Why? Because They're Evil

Teach Your Children Well

I have three teenage children. They're good kids, all relatively free of drugs and sex (as far as we know -- ha, ha.) But my wife and I have clearly made a serious mistake in their upbringing. We seem to have raised them to actually think for themselves, and sometimes even to challenge the unassailable wisdom of their parents -- even when it comes to political issues. Where have we gone wrong?

I have fond memories of sitting my tiny children on my lap every four years to watch the political conventions. I would objectively and dispassionately point out to them how much uglier the Republicans were than the Democrats.

As they soon learned that ugliness is only skin deep, they've also been indoctrinated instructed with never-ceasing waves of well documented and logical arguments about why Republicans are full of sh%#, even if the D's aren't exactly always saints.

And now this! My eldest recently accused me of being unpersuasive in these matters because I'm so biased against Republicans. (And some are her best friends' parents are Republicans -- and they're actually very nice people -- I've met and socialized with them on occasion.)

In fact, I've even received letters from a few Confined Space readers arguing that if I was more "objective" and less biased and partisan, I might be more persuasive. Well, I admit that I may not be "evenhanded," in the sense that our "objective" media seems to think is necessary, but that's not the same as not being "objective." As economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman said

"There's a confusion between objectivity and even-handedness, they are not the same thing," Krugman said. "If Bush said the earth was flat, the reports in the mainstream media would say, 'Shape of the Earth: Views Differ."'

(Anyway, I don't spend all of this time writing this thing so I can be "evenhanded." You've got the so-called "liberal media" for that.)

But I ask you (and my children): Check out the greatest hits from the articles below and ask yourselves: is there not good and evil in the world? And do we not objectively know which is which?

For example, this is from yesterday's Washington Post :

Provisions Benefiting Energy Industry Are Folded into Bill

• For several years the Environmental Protection Agency has been studying whether an increasingly popular -- but environmentally controversial -- drilling technique used by Halliburton Co. and other big oil and gas operators pollutes underground drinking water supplies.
  
  Now Republicans drafting broad energy legislation have decided not to wait for EPA to issue its final report. Instead, the House-Senate compromise on the energy bill exempts the technique, known as "hydraulic fracturing," from some of the controls of the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act.
  
  Hydraulic fracturing "involves injecting a mixture of fluids and sand under very high pressure to crack rock and coal seams, aiding the escape of trapped oil and gas. The technique is spreading because of a boom in drilling for methane gas in coal beds. Most of the richest lodes are adjacent to vast underground drinking water reservoirs."
  
  
• Language agreed to by House-Senate negotiators would, for the first time, end a requirement that construction activities related to oil and gas exploration operate with a permit under the Clean Water Act.

Yeah, I'm sure when Congress passed the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act , they really didn't seriously intend for them to apply to the oil industry. Of course not.

And note the reference to "House - Senate negotiators." They're all Republicans. So who's negotiating with whom?

And, wait a minute... Haliburton. Haliburton. Where have I heard that name before?

• House Republicans are pushing for revisions in underground gasoline storage regulations that could make it easier for companies to get federal aid to clean up leaks and spills even if the companies are financially able to pay, congressional sources said.

All the more money available to put back into Republican campaign coffers. Did someone say "corporate welfare?"

• Meanwhile House GOP officials, led by Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), have insisted that the legislation limit the liability of manufacturers and refiners of the gasoline additive MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), which has been blamed for polluting water supplies in California, New Hampshire and other states.
  
  Lyondell Chemical Co., based in [House Majority Leader Tom] DeLay's home state, is the largest manufacturer of MTBE, industry officials say.
  
  The provision would prevent communities from collecting damages resulting from MTBE infiltration into water supplies unless there is proof the product was handled negligently. Manufacturers and refiners could not be sued merely because their products contain MTBE.

You might think they were just trying to save their money for their friends. That's part of it, but there's another motive at work here: "It would strike at trial lawyers, a thorn in the side of the GOP's big business backers and a key source of campaign funds for Democrats."

****

The second example of evil has to do with the battle raging in Texas over the unprecedented mid-term redistricting plan that Texas Republicans, lead House Majority Leader Tom Delay, are trying to push through the Texas Legislature that would eliminate 7 Democratic House seats.

You've all heard about the ongoing battles, boycotts, walkouts, and involvement by the Department of Homeland Security. Now a report by Republican operatives has leaked out, illuminating the motives in all of their most disgusting detail.

For those wishful thinkers who think that the Democrats may be able to take the House of Representatives back sometime in their lifetimes, the success of this plan will make that all but impossible.

The author of the report, Joby Fortson:

appeared to take special delight in writing about what he predicted would be the fate of two Texas Democrats, Frost and Rep. Lloyd Doggett. "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha . . .," he wrote before describing how the plan would affect their districts.

Discussing Frost's district, which runs between Fort Worth and Dallas, Fortson said, "It simply disappears." He said black voters in Fort Worth would be shifted into a Republican-dominated district, black voters in Dallas would be sent to a nearby district that is already heavily black, and Hispanic voters would be moved into another GOP district.

This one's good too:

In another section, Fortson described how the GOP plan would shift Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) into new, unfriendly territory.

"Chet loses his Killeen-Fort Hood base in exchange for conservative Johnson County," he wrote. "They will not like the fact he kills babies, prevents kids from praying and wants to take their guns. State Rep. Arlene Wohlgemuth (R), come on down, you are the next congressman from Texas."

And then there's the inevitable racist angle of this plot, as described in another Washington Post article

A Republican official did not dispute the purpose of the new redistricting plan. "We're not going to get them all, but it puts a number of them behind the eight ball," he said of the Democrats. "Virtually every Anglo Democrat is going to have a rough time."

All of the most endangered Democrats are white. State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a black Democrat from Houston, called the Republican plan "racist" and said that its central purpose is the elimination of elected white Democrats.

"That is the target, because they want to change the face of the Democratic Party to black and brown so they can continue to run racist innuendo in their campaigns," he said. "It is the elimination of [Texas] Anglo Democrats in the U.S. Congress."

Children, come here. Daddy has something to talk to you about......

Worker Trial Against IBM Toxic Chemical Exposures Begins

This will be an interesting case:

Working in I.B.M.'s plant in San Jose, Calif., in the 1970's and 1980's, Alida Hernandez thought she had the dream job, assembling computer disk drives for what was then the most prestigious company in the electronics industry.

But eventually, Ms. Hernandez said, the chemicals she worked with caused her to lose her sense of smell. "I thought it was just part of the job,'' she said. Then two years after she retired in 1991, Ms. Hernandez discovered she had breast cancer and eventually underwent a mastectomy.

James Moore worked in the San Jose disk drive factory for nearly 30 years. In his first four years there, he said, he worked with chemicals that he would later learn were toxic. In 1995, he contracted a largely incurable form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and has undergone radiation treatment. Mr. Moore, who has retired, says he sometimes has trouble breathing.

Neither Mr. Moore nor Ms. Hernandez can say for certain how they contracted cancer, but both say they know one thing for sure: Through much of their working lives, they were exposed to chemicals on the job that at times made them feel sick, often landing them in the offices of I.B.M.'s on-site doctors who they say would treat them and send them back to work.

And there's more to come:

The suit is the first of its kind in the electronics industry to go to trial. Two hundred fifty similar cases have been filed against IBM -- primarily in New York and Vermont, where Big Blue has semiconductor-manufacturing plants, and in Minnesota.

The workers have already suffered a serious setback – even before the trial begins:

Although the trial has yet to begin, the plaintiffs' case has already suffered a serious setback: In pre-trial hearings this week, the judge granted IBM's motion to exclude its "corporate mortality file," a database of death records of 30,000 employees over a 30-year period. The plaintiffs had this database analyzed by Boston University School of Public Health epidemiologist Richard Clapp, who wrote in a declaration that IBM employees were "dying disproportionately of cancer at a much younger age" than the general population.

IBM contended that the plaintiffs' use of these records, plus an epidemiologist's analysis of them, does not follow any scientific method. “It doesn't show any relation between chemicals and disease,” said IBM spokesman Bill O'Leary.

I haven’t read the judge’s actual decision. One article with more information about this decision stated that the judge also found that “was irrelevant and would be prejudicial and confusing to the jury.”

These accounts are rather disturbing, mainly because of the judge’s lack of understanding of epidemiology. Epidemiology is the study of disease in populations. Epidemiology is not intended to show causation – e.g. that a specific chemical caused a specific disease. It only shows that certain populations may have a higher rate of certain kinds of cancers than the general (unexposed) population. Epidemiologists then attempt to find possible explanations based on previous exposures. It’s not an exact science, but it’s certainly relevant.

And the analysis would be “confusing to the jury?” Why not let the jury decide that.

This is also disturbing as long time readers of Confined Space know because it harkens back to recent warnings of the effect of the Daubert Decision.

Last June, I reviewed a report released by a group of experts in the legal and scientific community entitled Daubert: The Most Influential Supreme Court Ruling You've Never Heard Of:

Daubert was originally intended to assist judges in determining what evidence could be admitted into a trial. But as the authors explain:

The 1993 Daubert ruling directed federal judges to act as "gatekeepers" in the courtroom, using a standard that requires expert testimony to be both reliable and relevant before allowing it to be presented to juries. However, over the past 10 years, some judges have misinterpreted and broadened the reach of Daubert. Some have excluded scientific opinions when there is (or appears to be) disagreement among legitimate scientists; while others pick apart each piece of the scientific evidence presented by an expert rather than assessing the evidence as a whole, the way scientists do.

What this means is that when corporate attorneys manage to cloud the science and confuse the judges, the evidence gets labeled as “junk science” and good cases often get dismissed by the judge before they even get to a jury. Victims of toxic chemicals and drugs are the losers.

This seems to fit that analysis to a "T."

Another problem that the plaintiffs have is that workers are generally not allowed to sue their employer. Workers Compensation is generally the “exclusive remedy.”

Given this stipulation, lawyers for the workers will have to prove that I.B.M. was aware that employees were being sickened by their jobs and chose to cover it up. The case against I.B.M. is one of concealment, akin to a fraud case, rather than negligence.

Stay tuned.

OSHA Regional Administrator Accuses OSHA of Refusing To Test OSHA Inspectors for Beryllium Disease

OSHA is neglecting the health of its own employees, according to Region 8 Director Adam Finkel.

Finkel has accused the agency, specifically Assistant Secretary for Labor John Henshaw, of refusing to provide testing for OSHA inspectors who may have been exposed to beryllium dust while conducting inspections.

Beryllium is an extremely toxic metal that carries a high risk of disease following even very low exposure. Hundreds have already died of chronic beryllium disease (CBD); a fast-progressing and potentially fatal lung disease, the only known cause of which is exposure to beryllium. A blood test used by industry and the U.S. Department of Energy can detect whether a person has been sensitized to beryllium, a necessary condition for the onset of CBD. The test costs approximately $150 per application.

Finkel is one of only 10 OSHA Regional Administrators. He is in charge of the 6-State Rocky Mountain region. According to the whistleblower compliant filed by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on behalf of Finkel,

Beginning in 1999, OSHA scientists developed a protocol for testing active and retired inspectors. In March 2001, the agency rejected a recommendation to set up a pilot-testing program for beryllium. Then, in April 2002, Assistant Secretary Henshaw announced that the agency would not even provide information or counseling to potentially affected agency employees and retirees.

According to Finkel,

The risks of delay or failure to test are so substantial, and the costs of testing so minimal, that in my view, the only plausible reason to defer or deny testing is fear of tort liability. Such a concern is inappropriate for a public agency.

