Confined Space

Preventing Hispanic Worker Deaths: An Uphill Battle in NC

Better start climbing

You wonder why there are so many immigrant deaths in American workplaces?

"I had one boss who told me to go to the top of a roof," Tomas Ramirez recalled. "I said, 'Give me a rope," and he said 'I had another guy do it without a rope; are you a chicken?' Well, I'm not a chicken, so I climbed up there without the rope."

In North Carolina, while workplace deaths and injuries are falling in general, Hispanic deaths and injuries are on the rise

In 2002, the last year for which complete statistics are available, there were 169 workplace fatalities in North Carolina. That was 17 percent fewer than the year before, and the lowest number since record-keeping began in 1992. It was a remarkable improvement, with one exception: 25 Hispanics died on the job that year, up from 20 the year before.

Since October, at least six more Hispanics have died on the job in North Carolina, Labor Department data shows. Two of them lost their lives this past Monday in separate construction accidents in Wake County, the latest reminder of the risks such jobs bring.

Workers of Hispanic origin are also over-represented in nonfatal work injuries. In 2002, Hispanics made up 5.3 percent of the state's work force, but 7.4 percent of nondeadly accidents that involved days away from work, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

State officials say they're trying to address the problem. Some aren't so convinced

Tom O'Connor, a Chapel Hill-based coordinator for COSH, a national network of worker advocacy groups, is more blunt.

"Whatever they're doing doesn't seem to be working," he said.

O'Connor is helping lead a campaign to impose tougher federal penalties on employers that don't follow safety and health regulations. He points to California, which three years ago raised the maximum civil fines for serious workplace safety violations to $25,000, compared with North Carolina's $7,000.

Cherie Berry, chairwoman of the N.C. Labor Commission, doesn't think that tougher penalties would fix the problem.

A lot of small businesses, she said, can't afford to pay fines higher than what her agency levies today, so why force them out of business? But Berry also called on more employers to step up to the plate.

"We're out there trying to point out the benefits of training workers in safety," she said. "But it's also incumbent on the industry to self-police."

OK, now let me get this straight. We don't want to fine businesses because they can't afford to pay the fines, but you're somehow going to convince them to shell out money to enjoy the "benefits" of making their workplaces safe? Seems to me that there's no greater benefit for a business than to avoid a fine that might put them out of business. (While I always hate to sound partisan -- I'm a uniter, not a divider -- it should be noted that the Ms. Berry's position is elected and she, unlike the rest of the North Carolina cabinet, is a Republican -- in case you couldn't tell from her "philosophy.")

And what is "self-policing" in this context? Are businesses going to fine each other? You get kicked out of the country club if you kill more than one worker per year? Maybe drivers should start self policing other drivers too. I've always wanted to make a citizens' arrest when someone runs a light and almost hits me.

Which is not to say that solving the problem is an easy task

In the 1990s, North Carolina had the fastest-growing Hispanic population of any state, Census data shows. The numbers have continued to soar through the recent economic downturn: Between 2000 and 2002, the state's Hispanic population grew an additional 16 percent to nearly half a million residents.

During the same three-year period, North Carolina's Hispanic work force grew 42.3 percent to 215,000.

In 2002, nearly 30 percent of Hispanic workers in North Carolina earned their living in construction, the industry that claimed more lives than any other that year: 44. One in five worked in manufacturing and one in 10 in agriculture, the industries that rank second and third in terms of fatalities.

The North Carolina Department of Labor doesn't have enough Spanish speakers and often can't keep those it has because they are lured away by better wages in private industry.

So what's the answer if you want to address the problem? Spend the money that's needed, increase the disincentives to killing workers, or rely on self-policing?

I think we're seeing the answer.

Labels: COSH Groups, Immigrant Workers

Asbestos Comp Bill Coming

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he wants to bring the industry-favored asbestos bill up for a vote in the middle of April. Although negotiations continue, the current bill doesn't look good. Here are a couple of T.V. ads opposing the bill, here and here.

More on the current status here.

Obesity as Occupational Disease? Update

I wrote the other day about ACOEM's (American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine) curious choice of obesity for their 2004 Labor Day focus.

Brown University's David Egilman had some more observations:

I think Jordan has his dates messed up. Surely based on the date of release this must have been an April Fools joke. Or maybe it is serious and just the program is a joke.

As with tobacco this question presents an epistemological choice. (Of course ACOEM did and does not and will not deal with these. This is an easy answer organization.) Do we solely blame the victim or are there structural issues that "cause or contribute" to obesity?

How about the the obvious corporate efforts to influence children to eat unhealthy foods? Watch any commercials during Sat AM cartoons lately?

What are the corporate medical directors of McDonald's and that great health foundation Kellogg doing about that? Will the ACOEM spur them to action? This is so important (threatening) that ACOEM will avoid all discussion.

How about more subtle issues like stress at work or the distribution of power at work that may contribute to maladaptive behaviors? Will ACOEM call for a 35 hour work week and mandatory unionization? No. These are off the table certainly; they will not be discussed.

Or how about a society whose only raison d'etre is consumption? Should a society be organized around other (even additional) constructs like quality of life (6 weeks vacation), universal health insurance and guaranteed quality primary and secondary education?

David Egilman MD, MPH
Clinical Associate Professor
Brown University

College Bound Children?

Taking a few moments to write as the father of a college-bound daughter (and two more every two years).

Generally, I don't like New York Times political columnist David Brooks. That's because he really should have been a high school college counselor instead of a political columnist. His column today makes more sense than anything I've read on the subject. If you are in my situation read this. If you expect to be in the next few years, print this out and save it.

The Forgotten Victims of 9/11

Forgotten among the thousands who died on 9/11 are the hundreds or more who helped rescue the victims and clean up the mess -- and are now still suffering the consequences, apparently without any notice, care or assistance from a government that told them the air was safe.

Hundreds of Ground Zero workers have lingering illnesses, but the government isn't paying for their care, said a leading doctor and two federal lawmakers.

Of 700 workers in a treatment program at Mount Sinai Medical Center, three-quarters still suffer from upper-respiratory problems brought on by work at the World Trade Center site, said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the hospital's Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. More than 40% suffer post-traumatic stress, said Herbert.

"The rates of symptoms we're seeing do not seem to be decreasing much," Herbert said. "The health problems we're seeing are serious and persistent." Herbert said the center is still analyzing data from its health screening of 9,229 workers, but an initial sampling of 250 showed half still have health issues.

Representatives Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) have introduced legislation that would require the federal government to pay for their treatment.

"The lack of federal coordination, delays in funding, and total absence of aid for treatment shows a shameful neglect of 9/11 health issues in Washington," Maloney said. "We hope to change that with this legislation."

Herbert said that without government aid, many of the workers have no way of paying for their treatment.

"Many of our patients have become disabled," Herbert said. "They have no income, no health insurance and, in the absence of a philanthropically funded program, no way to get any care."

Vhristie Whitman was Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on 9/11 and Newsday columnist Dennis Duggan thinks she might learn a lesson from Richard Clarke's apology:

Christie Whitman wasn't at City Hall yesterday. She was out among the horse set in Somerset County, behind the neatly trimmed hedges of her wealthy estate.

The people visiting City Hall yesterday were the walking wounded, the ones who believed her when she declared that the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe just days after the Twin Towers were toppled.

Most of the people who believed her in September 2001 were numbed by attack. They wanted life to be as normal as possible.

So the apartment dwellers went in and cleaned up their homes, the kids went back to school, the Wall Streeters returned to work and the rescuers came down by the thousands to search for the living and the dead.

Whitman wasn't one of those at Ground Zero. At the time, she was in Washington, issuing her statement. "Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York's financial district," she said.

Of course it wasn't safe. EPA knew it didn't have enough information to state that it was safe, but the White House didn't think it was prudent to worry people. They had other concerns.

And, apparently they still do.

Labels: 9/11 World Trade Center Workers, AFL-CIO

More on California Workers Comp Mess

Workers comp in California and elsewhere is such a mess it makes you think that the solution might just lie in making sure workers don't get hurt in the first place....

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good article outlining the basic facts of the California Workers comp crisis which we've written about here before. Basically, in California, direct cash payments to workers are at or below the national average, but California employers pay the nation's highest rates for coverage due to the high number of claims that are filed and higher medical costs in California.

Governor Schwarzenegger (Jeez that's still hard to write -- but so is President Bush) has proposed a reform package that basically screws workers and is threatening to promote and even more drastic referendum if the legislature doesn't act to cut the current program in half.

Fraud is a Fraud

In addition to the main article, there are several interesting sidebars. One is about an insurance fraud investigator, Steven Begley, who spends some time tracking down cheating workers,

But left out of the public debate this year seems to be the cheating ways of their bosses.

Their scams, he said, include "not reporting all the claims they should be claiming, or running a shell corporation: changing the officers of the company on papers to lie and say you've never had experience running a business before. Or misclassifying your employees."

Is fraud a major problem? According to Begley it's a popular fiction:

While the level of fraud can't be judged by the number of cases investigated, that number is far smaller than some imply. In 1999, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 1.6 million workers' compensation claims were filed. Investigators are probing only 989 of those cases.

So, what's at stake?

Not much. Despite reformer rhetoric that plays on the notion of rampant fraud, the Schwarzenegger-backed ballot initiative doesn't call for an increase in the number of state investigators to tame it. Talk swirling around the expected compromise reform bill hasn't centered on fraud containment, either.

MUST READ: Put 'em to work, poison 'em, then move to China and fire their asses

This is an amazing and extremely disturbing article from the East Bay Express about AXT Inc., a Fremont, CA, semiconductor company which exposed its employees to airborne arsenic at levels four times the legal limit in 2000 and was issued "Willful" citations and penalties of $313,000 by Cal/OSHA, the California workplace health and safety agency.

Company employees were almost entirely recent Chinese immigrants who spoke no English. As a result of the Cal/OSHA inspections and fines, American Xtal Technology (AXT) moved its production operations to Beijing, China, where it now has a 1,000-worker factory doing the work that health and safety regulators in California would not allow.

Despite the reloccation of the major production operations, the company has been cited and fined three times since the 2000 inspection, including another set of "Willful" citations issued in June 2003, which are currently under appeal.

Every day, Chan poured industrial alcohol into dozens of boxes. She worked without goggles -- her supervisors did not provide any -- and her eyes were assaulted by the alcohol fumes and gallium arsenide dust. By the end of each shift, she and her co-workers would stagger to their cars, their eyes red, bleary, and inflamed, their vision so clouded they could barely see. At night, when Chan went to sleep, she says the pain felt as if someone were rubbing gravel and sand into the underside of her eyelids, or piercing her irises with little needles.

In October 2001, a woman on the cleaning crew asked Chan to look at her neck. "She asked if there are lumps in glands in her throat, and she went to the doctor the next day," Chan recalls. Her friend was eventually diagnosed with nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a cancer of the upper respiratory tract. She never returned to work and eventually was laid off. Today, she can no longer talk above a guttural wheeze.

The following April, another woman on Chan's crew was diagnosed with rectal cancer, which has left her unable to control her bowels. In the space of six months, half the members of her team discovered they were staring death in the face. Chan confronted her manager and asked if something was wrong with the air, but he told her not to worry. "They said, 'We have people working here for ten years, and they're okay,'" Chan says. "I was very worried, but I still had to work, so there was nothing I could do about it."

