A truck driver was killed Friday at a Northeast Portland salvage yard when he was hit by a crushed car being loaded onto a truck.

Timothy A. Bowers, 37, of Albany died at the scene, Portland Fire Bureau spokesman Lt. Neil Heesacker said.

Council Bluffs man killed in forklift rollover

OMAHA - A Council Bluffs man was killed Thursday morning at a construction site in Omaha when a forklift rolled over on top of him.

James Kirk, 42, of Council Bluffs was pronounced dead at the scene.

The accident occurred at the Quality Pork International worksite in southwest Omaha around 11:20 a.m. Kirk, a forklift operator, was working for KFR Inc., a company subcontracted by Dietzel Enterprises to work on installing a support wall at the business, according to Omaha Police Sgt. Cathy Cook.

State investigating Ireton man's death on farm

State investigators are looking into the work-related death of an Ireton, Iowa, man.

The Iowa Occupational Safety and Health agency has visited the Bar-K Farms in Carmel, Iowa, to investigate the July 18 death of 31-year-old Kenneth Van Wyk.

A report won't be completed for at least a month, said Mary Bryant, IOSH administrator.

Van Wyk died while repairing a steel 11,000-gallon liquid storage tank, said a Bar-K employee who declined to give his name. Van Wyk was inside the tank, which contained gas fumes, and passed out, the man said.

Honeywell worker dies after chemical leak

BATON ROUGE, La. A Honeywell International worker has died after being injured during a chemical leak at the plant, prompting another investigation by local, state and federal officials.

Delvin Henry of Baton Rouge was pronounced dead Wednesday at Baton Rouge General Medical Center, Sheriff's Office spokesman Lt. Darrell O'Neal said.

A container at the plant sprung a leak Tuesday while being filled with antimony pentachloride, according to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. The corrosive chemical can burn the skin, irritate the nose, mouth, throat and lungs; and cause headaches and nausea.

This latest accident follows a chlorine leak July 20 in which eight workers and some nearby residents were hospitalized after complaining of burning lungs and other irritations. The July 20 leak prompted safety investigations by the Fire Department, DEQ, Louisiana State Police, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.

UI worker dies from Sikorsky accident

David Bagdasarian was supposed to join friends today for the group’s annual summer trip to a major league ballpark to watch the Mets play.

Bagdasarian will not make that trip.

The United Illuminating Co. employee from Shelton died Thursday from injuries he suffered in a July 10 accident at Sikorsky Aircraft.

Bagdasarian, 49, died at Bridgeport Hospital from complications associated with injuries from the accident that occurred as he and two other UI employees surveyed electrical equipment in an outdoor cage in a parking lot at Sikorsky’s sprawling factory on Main Street in Stratford. The three men were surveying the equipment in preparation for work they were to do that weekend when an electrical arcing occurred.

Industrial accident claims Rock Springs man

GREEN RIVER -- A Rock Springs man died early Tuesday morning from neck and head injuries after the lift vehicle he was driving fell off a loading ramp, according to Sweetwater County authorities.

Douglas Ray Bernard, 35, was found by coworkers at around 6:45 a.m. at Wyoming Rents on Sunset Drive in Rock Springs, said County Coroner Dale Majhanovich. He estimated the accident occurred around 4:30 a.m.

2nd Skyway Construction Death Of Summer

Aug 2 (Chicago) -- A worker fell 50 feet to his death Friday after he stepped on an unsupported platform while working at a construction site on the Chicago Skyway, marking the second fatality from the area in less than a month.

The victim, identified by the medical examiner's office as David Stevens, 36, fell at about 1 p.m. from the Skyway at 75th Street and Greenwood Avenue, Gresham District Sgt. Robert Orlando said.

Stevens was laying a platform to pour concrete from when he stepped on a 3-by-4-foot piece of plywood that had no support under it, according to a Calumet Area detective.

The worker plunged 50 feet and struck his head on the ground, the detective said. He did not know the name of the construction company the victim worked for.

This was the second time in less than a month that a construction worker was killed falling from the Skyway.

Dennis McNamara, 63, 249 Lincoln Ct. in Wood Dale, was working on the Skyway near 77th Street when he plunged to the ground at about 11:10 p.m. July 9.

Worker Killed By Driver
A suspected drunken driver slammed into a Central Florida GreeneWay tollbooth under construction early Friday, killing one worker and injuring two others.

Grady Hill, 38, of Casselberry, suffered fatal injuries, according to the FHP. Injured were Paul Kimbro, 44, of Oviedo, and Charles Starrett, 43, of Geneva.
More here.

Labels: Weekly Toll

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