OSHA had previously accuse Finkel of leaking to the press information about OSHA's refusal to provide testing of inspectors, and was attempting to transfer him out of RA position back to Washington. The transfer was stayed last June by the Merit Systems Protection Board. There are rumors that he has not been transferred back to Washington, but that information has not been confirmed.
More here and here.

It's A Dog's Public Employee's Life

In 16 years working for AFSCME, representing state, county and municipal public employees, I came to a few conclusions:

• Public employees do the most important work this society demands to make life in this country livable and comparatively comfortable.
  
  
• I wouldn't want to do almost any of their jobs
  
  
• They are underappreciated and underpaid. In fact, many people take out their frustration at politicians, or their own problems on public employees.
  
  
• Their jobs are dangerous, particularly due to workplace violence. Year after year, more AFSCME members in social services would be killed than corrections or law enforcement. Violence, added to the other hazards that highway workers, sewage treatment plant workers, hospital workers, etc., etc., experienced, combined with the fact that public employees in over half the states aren't covered by OSHA.

Anyway, it's nice to see an occasional reporter who gets it.

Labels: Public Employees, Workplace Violence

A Good Vintage? Ergonomically Correct Wine

Some California vineyards are switching to smaller tubs in an effort to reduce back injuries among farm workers.

California workers' compensation reports indicate 43 percent of all reported injuries in agricultural jobs were sprains and strains. Overexertion was cited as a cause for 25 percent of these reported injuries.

But the switch to smaller bins is just one part of worker safety programs constantly under review in Napa and Sonoma counties, where agriculture ranks second only to construction in terms of deaths and injuries for workers, according to statistics from the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

***

Grape pickers have a high risk of repetitive stress trauma because they must perform rapid, repetitive motions of the upper body over a long period. They stoop, lift, carry and dump picking tubs up to 20 times an hour, which doesn't include gripping and moving the tub as they move down the row to cut grapes from the vines.

Research has found that by reducing the weight of the grapes in the tub to less than 50 pounds, workers suffer fewer strains, sprains and back injuries, which account for nearly half of all the reported injuries in California agriculture.

But ergonomic hazards are not the only workplace safety problems farmworkers face:

CalOSHA accident reports tell the stories of what can go wrong on Sonoma County farms, ranches and vineyards, the accidents that lead to serious injury or death: there's the report of the farmworker who was killed after being struck in the head while operating a post hole driver; the worker at a dairy who got his hand caught in a feed auger and had to have a finger amputated; the vineyard worker who was riding in the bed of a pickup and broke his leg when a bin of grapes crushed it.

Last week in Napa County, a vineyard manager was killed in a forklift accident.

"Nationally, agriculture is one of the most hazardous occupations, ranking right up there with construction and mining. But the amount spent on improving farm safety is just a fraction of what's spent on mining safety," Dr. Marc Schenker, director of the Western Center for Agriculture Health and Safety at UC Davis said.

And this is interesting:

Exposure to pesticides is another hazard for agricultural workers, but ranks below farm machinery accidents and repetitive strain trauma in the cause of illnesses and injuries, said Schenker.

"Despite most popular impressions, pesticides are not the biggest hazard affecting farmworkers, particularly in California, where we have fairly strict controls on their use," said Schenker.

In 2001, the last year for which data is available from California's Department of Pesticide Regulation, there were 10 reported cases of pesticide illnesses in agriculture in Sonoma County. Most of the illnesses were skin rashes or eye irritations caused by sulfur, an organic element used to control mold and mildew in the vineyards.

Interesting, perhaps, but probably not true according to those who actually work with farmworkers, especially if the hazard is being judged by the number of reported cases of pesticide poisoning.

First, almost all reported cases of pesticide poisoning are acute poisonings, e.g. doses so high that they cause severe vomiting, convulsions or death. Long term, or chronic poisonings generally are not detected, as it may take many years for chronic effects, like cancer or liver disease, to show up. And even then, farm workers are exposed to so many different pesticides -- most of which they can't even identify -- that it's difficult, if not impossible, to trace health effects back to exposures.

Finally, there is pressure on farmworkers from the growers not to report pesticide poisonings at all.

Subcontractor Pleads Guilty In Fatal Scaffold Collapse

Collapse Kills 5 Workers

NEW YORK -- A Long Island subcontractor pleaded guilty to manslaughter Tuesday in connection with the deaths of five workers killed in a Manhattan scaffold collapse.

Lives Come Cheap on the Farm

This seems like kind of a low price to pay for killing someone in a confined space. I'm sure his family must feel much better now.

A Sioux Center, Iowa, farm has paid $1,125 in fines for violations connected to an employee's death this summer.

The Iowa Occupational Safety and Health agency found that Bar-K Farms did not report the death of 31-year-old Kenneth Van Wyk of Ireton, Iowa, to IOSH within eight hours. Bar-K was fined $750.

IOSH also fined Bar-K $375 for failure to study the potential hazard associated with or conduct training for working within a confined space.

Van Wyk died July 18 while repairing a steel 11,000-gallon liquid storage tank at Bar-K's Carmel, Iowa, location. Van Wyk was inside the tank and suffocated because of a lack of oxygen.

The Weekly Toll

Tree trimmer electrocuted

Springfield, OH -- A tree trimming employee died Saturday morning when he touched a bucket lift truck that came into contact with a power line.

After an effort to revive him, Anthony R. Hacker, 24, of New Carlisle was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Clark County Sheriff's Office.

Construction worker is killed by backhoe while working in ditch

CHULA VISTA, CA – A construction worker at the site of a
future residential community was fatally injured yesterday when a backhoe struck him.

The county Medical Examiner's Office identified him as Alfredo Alvarez, 41, of San Diego. He worked for TC Construction in Santee.

Alvarez was working alone in a 6-foot-deep, 6-foot-wide and 9-foot-long ditch used for water lines when backhoe's bucket hit him, according to police reports. The backhoe then fell into the ditch, but not onto him.

Chula Vista police Sgt. David Eisenberg said the backhoe's operator accidentally swung the bucket into Alvarez's abdomen.



Fallen bridge worker 'not hooked in' to safety system


La Cross, WI -- Anthony Poterala, who died Monday in a fall from a bridge construction project in La Crosse, was buried with military rites Friday in his hometown of Tomahawk, Wis.

Poterala, 34, "was not hooked in" to the fall protection system workers are required to use, said Paul Nortman, superintendent of the project for Lunda Construction Co. "We don't know why he decided to unhook himself."

[Question: Will the readers of the La Cross Tribune ever learn why "he decided to unhook himself?"]

Co-workers say the ironworker who died after
falling from a bridge had unhooked his safety harness to move to another work area.


Worker Killed by Cement Truck

Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials still are investigating how a construction worker was killed by a cement truck Tuesday in Stevens Point as he replaced sidewalks.

"We have a rough idea of what happened, but we're still tying down loose ends to verify," said Mark Chasco, a team leader at OSHA's Appleton office.

Walter J. Novotny, 47, Auburndale died after a cement truck rapidly accelerated as it was being repositioned

Construction Worker Dies In Accident

A worker died in an accident at a construction site in Kansas City, Kan., Tuesday afternoon. Police identified the victim as Antonio Cruz-Castillo, 62.

The accident took place at 4349 North 122nd St., where a home was under construction. KMBC's Kris Ketz reported that a gable over the home's front door collapsed on top of the victim, who was working for a painting company at the site. Other workers pulled the structure off the man, but he died at the scene.


Roofing worker plunges to death

The death of a roofing company worker who fell 60 feet from a Dayton, Ky., building Tuesday is under investigation.
David Sturgeon, 33, of 811 Scott St. in Covington, died instantly after plunging from the roof of the Raymee Building at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Berry Street.

"He was throwing some debris off the roof and he apparently slipped. It's a very steep roof and I guess he lost his balance," Garnick said. "But he didn't have his safety harness on -- it was rigged up, but he didn't have it on."

Construction Worker Dies In Workplace Accident
Man Is Crushed Under Tire Of Machine03

LAWRENCE, Kan. -- A construction worker was killed in a workplace accident on Thursday.

Ivan Pippert, 76, died after he was run over by a piece of construction equipment called an earthmover. Pippert was a mechanic for Foley Construction, and he was at work on one of the company's sites in Lawrence when the accident occurred.


Boxcar kills train employee

A Burlington Northern Santa Fe employee was killed when he was run over by a boxcar early Wednesday at the company's Calwa Yard at 3901 E. Vine Ave., Fresno police reported.

Leana Kent, a company spokeswoman, identified the victim as Todd Mohler, 35, of Fresno, a freight train conductor who joined BNSF in June 2001.

Gillette man killed at Bel Ayr mine

GILLETTE, WY -- A Gillette man was killed in an accident at RAG Coal West's Bel Ayr coal mine about 20 miles south of Gillette on Tuesday, according to mine officials.

Brad Beavers, 36, an RAG mine employee, was killed when a tow strap broke as he and another miner attempted to use a pickup to get another pickup unstuck. Beavers was struck by the "tow hook," said Steven Laird, RAG manager of lands, legislative and public affairs.


Mount Vernon man killed by falling tree

A Mount Vernon, MS man was killed when a tree he was cutting down in St. Elmo fell on top of him Friday afternoon, according to the Mobile County Sheriff's Department.

Max Weaver, 45, was helping Chestang Tree Service clear a lot on Saucer Road


Small Town Struggles with Two Deaths

This western Ohio farm town and its 32-member volunteer fire department were struggling to carry on after two firefighters were killed Wednesday in the blast at a lumber company that injured nine other people. ``We're hurting. We're overwhelmed,'' said Schnelle, adding that Garman once went two straight years without missing a single fire run.

Kenneth Jutte, 44, was atop a silo for wood shavings at Hoge Lumber Co. in nearby New Knoxville and Garman, 40, was in an aerial basket when the smoldering scrap exploded, blowing the top off the concrete structure and throwing them to the ground.

Driver's body found in water

TACOMA -- A 61-year-old Edgewood man died Monday when his front-end loader toppled into the water at the Simpson Tacoma Kraft Co. mill.

Robert G. "Gary" Hueneka apparently was in the 20-deep water of Commencement Bay for an hour or more before his absence was noticed and Tacoma Fire Department divers were called.


Roof collapse kills 1, hurts 2

Cape Coral, FL -- A collapsing roof killed a construction worker Thursday while he worked on a Cape Coral church’s basketball pavilion, police and witnesses said.

Richard Scott Erling, 37, of Cape Coral died on the scene at First Baptist Church. A blue sheet covered the carpenter’s body in front of the building’s metal, open-air framework Thursday afternoon.

Labels: Weekly Toll

OSHA Deputy Nominated to Chem Board

President Bush has nominated Gary Visscher, Deputy Assistant Secretary of OSHA, to a soon-to-be vacant seat on the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.

Visscher was a former Vice President of Employee Relations for the American Iron and Steel Institute. From July 1999 through November 2000 he served as a Member of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. Visscher served in Congressional staff positions from 1983-1999, including Workforce Policy Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce from 1989-1999. It was in this position that, following the 1994 elections when the Republican's took both houses of Congress, Visscher helped spearhead Republican Congressman Cass Ballenger's (NC) attempt to remake the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

CSB Board members serve for 5 years. The terms of two members appointed by President Clinton, Dr. Andrea Kidd Taylor and Dr. Isadore (Irv) Rosenthal expire this year. Dr. Taylor came out of the Health and Safety Department of the United Auto Workers Union, while Rosenthal was corporate health and safety director for Rohm and Haas.

Visscher would fill Rosenthal's seat, while Rixio Medina, currently Manager of Corporate Health, Safety and Security for CITGO Petroleum Corporation, would take Taylor's seat, leaving the Board without any representation from organized labor for the first time in its history.