As it turned out, Chan wouldn't have to worry much longer. In September 2002, AXT outsourced her job to a new factory in China, firing her and more than one hundred other workers. When she came to pick up her two weeks of severance pay, she says, a manager told her that unless she signed a statement promising never to sue AXT, she wouldn't get her money. Chan signed the statement.

It's a common story in Silicon Valley as we've seen from recent lawsuits against IBM.

Workplace toxins and outsourcing jobs are hardly new to Silicon Valley. Personal computers and the Internet continue to transform our lives in many ways, but the building blocks of the high-tech revolution have left a toxic legacy in Bay Area soil and drinking water. Santa Clara County, for instance, now has 23 Superfund waste clean-up sites -- the most of any county in America: Nineteen of them are directly related to the high-tech industry and involve poisons such as freon, benzene, and trichloroethylene. The 1980s saw a disturbing rise in the incidence of birth defects and miscarriages in certain Silicon Valley neighborhoods, and the cost of cleaning contaminated sites and settling the subsequent lawsuits has run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Moving production to China where AXT doesn't have to worry about worker health reveals the dark underside of globalization:

"The reason everyone talks about outsourcing is cheap labor," says Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a nongovernmental organization that tracks the spread of toxic chemicals across the globe. "But there are certain things that go hand in hand with cheap labor that no one wants to talk about. They include the lack of government occupational safety regulation, lack of tort law to redress a grievance, lack of labor unions. All of these things are part and parcel of outsourcing. You're not just taking advantage of cheap labor, you're taking advantage of marginalized and vulnerable populations, and the fact that you can poison people without ever having to face the music."

Much of the attention paid to the exploitation of immigrant workers focuses on the construction industry, but it's the same story here.

Young Shin, the executive director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, says employers hire workers such as Zhao precisely because they speak little or no English and know nothing of their legal rights. "It's not an accident that certain industries employ Asian females with no or limited English," Shin says. "It's institutional; it's a design to hire certain targeted populations. You're talking about immigrants who do not have networks to assert their rights, so it's an easy target for them. Second, this being the US, a monolingual society, when you don't speak English it's hard to get information about your rights. So you're targeting a population that's easy to exploit."

Read the entire article. It gets worse when workers experience increased exposures after the company had been inspected and cited by CalOSHA and then appealed the citation which meant the CalOSHA inspectors could no longer enter the plant until the appeal is resolved. And this article, along with many others appearing lately on the plight of immigrant workers in this country also raises important questions about whether federal OSHA or state OSHA's have the resources, ideas or will to tackle these problems. More on that later this week.

Two other things: The CalOSHA inspector who broke this story, Garrett Brown, is well known to many Confined Space readers. Garrett is also the coordinator of the Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network, a volunteer network of over 400 occupational health and safety professionals who provide information, technical assistance and on-site instruction regarding workplace hazards in the 3,000 "maquiladora" (foreign-owned assembly) plants along the U.S.-Mexico border.

I also want thank the author of this article, Chris Thompson, for believing that Americans should care about how American companies treat immigrant workers in this country and in the countries that they flee to. Chris joins David Barstow, Justin Pritchard and Andrew Schneider in the Confined Space Journalism Hall of Fame. If you appreciated this story, send him an e-mail. Reporters need love too.

Labels: CalOSHA, Immigrant Workers, Journalism

ACOEM Jumps On Bandwagon, Misses Boat

Occupational Physicians Group Makes Obesity the Focus of Annual 2004 Labor Day Checklist.

Every year the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) identifies a topic for its "Labor Day Checklist" which is designed to provide "quick tips on a timely topic to improve the health and safety of workers, the workplace, and the environment." In past years, ACOEM has chosen hearing loss, occupational asthma, eye safety, communicable diseases, back injuries and ergonomics. Not a bad list.

So what to choose this year? It's probably not an easy decision. Look around. We have an epidemic of immigrant worker death, injury and illness. Asbestos-related illness remains a serious nationwide problem, and millions of workers face harmful exposure to toxic chemicals about which we know very little. Year after year, OSHA "enforces" the same forty year old chemical standards for a tiny fraction of the chemicals used in this country. Meanwhile, OSHA, the only government agency charged with enforcing safe workplace conditions is rapidly turning into a poorly funded business consulting association while thousands of workers die every year from perfectly preventable "accidents."

So what should ACOEM choose for its 2004 Labor Day list? So much to choose from. So few opportunities to make a splash. Definitely not an easy decision.

Or maybe it can be an easy decision. Why not just peruse the news and see what's popular these days? How about OBESITY? Yeah, that's the ticket. Everyone's jumping aboard the obesity train. The Bush Administration has declared war on obesity. Obesity among children is at epidemic proportions. Walks to raise money to fight obesity have joined walks to fund AIDS and Breast Cancer research.

Of course, people can take this all too far. Happily, we have the U.S. Congress (joined by a number of state legislatures) who have manned the trenches in defense of the embattled double bacon cheeseburger by passing legislation to ban lawsuits against the fat food pushers. (Thank heavens for the U.S. House of Representatives, which in the span of a couple of weeks has saved the Republic from both hamburger haters and breast exhibitionists.)

Happily, there are a few thinkers going against the flow. Responding to a 102-1 vote by the Florida legislature to ban lawsuits against restaurants and fast food vendors, the Palm Beach Post had the nerve to note that the Emperor is slightly underdressed:

Courageous lawmakers might have considered actually doing something about public health. At the least, public-service messages could instruct families on healthy eating habits. If the state gave public schools an adequate budget, they could afford physical education programs and wouldn't have to sell sodas and junk food in vending machines in an attempt to make ends meet. The governor's task force on obesity recently criticized the machines but offered no ideas as to how schools might afford to get rid of them. Without help from the state, they can't. If the legislators really wanted to take on a public-health problem, they might try doing something about the one in six Floridians who have no health insurance. How about some protection for those families?

But I digress. Back to trashing ACOEM.

What are they thinking? Enquiring minds want to know. A study in the January issue of ACOEM's Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that

Workers' physical activity and physical fitness had a significant impact on their work performance. More physically active workers reported higher work quality and better overall job performance. As physical fitness increased, so did the quantity of work performed. In addition, more fit workers needed to expend less extra effort to do their work.

Obesity had a significant but negative impact on work. Twenty-two percent of workers in the study were classified as obese, and 4.5 percent as severely obese. Obese employees reported more difficulty getting along with coworkers, while severely obese workers missed significantly more days of work.

Now I don't doubt that these findings are true. Nor do I think it's necessarily a bad idea to use the workplace to educate people about healthy eating habits. But that shouldn't be the central focus of an association that is first and formost "devoted to prevention and management of occupational and environmental injury, illness and disability."

Again, I'm not saying that fighting obesity is a bad thing, nor is it necessarily inconsistent with the rest of ACOEM's mission, to promote the "health and productivity of workers, their families, and communities."

But come on people, everyone and their uncle is promoting the war against obesity these days, whereas almost no one (with the exception of labor unions and a handful of health and safety activists and enterprising reporters) is making any serious attempt to focus the public's attention on the continuing carnage in America's workplaces.

Instead of spending their time and resources telling people they eat too much, occupational physicians, organized by ACOEM, could use this opportunity to call attention to sick, injured and dead workers that almost no one else in this country seems to know or care about. For ACOEM to just melt into the throngs and choose obesity as the main focus of this Labor Day is, as one occupational physician told me, "an embarrassment to occupational medicine."

Irate comments here:

Connection Between Environment and Public Health? Industry Shocked and Panicked!

This is a really bizarre article. I mean, where have these people been for the past 30 years?

Chemical Policy Alert (no link) reports that

Bart Mongoven, who monitors non-governmental lobbying efforts for Stratfor, a private intelligence (sic) firm that consults with industry and government agencies, said in a March 23 speech to petroleum industry officials here that environmentalists are involved in a number of "coordinated" campaigns that are "gaining momentum," trying to attract patient advocacy groups to environmental proposals that promise to improve public health, as opposed to those that only protect the environment.

Now, I know industry people have always tried to label environmentalists as a bunch of tree huggers who didn't really care about anything except birds and snail-darters, but I never thought they actually believed it themselves.

"In five years, the environmental community would like to see all debates [be about] the environment and health," he said in a speech at the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association (NPRA) annual meeting. "Right now, the environmental community doesn't have the credibility with the public like it does in the Netherlands and Germany," he said, adding that emphasizing health "works here."

Mongoven said that environmentalists have traditionally focused health arguments on the impacts of toxic exposure to pesticides. But the advocacy groups have now broadened the debate to the health impacts of industrial emissions and effluent as well, he said.

Yeah, about 25 years ago. What planet have these people been living on?

He said that one way for industry to fight these new lobbying efforts is to paint the efforts as being "anti-chemical," rather than in favor of a public health goal.

Oh yeah. That'll work. Good idea, Bart! And here's another new idea. Maybe you can label them as anti-job too.

(Hmm. I'm clearly in the wrong business. Maybe I can start a consulting group and make speeches to industry organizations warning them that unions are starting to argue that workplace safety activities are starting to focus on worker health and safety, as opposed to, ah, union organizing, and, and this is really bad, because people actually care about their friends and neighbors and family members dying and getting maimed and sick at work! Yeah, that's the ticket. I could be rich.)

What really worries these guys is a group called Collaborative on Health and the Environment which has had some success building an alliance with patients rights and disease groups such as Alliance for Prostate Cancer Prevention, the American Cancer Society, the ALS Association and a number of other similar local and national organizations that are increasingly making the connection between environmental problems and chronic health issues. The Collaborative is headed by Stanford Professor Dr. Phil Lee, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration.

And indeed they sound kind of wierd and scary:

The group, which was established in 2002, cites a range of pollutants that may be responsible for increased rates of chronic disease, including synthetic chemicals, heavy metals and related elements such as lead, mercury and arsenic. "Since World War II, more than 85,000 synthetic chemicals have been registered for use in the United States and another 2,000 are added each year, and few are adequately tested for their potential impacts on health," the group says.

Exposure to these substances may be responsible for increases in a host of diseases, including asthma, autism, birth defects, cancers, developmental disabilities, diabetes, endometriosis, infertility and Parkinson's disease, the group says on its website. As part of its efforts, the group strongly emphasizes the use of biomonitoring -- testing for the presence of toxins in the human body -- as one of a number of strategies to monitor human exposure to toxins.

And NPRA members are running scared

Some industry officials say Mongoven's speech raises concerns about the possible success of future environmental lobbying campaigns. "Quite honestly, your presentation scared the heck out of me," Charles Drevna, NPRA's director of technical advocacy, said after the speech.

And if they think they're worried now, wait until they see this:

Birth Weights Up After EPA Pesticide Ban, Study Finds

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 25, 2004; Page A10

A federal ban on two popular household insecticides has significantly reduced the number of underweight babies born in neighborhoods where the chemicals had been widely used, a study has found.

Researchers at Columbia University found that infant birth weights and birth lengths in upper Manhattan improved immediately after the pesticides chlorpyrifos and diazinon, used in a number of household products, were banned for indoor use by the Environmental Protection Agency beginning in 2000.

Life and Death of a Chinese Food Deliveryman

Yesterday I wrote about the chemical hazards faced by Korean nail salon workers. Today the hazards faced by another largely ignored group of workers -- Chinese food delivery persons.

Nearly six weeks have passed since Huang Chen, 18 years old, the youngest of three children and the only son of Ming Garden's owners, delivered a chicken dinner to a seventh-floor apartment in one of those brown buildings. Delivering takeout is how Mr. Chen died.

The authorities say that two 16-year-old boys decided to set up the deliveryman, that they stabbed him and beat him with a baseball bat for fear that he could identify them, that they wheeled his body out in a shopping cart before shoving it into his car, that they dumped his body in a pond about three miles away and that from this endeavor they realized about $50.

The boys were charged with murder, and the news media briefly revisited one of this city's continuing narratives, the victimizing of Asian food deliverymen. John C. Liu, a city councilman from Queens, who is Asian-American, called for a one-day moratorium on such deliveries, and suggested that while picking up their food, customers get to know the people on the counter's other side.

People needed to be reminded "that there are human lives and human faces behind the preparation and delivery of their food," Mr. Liu said this week. The reminder was necessary, he added, because he detects a racist component to the beating and killing of deliverymen - men like Mr. Chen.

"It's as though we're not American," Mr. Liu said, his voice rising in anger. "We're not human, even. We're not real people."

Model Corporate Citizen -- Of the 19th Century

OSHA handed down a whopping $468,600 against Midwest Racking Manufacturing Inc. for a series of safety and health violations. OSHA accused the company

of violations ranging from electrical hazards to allowing smoking within 20 feet of a spray painting operation.

The firm, which makes metal storage racks, also is accused of not having protective covers on machines and not providing gear for workers' eyes and feet, as well as respirators.

So why the big fine?

OSHA has cited the company seven times since 1995 for total of $192,945 in fines for similar problems, federal officials said. It was unclear Wednesday how those fines had been dealt with.

Federal officials said the company has failed to correct some hazards in spite of offers of free assistance from OSHA.

The company is owned by Michael Sabados Jr., who is the president of the company, federal officials said. His father, Michael Sr., is operations director.

Federal officials said they were unable to determine whether any workers had been injured at the Madison plant, which was opened in 1994. They said the firm didn't keep records of injuries.

This story has one other ironic -- and tragic -- twist

Michael's brother, Richard, died in October when a forklift he was operating in Mishawaka, Ind., tipped over on him. He was installing shelving for Midwest Racking at a pet supply store.

Free Speech For Highway Workers, continued

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Michael Gerstenslager, the Ohio highway maintenance worker who displayed a sign with the word "traitor" on a snowplow while helping provide security for President Bush's motorcade. Gerstenlager, a steward with the Ohio Civil Service Employees, AFSCME Local 11, was charged by the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) with two work-rule violations and one Ohio Revised Code violation: posting an obscene gesture, the misuse of public equipment and insubordination. He accepted a two-week suspension without pay.

And then there was this other issue:

Peter Wray, a spokesman for the union that represents Gerstenslager - the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association - said he can't explain Gerstenslager's actions but complained that ODOT should never have provided security, at least not without reimbursement from Bush.

"With all the state cutbacks, we can't afford to be providing this type of support," Wray said.

Bush visited Cleveland to promote his economic policies, though his speech featured much of the same material he covers in his campaign speeches.

ODOT spokeswoman Lora Hummer said the state was not reimbursed for its employees' time. She said that the cost was "minimal" and that it is a "patriotic duty" to help. She described the state's involvement in Bush's visit as a "successful mission."

Gag me with a spoon.

Well, someone certainly did their patriotic duty. Maybe Gerstenslager should consider his two week suspension a campaign contribution.

OCSEA has been inundated with letters of support. If you haven't yet, you can send e-mails supporting Gerstenslager to Bruce Wyngaard at OCSEA.

'Reckless Endangerment' Ain't What It Used To Be...

Dude, that's harsh!

UPDATE: I didn't have the following article quite right yesterday. Reading the NY District Attorney's Press Release today, I discovered the following:

As a result of today's plea to Reckless Endangerment, Kaltech will be required to provide and pay for a comprehensive twenty-four hour course of chemical safety training resulting in an OSHA certification for all employees of sign manufacturers in the New York City area using chemical processes in their work who attend. All Kaltech employees - and those of other sign and chemical companies owned by Kaltech's principals - will be required to attend the training courses....At least 26 companies in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey will be invited to attend the training sessions. The training sessions, which will be advertised, are free and open to any employees of metropolitan area sign companies who use chemical processes in their work.

This is kind of an interesting concept -- paying to train worker from all similar companies in your area. Might be something to emulate.

-------------

For blowing up a building and injuring dozens of workers and bystanders in April 2002, Kaltech Industries has been sentenced to.....comply with the law.

NEW YORK (AP) A sign-making business pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment Wednesday and will pay to train its employees to use hazardous chemicals following an April 2002 building explosion that injured dozens of people.

Kaltech Industries, which stored hazardous chemicals in the basement of its building, entered the plea in Manhattan's state Supreme Court, prosecutors said.

Kaltech employees and workers at companies affiliated with Kaltech will be required to take the course, which would certify employees to use chemical processes in their work.

The April 25, 2002, blast collapsed the building's facade onto West 19th Street and frayed the city's nerves just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

Thirty-one people were hospitalized after the blast, which investigators say was caused by workers mixing incompatible waste products.

Doesn't OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard already require companies to train their employees?

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board found last September one of the root causes of the explosion 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.

93rd Triangle Fire Anniversary

On March 25, 1911, 146 young immigrant garment workers died in a tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This tragedy galvanized a city to fight for labor reforms and for fire safety in the workplace.

Great website on the Triangle Fire here. And order Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, by Dave Von Drehle from the Confined Space Reading list. Another article here.

Korean Immigrants Nailed by Chemical Hazards

Throughout this country immigrant workers are doing hazardous work whose dangers go almost unnoticed. They don't generally belong to unions, and they will almost never see an OSHA inspector.

Luckilly for workers in some parts of the country, there are COSH groups and other health and safety activists who attempt to educate and help these workers.

This article deals with efforts by NYCOSH to address the hazards faced by Korean nail salon workers in New York who are exposed to a number of solvents that cause cancer, asthma, burns, serious allergic reactions, liver and kidney damage.

It began with a runny nose and red, irritated eyes, but then came the coughing. Before long, Soonok Kim was having trouble breathing.

A doctor diagnosed her with severe asthma, which she believes was likely the product of more than a decade spent working at nail salons with little ventilation and lots of chemicals.

"My chest felt a lot of pain. My body felt weak," said Kim, 37, of Flushing, who worked as a nail technician for 11 years after immigrating to New York City from Seoul in the Republic of Korea in 1989.

"I felt like I'd be dead sooner or later," Kim said.

NYCOSH and the Young Korean American Service & Education Center will survey 100 of these workers to find out what they are exposed to and to try to prevent others from suffering health problems.

Evidence of illness has been mostly anecdotal, with workers relating symptoms such as asthma, skin rashes, burns and severe allergic reactions. Though the city's more modern salons have ventilation equipment and provide employees with face masks and gloves, Na said most salons remain packed into tiny, poorly ventilated spaces, providing little relief for workers.

Salon employees often work 10 hours a day with their heads bent inches away from a client's hands and feet, Kim described. Breaks come only when business is slow. Lunch is eaten next to trays of toxic nail polish removers and other chemicals.

"It's a workforce that no one pays attention to in an industry that's not really regulated," said Beverly Tillery of the Manhattan-based New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit coalition of unions, workers, physicians, and health and safety activists.

Anti-Ergonauts on the Rampage Again

Michigan Republicans Vow to Cut Off Funding for Ergo Standard

Vowing to stomp out any hint of an ergonomic standard like it was a toxic weed, the Republicans in the Michigan state legislature are preparing to pass legislation cutting off funding for MIOSHA's work on an ergonomics standard. As I wrote previously,

In 2002, Michigan OSHA formed a steering committee to develop a framework for addressing an ergonomics rule and appointed members to the Ergonomics Standard Advisory Committee from management, labor and the public. Around half of the states run their own OSHA program and are able to issue their own workplace safety standard. Currently, California is the only state with an ergonomics standard. Washington state's was repealed last year.

After three meetings, Charles Owens, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business resigned from the Ergonomics Standard Advisory Committee because, he said, he realized that the mission of the committee was to develop a standard. Owens said that he had been under the impression that the purpose of the committee was to determine if a standard was needed. National NFIB was one of the most active business associations behind the repeal of the federal ergonomics standard in 2001.

According to Inside OSHA,

Within a week, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Marc Shulman (R-Oakland) will move to insert
language into the state’s fiscal year 2005 budget that will express the intent of the Legislature that no funds allocated to MIOSHA be used to promote development of an ergonomics standard. Shulman told Inside OSHA, “We [Republican lawmakers] have been informed that it [regulating ergonomics] just doesn’t seem like it is an economically feasible issue.”

Even though MIOSHA hasn't even yet issued a rough draft of a regulation, Shulman claims that early action is needed to protect workers' jobs: "When everyone is talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, we have to keep jobs in Michigan."

Now, this job blackmail attack is older than Adam Smith, and in times of high unemployment, it's particularly effective, as we have seen in Washington State. Of course, students of recent history may remember that Republican attacks on the federal ergonomics standard reached their zenith during the boom times of the Clinton administration. High unemployment, low unemployment. I guess no season is good for an ergonomics standard.

Even without Republican obstructionism, the standard faces a number of hurdles

The advisory committee is composed of an equal number of business and labor representatives, plus a public representative. Assuming it can reach agreement on a new rule, it would undergo a number of public hearings and would have to be approved by the two state standards commissions. In order to merit approval, the commissions must certify there is a "clear and convincing need" for the rule.

Finally, the Governor's Office of Regulatory Reform must sign off on the rule.

But hey. No point in putting everyone through all that pain. Might as well put it out of its misery now.

Labels: Ergonomics

"Americans Are Going To Get Ripped Off"

Republicans Push to Deregulate Insurance Industry

Have you ever noticed how Republicans champion states rights until some states impose stricter controls over business than the federal government? (or until they want to select a President -- but that's another story.)?

The latest is an effort by Congressman Michael Oxley to take away states' ability to regulate the insurance industry. including workers compensation insurance. Oxley's bill

would force the states to adopt uniform standards and permit the market to determine insurance prices rather than have them determined by regulators as is generally the case now.

That is music to the ears of many of the biggest insurers. Once content with sluggish state regulation as long as it remained relatively lax, they have been campaigning for a single federal regulator to replace those in each of the states as competition with banks and mutual fund companies has intensified. The insurers say they want efficiency: one-stop shopping and quicker approval of new insurance and investment products. Their critics say that they want less regulation and that customers would suffer.

One force driving the initiative is a desire to end what Mr. Oxley called "the travesty of price controls" in the insurance industry by allowing the market to set prices. He said his changes would increase profits for an industry that has been lagging behind banking and other financial service businesses and would give customers more choices.

Oxley's proposal is strongly opposed by the AFL-CIO and the Consumer Federation of America. According to the AFL-CIO's Rob McGarrah,

While many states have fairly weak insurance regulation, it's better than the total deregulation Oxley has proposed for the American Insurance Association.

Effective insurance rate regulation in Massachusetts and Virginia protected workers from benefit cuts this past year, but skyrocketing workers' compensation rates in Florida and California forced legislators to cut benefits, with Schwarzenegger demanding another $11 billion in benefit cuts by Friday or he'll again put his "jobs" initiative on the November ballot. (Since California deregulated workers' comp insurance in 1993 26 companies have gone bankrupt and rates soared 300% in the last 2 years) In New York, insurers are leading the opposition to our drive to increase the near-poverty $400 week benefit rate.