The Legislative Authority creating the Chemical Board states that

Members of the Board shall be appointed on the basis of technical qualification, professional standing, and demonstrated knowledge in the fields of accident reconstruction, safety engineering, human factors, toxicology, or air pollution regulation.

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

Ergo Almost Enters Pres Debate

Gosh. Joe Lieberman almost mentioned the word ergonomics in the Democratic Presidential debate Thursday nite.

Responding to a question about labor's role in rebulding the economy, Lieberman condemned Bush for repealing "workplace safety regulations" and said he would reinstate them as soon as he became President. Couldn't quote come up with the word "ergonomics" though, or maybe didn't want to.

I'm not endorsing him. I don't even like him much, but it's nice to hear the subject of workplace safety raised during a national debate.

Labels: Ergonomics

Give Them a Brake. And Some Barriers

As usual, the newspapers don't give any details on what might have prevented these deaths. And as they're all public employees in states without OSHA coverage, we may never know.

Second road worker killed

The death of a second Chicago-area highway worker this week has state officials urging caution in construction zones, while a judge is keeping the driver in the first accident behind bars because of his criminal record.

A semi truck entered a closed lane on Interstate 294 early Thursday morning and killed a 26-year-old tollway worker, State Police Sgt. Steve Clemente said. Police identified the man as Paul Liotine of West Chicago. He and several other tollway workers were replacing reflectors in the pavement.

Authorities said charges had not yet been filed and it did not appear drugs or alcohol were a factor. But the Chicago man arrested after an accident that killed a 36-year-old mother of seven in an I-57 construction zone on Monday had four previous DUI convictions and police said his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit.

And this

MODOT Accident

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Local highway department crews are mourning the loss of a fellow worker. 35-year old Karla Baublitz of Sarcoxie was killed yesterday morning near 7th and Schifferdecker in Joplin. Baublitz was one of two MODOT workers who were repairing a tractor when they were struck by a small pickup. State troopers say the driver of the truck fell asleep at the wheel. Baublitz was pronounced dead at the scene. Her fellow worker, 31-year old Trevor Keller is being treated for serious injuries.

And this

Runaway truck kills driver

A city garbage truck driver was run over and killed Thursday morning after he tried to chase down his runaway truck on a South Hills street.

***

Leonard's death marked the second time in five years that a city garbage worker was killed by a runaway truck. On May 15, 1998, Kenneth S. Tester, 35, was crushed in the cab of his truck after it rolled down Saline Street in Greenfield and struck a house porch.

Labels: Public Employees

Gold Medal For Workplace Killing?

About 1,200 employees at the 2004 Olympic Village staged a 24-hour strike Thursday, a day after a construction worker was killed at the site.

The strikers stayed off the job to protest safety conditions.

A construction worker -- the fifth to die on the site -- was hit by a vehicle Wednesday.

Union representatives repeatedly have complained of poor conditions, including limited access to toilets and running water.

Four Greek construction groups are building the residential zone of the village, which will house 16,000 athletes and officials at Menidi, 15 miles north of Athens.

Good Riddance!

Republican Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles (R-OK), has announced that he will retire next year. Nickles has been a frequent guest in my nightmares over the past three years:

For business leaders, Nickles has been a stalwart. In 2001, he led a successful effort to kill ergonomics rules that the Clinton administration wrote to force companies to take detailed steps to prevent workplace injuries.

I have "fond" memories of him leering at us outside the Senate chamber as he led the assassination of the ergonomics standard, and then standing around gloating after the foul deed was done.

Greatest Quotes:

"It's probably the most expensive, intrusive regulation ever promulgated."

"It's probably the most expensive, intrusive regulation ever promulgated, certainly by the Department of Labor and maybe by the government entirely"

Golly, maybe in the whole world! Or in the history of the universe!

"The Senate did the right thing tonight by voting to overturn the most intrusive, expensive and job-killing regulation ever handed down by OSHA. It was the right thing to do for employers and employees alike"

He should go get a job in a poultry processing plant or a nursing home.

Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., holds a copy of the regulations issued by the Clinton administration dealing with workplace ergonomics during a Washington news conference.
Photo by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Labels: Ergonomics

GAO Finds MSHA Provides Lax Oversight of Mining Industry

The federal government’s General Accounting Office (GAO) has found serious problems with the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement program. The report “criticized it for not pursuing mine safety violations and for providing lax oversight of the industry.”

The GAO report comes as the rate of coal mining fatalities in the United States is rising. So far this year, 26 miners have been killed in accidents, compared with 27 for all of last year, which was a record low.

Kentucky and West Virginia lead the nation in coal mine fatalities with eight deaths each, according to MSHA statistics.

The investigation was conducted in response to a request by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) following the Quecreek Mine accident in Pennsylvania in which nine miners were trapped underground for three days. According to a summary in the Louisville Courier Journal, the report found that

• Almost half of the mine safety violations cited by agency inspectors during the past decade weren't corrected by the required deadlines.
  
  
• Some mines may be operating without adequate ventilation and roof support systems because MSHA doesn't provide adequate oversight.
  
  
• Inspection procedures sometimes are unclear and enforced inconsistently and information on accidents is compiled but is not being used to improve safety.
  
  
• Plans for new coal slurry ponds, called impoundments, are backlogged because the agency is short on engineers and is facing a personnel crisis.
  
  
• Nearly half of its inspectors will be eligible to retire in the next five years, and the agency has no plan for dealing with that — a shortage that could hamper the government's ability to ensure the health and safety of miners, the report warned.

The GAO recommended that MSHA :

• monitor the timeliness of technical inspections conducted
  as part of the 6-month review of certain mine plans,
  
  
• ensure that mine operators are correcting hazards identified during inspections in a timely manner,
  
  
• develop a plan for addressing anticipated shortages in the
  number of qualified inspectors due to upcoming retirements, and
  
  
• revise the systems used to collect information on accidents and
  investigations.

Neither the United Mineworkers, nor Senator Kennedy were pleased by the findings of the report:

The report's findings drew sharp rebukes of MSHA from the nation's miners' union and from Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Tom Harkin of Iowa, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee's labor subcommittee.

"It's a pretty tough report. It's a bad report card on" MSHA, said Joseph Main, administrator of the United Mine Workers of America's Department of Occupational Safety and Health.

Kennedy said the GAO study "makes clear the Department of Labor is failing to meet its responsibility."

"The current agency failures are an invitation to new disasters," the senator said in a statement. "The mine agency is being overwhelmed by its mission. It can't protect miners if it fails to inspect and monitor the nation's coal mines regularly and thoroughly."

MSHA, on the other hand was not convinced

A Mine Safety and Health Administration spokesman declined comment yesterday, pointing instead to the agency's Aug. 19 rebuttal by Dave D. Lauriski, assistant secretary of Labor for mine safety and health. The rebuttal, included in the back of the report and issued in response to an earlier GAO draft, critiqued everything from what it described as several "inaccuracies" to the report's title.

Kaltech: Don't Forget Training....

My friend Jim Young at the New Jersey Work Environment Council correctly points out that when I reported on the Chemical Safety Board's Kaltech/Chelsea explosion investigation last week I neglected to mention that one of the root causes was the failure of Kaltech to train its employees in hazardous chemical and hazardous waste safety, as well as the failure of the NY City fire code to require training of employees who work with hazardous materials.

The Board recommended that Kaltech train its workers, that the NY Fire Code be revised to include worker training and that the fire department train its inspectors in safe management of hazardous materials.

As Jim says, "This official endorsement of training should, in my opinion, by broadcast, underlined, shouted from the rooftops during this period when union safety and health departments are so vulnerable."

Couldn't agree more.

OSHRC Comforts Corporate Crooks

Say Goodbye to OSHA's Egregious Penalty Policy

In another victory for compassionate conservatism, Republican members of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission have eliminated one of OSHA's only remaining weapons for citing employers with big enough violations to make a difference.

In a 2-1 decision, the Board dismissed the "egregious" portion of an OSHA asbestos-relation citation against Eric K. Ho, Ho Ho Ho Express, Inc.

Under its "ergregious penalty" policy, OSHA was able to cite each instance of a violation per employee. For example, where eleven employees were over-exposed to asbestos, OSHA could cite eleven different times.

The egregious penalty policy was first introduced under the Reagan administration and was often used during the 1990's to cite ergonomic and recordkeeping violations. The policy allowed OSHA to impose much higher fines for extreme violations of OSHA standards than it would normally be able to do with a single penalty.

The decision is particularly despicable considering the conduct of the employer:

Ho signed a property disclosure form indicating that he had been made aware of the presence of friable asbestos in the building. Nonetheless, with full knowledge of the conditions and the need for professional removal of the ACM, Ho began asbestos removal with untrained, unprotected Mexican nationals, none of whom spoke English or understood the hazards associated with asbestos.

Ho's disregard for the law is evidenced by his failure to obtain work permits for the site, as required by the City of Houston and his surreptitious removal of asbestos after the City attempted to close down the site. When the ongoing work was discovered by an inspector for the City of Houston the Bellaire site was red tagged for probable violations of asbestos abatement requirements. Ho was ordered to cease its demolition operations. However, the City's attempt to close down Ho's worksite failed. After soliciting a bid for asbestos removal from a certified asbestos abatement contractor, Ho chose to recommence removal operations under cover of darkness with the same untrained, unprotected laborers, rather than engage the qualified contractor at the named bid price of $172,266.

Ho retained the qualified abatement contractor to complete the asbestos abatement only after the March 11, 1998 explosion brought his nighttime activity to light and the Texas Department of Health onto the site.

Not only does the evidence specifically demonstrate Ho's disregard for his employees' exposure to asbestos, the record contains ample additional evidence of Ho's indifference to those same workers' general health and welfare. Ho's laborers worked 12 hour shifts 7 nights a week under substandard conditions: the workers were locked inside the Bellaire site; they worked without electricity or ventilation; adequate sanitary facilities were not available; no potable water was provided.

The two commissioners voting to overturn the policy were W. Scott Railton and James M. Stevens, both recent Bush Administration appointees. Dissenting was Thomasina Rogers, originally a Clinton Administration appointee recently re-appointed by Bush.

The majority's rather creative reasoning was that because OSHA's asbestos standard refers to a training program and a respirator program, only the individual program can be cited once, rather than citing for each individual worker who was overexposed, and also that the employer did not know that the standard could be cited on a per-employee basis.

Railton argued that "While we agree that Ho is one of the worst employers the Commission has had come before it, we cannot allow harsh facts to result in bad law -- a result which would clearly follow should we accept the Secretary's proposed penalties." Suddenly decades of "good law," created under the sainted Ronald Reagan has become "bad law" under our compassionately conservative President.

Rogers called the decision "A radical departure from settled Commission and court precedent recognizing the Secretary's authority to issue multiple citations for violations of the same standard where the standard can reasonably be read to permit multiple units of violation."

Give a bunch of monkeys a bunch word processors, a lot of time, and high legal fees and they will eventually come up with enough legal garbage reasoning to justify overturning any legal precident that protects workers. But the bottom line here is that OSHA has lost one of its last ways to bring significant penalties down on the heads of particularly bad employers who are fully aware that they may be killing their employees. Without the ability to inflict large penalties or to bring criminal violations, the Bush administration has succeeded in moving OSHA yet one more step toward becoming a completely toothless tiger.

The Department of Labor can appeal OSHRC's decision. That decision to appeal will show whether or not OSHA, DOL and the Bush Administration are serious about bringing corporate criminals to justice.

Labels: Ronald Reagan

Ergonomics: From Washington D.C. to Belzoni, Mississippi

Molly Ivins Tells the Truth About Boy George

Looking for something to read after you finish Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right? Read Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America. Ivins, as most of you know, is one of the most hard-hitting, amusing and politically astute writers in America. Added to this, she talks to actual, real workers about actual real issues -- like ergonomics -- and relates them back to what Boy George is doing to the people of this country.