J. Robert Hunter, a former insurance regulator in Texas and now the director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America says that

Americans are going to get ripped off. Insurance is not like other products. The policies are complex legal documents. Most people can't look at an insurance policy and tell whether they have a good one. It's hard to compare prices because coverage can vary greatly. You need someone looking out for the customer. The insurance companies aren't going to do that.

If you'd like to sign on to a letter opposing this legislation, contact Rob McGarrah at the AFL-CIO.

Piercing the Corporate Veil

No, this is not a story about Taliban attacks on business women. This is a story about OSHA possibly going after companies -- especially small construction companies -- who hide behind complex corporate structures to avoid repeat violations from OSHA.

The Washington Post's Cindy Skrzycki writes that the Occupational Safety Review Commission is considering two cases of business owners who have owned a series of companies that have killed workers, but are fighting repeat OSHA violations because their original companies have gone out of business.

The cases in question stem from OSHA inspections that alleged the companies were violating rules that protect workers from falls and other hazards.

The safety agency cited Sharon and Walter Construction Corp., a general contracting company in New Hampshire, for repeat violations since the owner ran an earlier company that had the same employees and work, and had been cited in 1995. The company owes $10,750 in penalties.

Charles A. Russell, an attorney for Sharon and Walter, said his client should not be considered a repeat violator since the first venture, a sole proprietorship, went bankrupt. He also said the company should not be held liable for an employee who fell off a roof because he was an independent contractor.

The other case involves two New Jersey companies that are involved in pouring concrete for major commercial projects. OSHA alleged that through complicated family ownership provisions, Altor Inc. and Avcon Inc. were in effect owned by father and son, Vasilios and Nicholas Saites, and they should be personally liable for $292,300 in penalties for various safety violations.

Paul A. Sanders, a New Jersey attorney representing Altor and Avcon, said: "The individuals don't intend to pay the fees. They don't think they are responsible."

The AFL-CIO doesn't agree.

"It's about naming and holding the responsible parties responsible," said Lynn Rhinehart, associate counsel for the AFL-CIO. "These are a series [of cases involving] construction companies and they have been repeatedly cited for OSHA violations. There is evidence they manipulated the corporate form to evade OSHA penalties."

Interesting cases, but I'm not optimistic. The Post notes that these cases were selected a for review a while back by Democrat Thomasina V. Rogers. Currently the Board has two Republican members, in addition to Rogers.

The Mouth Is More Dangerous Than The Trench

Dennis Mulvihill in a letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (published by master-blogger Atrios) wonders

why the Republicans believe that hearing a four-letter word on the radio is more damaging than death or catastrophic injury. Consider that the Bush administration wants to increase FCC

fines for indecency up to $500,000 per violation per station, yet at the same time, it wants to restrict noneconomic damages in tort cases to $250,000 or $350,000.

So if a DJ says a four-letter word on the radio, the harm is so appalling that a fine of $500,000 per word, per station is justified. But if someone is paralyzed, killed or otherwise catastrophically injured, the most the family could get for the (noneconomic) loss would be up to $350,000.

Good point.

The same analogy could be made for OSHA citations. It's a lot cheaper to willfully kill one of your employees than to call them a "fu*kwad" on the radio.

Labels: Trench Hazards

Magazine Finds OSHA 'Chemically Challenged'

OSHA's inaction is even getting to be too much for normally sober occupational health and safety journals. Jerry Laws, editor of Occupational Safety and Health magazine notes that

On Feb. 2, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board formally notified OSHA that it won't quietly accept the cooperative, anti-regulation approach OSHA favors. (I'll get angry letters from some readers over this statement, so watch our magazine's Letters page in upcoming issues. Here's my response: What other description fits an agency that scraps its own proposed regulations on tuberculosis, employer-paid PPE, and a musculoskeletal disorders column on the recordkeeping form, to name a few examples, and instead stays busy signing "alliance" agreements and lowering the bar so it can pad the ranks of its Voluntary Protection Program?)

You may remember that in January, the CSB found that OSHA's non-response to their recommendation that the agency revise its Process Safety Management standard to include reactive chemicals to be "unacceptable.

Noting that OSHA had also been dinged by the New York Times at the end of last year, Laws was unimpressed with OSHA director John Henshaws response to the CSB determination:

Henshaw had a quick answer ready when The Times focused on his agency's weak enforcement in fatality cases. He quickly answered [CSB Chairman Carolyn] Merritt, as well: "Our comprehensive approach to address hazards is a sound one. . . . We welcome the opportunity to continue to work with the Board and would consider further information they provide us." He could answer even faster by simply telling the truth: We aren't in the business of writing new rules.

And sometimes I think Confined Space is the only publication out there that sees OSHA for what it's really become. Welcome to the crowd, Jerry.

Utah Miners Strike In Safety/Pay Struggle

From China to the U.S....Coal Seventy-four coal miners at C.W. Mining Company's Bear Canyon mine (known also as Co-Op mine) in Huntington, Utah were illegally fired from their jobs on Sept. 22, 2003, after they protested the suspension of a co-worker and unsafe job conditions. The mine, owned by the Kingston family, had suspended UMWA supporter William Estrada for refusing to sign a disciplinary warning the week before.

At the time, it was the company's third attempt to victimize a UMWA supporter, according to the Co-Op miners. The miners were involved in organizing themselves into the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

Until recently, coal never struck my fancy. But this past week I met two coal miners from Huntington, Utah: William Estrada and Ana Lilia Vilalba, originally from El Salvador and Mexico, respectively. They educated me more than I had expected.

It would have been nice to just talk with them about the importance of their work, but instead, we talked about their working conditions.

Estrada and Vilalba are among 75 workers who have been locked out of their mining jobs since they decided to organize to demand better pay and better working conditions. Losing a job is difficult anywhere, but in the area where they come from in Utah, the Kingston family not only owns the Utah's Co-Op Mine, but many other businesses.

Working conditions at this mine have been in the news before. Three workers were killed in accidents in the mine since 1996.

"In coal mines, safety is a big thing," said Estrada, 37. "But in this company, if you're in a position to report an accident, you either work while injured or you risk losing your job. If you report an accident, they may accuse you of damaging the equipment and they'll take away your bonus."

Check out the UMWA website for more information.

Deadly Chinese Coal Mines

Yet another in a series of depressing articles about workers dying in coal mines in China:

Miners occupy the treacherous underside of China's economic ascent. As factories on the bustling coast churn out goods for the world, and as urbanites move into high-rise apartments and buy new cars, miners are bearing the often deadly burden of extracting the resources needed to keep the lights on and the machinery turning. By the government's own reckoning, more than 6,700 miners died in accidents last year, about 18 per day -- and experts say the real figure is probably twice that. The fatality rates in China's mines are as much as 350 times those in the United States and Britain, according to government reports.

Iowa Company, President Convicted for Workplace Death

Now this is some good news:

Jury convicts company in worker's death

VINTON, IA — A Benton County jury has convicted a Tipton company and its president of violating state safety rules in the death of a Cedar Rapids man.

Andrew Ross, 29, fell to his death in 1999 while working on a 300–foot free–standing communication tower. It was his first day on the job for Trigon Inc. The Iowa Occupational Safety and Health bureau said he lacked proper training and was not wearing fall protection equipment.

"This is the first criminal case in the state of Iowa in which a willful violation of OSHA laws that caused a death has been prosecuted," said Benton County Attorney David Thompson, who prosecuted the case.

Trigon and its president, Karl Thompson of Mount Vernon, were each found guilty of two counts of willful violation of safety regulations. Each charge is a serious misdemeanor and carries a maximum sentence of up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $1,500.

Labels: Criminal Prosecution

Tuberculosis: Plateau or Resurgence?

Only three months after OSHA cannned its tuberculosis standard, the Centers for Disease Control reports that tuberculosis cases are on the rise in California, Texas, New York and 16 other states. TB cases also rose by 5% in New York City.

Overall,

During 2003, a total of 14,871 tuberculosis (TB) cases (5.1 cases per 100,000 population) were reported in the United States, representing a 1.4% decrease in cases and a 1.9% decline in the rate from 2002. This decline is the smallest since 1992, when TB incidence peaked after a 7-year resurgence. In addition, the rate remains higher than the national interim goal of 3.5 cases per 100,000 population that was set for 2000

"We're not sure if this is just a plateau or a resurgence," said Dr. Eileen Schneider, an epidemiologist with the CDC's tuberculosis elimination division.

The trends are fueled a sharp jump in global tuberculosis cases and the US case increases are centered in states with highest number of immigrants, especially from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and China. Among infectious diseases, TB remains the second leading killer of adults in the world, with more than 2 million TB-related deaths each year.

Assistant Secretary for OSHA, John Henshaw announced last May that the administration had decided not to to issue the OSHA TB standard that the agency had been working on since the mid-1990's, despite the fact that the National Institute of Medicine had

concluded that an OSHA standard was needed to maintain national TB rates among health care and other employees at their current levels and to prevent future outbreaks of multidrug resistant and other forms of TB among these workers.

AFSCME, SEIU and a number of other unions petitioned OSHA for a Tuberculosis standard in 1993 in response to a nationwide outbreak of tuberculosis -- including multiple drug resistant TB -- that was exposing and killing health care and corrections workers. The standard was on the verge of being issued at the end of the Clinton administration, but because of OSHA's total focus on ergonomics, the curtain fell before the standard was finalized.

March 24 is World TB Day.

New Take on an Old Psalm

It's Sunday. Let no one say that we here at Confined Space are a bunch of heathens.

Bush is my shepherd, I shall be in want.
He leadeth me beside the still factories,
He maketh me to lie down on park benches,
He restoreth my doubts about the Republican party.

He guideth me onto the paths of unemployment for the party's sake.
I do fear the evildoers, for thou talkest about them constantly.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy deficit spending,
They do discomfort me.

Thou anointeth me with never-ending debt,
And my savings and assets shall soon be gone.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

(This is making its way around the internet. -- Thanks Ingrid.)

Strikes! Terrorism! Workplace Hazards!

We've got it all here.

Teamsters Local 251, representing drivers from chemical distributor Univar in Providence, RI, have been on strike for 8 months. Univar has hired replacement drivers and the union complains that the replacement drivers are inexperienced and create hazards.

And, it looks like they were right.

Sodium hydroxide leaked from a tanker, burning a police officer in the face.

the officer was burned about the face and head by sodium hydroxide that was being delivered to the ec pigments plant on Quequechan Street. The officer was treated at Saint Anne's Hospital and released.

Officials said that during a delivery of the chemical, a replacement driver forgot to secure the top of the tanker before he pressurized the cargo hold. The resulting spray of caustic soda burned the police officer, who was standing by the truck...Drivers from Teamsters Local 251 claim there have been numerous spills because of unqualified and untrained drivers.

So what was the police officer doing there?

The police "were here because there was a call that there was some terrorist action going on down here, but it was an union issue down here," District Chief Stephen Pietruska, of the Fall River Fire Department, said....

"The cops came and they said that they got a call that maybe terrorists were following the truck. The terrorists are behind the wheel of the truck. That's the terrorist," Greg Fagundes, a striking worker said.

The Weekly Toll

Pipe crushes worker in Castro Valley

CASTRO VALLEY, CA - A worker on a sewer pipeline project was killed Friday afternoon when he was crushed by a 4,000-pound piece of pipe that fell off a truck, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department reports.

The 31-year-old worker was killed shortly after noon when a 40-foot-long concrete-lined steel pipe fell off a flatbed truck for an unexplained reason, Sgt. Dave DiFranco said.

The Alameda County Coroner's office identified the dead man as Clemente Gonzalez-Contreras of Morgan Hill.

Mechanic Dies In Accident At Urbana High School

URBANA, Md. -- Frederick County school officials said a mechanic at Urbana High School fell to his death as he was climbing a light pole at the football stadium.

It happened about 10 a.m. Thursday when the worker was climbing the 65-foot pole to adjust the lights.

A school spokeswoman said Larry Rough, 45, fell more than 50 feet. Officials said he had been wearing a safety harness and three other workers were with him when the accident happened.

Court Officer Killed Serving Warrant

PHILADELPHIA (AP) One court officer was killed and two others injured early Friday when they were shot serving a warrant on a man wanted for failing to appear at his trial on rape charges, police said.

Joseph LeClaire, a 50-year-old supervisor, was shot in the head and stomach in an apartment in the city's Germantown section at 1:42 a.m., authorities said. More here.

VDOT worker killed at HRBT

HAMPTON -- A Virginia Department of Transportation worker apparently was violating safety rules and riding in the back of a truck designed for a taller tunnel when he was killed at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel on Wednesday night, VDOT officials said Thursday.

Paul Thurber, 48, a Norfolk resident and electrician with the department for more than a year, was killed when his head hit the top of the westbound entrance to the tunnel.

Charles Brinkley, also riding in the back of the truck, suffered minor injuries and was released from the hospital after a short observation period.

Thurber and Brinkley were sitting on a ledge installed in the back portion of the platform meant to rest tools on when the truck entered the westbound tube and their heads hit the mouth of the tunnel.

Crash kills farm worker

LOGAN TWP., NJ -- An unidentified farm worker was killed when the van in which he was a passenger crashed into a flatbed trailer on Mallard Court Thursday.

Caesar Perez of Bridgeton was driving the large 1992 Ford Superwagon, taking workers to farm sites, according to police, when the van crashed into the parked trailer.

There were 13 passengers in the van when it crashed at 2:54 a.m., police said

Construction worker falls to death

Bronx, NY -- A construction worker plummeted to his death Wednesday after falling three stories from a Bronx rooftop onto a scaffold landing that collapsed beneath him, police said.

Calwain Brown of the Bronx, an employee of Ozone Park-based Tahoe Contracting Inc., was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital Wednesday about 9 a.m. Brown, who was in his 40s, died a short time later, police said.

According to building officials, Brown was climbing down a ladder leaning precariously against a residential building he was working on at 1180 Jackson Ave. A 12-foot stationary scaffold was positioned six feet away from the building, and the ladder was leaning against the scaffold pointed toward the roof, Buildings Department spokeswoman Ilyse Fink said.

"The weight of the worker and the angle of the ladder pried the scaffold away from the building and the worker fell three stories," Fink said.

Worker survives 8-story plunge

Hollywood, FL -- A construction worker fell more than eight stories Monday from a Hollywood apartment building, leaving him in critical condition with fractures and internal injuries.

Pedro Matta, a worker with a waterproofing and painting company, was repairing a balcony at the Apartments at Hillcrest complex when he fell more than 80 feet, said Hollywood Fire-Rescue spokesman Matt Phillips.

Matta, of Miami, fell after attempting to jump from the building's roof onto a motorized platform about a half-foot below the roof, said co-worker Ricardo Veliz.

Crane crash robs man of his legs

Bend, OR -- Friday was going to be the day that Melvin Henderson quit his job.

Half an hour after he arrived at work near Round Butte Dam, his body was mangled in an accident that cost him both his legs.

Date farm worker electrocuted after ladder touches power line

THERMAL, CA -- Authorities are investigating the death of a Thermal man who was electrocuted Tuesday on a date farm.

Gerardo Olvera-Hernandez, a 23-year-old date farm worker, died early Tuesday after he touched a ladder to a high-voltage power line at 84-301 Avenue 66, the Riverside County Coroner reported.

Olvera-Hernandez reportedly crossed under a 7.2-kilovolt power line while carrying a 32-foot metal ladder in the upright position while pollinating date trees. He was electrocuted when the ladder touched the power line.

Rosa Maria Gonzales, spokeswoman for IID Energy, said the voltage that surged through the man would light up roughly 7,200 light bulbs.

Lansing man falls to death in job accident

DELTA TWP., MI - Local and state officials are investigating the death of a 41-year-old Lansing man who died Monday after he fell 50 feet while working at the Eaton County Road Commission office.

William Shattuck was working from a bucket truck installing a flagpole at the office at 3102 Sanders Road, when the rope he was attaching to the pole snapped at about 2:30 p.m., Eaton County sheriff's Lt. Jeff Warder said.

Shattuck fell from the bucket, hit the truck, then landed on the ground.

Conveyor-accident victim identified

Matthew P. Boden, 32, of Denver died Monday after a piece of his clothing got caught in a conveyor belt at a SoundTrack store at 1370 S. Colorado Blvd.

Boden was strangled in the accident, police said.

The accident is being investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. More here.

Breyers worker killed in accident

FRAMINGHAM, MA -- In what police described as a tragic accident, an employee at the Breyers Ice Cream plant was crushed to death when a piece of machinery fell on him.

Gregory MacDonald, 45, of 31 Solar Ave., Braintree, was pronounced dead early yesterday at the MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham.

Fire and police officials said he was crushed when a large piece of equipment fell on him in the freezer area of the Old Connecticut Path facility.

Worker at Tyson plant in Wilkesboro dies in fall

(WILKESBORO, NC) -- For the second time in three months, state officials are investigating an accident at a Tyson Foods plant in Wilkesboro.

Authorities say David Hartness died on Sunday after ductwork collapsed as he worked on overhead pipes, causing him to fall 15 feet to a concrete floor.

An investigation by the state Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health division begins on the same week that state officials are reviewing a final report in the death of Tyson worker Thomas Okrenuk on December 27th.

Okrenuk was crushed in an accident inside the same plant where Hartness fell. More here.

Officials investigate fatal fall through roof

Macomb, MI -- Shop owner Dan Gleason stands beneath skylights in the ceiling of his business, Gleason-Holbrook Manufaturing on Groesbeck near Metropolitan Parkway in Clinton Township. Last Saturday, a roofing worker fell through one of the skylights and fell to his death on the factory floor.

State and local investigators are trying to determine why a 19-year-old Detroit man fell to his death while doing roof work at a Clinton Township tool and die shop.

William Edward Thomas was killed Saturday when he fell through a sky1ight and landed on the cement floor inside the Gleason-Holbrook Manufacturing Plant.

Boy's death result of fall at work site, not from bicycle

NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, SC - A 16-year-old boy who was initially reported to have died Tuesday as a result of a bicycle accident actually died as a result of an injury sustained while working at a construction site, according to the Horry County coroner.

Coroner Robert Edge Jr. said Gustavo Hilario died of head injuries received at a work site on Second Avenue North in North Myrtle Beach.

The boy's father, Geraldo Hilario, initially told authorities his son had been riding a bicycle on Ranchette Circle in Socastee and fell, hitting his head on the ground. More here.

Fall from tree kills Georgetown man

Georgetown, SC -- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating a work-related accident that claimed the life of a Georgetown man Friday.

Henry Knowlin, 46, was working to remove a tree at a home under construction at 901 Sixth Ave. in Conway at about 10 a.m. Friday. According to Horry County Deputy Coroner Dan Bellamy, Knowlin was in the tree when he fell.

Bellamy said he fell about 45 feet and was unconscious. He was rushed to the Conway Medical Center where he died two hours later.

Firefighters Die in Church Blaze

PITTSBURGH-March 14, 2004 ? Firefighters who thought they had a church fire under control were trapped when the steeple collapsed Saturday. Two firefighters were killed and 29 were injured, including nine that were hospitalized, officials said.

Emergency crews found the bodies of both firefighters by Saturday afternoon, about eight hours after the fire started at the 131-year-old Ebenezer Baptist Church, city Operations Director Bob Kennedy said.

Firefighters Richard A. Stefanakis, 51, and Charles G. Brace, 55, both of Pittsburgh, died in the blaze

DOT Worker Struck, Killed

ATLANTA -- A state Department of Transportation worker was killed and another one injured Thursday when they were struck while picking up a piece of trash along the side of Interstate 20 in downtown Atlanta, authorities said.

The workers, whose identities were pending, were hit from behind around 11 a.m. while collecting debris along the westbound lanes of I-20 near Spring Street.

Sheriff's deputy killed, four injured during standoff with teen

LENOIR CITY, Tenn. -- The teenage son of a prosecutor killed a sheriff's deputy and barricaded himself in his home before he was found dead inside Saturday with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot to the head, officials said.

Michael Harvey, 16, was found in an upstairs bedroom of his lakeside home, said Loudon County Sheriff Tim Guider. He said the teenager had been dead for up to 20 hours.

The confrontation started Friday morning when officers went to investigate a domestic violence complaint from the boy's mother, who had fled to a neighbor's house. She allegedly was attacked with a pipe when she refused to let the boy drive to school after drinking the night before.

The first officer to arrive, Deputy Jason Scott, was fatally shot as he stepped out of his car, Guider said. He was shot four times, and a second officer retreated under fire and called for backup.

Worker dies after falling into a box compactor at a Macy's store in Yonkers

YONKERS, NY - An employee died in an apparent workplace accident Wednesday morning at the Macy's store in the Cross County Shopping Center in Yonkers. Sources tell News 12 Westchester Dimitri Henry became caught in a box compactor and was crushed. Henry was rushed to Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx where he later died.

Trench collapse kills worker

FISHERS, Ind. -- A trench that apparently failed to meet construction safety standards collapsed Monday morning, killing a Carmel man.

Hector Javier Marquez, 33, was working in a 3-foot-wide and 15-foot-deep trench on a home site when the dirt collapsed on him, Fishers fire officials said. The trench was not shored up with boards or gradually sloped. At least one of those safety steps is required in trenches deeper than 5 feet, according to the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration's rules.

More here and here.

Beltway accident kills road worker

Baltimore, MD -- A construction worker was killed yesterday evening when a car plowed into a work site on the shoulder of the northern side of the Beltway in an accident that brought traffic to a standstill for several hours.

State police said Erika Glazer, 76, of the 7900 block of Winterset Ave. in Baltimore was westbound on the outer loop when she apparently fell asleep at the wheel of her 2000 Acura, entered the shoulder of the fast lane and struck David A. Bowles, 51, of Kingsville.

Bowles...was erecting a portable highway sign advising motorists of scheduled lane closings when he was struck, police said.

A similar work-site accident occurred March 2 on a nearby stretch of the Beltway when an Ellicott City woman lost control of her 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse while eastbound near Thornton Road and struck three construction workers. She and one of the workers were seriously injured.

Man dies at Mason plant

The Ohio Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigators are investigating what caused an accident at Leggett & Platt in Mason that killed an employee after he fell into a compression machine early Monday morning.

At 2:27 a.m. Monday, Mason Fire Department emergency medical crews responded to an accident involving Robert Brogan, 30, of Franklin, at the bed spring manufacturer, 4074 Bethany Road.

OSHA spokesman Dick Gilgrist said Brogan was caught in the machine that compresses the bed springs and bands them before they are shipped.