This is from an interview with Ivins in the Austin Chronicle:

One of my favorite examples is that chapter on ergonomics ("The Blues in Belzoni"). When Bush came in, he appointed a guy named Eugene Scalia, son of the Supreme Court justice, to be the top lawyer at the Department of Labor. Scalia the Younger has spent his entire career as a very highly paid lobbyist in Washington, working for manufacturers associations, for the specific purpose of defeating ergonomic regulations. That was an effort started at the Labor Department by Elizabeth Dole -- that well-known communist. For 12 years they worked on trying to set up a central set of regulations. Everybody was at the table -- the manufacturers, the labor unions, the docs, all the players -- trying to prevent repetitive stress injuries, which actually cost industries an enormous amount of money, because millions of people get these things from repetitive motions at work. These regs had been worked out, they had been placed in the Federal Register, and then the Bush administration came in with a very clever ploy, and they undid the whole thing.

We went down to Belzoni, Mississippi, to talk to a bunch of very nice black women who work at the Delta Pride Catfish factory there. Not all of them get this, but there is a kind of repetitive stress that results in gangliatic cysts on the back of the wrist. These women -- they're not 30 years old yet -- their fingers look like they have rheumatoid arthritis, their hands look like a bunch of bent twigs. ...

They listened to this whole story about this guy Eugene Scalia -- of course they'd never heard of him, and they'd never heard of "ergonomics" -- but they said, "Huh, he says this is 'junk science'? Well, you tell him I want his ass next to me on the second gut line, and I'll show him some junk science. Just bring that boy down here."

Labels: Ergonomics

Canadian Workers on the Vanguard of Environmental Protection

Cradle to Grave Product Responsibility

Tired of just tossing your old car into the trash (or junk yard) when you're done with it. The Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW) is advocating a better way that will not only protect the environment, but also create new jobs:

The CAW is calling on Canadian governments to apply a policy called "extended producer responsibility" to the auto industry. Also known as take-back legislation, this policy holds manufacturers accountable for the goods that they produce for the product's entire lifetime. This means that owners can return vehicles to the manufacturer at the end of their useful life. Instead of cars winding up in unsightly junkyards, landfills or incinerators, their manufacturers would be obliged to take them back.

So it's good for the enviroment. But it's also good for jobs:

By lobbying for take-back legislation, the CAW is merely demonstrating enlightened self-interest. The CAW envisions a vehicle disassembly plant beside every assembly plant. Even if car sales decline in an environmentally friendly future dominated by public transit, cyclists, pedestrians, and tele-commuting, there would still be jobs for auto workers.

The Wal-Mart Effect

Can someone tell me how this is good for America?

WHEN WAL-MART COMES to town selling groceries, it undercuts prices in the market by 14 percent. So says UBS Warburg, an investment firm that studied the impact of Wal-Mart Supercenters in Dallas, Las Vegas and Tampa.

That's good news for consumers, bad news for the competition and awful news for workers in the supermarket industry

Yeah, sure, it's good for consumer -- as long as the consumers don' t happen to also be employees of the struggling unionized supermarkets.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: Still Lessons to Be Learned

Thee was a good review last week in the NY times of a new history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911:Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle.

The reviewer, Mike Wallace, distinguished professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and director of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, thinks this is the best history written so far about the fire, but he also has an important message. He criticizes the author for implying that the fire and subsequent investigation lead almost automatically to important permanent reforms of “the New Deal, women's rights, labor empowerment and urban liberalism, first in New York, then across the country.”

But

Such triumphalism, while inspiring, overlooks the fact that history can run backward, and that gains won can be lost again — and have been, repeatedly. Many of the initial post-Triangle reforms were strenuously opposed by conservative businessmen. Unable at first to prevail amid mass indignation at the fire and shocking revelations about working conditions in the city and state, they were soon back in the saddle and able to halt, hamstring or reverse liberal initiatives.

The Depression galvanized progressives again, and the New Deal expanded the terrain of social democracy, but by the late 1930's, opponents had regained the initiative and dismantled many of its signature programs. In the 1960's and 70's reformers won health and safety and pollution regulations; today's free marketeers are whittling these away. And sweatshops that exploit vulnerable and unorganized immigrant workers are again alive and malignantly well in New York City.

Mr. Von Drehle's fine history is a welcome reminder of the realities of life in a laissez-faire jungle, and of the Triangle fire's importance in spurring the movement that helped tame it. But resting on our ancestors' laurels won't prevent a return to the conditions he deplores; only constant pressure from informed citizens and an organized work force can accomplish that.

It's nice to see a reviewer/historian who realizes that historical progress doesn't just happen unless people make it happen.

Buy it here.

Busy, Busy Busy

"Be careful what you wish for," they say. I want to thank many of you who have been sending in stories, and story ideas over the past week(s). As you can see, I'm rather behind in those and other breaking news. I still haven't caught up from the hurricane outage and have been travelling. Gotta do something about this day job.....

OSHA Grants: Bad News for Labor

One of OSHA's most lasting successes over the years has been its worker training grant program. Started by Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, Eula Bingham in the late 1970's, the grant program, now known as the Susan Harwood Grant Program, has resulted in training programs benefiting tens of thousands of workers.

Although the program was significantly reduced during the Reagan-Bush I years, it began to regain its former size and significance during the Clinton era, rising to over $11 million in FY 2001. The 5-Year New Directions grants were reduced during times of low funding to one to two year grants. They were again extended into 5 Year grants in programs announced in FY 2000 and again in early FY 2001, by Assistant Secretary Charles Jeffress, giving grantees time to build a program that could plant some lasting roots.

One of the first acts of the Bush II administration was to rescind the last round of grants issued by the Clinton Administration only days before they were to take effect. They then tried to cut off the first round of 5-year grants after the first year. Democrats in the Senate, along with Republican Arlen Specter (PA), directed OSHA to refund the program.

Bush's first OSHA budget proposed eliminating the Susan Harwood Grant program and reducing OSHA's grant budget from $11 million to $4 million. The goal was to rely more on internet and other forms of electronic training rather than "inefficient" classroom training that had the disadvantage of being done during work time (ignoring the fact that OSHA standard require training to be done on worktime.)

Somehow they tried to sell the program as part of their Hispanic outreach program, conjuring up visions of tired Hispanic workers dragging home to their trailer parks from a 10 hour day cutting chickens in the poultry plant, making dinner, helping the kids with homework, and then relaxing in front of their high-speed internet connections for a bit of health and safety training.

Failing to pass the laugh test, the Senate once again ordered OSHA to fund the entire program, including subsequent years of the 5-Year grant program. Late last month, OSHA announced its new round of grants. In addition to refunding the 5-year program, OSHA announced 50 new grants. But this round has a slightly new twist. Throughout the almost 25 years of OSHA worker training grants, through Democratic and Republican administrations, there has been a tradition of even-handedness between business associations and unions. No longer. The only promise Boy George has managed to keep over the past few years is his promise to "Change the tone" in Washington -- seemingly for the worse:

Out of the 50 new grants that OSHA announced, only 4 (or 8%) go to unions or labor-management coalitions, while 14 (or 28%) go to businesses or business associations.

Compare this with FY 2000, the year before Bush II took office. Labor had 31% of the grants, while business had 37%. (Universities had 14% of the grants in FY 2000 and 52% this year.)*




I participated in the grant process during the two rounds of Grants in FY 2000 and 2001. We bent over backward to maintain some balance between labor and businesses.

This almost makes me feel like that was kind of stupid.




*Note: I have no way of knowing how many unions actually applied for grants this year, nor did I compare the amount of money granted to each group.

Stronger Unions = Stronger Democratic Party

And while we're reading Nathan Newman's site, he's got a neat chart relating the rate of unionization to the success of the Democratic Party in the last election, as well as the relative declines since 1964.

There's nothing particularly new in this chart. It's been clear for some time that what's good for labor is good for the D's. What's a complete mystery to me is why every Democrat is not making strengthening the labor their TOP LEGISLATIVE PRIORITY.

Bonus Question: What's the only state to increase its unionization rate since 1964?

Answer: Hawaii. Up from 21.7% to 24.6%

More Regulatory Burdens on Small Business

Only this time the small businesses are labor unions. Check out Nathan Newman on the latest illustration of the hypocrisy of the Right -- the Bush Administration's new regulations to enforce onerous new disclosure rules on unions.

Also require corporations to report information that "that lets them hide profits overseas, report publicly what they pay their workers, how much they contract out overseas, or a host of other things that would help the public?" Surely you jest!

UPDATE: Much more on the new regs from Daily Kos

This initiative has one purpose—to inhibit the ability of democratically-elected union leaders to use their unions’ resources to educate their members about public policy and political candidates. The more time union officers spend reporting every finance transaction to the Department of Labor, the less time they have to tell their members about George Bush’s latest attack on their right to bargain collectively and their right to earn a decent living.

More Holiday Shopping Ideas

Check out Democrats.com for holiday gift-giving ideas. Here's my favorite:

So What's New: Hispanics still face more deaths, injuries on the job

And to add injury to injury, not only do Hispanics have more deaths and injuries, but they're far less likely to have health insurance coverage, which means they can't get treatment for diabetes and cardiovascular disease which often result from their hard work and long hours.

Many Hispanics work in construction, an industry with a history of higher injury and death rates than other jobs.

Ricardo Benitez, an organizer with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Union Local 551 in Houston, said he commonly sees contractors cutting corners with Hispanic immigrant workers, who by his estimate perform 80 percent of the construction work in Houston.

He also blamed some of the construction accidents on slipshod training methods and said many Hispanic workers are reluctant to complain.

To top it off, they often don't get paid for the work they do, but are afraid to complain to government authorities.

That's why Hispanic groups are so focused on the legalization process:

Much of the focus for Hispanics is on the legalization process -- getting work authorization, getting permanent residency status and then getting U.S. citizenship -- so they don't have to accept the living and working conditions they faced before receiving the official right to work and live here.

Asbestos: The Gift that Keeps On Giving

Federal environmental officials have issued a health alert that could apply to thousands of people exposed directly or indirectly to asbestos from a Beltsville plant that produced insulation material from 1966 to 1993.

The warning covers all who worked at or visited the W.R. Grace/Zonolite Co. site at 12340 Conway Rd. before the plant was closed, as well as everyone they lived with. It is possible that people at or near the plant went home each day with asbestos fibers in their hair and on their clothing, so their families and roommates are also at risk of developing lung diseases, according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Labels: Asbestos

OSHA Prepares "Response" to CSB on Reactive Chemical Hazards"

In a speech to the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) annual conference, Assistant Secretary for OSHA John Henshaw described the offical reponse that OSHA is preparing to make in response to recommendations from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board regarding reactive chemical safety.

Last year, the CSB recommended to OSHA that the agency "Amend the Process Safety Management Standard (PSM), 29 CFR 1910.119, to achieve more comprehensive control of reactive hazards that could have catastrophic consequences."

Instead of committing to begin work on a standard, however, Henshaw instead promised a "comprehensive approach for addressing the hazards posed by reactive chemicals," consisting of making information and guidance available to employers, working cooperatively with stakeholders, and "where appropriate," issuing citations under the general duty clause.

The CSB recommendation was a product of a study by the Board that

examined 167 serious chemical accidents in the U.S. over the last 20 years that have involved uncontrolled chemical reactions. These accidents caused 108 deaths as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. More than half of the accidents involved chemicals that are exempt from OSHA and EPA process safety rules.

The Board requested that OSHA broaden the application of the PSM standard to cover both individual chemicals and combinations of chemicals that can undergo hazardous reactions under specific process conditions. The standard currently applies to only 137 listed chemicals, plus a class of flammable substances (there are estimated to be thousands of chemicals in common industrial use). Just 38 "highly reactive" chemicals are currently covered by the PSM standard. But the CSB study documented numerous examples where chemicals considered to be less reactive nonetheless caused runaway reactions, explosions, fires, or toxic gas releases, often with fatal consequences.

Although OSHA had six months to respond to the CSB, aside from participating in a CSB Roundtable this past June, OSHA has made no substantive response to the non-binding recommendation.

Last June, several labor unions petitioned OSHA for a new standard. Five unions had originally petitioned OSHA for a revised PSM standard in 1995 following an explosion and fire that year that claimed five lives at a Lodi, New Jersey plant. Under the Clinton Administration, OSHA had planned to issue an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to collect additional information on reactive chemical hazards as a first step toward revising the standard.

In December 2001, however, OSHA withdrew the proposed ANPR from the regulatory agenda because of “resource constraints and other priorities.”

Apparently, the current rationale for not issuing a regulation is that

It was apparent at the June Roundtable that we have yet to reach consensus on how to tackle this issue. Serious differences clearly remain as to what is the best way to anticipate potential problems and deal with them before they get out of control.

The main action promised by Henshaw was to

make available on our website the new CCPS book on chemical reactivity -- Essential Practices for Managing Chemical Reactivity Hazards. As you know, this book is a compendium of best practices, drawn from leaders in chemical processing and reviewed by experts.

OSHA will make this book available on the agency's website on a new page devoted specifically to reactive chemical hazards. Any employer, any worker -- actually anyone who visits our website -- can download information from the book -- FREE -- for the next three years.

According to a health and safety newsletter that actually interviews real people (instead of just spewing forth), labor responses to Henshaw's remarks ranged from calling it "preposterous" to calls for his resignation for letting people die "from completely preventable explosions." One labor representative accused Henshaw of turning OSHA "into a publishing house, not a government standard-setting adn enforcement agency as conceived under the OSH Act."

***

NOTE FROM THE CENSOR PUBLISHER: As the author of Confined Space has a certain conflict of interest with regard to this matter, he is recusing himself from making any inflammatory or judgmental statements about OSHA's response. Instead, he will employ something vaguely resembling the Socratic Method, asking a few relevant questions, thereby allowing readers to come to their own independent conclusions.

***

Where was I? Oh yes, Relevant Questions.

1. Hmm, "Comprehensive Appoach" Where, or where have you heard that before? Hint, Hint # 2

2. Can you find somewhere in the OSH Act, the legislative history
or even a court decision that says that there has to be a consensus among all "stakeholders" before OSHA can issue a standard (much less begin work on one)?

3. It's very nice of OSHA to make the CCPS's book available on the Web. Really. It's very nice. It's a very good book. Everyone agrees.

But if you were running a chemical refinery or a large (or even small or medium size) factory that uses a lot of potentially reactive chemicals in chemical processes, wouldn't you think you could shell out the dinero for your own copy of the book? I mean, for only $218 you can buy Essential Practices for Managing Chemical Reactivity Hazards and even get a copy of Guidelines for Chemical Reactivity Evaluation and Application to Process Design from CCPS ($20 discunt for buying both books separately.)

Now, $218 for a couple of books may be a bit pricy for your average family ("Hey Marge, cancel the trip to Borders, OSHA's got the book on the web!"), but it probably won't break the budget of most companies in America who process reactive chemicals. So what great public service is OSHA providing to humankind by allowing web surfers to "download information from the book -- FREE -- for the next three years?"

4. Read the CSB Recommendation again: "Amend the Process Safety Management Standard (PSM), 29 CFR 1910.119, to achieve more comprehensive control of reactive hazards that could have catastrophic consequences."

Now look at OSHA's comprehensive approach: making information available, working with stakeholders, and issuing some general duty clause citations.

Is one an equivalent replacement for the other? Is OSHA's "new" comprehensive approach significantly different from its current approach?

Talk among yourselves.

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

Safety Bingo: Bad Behavior

OSHA likes to boast every year that injuries and illnesses are going down. But sometimes I'm a bit skeptical. For example.....

In response to the recent posting about Canadian nurses being offered $300 for not staying home when they're sick, I got an e-mail from Ed Padgett who works for the L.A. Times:

After reading how the Canadians implemented the reward for not calling in sick, I was taken back at my job when my employer (Los Angeles Times), a Tribune Corp., rolled out another bright idea along the lines of the Canadians.

Starting On October 1st, 2003, the employees of Operations (pressroom, mailroom, machine shop, electronics, etc.) will be rewarded $50.00 a month, if employees from their team do not take time off with on the job injuries. Sounds like the company is encouraging peer pressure to keep injured workers on the job to me?

Sounds that way to me.

This is how it works. Operations is divided into 5 teams and everyone gets a bingo card. A new number is issued every day and if you get so many in order you win $50. BUT, "An on the job accident which results in lost time or restricted duty to a team member will result in ineligibility for the next month's game for the entire team " And it gets better: "If the entire Operations Department goes for three consecutive months without a lost time or
restricted duty injury, the prize per Bingo following the three-month period will be $75 and six months will. up the prize money to $100 per Bingo."

So you going to let your whole team down just because you were stupid enough to throw your back out or cut your finger off?

This nothing new. Safety Bingo and other safety "incentive" programs are sweeping the country. Do a Google search and you come up with more than 10,000 hits, a good number of them from companies who will set up a program for you:

Safety Bingo.
Watch SAFETY AWARENESS, morale & productivity go UP!

While INJURIES and your
Workers Compensation rates go down!

Unions oppose safety incentive games as one of a variety of ways to discourage workers from reporting injuries or otherwise underestimate the rate of injuries and illnesses in the country. They are part of a management philosophy called behavioral safety, which assumes that workers' behavior is at the bottom of most health and safety problems (as opposed to hazardous working conditions) and that incentives (like money) or punishments will "correct" that behavior.

But incentive games like safety bingo can do more harm than just discouraging reporting. Minor injuries -- the type that are most likely not to be reported -- should be seen as warning signals of much more serious injuries:

In a Massachusetts workplace last year, a worker was caught in an unguarded machine and crushed to death. Minor injuries that had occurred on that machine weren't being reported because the plant utilized both a safety bingo game that rewarded workers for not reporting injuries and a post-injury drug testing policy that mandated drug testing for all workers who reported injuries. If those minor injuries had been reported, the lack of machine guarding could have been identified and corrected. Instead, the hazard was never identified, and a fatality resulted.

So when management tries to implement a safety bingo game, tell them to go play with this word: B-O-Y-C-O-T-T.

You don't have to play. During the Clinton Administration, OSHA began to understand that discouraging people from exercising their right to report an injury was a form of discrimination, and an OSHA violation. The current administration seems slightly less concerned.

If you're in a union, changes in health and safety programs are a mandatory subject of bargaining.

If you're not in a union -- like my friend Ed Padgett -- organize one. (Not a problem.....)

There's much, much more on behavioral safety in Hazards Magazine.

Labels: Behavioral Safety

NY Times: Reg Benefits Harder to Ignore

The New York Times has noted OMB's finding that the benefits of federal environmental and other regulations outweigh the costs. But....

Whether these findings will alter the administration's suspicion of federal regulation is unclear. President Bush has rarely allowed science (or, for that matter, logic) to interfere with his policies — witness his attempts to suppress or ignore alarming evidence about global warming to justify his cost-free strategy. Whatever the numbers, fundamental policy shifts are probably not in the cards. Even now there are efforts afoot to weaken rules protecting water quality, transportation safety and the public lands. Nevertheless, the positive results are now there for all to see, and it should become harder for the administration to keep blaming everything from the California energy crisis to the economic slowdown on environmental regulations.

Chem Board Recommends Revisions of NY Fire Code

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard investigation Board recommended today that New York City revise its 85 year old fire code to include modern developments in hazardous materials management. The recommendations resulted from an investigation of the April 25, 2002 explosion at Kaltech Industries in the Chelsea section of Manhattan that injured 36 people, including 14 members of the public and six firefighters.

The blast erupted in the basement, where a commercial sign-making company stored hazardous chemicals and was mixing incompatible waste -- nitric acid and lacquer thinner, investigators said.

The explosion came just seven months after the World Trade Center attack, fraying the nerves of a still-rattled city. The building facade collapsed onto West 19th Street, and people on upper floors had to break windows and jump to safety after the explosion sent flames up the elevator shaft and a stairwell.

The report also noted that neither the NY state Department of Environmental Conservation, nor the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had ever inspected the company.

The actual cause was a witch's brew of chemical mismanagement and faulty oversight," said Gerald Poje, a safety board commissioner.

***

"Dangerous chemicals are prolific in New York York City," he said, and the board's investigation has revealed a "gaping hole in the city's chemical safety net."

The city's fire code, for example, was written in 1918 and is so outdated that it does not even prohibit the mixing of incompatible chemicals in manufacturing facilities, according to the report.

"We need a much more aggressive updating of the city's fire code," Poje said.

The incident could have been much more serious as it occurred in the middle of a commercial and residential area. In addition, several workers were trapped in the building and would likely have died if the sprinkler system had not extinguished the fire.

The Board also issued a recommendation that OSHA Region II (which covers New York and New Jersey) and the NY Fire Department that it establish a "referral program" where the fire department would refer to OSHA possible health and safety violations during the course of its inspections. The fire department visits almost all NY businesses that use hazardous chemicals, while OSHA rarely visits most small businesses.

NYCOSH Director Joel Shufro and Philip Weinberg, who teaches environmental law at St. John's University, published an article in Newsday pointing out that while explosions like Kaltech are bad enough, "the potential for arson and intentional releases of chemicals by terrorists is far greater." They point out that

The city requires companies to use alternative substances and equipment to reduce the presence of dangerous toxics. So do state regulations, which dovetail with the city's. And city law says risk-management plans must at least consider using less toxic substances.

But little has been done to enforce these rules. The city has never penalized a facility for filing an insufficient risk-management plan or mandated a reduction in toxic materials. The law should be strengthened to require that quantities of toxic chemicals be reduced wherever possible, with meaningful penalties for those who disobey.

The accidental release of a pesticide chemical in Bhopal, India, in 1984 resulted in thousands of deaths, so we know how devastating toxic discharges can be. A counterterrorism expert, Rand Beers, recently pointed out that "chemical plants have a vulnerability which has a catastrophic characteristic ... that could approximate the World Trade Center."

More articles on the Kaltech Report can be found here and here

You can view a live broadcast of the hearing here. The full text of the report will be available here in a few days.

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

Regulations Costly? Oops, Nevermind.

When it comes to environmental and workplace safety, the benefits to communities, workers, society and the economy far exceed the costs. This is not a surprise.

What is a surprise is that the White House's Office of Management and Budget agrees. (This report was released last week, but I'm still catching up from Isabel.)

A new White House study concludes that environmental regulations are well worth the costs they impose on industry and consumers, resulting in significant public health improvements and other benefits to society. The findings overturn a previous report that officials now say was defective.

The report, issued this month by the Office of Management and Budget, concludes that the health and social benefits of enforcing tough new clean-air regulations during the past decade were five to seven times greater in economic terms than were the costs of complying with the rules. The value of reductions in hospitalization and emergency room visits, premature deaths and lost workdays resulting from improved air quality were estimated between $120 billion and $193 billion from October 1992 to September 2002.

By comparison, industry, states and municipalities spent an estimated $23 billion to $26 billion to retrofit plants and facilities and make other changes to comply with new clean-air standards, which are designed to sharply reduce sulfur dioxide, fine-particle emissions and other health-threatening pollutants.