Second Construction Worker Dies

Tragedy has struck twice at an Effingham County construction site. This morning, Johhny Boyette of Bonafey, Florida, fell to his death on the job. That's the second time in less than two weeks that a construction worker has died at Plant McIntosh. WG Yates and Sons Construction has suspended all work at the site until it completes an investigation.

Officials aren't saying how Boyette died, but WTOC has learned the man basket he was in tipped over. Two weeks ago, the same thing happened to Joe Bethanie, who plunged 40 feet to his death.

Happy Anniversary

Oh, and finally, let's not forget these men and women who were killed just doing their jobs.

Labels: Weekly Toll, Workplace Violence

Mexican Government Not Happy About Workplace Death Toll

The government of Mexico has expressed concern over the findings of the Associated Press investigation on the workplace death toll of Mexican workers in the U.S. The AP found that Mexicans are more likely than U.S.-born workers to be killed even when doing some of the same high-risk work. (I wrote about this article earlier this week.)

"The findings of the report are very specific, are very worrying to us," said Miguel Monterrubio, spokesman for the Mexican embassy in Washington.

Mexican consular officials in California said the United States has good worker protections on paper, but suggested those laws are too often neglected.

In short, the investigation found that

Since the mid-1990s, Mexican deaths have increased faster than a growing population that is now spread across the United States.

The Mexican death rate has reached 1 in 16,000 workers even as the death rate steadily decreased for the average U.S.-born worker to about 1 in 28,000 workers, the investigation found. Mexicans now represent about 1 in 24 workers in the United States, but about 1 in 14 workplace deaths.

The response to these findings from the Bush administration has been less than overwhelming.

The Bush administration did not directly address the findings of the stories.

Instead, the Labor Department released a statement that lauded its outreach to Hispanic workers and expressed concern over "the unique challenges" Mexican workers face in the United States.

Hispanics are a coveted constituency in this year's presidential election.

U.S. Chemical Industry: Worst of Times, Best of Times

Bad times for U.S. chemical industry workers:

Across the country, 1 in every 10 chemical-related jobs has vanished in the past five years -- nearly 100,000 workers -- and that number would be worse if not for a surge in one segment, pharmaceuticals.

The chemical industry's eight-decade run as a major exporter has ended, with a $19 billion trade surplus in 1997 becoming a $9.6 billion deficit last year, according to the American Chemistry Council.

But good times for U.S. chemical industry executives.

The Dow Chemical Co. gave its top executive a $2.3 million bonus, a move that one area leader says sends a “bleak message” to a community where the corporate giant has been cutting jobs for two years.

In addition to the bonus awarded in 2003, William Stavropoulos received a base salary of $1.3 million, plus millions more in other incentives and benefits, according to the company’s proxy statement.

The American chemical industry has many problems:

Troubles began over a decade ago with the fall of communism, when countries of the former Soviet Union -- as well as China -- discovered they could compete in the world market for chemical products. Cheap labor and a freewheeling attitude toward safety and the environment helped them keep prices low.

As the global economy slowed, industries that consume chemical products came to depend on those lower prices to offset declining sales and profits. U.S. chemical makers struggled to cut costs and keep up. Then, around 2000, an unexpected problem hit: Natural gas prices went up.

Chemical plants are especially sensitive to natural gas prices because they use it both as a fuel and as a "feedstock" or ingredient in making plastics, resins, fertilizers and more. In the past five years, U.S. natural gas prices have roughly doubled as more and more electrical plants consume the clean-burning fuel but supplies stay stagnant. Other parts of the world -- including Western Europe -- pay far less.

But American chemical industry executives have few problems:

In addition to his base salary and bonus, Stavropoulos was paid $163,473 in other compensation, which was primarily for tax preparation and financial advice related to his return to the CEO position, according to the proxy statement.

Stavropoulos also received deferred or restricted stock awards valued at $6.5 million; 350,000 shares that are 10-year, market-priced options; $977,572 in long-term incentive payouts from deferred stock granted in 1998 and dividend unit awards granted prior to 1999; and $184,852 in other compensation for items ranging from relocation benefits to insurance.

And American workers are pissed off:

Kenny Perdue, secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO, said today the bonus “flies in the face of the workers.”

“The workers are out there doing their jobs, trying to keep their pay and benefits and feed their families and the CEO is awarded a $2.3 million bonus that in his own mind he believes he’s worth,” Perdue said. “And all along the company is laying off workers. Why couldn’t the company use some of this bonus to keep workers?”

AFL-CIO Petitions Bush Administration to Take Action Against China's Treatment of Workers

Arguing that 700,000 U.S. workers have lost their jobs due to worker repression in China, the AFL-CIO has petitioned the Bush administration to pressure the Chinese government to increase wages and improve working conditions there. The AFL-CIO is arguing that worker repression in China constitutes an unreasonable trade practice that violates U.S. law.

Harold Meyerson has the real story here.

The petition and other information can be found here. Section VI-D, starting on Page 49, contains a lengthy discussion of workplace health and safety conditions in China.

Labels: AFL-CIO

Interview with Popcorn Lung Victim

Eric Peoples, whose lungs were severely damaged from inhaling vapors from a chemical used to flavor popcorn, was interviewed here on the CBS Early Show after being awarded $20 million by the jury.

vapor vapors
Additional articles in this series are listed at the right under Greatest Hits

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Does It Really Work?

The National Institute for Occupational Safety has issued a publication on how to evaluate safety and health changes in the workplace.

The publication outlines steps that employers and workers can take to evaluate the effectiveness of health and safety improvements, as well as a number of case studies from health care, meatprocessing, grocery stores and chemical exposure.

Court Lets Parent Company of Two Dead Workers Off the Hook

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago has decided that a company whose subsidiary killed two workers cannot be held criminally liable even thought it had taken responsibility for the safety programs of its subsidiaries. I have written extensively before about the deaths of Blake Lane, 20, on a 120-foot steel tower in Mt. Prospect, Illinois and Wade Cumpston, 43, a veteran lineman from Ashland, Ky., who died March 25, 2000, while working on a high-voltage transmission tower in Plainfield, IL. Lane and Cumpston worked for L.E. Myers Co., a subsidiary of MYR.

The Justice Department, at OSHA's request, had attempted to prosecute MYR. The court found that indictment of MYR Group "was an unacceptable attempt to broaden the Occupational Safety and Health Act."

[Defense lawyers Joseph] Duffynoted the ruling was the third to decide that MYR Group could not have committed a crime under the law.

"It's unfortunate the company had to endure the public humiliation and economic consequences of an indictment," Duffy said.

Poor babies.

Unprecedented, But Not Surprising: Industry Lobbyists Write EPA Mercury Rule

Who would have ever thought that this administration's environmental policy would be influenced by industry lobbyists?

WASHINGTON — Political appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency bypassed agency professional staff and a federal advisory panel last year to craft a rule on mercury emissions preferred by the industry and the White House, several longtime EPA officials say.

The EPA staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. At the same time, the proposal to regulate mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants was written using key language provided by utility lobbyists....

EPA veterans say they cannot recall another instance when the agency's technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal.

Ho, hum. Just another day in Bush world.

What a Surprise: Company Fights Citation for Killing Workers

Someday, after a worker is killed and OSHA has issud its citation, I'd like to hear the President of the cited company say something like this:

"We're sorry. We really screwed up. We were trying to save a few bucks, get the job done a bit faster and cheaper and ended killing someone. We'll never forgive ourselves and we accept whatever sanctions we receive, knowing that no matter how high the fine, it won't begin to atone for the sins we've committed and the pain we've caused to the victims family, friends and co-workers.

Dream on.

Instead, when a company kills one of its workers, we typically get denials and protestations that "We did nothing wrong. We have an excellent safety program." Translation: The dumb worker screwed up and got what he deserved.

Today's version is from the Coors Brewing Company.and a contractor who together were fined over $140,000 for the deaths of Keith A. Dean, 44, of Grottoes, and Frank Domzalski, 45, who were killed in an explosion September 9, 2003, when a tank they were welding on exploded.

Virginia OSHA said that

Coors and maintenance contractor E.A. Breeden Inc. improperly allowed welding on a storage tank containing organic sludge and its combustible byproduct, methane gas....At the time of the blast, the two were welding on a 440,000-gallon sludge tank at Coors' waste-water treatment complex.

Coors had issued a "hot work permit" to Breeden before the workers started welding that certified that there were no combustible fibers, dusts, vapors, gases or liquids in the tank "even though both companies knew that the organic sludge in the tank and methane gas by-product had not been removed from the sludge tank."

Coors's response:

Coors denied wrongdoing.

"Coors is committed to workplace safety and believes that the citations are erroneous. We intend to vigorously contest them with Virginia [occupational-safety law]," the company said in a statement.

Figures

Let no rat die in vain.

Popcorn Lung Trial Follow-Up

This is off a listserve from Dr. David Egilman who provided crucial testimony for Eric Peoples in the popcorn lung trial:

BASF conducted an animal study of butter flavor in 1993. It revealed that the flavor was toxic to rat lungs at exposure levels that were lower than those experienced by many (perhaps all) workers with direct contact to it in popcorn manufacturing facilities. Workers with indirect contact (packaging) may also experience cumulative exposures above those that killed the rats.

Unfortunately the rats died in vain. BASF never published the study and never turned it over to NIOSH after they began to investigate the occurrence of bronchiolitis obliterans in some exposed workers. The study was turned over during discovery in the current lawsuit. Another gastric study revealed toxicity but this study was not easily obtained and was omitted from all MSDS sheets.

Clinical and perhaps animal trials of cytoxan and steroids and other drugs should be instituted to help determine how to best treat these workers.

If anyone has an idea about how to organize this let me know. BASF, and IFF [International Flavors and Fragrances Inc.] and FEMA [Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association] should fund these.

Finally case-controlled studies of "idiopathic" bronchiolitis cases may reveal the magnitude of the problem nationally or turn up other occupational causes of this disease.

Companies should be required to publish all such studies. Let the word go forth - Let no rat die in vain.

Egilman is a Clinical Associate Professor at Brown University.

vapor vapors
Additional articles in this series are listed at the right under Greatest Hits

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Obesity Epidemic: Heavy Toll For Health Care Workers

Being fat is not just unhealthy for fat people, it's bad for the health care workers who have to lift them. Dealing with obese patients has induced one hospital to kick off

an Internet-based initiative to provide comprehensive answers to hospitals asking for help in meeting the needs of heavy patients – including proper ergonomics and sensitivity training for nurses and employees, according to Sandy Wise, the company's senior director of medical service lines.

Dealing with obese patients has raised safety issues because the federal government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends that workers manually lift no more than 50 pounds.

"This is a safety issue, as well as a quality-of-care issue for patients and health care workers," Ms. Wise said.

Labels: Ergonomics

Jury Awards Popcorn Lung Victim $20 Million

What Lessons Have We Learned?

In a huge victory for American workers who face unknown hazards from exposure to chemicals at work, a jury in Joplin, Missouri has awarded factory worker Eric Peoples $20 million dollars. Peoples had argued that his lungs were ruined as a result of mixing flavoring oils used in microwave popcorn.

Peoples had charged that International Flavors and Fragrances and Bush Boake Allen, the manufacturers of the diacetyl (the ingredient that gave the popcorn a buttery flavor) knew their butter flavoring was hazardous, but failed to warn the workers at the plant where the chemical was used of the dangers or provide adequate safety instructions.