While the report focuses primarily on environmental regulation, it also looked at OSHA's Confined Space standard where the benefits of $540 million were found to outweight the costs of $92 million. The total benefits of OSHA regulations were estimated between $1.8 billion and $4.2 billion from October 1992 to September 2002, with costs estimated to be just over $1 billion.

The report did not consider OSHA's assassinated ergonomics standard because it was repealed in 2001 by the Bush Administration and Republican Congress. Oh, well.

The report is particularly surprising because the appointment of John Graham, head of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was fiercely opposed by labor and environmental organizations because

Graham, founder of a Harvard University-based risk analysis institute, would lead a Bush administration assault on regulatory safeguards. But Graham has sided with environmentalists on several key issues, including new rules to sharply reduce diesel engine emissions and the fine airborne particles that contribute to asthma and other serious respiratory ailments.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) suspected that the Bush Administration's supporters would not be amused

"I'm sure the true believers in the Bush administration will brand this report as true heresy because it defies the stereotype of burdensome, worthless regulations," Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said yesterday. "They clearly don't understand that the government regulations are there to protect you -- and they work."

Sure enough

An industry official said the report may have greatly understated the costs associated with environmental regulations. Jeffrey Marks, a clean-air policy expert with the National Association of Manufacturers, said EPA "has traditionally underestimated the costs of regulations on industry. . . . The tendency to choose benefit numbers to correspond to favorable policy choices is strong within the agency."

More commentary on the report by Calpundithere.

Happy Birthday

No, not to me, I just had one. To Confined Space. It's 6 months old today. Never thought I'd make it this far, but I've managed to successfully fight off hurricanes and family members who think (for some crazy reason) that I spend too much time on the computer.

Over the past 6 months, we've had over 14,000 visitors and almost 23,000 page views. (Some blogs get that many in a few days, but there's always next year.)

It's had visitors from over 80 countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, from Oman to Croatia, from Jamaica to the Cook Islands.

Has it been everything I've hoped it would be? Well, first it's been fun. It keeps me from kicking the kids and yelling at the dogs every time I read the newspaper. I've gotten a lot of good feedback from those of you out there in internet land, and surprisingly few "flames" or death threats.

I've managed to share my perspective on workplace safety and health issues, the environment, labor, politics or whatever I was in the mood for. Hopefully, it's inspired some thinking among those who don't have the time (and ability to exist on very little sleep) that I do.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I've yet inspired a major movement of millions of health and safety activists to storm the halls of OSHA and take back the country. It's been a challenge to reach local workplace health and safety activists who may not spend a lot of time hanging out on the internet. While I've been linked on a number of union, COSH and other Weblogs, I'm still around 13 million short of being read by every member of the AFL-CIO.

I've also found it difficult to inspire fights on health and safety issues, when OSHA's chief mission these days seem to be to make itself invisible and irrelevant. Not to mention a few other issues dominating the news of late.

Over the next 6 months (if I survive that long), I'd like to try to make this site more interactive. I had a very underused "comments" section for a while before it ran into technical difficulties. I may try that again. I'd also like to invite more of you to send me information or even "guest" articles. I can't do this all alone. And, in fact, I haven't. Many of you, especially Rory O'Neill at Hazards and Jonathan Bennet at NYCOSH, and others too numerous or shy to mention (but you know who you are) send me frequent news stories without which I wouldn't have half so much to write (although I'd get more sleep.)

So, if you have any great ideas or stories or suggestions or even criticisms, please e-mail me. If you see a webpage that I should be linked to, e-mail them (or me). If you'd like to be added to my weekly "I'm still here" e-mail list, let me know. And if any of your local or national magazines or newsletters are looking for stories, suggest one about the one and only blog focusing on "News and Commentary on Workplace Health & Safety, Labor and Politics"

Otherwise, don't just websurf, organize.

-- Jordan

Canada: Come in sick, win a prize

This is amazing. I surprised they didn't think of this in the U.S. first.

A Canadian health authority is offering workers a chance to win $300 Canadian if they don't call in sick for six months. Vancouver Coastal Health Authority is running the contest to cut staffing costs.

Public sector union CUPE has condemned the contest as 'absurd and dangerous' and 'only a small part of an unhealthy cost-cutting agenda.' The health authority is bent on reducing a $175 million budget deficit by cutting staffing costs. Any of the 27,000 employees of the authority is eligible to enter the raffle if they don't call in sick during the six months between September 15 and March 15.

Health care workers say encouraging sick people to go to work in hospitals, nursing homes and care facilities will inevitably put patients at risk. 'In light of the SARS episode and infectious disease experts predicting SARS will come back (Risks 102), it’s appalling that a health employer will encourage people to risk making other people sick,' said Deb Niemi, a nurse and union rep. She added that the authority should be addressing concerns raised by health care workers about stressful working conditions.

Source: Risks Issue no 125 - 27 September 2003

U.S. Pressures Europe to Stop Caring So Much About Environment and Health

I've written before here and here 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. And I've written about how the tactics used by U.S. companies here -- major lobbying dollars arguing that regulations are too costly, they'll drive us out of business, etc. -- don't work in Europe.

You may recall a recent American Prospect article which described the American objections.

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.

Now Britain's Independent Portfolio has uncovered documents showing that

President George Bush is mounting an intensive campaign to force European countries to drop safety tests expected to save thousands of lives each year.

***

The documents - which include diplomatic cables signed by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell - show that the Bush administration has threatened Europe with trade sanctions if it goes ahead with the tests, which are designed to protect workers and the public from highly toxic chemicals.

The interest among European workers and consumers is clear:

The European Commission estimates that it would prevent up to 4,300 cases of cancer a year among chemical workers alone; far more lives could be expected to be saved among the public at large.

Pressure from the Bush Administration seems to be having some effect. Like the war on Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has once again jumped onto George Bush's lap. The British government

which has been generally supportive, last week denounced the measures as "disastrously wrong".

Safer Alternatives: Out with the Bad, In with the Good

When workers are exposed to toxic chemicals, management's first response is often to give them respirators. But respirators -- hot, uncomfortable and often ineffective -- are the last option on the list of the industrial hygiene "hierarchy of controls."

The best way to protect workers from toxic chemicals to substitute a safer chemical for a hazardous chemical. Now there is a bill in the Massachusetts state legislature that would "replace commonly used toxic chemicals with safer alternatives."

The bill, S. 1268/H. 2275 An Act for a Healthy Massachusetts, initially targets 10 of the worst toxic chemicals found in common household products such as dry cleaning, pesticides, solvents, building materials, foam cushions, and electronics. It would mandate a careful process to evaluate alternatives to these chemicals and replace them with safer alternatives where feasible. It would also stimulate research and development on new technologies and solutions when a safer alternative is not currently feasible.

***

The ten chemicals targeted by this bill were chosen because there is credible evidence that they pose a threat to human health or the environment, they are widely used within Massachusetts, they are found in a range of products we use in our homes and offices and safer alternatives exist for many uses of the chemicals.

As usual, opponants of the bill are claiming that it will be too costly and drive business out of Massachusetts. But economics experts at Tufts University disagree:

"Public health and safety are not unaffordable luxuries -- it would cost the state little or nothing to begin switching to safer alternatives for several of the chemicals identified in this bill," said Frank Ackerman, PhD, Research Director for the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. "Furthermore, our failure to eliminate hazardous chemicals imposes huge health care costs and losses of future income."

Now if Massachusetts would just pass a law providing OSHA coverage to public employees....

Not a Nice Place to Die AND I Wouldn't Want To Work There

Even the best morgues are probably not the nicest places. But the D.C. Morgue? Yech!

Behind the walls of the District's morgue, even death is put on hold.

Unclaimed bodies, awaiting public burial, have been decomposing on fiberglass trays in refrigerated storage rooms, some for up to three years. The cause and manner of death for roughly 400 people who have died since 1999 are "pending," the details of their demise left unresolved. Paper case files -- the morgue's records are not computerized -- are stored in unlocked rooms where workers, visitors and funeral directors wander freely.

In the unventilated laboratory where tissue samples are examined, toxic chemicals and formaldehyde were left out in the open, creating fumes so noxious that city health inspectors in June called them "immediately dangerous to life and health."

Unidentified skeletal remains lie in a cardboard box, a grim hand-me-down from the previous physicians who headed the office -- an agency that until the early 1980s was one of the best in the country, renowned for its research into gunshot deaths and its superb training of medical residents.

McWane/Tyler Pipe: Getting better or Same Old, Same Old?

McWane corporation, owner of Tyler Pipe is in the news again. McWane, you will remember, was the subject of a New York Times/Frontline investigation into the high number of injuries and deaths at McWane-owned facilites over the past several years.

McWane says they're doing better, and OSHA agrees.

David Willis doesn't agree.

David Willis was working against the clock. His shift was ending soon and he still had a job to do.

The mechanic had a choice, the kind that has become routine at the Tyler Pipe foundry. He could do things the slow, safe way but maybe not finish in time, or be fast, risky and, if all went well, get the job done.

Like so many colleagues before him, Willis went for speed. Eighteen days later, he left a hospital, lucky to be alive.

Willis skipped the "lock out" process, which would have kept his machines shut off while he changed a 500-pound iron mold. Without that safeguard, the machine was somehow triggered by co-worker Jason Testerman, crushing Willis against an elevated deck. Ribs broken and a lung collapsed, his face turned purple as he shrieked for his life.

***

Tyler Pipe officials insist conditions have improved in recent years. But workers point to Willis' July 22 accident and other problems as proof that the East Texas foundry is still fraught with risk.

And do we think there's a connection here:

Lost workdays are still higher than the most recent industry standard. In 2001, Tyler reported 17.1 percent of workers had injuries that prevented them from doing their usual jobs, compared with the industry standard of 7.4 percent. In 2002, Tyler improved to 13.8 percent. Industry figures are not yet available for 2002.

More training hours are now required, the company said. There's also a safety task force and incentives for complying: company jackets, caps and watches to workers who avoid accidents; cash prizes for reporting hazards

Some workers evidently think so:

While some employees agree, others say the shift is superficial. It's still bottom-line first, they say, noting that training is limited to videos, relief workers are still scarce, and employees are still asked to work alone and do jobs they're not trained to do.

There are also grumblings that the safety incentives are a joke because some supervisors don't enforce rules and bully workers to keep quiet about violations.

Anyway, no matter how hard you try, shit happens.

Company officials say they're doing all they can, but they can't prevent everything.

"Sometimes," said Ruffner Page, the McWane president, "mistakes are made."

But "sometimes" the ones who make the mistakes are not the same as the ones who get hurt.

Labels: McWane

AFL-CIO Health and Safety Conference Dec. 7-10, 2003

Spend December in Detroit!

The AFL-CIO will hold its biannual health and safety conference December 7 - 10 at the Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center. This conference will be incredibly important leading up to an election year. Register now.

Labels: AFL-CIO

NYCOSH UPDATE ON SAFETY AND HEALTH

Check out the NYCOSH (New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health) Update on Safety and Health.

Highlights:

-- Political Storm Develops after EPA Inspector General Reports that White House Downplayed Post-9/11 Health Hazards in Lower Manhattan

-- Senate Could Take Up Controversial Asbestos Compensation Bill Soon

Labels: Asbestos

I'm Back

I finally called the CEO of RCN (Starpower's parent company) in New Jersey after a week of:

-- "We're having an outage." Well, duh!

-- "We're working on it." I should hope so!

-- "We don't know how long it will be until you have service. It could be a day or a week." Not acceptable

-- "My supervisor, and her supervisor will tell you the same thing." So, no one in the entire company knows what's going on?

-- "We'll send someone out to your house in a few days" Uh, I don't think this is MY problem. I think it's a system problem.