Peoples' lawyers introduced testimony that tests done as far back as 1993 showed that diacetyl could cause severe lung damage and that workers at the factory that made the chemical wore respirators. The Material Safety Data Sheet given to the popcorn factory, however, contained the phrases "no known health hazards" and "respiratory protection is not normally required."

Peoples needs a double lung transplant and is not expected to live much past the age of 50. Thirty other workers who suffered damage from the chemical are also suing.

I've have written quite a bit about this tragedy (See under "Greatest Hits" on the upper right of this page), but it might be useful to review some of the "lessons" of this case:

Workers in this country are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. The health effects of chemical aren't adequately studied, and when they are, the results are hidden -- until someone notices that workers are starting to get sick and die. Ironically, Eric Peoples was somewhat lucky. Diaceyl left its "fingerprint" on his lungs in a relatively short period of time. Had the damage caused by the chemical masked itself as some more common "lifestyle" disease, it may never have been linked back to his working conditions.
Current OSHA standards are ineffective. Despite the arguments over the legal interpretations and uses of OSHA's respirator and general duty standards, the fact is that OSHA standards are woefully inadequate to protect workers from the effects of most hazardous chemicals. The vast majority of OSHA's chemical exposure standards are over 30 years old and they only cover around 600 of the tens of thousands of chemicals in use today. Most chemicals have not been adequately tested and even where good data about chemical hazards exists, the information is often not communicated to workers, as we have seen in this case.

In rare cases, the General Duty Clause or the respirator standard can successfully be used to protect some workers. But ultimately, until chemicals are adequately tested before workers are exposed, until more chemicals are adequately regulated, and until workers have a right to refuse to work with hazardous or untested chemicals, tragedies like this will continue to occur. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, more often than not, we won't even know how many workers are getting sick and dying from exposure to toxic chemicals.
Industry Associations Lack Credibility. OSHA may never again be able to issue any kind of "controversial" standard, no matter how needed. And the reason isn't due to lack of science. The reason is opposition by the regulated industries, generally led by the associations representing those industries. New regulations aren't needed because companies naturally want to protect their workers, they cry. All they need is information.

Well, in this case we saw that the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA) had information about the hazards of diacetyl way before Eric Peoples was exposed. What did they do with it? Who knows? But it clearly never made it to the factory where Eric Peoples and his co-workers were employed, despite the fact that FEMA took upon itself the responsibility for evaluating and approving the safety of flavoring ingredients.

Business associations have a legitimate role in our society. Businesses have a legitimate need for information about what happens in Washington. They have a legitimate need to have their interests represented. They need information clearinghouses and guidance on common issues such as health and safety.

There is a legitimate need for such associations and that's why businesses pay their dues. But all of my experience shows their members aren't getting what they pay for. The associations ~~lie~~ distort and misrepresent information about practical, common sense laws and regulations that can only benefit the economic health of the industry and the physical health of their workers. They fund politicians who care more about their short-term campaign funds than they do about the long-term credibility and survival of the industry. They only seem to be able to exist by constantly claiming that the sky is falling. And they don't even do a decent job of disseminating information about health and safety hazards. Members should ask for their dues money back.
The practice of considering chemicals to be innocent until proven guilty must end. I have written often about REACH, the European Union's proposal to gather and report the quantity, uses and potential health effects of approximately 30,000 chemicals, and about the defects of the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act. We must call on the U.S. Government to not only stop lobbying against the European proposal, but to advocate for a similar law here. (Although, realistically, we may need a regime change here before that happens.)

So, this jury verdict feels good. As Eric Peoples said, "We're relieved that it's over and our lives can get back to as normal as they can be. At least for now, we'll be able to spoil our children and let them forget for a while.''

But he and others are not going to have the lives that they should have had and they are still going to die much sooner than they should have.

Ultimately, victory will only come in the form of strong laws that will keep this from ever happening again. And for that we need a lot more people to be a lot more outraged at what we continue to do to the workers of this country and why we continue to let it happen right under our noses.

vapor vapors
Additional articles in this series are listed at the right under Greatest Hits

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Mexican Workers in the U.S.: Impaled, Shredded in Machinery, Buried Alive

The Last Day in the Life of a Mexican Meatpacking Worker

No one witnessed the exact moment.

Maybe the cuts were taking just that much too long because Soto couldn't pause to sharpen his knife. Maybe the next slab whacked Soto's hand as he turned a beat late.

The wound didn't look that bad. Martin Contreras, still a high-level worker at the plant, had seen gashes gush far more blood. This man will survive, he thought, standing above Soto.

The knife had punctured Soto's chest just above the protective mesh. Above the left collar bone - where the jugular vein returns blood from the head to the heart.

Within minutes, Soto went from yelling in pain to dazed silence.

Contreras sped behind the ambulance in a manager's car - past cornfields and the Last Chance steakhouse - to the medical clinic. It turned out there was no need to rush.

Soto's wife, Gloria Sustaita, arrived with their young sons. In the emergency room, she didn't flinch, didn't cry. But this was the boy she knew growing up in Mexico City, the 21-year-old man she married, the father of her boys, the reason she stayed in Nebraska.

Afterward, she told a confidant, she felt as if their trailer home had become her own grave - as if she were "in a coffin, too."

Excel was not fined for Soto's death because no federal safety standards covered the circumstances that killed him, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA did make five recommendations: among them, don't let workers pull double duty.

This is just one of many tragic stories uncovered by AP reporter Justin Pritchard in an excellent investigation of the high number of preventable workplace deaths among Mexican workers in the United States.

The jobs that lure Mexican workers to the United States are killing them in a worsening epidemic that is now claiming a victim a day, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Though Mexicans often take the most hazardous jobs, they are more likely than others to be killed even when doing similarly risky work.

The death rates are greatest in several Western and Southern states, where a Mexican worker is four times more likely to die than the average U.S.-born worker. In Arizona, the annual Mexican worker death toll has been increasing, but because of the large Mexican-born population their death rates are lower than most other states - though the rates are still well above the average for U.S.-born workers.

These accidental deaths are almost always preventable and often gruesome: Workers are impaled, shredded in machinery, buried alive. Some are as young as 15.

And things seem to be getting worse:

Mexican death rates are rising even as the U.S. workplace grows safer overall. In the mid-1990s, Mexicans were about 30 percent more likely to die than native-born workers; now they are about 80 percent more likely.
Deaths among Mexicans in the United States increased faster than their population. As the number of Mexican workers grew by about half, from 4 million to 6 million, the number of deaths rose by about two-thirds, from 241 to 387. Deaths peaked at 420 in 2001.

We know what the problems are. Mexican workers are hired to do the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. They receive no training and little safety equipment. The are afraid to complain about unsafe conditions if they don’t speak English, don’t know their rights or if they are here illegally.

So what is OSHA doing about the problem? OSHA’s John Henshaw says the agency is trying to deal with the problem using its Spanish language factsheets and working through its Hispanic Taskforce, which coordinates outreach. That’s all well and fine, but they’ve got some major problems to address:

As OSHA works to improve safety, language remains a barrier. By the agency's own count, there are no Spanish-speaking inspectors or accident investigators in the half of Georgia that includes immigrant-rich Atlanta. Some other Southern cities do have Spanish-fluent enforcement officials.

In its eight-state Southeastern region, OSHA has a single Spanish-speaking outreach worker. Marilyn Velez encourages workers and employers to avoid unsafe practices.

And things are only going to get worse. With OSHA's funding stagnant, there will be no ability to hire any significant numbers of Spanish-speaking staff. And OSHA is attempting once again this year to kill the Susan Harwood worker training grant program which has funded a number of successful projects to educate immigrant workers about workplace safety and their rights.

The $11 million Harwood grants would be replaced with a $4 million program that would 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 standards require training to be done on worktime.)

Henshaw insists on selling the web-program as part of OSHA's 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.

Another issue raised by the article:

President Bush's recent proposal to grant illegal immigrants temporary legal protections energized the national immigration debate. Yet in these discussions, job safety has been an afterthought. Meanwhile, Mexicans continue to die on the job.

I’m skeptical that Bush’s proposal will help at all (even in the very unlikely event that it gets passed) as I’ve written before. Making semi-legal immigrants dependent on staying in the good graces of their employer isn’t likely to make workers more confident about complaining to OSHA about health and safety problems. Workers Comp Insider has more discussion about the effect of Bush's immigration proposal on the health and safety conditions of Hispanic workers.

Meanwhile, the Nation’s Health, a publication of the American Public Health Association also has a special report on Work Place Health Disparities Increasing Among Hispanics. (Scroll down to page 11)

The article focuses on many of the health related problems facing Hispanic workers in the United States and notes that the U.S. lacks a reliable system of accurately tracking occupational disease and injury, especially date pertaining to certain ethnic and racial minorities. Pesticide exposure is one of the most serious problems facing Hispanic workers, according to Virginia Ruiz, environmental health coordinator at the Farmworker Justice Fund:

When Ruiz talks to farm workers along the border, she often hears complaints such as lack of pesticide safety training, not being provided with handwashing equipment, not being told when or where pesticides have been applied and, occasionally, stories of being directly exposed to pesticides.

Erik Nicholson, Pacific Northwest regional director for United Farmworkers raised another problem: Health care professionals often miss many pesticide-related health because they don’t ask the workers where they work and what they do.

Finally, the APHA article discusses the problems of day laborers in New York city, including those who face respiratory health problems stemming from clean-up of the World Trade Centers.

Also, see this article about a pesticide poisoning in Florida.

Labels: Immigrant Workers

Asbestos in Sarnia: A Slow-Motion Bhopal

One thing that amazes me when I read and write about stories like the popcorn lung tragedy is how little we learned from the decades of coverup -- and the continuing devastation -- wrought by asbestos. This article in the Toronto Globe and Mail is one of the most devastating I've ever read about the man-made plague of asbestos.

Blayne Kinart is a man who used to take pride in the look of his body. When he was 50, he says, there wasn't an ounce of fat on it. He was all muscle, a tribute to the physical rigours of being a millwright in Canada's chemical valley, the maze of petrochemical plants located on the southern outskirts of this Ontario city.

His wife Sandy likes to joke that her husband, a childhood sweetheart who caught her eye in grade school, had always been as "healthy as a horse. If you got a cold in 300 years, it was something."

But today, at 57, Mr. Kinart looks like he wandered into Sarnia directly from a Nazi death camp. Eighteen months ago, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer in the lining of the chest wall. It's an exceedingly rare cancer -- but one that is exceedingly common around Sarnia.

If you are unfortunate enough to get mesothelioma, it basically means only two things. The most immediate is that you've just been handed a death sentence, and an excruciatingly painful one. The other is that at some point in your life, you've breathed asbestos fibres.

There is an epidemic of mesothelioma in Sarnia, the epicentre of what, by some assessments, is the worst outbreak of industrial disease in recent Canadian history.

Jim Brophy, who runs a clinic for Sarnia workers, points out another aspect of the tragedy.

Among the patterns are women who have had their lung cavities scarred because they've done something married women did without thinking in the 1960s and 1970s -- they washed their husband's work clothes. This isn't normally life-threatening, but it is if your husband's coveralls are dusted with asbestos. In other cases, industrial cancers are family affairs, afflicting multiple generations.