-- "Don't worry, you won't be charged for the time your service is out." Gee, thanks, but you need to do much better than that.

-- "We're going to have someone come out to the neighborhood on Saturday to see what's wrong." $#%^&@#^&**!!!!

All this after waiting an average of 30 minutes on hold each time listening to lousy elevator music.

I actually didn't get to talk to the CEO, but I did speak to one of his assistants who brought up my neigborhood on his computer. "Oh my God!" he responded after perusing the service calls from my area. "There are a lot of people getting no information."

He then spent a half hour trying to reach someone in the Washington area to no avail, but promised to call me back in the morning.

I haven't heard from him yet, but this morning our telephone and cable were back up again. Don't know if it was my call that did it, but I've been happily accepting the accolades of a grateful neighborhood.

So this weekend I'll do a bit of catching up from my involuntary blog vacation. Hope you didn't miss me too much.

In the meantime, speaking of failing infrastructure, this is an interesting perspective on America's Crumbling Infrastructure.

Starpowerless

Update:

Still no phone or internet (thanks Starpower), but "promises" that they'll be restored by this evening. Meanwhile, rumors of (news) starved Confined Space fans rioting in the streets cannot be substantiated.

Consider this a good opportunity to sample some of the links on the left, especially the other Political and Labor Blogs, as well as checking out the archives for your favorite episodes of Confined Space before the new season starts.

Talk to you sometime.....

Surviving

Date with Izzy ended up more like Fatal Attrraction. No electricity for two days. (Bad, but not as bad as many.) And no phone or internet still.

Woe is me.

Back with you sometime.

Blow Izzy Blow

Got a date with a girl named Isabel. Sounds like a wild one. Talk to you later.

CENSORED: The Effort to Make Unions Disappear

"Called the 'most pro-corporate president in history,' George W. Bush has been, particularly since 9-11, engaged in a relentless, yet largely covert, effort to undermine labor unions and worker protections."

The Bush Administration's effort to effort to destroy labor unions has earned it the number 5 position among Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2002-2003.

Project Censored explores and publicizes "the extent of censorship in our society by locating stories about significant issues of which the public should be aware, but is not, for one reason or another." Hopefully, the public will then demand that journalists start covering these stories.

The issues highlighted by the journalists that did cover this story include Bush's intervention in the Northwest Airlines strike, using homeland security concerns to attack public employees, contracting out of government work, (ab)use of the NLRB to discourage organizing, and misportrayal of the 2002 West Coast dockworkers' strike and other recent labor struggles.

Thanks to Muvfugga for bringing this to my attention.

"Just a Horrible Accident"

Workers dying in trench collapses have always pissed me off -- mainly because they're completely avoidable and almost always a result of pressure to finish a job quickly or cheaply. In this case, 54-year old Steve Durbin, an employee of the Kokosing Construction Co., was crushed to death under more than 1000 pounds of wet soil when the trench he was in collapsed on top of him.

What really makes me mad though is when these deaths are portrayed in the press or employers who should know better as just freak, unavoidable accidents:

"It was just a horrible accident," [Health Police Detective Eric] Rardain said. "There doesn't appear to be any negligence on any person."

According to the Newark (Ohio) Advocate, the Executive Director of the construction company, Ronald Cochran assured the public that "we're investigating right alongside OSHA to find out what in the world caused this."

According to one article, "It was unknown what caused the collapse, which forced Durbin against the water line at about hip level."

Actually, it doesn't appear that it's too hard to determine "what in the world" killed Durbin. The article states that Durbin "was killed when the dirt wall of a 7-foot trench collapsed on him." Seven feet is 2 feet deeper than OSHA regulations allow without shoring or sloping.

So what's the problem? After all, OSHA will investigate and probably fine the company.

The problem is that the public -- which includes construction workers -- now have the impression that this was an unavoidable, "freak" accident that couldn't have been prevented. "What in the world" could have caused it? As if this is the first trench collapse that ever happened, instead of the same accident that needlessly kills who-knows-how-many workers every year.

Yes, six months from now, OSHA will probably cite the company. Maybe the citation will get a bit of press. Maybe not. But the impression will remain with most people that it was "just one of those things."

It is our responsibility -- those of us who know that these deaths are preventable -- to educate the press and the public that these deaths are preventable. Workers won't be safe until they understand the hazards of trenching and how to prevent them. Ultimately, workers need to have the right -- and the power -- to simply refuse to enter unprotected trenches, and they need the backing of a strong union and the support of an outraged community that has decided they've seen enough of their neighbors die.


Footnote: Because Kokosing is a private sector contractor, OSHA is investigating the accident. But Kokosing is working under contract for the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT). In the mid 1980's I worked on an AFSCME public employee organizing campaign in Ohio and it was not uncommon for state and local employees to be trapped -- and sometimes die -- in trench collapses -- some 12 or 15 feet deep. But because public employees weren't (and still aren't) covered by OSHA in Ohio, there were never any investigations or penalties. Had Durbin been an ODOT employee, there would be no OSHA investigation today.

In 1990 I testified at a U.S. Senate hearing into proposed legislation that would have required all states to provide OSHA coverage for public employees. Testifying with me was a women who had recently lost her father -- a municipal employee nearing retirement -- in a trench collapse. She told the Senators that she had never suspected that her father had no OSHA coverage, that there was no law requiring the city to make his workplace safe.

Then she broke down -- along with the Senators and myself -- when she told of how her son would never be able to go fishing or to a ball game with his Grandpa.

Twelve years later, and more than 30 years after passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, most states in the country still provide no OSHA coverage for public employees. Public employees still die, their deaths still uninvestigated, the lessons still unlearned.

Just one of those things.

Labels: Trench Hazards

Chemical Safety Board Issues Report on Fatal Fire

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board called on the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oilfield operations in the state, to require all drillers and producers to comply with federal regulations on communicating hazards to workers and safely transporting hazardous liquids.

The January 13 accident in Rosharon, Texas, occurred as two tank trucks unloaded waste liquids into an open collection pit at the BLSR Operating Ltd. disposal facility. Unknown to either the drivers or BLSR personnel, the waste material was highly volatile, and a flammable vapor cloud formed in the unloading area. Vapor was drawn into the air intakes of trucks’ running diesel engines -- causing them to race and backfire – and the flammable cloud ignited. Two BLSR employees standing near the trucks were killed in the fire, and three others suffered serious burns. The two drivers, who were employed by T&L Environmental Services Inc., were also burned after rushing back to their trucks when they heard the engines accelerate. One of the drivers died several weeks later from his injuries.

More here.

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

Texas Passes 'Polluters and Predators Protection Act'

According to the New York Times, "The doctors beat the lawyers on Saturday as Texas voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment limiting medical malpractice awards."

But actually, the winners were the insurance companies and the losers (as usual) were patients, consumers and workers.

In yet another example (California governor, Washington State ergonomics) of conservative big-money perversion of the democracy and the initiative process, voters in Texas narrowly approved a change to the state constitution Saturday that puts a limit of $750,000 per case on noneconomic claims for medical malpractice.

Among the numerous "sky is falling" claims by supporters of the proposition was the main allegation that "Skyrocketing medical liability insurance costs have forced some doctors to close or cut back their practices, reducing available healthcare in many areas of Texas."

Now it's true that medical malpractice insurance premiums have been rising to unaffordable levels in many states. But the first question that must be asked is "How bad is it? Really?" Here are the facts about rising medical malpractice premiums according to a Washington Post summary of a recent report by the General Accounting Office (GAO).

And many of those highly publicized accounts of doctors who have retired or moved are, according to the GAO, either "not substantiated," temporary or involved only a few physicians.

In Pennsylvania and West Virginia, for example, two of 19 states designated by the AMA as being in a "full-blown liability crisis," the number of doctors per capita has actually increased in the past six years, according to the GAO.

In Florida, where the state medical society told congressional investigators that all the neurosurgeons in Collier and Lee counties had stopped practicing, the GAO found at least five such specialists at work in each county. Although medical groups have repeatedly warned that doctors are reluctant to come to Florida because of escalating premiums, the GAO found that the number of new medical licenses issued by the state has increased in the past two years.

The second question is what's causing medical malpractice rates to rise?

According to Robert Hunter, former federal insurance administrator who is now director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a CFA study showed that

Premiums paid by doctors "do not correspond to increases or decreases in payouts," but "rise and fall in concert with the state of the economy. . . . Insurance companies raise rates when they are seeking ways to make up for declining interest rates and market-based investment losses."

That conclusion is similar to one reached by the GAO in a report released last June. Among the causes of the latest round of malpractice premium increases, the congressional investigators found, were insurers' losses in their investment portfolios, inadequate reserves to pay claims and artificially low rates set during the 1990s when many companies vied to attract policyholders.

Did you get that? Insurance companies are raising rates because they (like many Americans) have lost a lot of investment income over the past few years due to declining interest rates and the falling stock market.

Does this sound familiar? Those of you who read Confined Space religiously may remember that this is the same reason Workers Compensation rates are currently rising in many states, causing a Workers Compensation "crisis" that business groups are exploiting to pass laws that "solve" the problem by cutting benefits that go to injured workers.

And what's NOT causing medical malpractice rates to rise? Medical malpractice awards:

Figures collected by the Texas Board of Medical Examiners for medical malpractice claims since 1989 show that the number of lawsuits filed has dropped from 5,467 in 1999 to 4,555 in 2001. During that same period, the total amount paid in claims has declined from $171.5 million to $71.1 million.

The average paid per claim also has dropped from $37,000 to $25,000.

It's Even Worse In Texas

Other states have passed similar limits on medical malpractice awards, but Texas has now taken the process one giant step further. The initiative

extends the limits on malpractice awards across the board for lawsuits that could cover polluters, toxic dumpers, unsafe apartment buildings, hazardous workplaces or dangerous products.

Which is why columnist Molly Ivins warns

Don't let anybody tell you Prop. 12 is just about med-mal, just a little cap on jury awards in this one area. This is the whole ball of wax. This thing permanently alters the separation of power between the judicial and legislative branches.

For 150 years, the Texas Constitution has guaranteed that every person who has suffered some sort of injury shall have remedy by due course of law. Prop. 12 limits the right to sue makers of dangerous supplements like Fen-fen, makers of unsafe tires and exploding gas tanks, polluters, drunk drivers, manufacturers of unsafe medical devices like the Dalkon Shield and corporate crooks. People like Ken Lay and Jeff Skillings of Enron, who destroyed the life savings of thousands of people, get legal protection under Prop. 12. This is the Polluters and Predators Protection Act. And it doesn't even do anything to discourage frivolous lawsuits.

(More good information from another blogger on the Texas proposition here.)

Don't Confuse Me With The Facts

The most infuriating thing is that when insurers are forced to tell the truth, a very different story emerges. This past summer while similar medical malpractice legislation was being considered in Florida, something strange happened when insurance industry representatives were forced to testify under oath: They told the truth.

Among the startling admissions:

There are no "frivolous lawsuits" against doctors - despite the Bush brothers' fancy for the phrase - because Florida law put a stop to them more than 14 years ago.

The medical lobbies have only anecdotes, not hard facts, to back their claim that Florida is losing doctors, emergency rooms and trauma centers; if anything, there are more licensed doctors every year.

The Office of Insurance Regulation doesn't probe the data that companies submit to justify their rates and doesn't require executives to attest to the truth of it.

There has been no explosion in actual malpractice or litigation, and the insurance company that underwrites the most Florida doctors considers this its most profitable state. "If we can't make money at these rates," its president conceded, "we ought to quit." (His company pays the Florida Medical Association $500,000 a year, which is 10 percent of the FMA's budget, to recommend its policies to Florida doctors regardless of what competitors might charge.)

In addition,

Florida insurers reneged on their promise to reduce doctors' premiums by 20% if a cap were passed. Soon after, an executive of Florida's largest malpractice insurer admitted under oath that Florida is its most profitable market, despite claims that large jury awards are forcing companies to raise premiums

More about the rare and strange phenomenon of insurance industry representatives telling the truth here and here.

Hmm. I think it might be interesting to force industry representatives to testify under oath at OSHA and EPA regulatory hearings as well. Maybe we could even go so far as forcing them to tell the truth in Congressional testimony.

Sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, you first need legislators that will actually base their votes on the facts, instead of where their campaign contributions are coming from: The Florida legislature passed legislation limiting medical malpractice awards anyway.

As Molly Ivins says, this is serious business. The regulatory process is all but broken and enforcement of workplace health & safety, environmental or consumer protections always wins the Congressional prize for "most likely to be cut." By reducing damage limits you not only remove the incentive for companies to clean up their acts, but you remove the incentive for trial lawyers to take up the cause of people who have no money to hire an attorney (much less the high-priced talent the major corporations and business associations can hire.)

Oh, and as a side-benefit, by damaging the income of trial lawyers you weaken one of the main progressive contributors to the Democratic party.

So without malpractice and large judgements against other forms of corporate malfeasance, what do we have left to strike fear into the hearts (and portfolios) of businesses that may not have the welfare and health of workers/consumers/patients/ communities at heart?

The Weekly Toll

Worker killed in S.J. blast identified
By the Mercury News

The Santa Clara County coroner's office has identified the factory worker killed Friday in an explosion at United Technologies Corp. in South San Jose.

James Franklin Spotts, 47, of San Leandro died while working on a 400-gallon mixer used to make rocket fuel at the factory. Officials from UTC said Friday that the worker, an employee of Union City-based contractor Jenson Mechanical Inc., was making ``maintenance upgrades'' on the mixer.

Friday's blast follows another, larger, explosion that rocked the company's plant Aug. 7.

More here.



Trench collapse kills contractor on site

ATLANTA - A 31-year-old contractor from Woodstock died Thursday after a trench collapsed at a construction site in southeast Atlanta near Grant Park.

Family members identified the man killed as Richard Turem.

Mr. Turem was part of a three-person crew that was installing storm sewers, officials said. The soil around the project collapsed, officials said.

GREGG COUNTY FAIR
CARNIVAL WORKER ELECTROCUTED

LONGVIEW - The Gregg County Fair opened as scheduled Tuesday night, a day after a carnival worker died while working on a Ferris wheel.

Pat Crabtree, president of Crabtree Amusements, said the worker was Timothy J. Swickard, 20, of the Houston area, an employee who had worked for the company, based near the San Marcos area, for two seasons.

Swickard would have turned 21 later this month, Crabtree said.

Crabtree said Swickard was working on the ride's lights when the incident occurred. Another employee later noticed Swickard wasn't moving, he said.

"I believe he was electrocuted," he said, noting that he most likely came in contact with the device that gets power into the moving part of the wheel. Crabtree said Swickard was not following proper procedure because power was on in the area he was working.

Scaffolding Accident Kills 1 Person In Camden
Second Worker Injured

CAMDEN, N.J. -- One person is dead after a scaffolding collapsed Tuesday morning in Camden, N.J.

According to the Camden County Fire Department, the accident happened around 11:20 a.m. at Sixth Street and Penn streets, which is near the Rutgers University-Camden campus.

Authorities said Donatius McMahon, 44, of Delran, N.J., and another man were installing glass panes on the new Camden County College building.... The men were disassembling the scaffolding when it fell about 40 feet, or three stories. More here.

Second Blast Victim Confirmed Dead

Authorities have recovered the second body of two contract workers killed in a blast that rocked eastern Rockingham County yesterday afternoon.

The Rockingham Sheriff's Office identified the victims as Keith A. Dean, 44, of Grottoes, and Frank Domzalski, 45, of Timberville.

The two were welding on a sludge storage tank at the Coors Brewing Co. plant near Elkton when the explosion occurred between 2 and 3 p.m. yesterday.

Fire and rescue workers found Dean's body shortly after the blast. Authorities located Domzalski's body about 10 p.m. last night, said a spokeswoman with the sheriff's office. Authorities with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration are investigating the accident.

Barrel blast kills Eagle Alloy worker

Sunday, September 14, 2003

A 22-year-old Eagle Alloy Inc. employee was killed Saturday morning when a metal barrel he was cutting with a torch exploded.

Jason L. Nichols of Muskegon Township died at the steel foundry, 5142 Evanston, from injuries caused by the explosion

Sanitation Worker's death investigated

September 09, 2003

RED BLUFF, CA — The state has launched an investigation into the death of Christopher Lee Berry, 44, of Corning, who died in an industrial accident at GreenWaste of Tehama.

Berry was replacing the hydraulic cylinder inside the garbage truck when the accident occurred...The accident happened after Berry called out to fellow employee Jarrod Calder, who was standing outside the truck, to push a button that activates the packer, a device that compacts garbage, so he could place a rod. Although Berry believed he had set the packer to go forward, it went the other direction and crushed him in a matter of moments. More here.

OSHA Investigates Fatal Fall In Evanston
38-Year-Old Falls From Scaffolding Sunday

CHICAGO -- Federal investigators will try to determine Monday what caused a painter to fall to his death from a scaffold affixed to an Evanston office building.

Robert Klein, 38, fell Sunday from a building at 1029 Howard St. in the near north suburb, according to a spokesman for the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.

Friends recall surveyor killed in accident

September 6, 2003

WILTON CT-- As the investigation continued yesterday into the death of a Wilton man killed Thursday while working for a surveying company in Greenwich, his friends and colleagues recalled a tireless and intelligent worker who was also a champion orienteer.

Damon Douglas, 69, a senior surveyor for Stamford-based Redniss & Mead Inc., died while examining pipes with another employee inside a manhole on a private driveway of Prescott House, a residential development owned by Greenwich Hospital. As Douglas raised his head, he was struck by a sports utility vehicle, according to police. There were no cones or barricades protecting the manhole, police said.
More here.


Television tower collapse kills 3
09/05/03

HUNTSVILLE, AL - Three men were killed Thursday when the Huntsville television tower they were working on collapsed.

The tower of just more than 1,000 feet, including antenna, leased by WAAY-TV Channel 31 fell just after 1 p.m. Thursday, police said. Two workers died instantly and the other died later at Huntsville Hospital.

Names of the men were being withheld pending notification of family, police said.

All three men were above the 700-foot level adding support to the tower and putting in equipment for digital cable when the tower buckled below them, said Huntsville Police Sgt. Ed Cain. The tower collapsed on itself before the top part fell over, the tip of the antenna landing 15 feet or so behind the television station building, which sits atop Monte Sano Mountain. More here.

CRANE MAN CRUSHED IN S.I. COLLAPSE

September 4, 2003 -- A crane operator was killed and another worker injured when a 60-foot crane collapsed on a Staten Island loading dock yesterday, witnesses and officials said.

OSHA investigating blast that injured workers

Two workers who were seriously injured in an explosion Tuesday morning at Ametek Specialty Metals Products on Route 519 in Eighty Four remain hospitalized in Pittsburgh.

The federal Occupation Safety and Health Administration is investigating the explosion of the electrical arc furnace that burned Rudolph Paci, 38, of Brownsville, and James C. Sutch, 37, of Daisytown.


Police give construction site death case to OSHA

LAWRENCEVILLE — Police have turned over the investigation of a man who died Friday at a construction site to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The unnamed victim died while working at a construction site near Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, where a shopping center is being built. He was dead when fire officials arrived, said Gwinnett Fire spokesman Chief Randy Robinson.

Labels: Weekly Toll

"Shangshan village will be a widows' village in 10 years' time..."

More depressing stories from the capitalist paradise, "communist" China:

SHANGSHAN, China - The oxygen tank at Wu Shengfu's side fills his scarred lungs with enough air to breathe but not enough to talk for long about why, at 48 years old, he will be dying soon.

His friends do their best to help explain, even at the risk of being harassed by police, because many of them too will succumb to an early death. Slowly, the men of this village in central China are dying, and the local authorities here, having profited from their labors, would prefer that they die in silence.

****

Without much supervision from local authorities, Wu and other villagers worked seven days a week drilling into the rock on Earth Dragon Mountain to mine gold ore for the government and, furtively, for themselves. They also breathed in huge amounts of white dust - silica from quartz - because they weren't wearing masks or any other protective equipment.

The dust was everywhere, Wu's friends said, so thick sometimes that one couldn't see a fellow miner a few feet away. It would sit in their lungs for years until the miners, one by one, developed silicosis, an incurable lung disease.

Is Anything Better Off?

You know, I just can't help but wonder sometimes how Bush's popluarity rating can even get up to 25%, much less 52%. Can anyone out there in Blogland tell me anything about this country that has become better since he took office?

One only hopes (and recent polls like this and this are looking better) that some of this information is sinking in around the country:

With no extra money available for the foreseeable future, real choices are being illuminated on Capitol Hill — choices between electronic bombs and electrical grids, between low taxes now and lower retirement payments later.

Should Washington reconstruct Iraq's schools and hospitals, lawmakers are asking, or America's? Should it pay for more than 100,000 American troops to stay in Iraq, or for 40 million seniors to be offered prescription drugs through Medicare? And if it tries to do it all, should it keep cutting taxes?

The Bush administration says it can do all of the above, once the tax cuts inaugurate a burst of economic growth. Democrats and virtually every mainstream economist say that something will have to give, very possibly the government's retirement promises to millions of aging baby boomers.

***

Disputes have broken out in Congress this year on spending items that used to be routine, like construction of housing for military families, which the administration proposed cutting by 6 percent. The administration invoked the deficit earlier this year in explaining the size of its proposed 2004 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, which was 5.5 percent less than this year's spending. (Congress is likely to restore some of those funds.) And next year's budget could fall short of paying for more than 100,000 housing vouchers now used by low-income families, said a study by the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities; it would be the first time in 30 years that existing vouchers were not renewed.

***

The Committee for Economic Development, a group of business executives, warned earlier this year that persistent deficits could lead, for the first time in the nation's history, to a lower living standard for future generations.

A Sliver Lining?

With things looking so bleak, enquiring minds might wonder if there's some kind of vast rightwing conspiracy out there:

Congressional Republicans deny the Democratic charge that the deficit was deliberately created to shrink government, but nonetheless acknowledge that it will be a useful tool to achieve that goal.

"There's no question that annual federal deficits have been the only effective check on Congressional spending in the modern era," said Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican and a member of a conservative House caucus pushing for big cuts in spending. "There's been a lot more willingness on the part of our appropriators to exercise discipline in the last eight months than in the previous Congress. It doesn't justify all that red ink, but it's kind of a silver lining in that cloud."

That was the New York Times, here is the Washington Post

Imagine an army massing directly in front of you. Your own forces are having some supply line problems. And enemies are hiding on either side, waiting to ambush you. So what do you do? Dismantle your own arsenal?

If you're talking about the fiscal battles the United States is facing, and if you're the Bush administration, the answer seems to be: Yes. Call it fiscal disarmament. In its first two years, the Bush administration -- faced with a swelling army of retirees, unknown costs of lurking national security dangers and challenges to its supply of tax revenues because of fixes needed with the alternate minimum tax -- chose to surrender some of the fiscal weapons at its disposal through massive tax cuts.

The president's request last week for another $87 billion for the occupation in Iraq is chump change in the context of what has been given away in the Bush tax cuts. It comes to about 5 percent of the cost of the president's tax cuts over 10 years. In the mountain of U.S. borrowing, it amounts to a hill of beans. It will add only a little more than 2 percent to the national debt.