Labels: Asbestos

Free Speech For Highway Workers

Support Michael Gerstenlager

I wrote a couple of days ago about Michael Gerstenlager, the Ohio highway maintenance worker who displayed a sign with the word "traitor" on a snowplow while helping provide security for President Bush's motorcade. Gerstenlager, a steward with the Ohio Civil Service Employees, AFSCME Local 11 has been suspended and faces termination (if not a trip to Guantanamo).

He can use your support. You can send e-mails supporting Gerstenlager to OCSEA Director Bruce Wyngaard.

And although I would never advocate such a thing, wouldn't it be interesting if Gerstenlager's idea caught on everywhere Bush traveled?

Pesticide Poisoning of Immigrant Worker

The pesticide poisoning of an immigrant worker in Florida has drawn the attention of state lawmakers, concerned that many migrant workers who toil in Florida's fields are unaware of the possible dangers such work holds.

Mario Chavez's hands tremble as he reaches for his dinner plate. He has ''tubes in his kidneys'' because they can't function on their own. His memory is fuzzy.

Until November 2002, Chavez unloaded plants from a trailer at Costa Nursery Farms in the Redland -- plants that were destined to adorn living rooms in homes he could never afford.

Chavez says pesticides from those plants entered his pores, making him vomit every night for a week, turning his face red and swollen. He had a brain hemorrhage and spent a month in a coma.

Doctors have not concluded that the pesticides caused the brain hemorrhage, but they have not ruled it out.

The incident, however, sparked an investigation into the nursery's practices by the state last year. Six violations were found, and the nursery was also fined.

Without any protection, Chavez had been unloading plants that had just been sprayed with a pesticide that was supposed to have a 24-hour waiting period.

Several bills currently moving through the Legislature would require farm owners to tell their workers what pesticides they are using and what the toxic effects could be. Similar bills died in the Legislature last year.

The nursery where Chavez worked was fined a whopping $7,000. They are, nevertheless, denying any wrongdoing and are fighting the citation.

Chutzpa.

Ho hum. Nursing Home Work Is Dangerous. What Else Is New?

Every year it's the same. OSHA releases its list of most dangerous workplaces, and every year nursing homes make the most frequent appearance on the list.

A nursing home employee in New York is more likely to get hurt on the job than a firefighter, a cop or a construction worker, federal statistics show.

A whopping 187 nursing homes across the state made the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration list of employers with excessive injury rates in 2002, making it the top industry in which workers are most likely to get hurt.

In fact, there are traditionally so many nursing homes on OSHA's targeted inspection list, that nursing homes are the only industry that doesn't have all of its targets inspected. There are simply too many.

And that's why OSHA used to have a Nursing Home Initiative that targeted this hazardous industry for special attention. The nursing home initiative lasted all of one year before OSHA cancelled it.

Problem solved? Mission accomplished?

Doesn't look like it from here.

(And don't even mention that stinkin' no-science, job-killing, pinko ergonomics standard. Just get over it already.)

Labels: Ergonomics

IBM Chemical Problems In The News Again

Computer maker IBM, which has been in the news for a number of lawsuits, is once again in the news for contaminating a town in NY.

"Your house acts as a kind of chimney" for the vapors, which have tested positive for the contaminant trichloroethene, or TCE, said Alan Turnbull, 69, who in 2002 created the Residents Action Group of Endicott, also known as R.A.G.E., after his wife, Donna Turnbull, 57, was found to have throat cancer. Ms. Turnbull does not smoke, and she used to exercise regularly in her finished basement. Now, she rarely ventures down the basement stairs.

That the TCE found in Endicott, a suspected carcinogen, has been measured at very low levels is scant comfort to those worried about more than two decades of exposure. "Oh, sure, we're scared to death," said Ms. Turnbull, who has lived in her Cleveland Avenue home for 21 years. "We know the chemicals are dangerous, but we don't know how dangerous or the long-term effects."

Results of air quality tests from homes in 2002 prompted the state environmental officials to announce in January that the Endicott pollution was more serious than previously believed.

Silica Lawsuit

Last month I wrote about hundreds of workers who were exposed to silica dust while digging a tunnel for a nuclear repository for the Department of Energy (DOE). According to the DOE, up to 1,500 of them may have inhaled airborne silica.

"This lawsuit will expose an outrageous fraud against the work force and even the visitors at Yucca Mountain, one that's already killing people," said plaintiff Gene Griego, who worked as a tunnel supervisor at the Yucca Mountain site.

Griego, a nonsmoker who lives in Las Vegas, was diagnosed last year with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The lawsuit names Bechtel Corp. and its Nevada subsidiaries on the Yucca Mountain project; Bechtel SAIC Corp. of Delaware; Kiewit Group of Delaware; Parsons Brinckerhoff Construction of Delaware and subsidiaries; Morrison-Knudsen, now known as Washington Group International of Delaware; and TRW Automotive Holdings of Delaware and subsidiaries.

But not to worry...

Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said Thursday that because the DOE was not named as a party to the lawsuit, it would not comment. But he added that the health and safety of Yucca Mountain workers "has been and continues to be our first priority."

Yeah, just like worker health and safety was a priority at Hanford.

Sometimes, You Just Can't Fool Any Of The People

Working Class Hero

Ohio is destined to be the Florida of election year 2004. Gore gave up on the state early in 2000, yet he lost it by only a few points. With high unemployment and jobs fleeing overseas like cockroaches from Raid, it looks much worse for the R's this year. Which is why President Bush was there earlier this week bragging (sic) about his economic policy.

Well, there's one Ohio worker who wasn't fooled -- and is paying the price.

A state maintenance worker was suspended after he displayed a sign with the word "traitor" on a snowplow while helping provide security for President Bush's motorcade, the Ohio Department of Transportation said.

Michael Gerstenslager was asked to park a snowplow on an entrance ramp to block access to a highway that the president's motorcade used to go from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport into downtown Cleveland on Wednesday.

A state trooper in the president's motorcade saw the sign and reported it to the state's transportation department, ODOT spokeswoman Lora Hummer said.

Gerstenslager is suspended with pay while the department investigates, Hummer said. She said she couldn't identify the potential violations or penalties until the investigation is complete. Discipline can range from a verbal warning to dismissal.

A disciplinary hearing will occur next week, Hummer said.

Gerstenlager is a steward in the Ohio Civil Service Employees, AFSCME Local 11. (I'm sure he must be a graduate of one of my training classes.)

Discipline? I say give him the medal of honor.

OSHA: Missing in InAction?

We've written a lot here in Confined Space about OSHA's attempt to make itself totally irrelevant or even invisible. Well, an enterprising investigator has figured out what the problem is. His discovery is here.

Remember, you heard it first at Confined Space. (Style help from Wage Slave World News.)

NPR Story on Worker Safety and Health Problems at Hanford

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a Wasington Post investigation into serious health and safety problems at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Workers were being exposed to toxic and radioactive vapors, but their employer and the worker health clinic was covering up the fact that their resulting dieases were work related.

Now NPR has joined the investigation with this story about the worker health clinic, funded by the Department of Energy to deal with workplace problems, that is accused of falsifying medical records and failing to provide adequate care to workers exposed to dangerous substances.

Popcorn Lung Trial Update 4

Comment and Background

I received a comment from Larry Halprin, an attorney with Keller and Heckman, taking issue with a comment I made in yesterday's popcorn lung trial update. An industrial hygienist representing International Flavors and Fragrances, which is being sued by Eric Peoples, had testified that "regulations issued by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration require employers to assess hazards in their company and develop plans to control those hazards."

Larry objected to my statement that "Actually, the chemical that allegedly destroyed Peoples' lungs is not covered by any OSHA exposure regulation, nor is there any OSHA regulation that requires employers to control exposure."

Jordan:

Regarding your article titled "Today's Popcorn Lung Trial Update", I believe you have overlooked the application of 1910.134(a). Starting with that premise, I respectfully disagree with your analysis, which seems to conclude that current OSHA standards are inadequate to address this issue.

Sincerely, Larry

Now, Larry and his firm may represent the dark side, but he does have a partial point here. OSHA's respiratory protection standard, 1910.134, paragraph (a)(2) states that "Respirators shall be provided by the employer when such equipment is necessary to protect the health of the employee." (And paragraph (a)(1) states that respirators can only be used as a last resort, after other, more effective control measures -- such as local exhaust ventilation -- have been used.)

And the preamble to the respirator standard states that 1910.134(a)(2) has been used "in conjunction with a citation of the General Duty Clause....to control exposure to a contaminant that was clearly a recognized hazard even though no OSHA PEL [permissible exposure limit] existed."

And, in fact, there have been a few cases where OSHA has cited employers for exposing employees to a chemical that did not have a permissible exposure limit. (For example, OSHA has cited hospitals for overexposing workers to cancer-causing anti-neoplastic drugs.)

So, yes Larry, in theory, if the workers at the popcorn plant had known how seriously hazardous the chemical was, and had the employer not controlled their exposure, the employees could have requested an OSHA inspection asking for a general duty clause citation against the employer for not protecting them against exposure to diacetyl.

But we'd have to make some major assumptions for that to happen. First, Peoples' employer would have had to have received a good MSDS from the manufacturer with accurate information about how dangerous diacetyl was. As we shall see below, this wasn't the case.

Second, assuming the employees had been trained and had all of this knowledge, they would have to have had a pretty expert knowledge of how OSHA works. Not finding diacetyl on OSHA's PEL list, they would have had to have known about the General Duty Clause and how it could be used in conjunction with 1910.134(a)(2). That might happen if the workers were represented by a union that was aware of the problem, or perhaps if they were represented by an attorney with Larry's knowledge of the law, an attorney who wasn't representing the dark side.

Third, the General Duty Clause would have to be much easier to use. There are a number difficult conditions that must be satisfied to successfully use the General Duty Clause, especially when dealing with a "new" hazard.

All of these things theoretically could have happened, but finding your way through this maze of legal interpretation is a long way from a simple requirement that employers control workers' exposure to diacetyl. And it's a long way from the OSH Act's guarantee of a safe workplace for every American workers.

So, Larry, to answer your question, no, I do not believe that current OSHA standards are adequate to address this issue. Not even close.

Meanwhile, back at the trial....

Dave Carroll, the director of fragrance safety assurance for flavoring manufacturer International Flavors and Fragrances, which is being sued by Eric Peoples because they produce a popcorn flavoring ingredient that is alleged to have destroyed Peoples' lungs, has testified that

The warning sheets that accompanied butter flavoring used in a Missouri microwave popcorn plant should have alerted plant managers to the possibility of hazards to employees. (In other words, we're innocent, Peoples' employer is to blame for his condition.)

I find this rather curious as Carroll also testified that:

he had written a computer program to produce the data sheets for the company's flavorings. He testified that the butter flavoring's sheet contained the phrases "no known health hazards" and "respiratory protection is not normally required," but said that does not mean users should not take precautions in using their product.

Carroll also testified that the sheets state that ingredients in the butter flavoring could irritate the skin and eyes, and might cause severe irritation to the eyes, throat, and lungs.

Well, that's perfectly clear.

At least it was clear to International Flavors and Fragrances, because

Under cross examination by Peoples' lawyer, Carroll confirmed that workers at the company's Chicago plant, which produced the flavoring, had been wearing respirators since 1995.

Well, isn't that convenient. The manufacturer has its workers in respirators, but they send out an MSDS to the popcorn company that says that respirators aren't needed. Then they blame the popcorn company for not making their workers wear respirators.

Chutzpah

vapor vapors
Additional articles in this series are listed at the right under Greatest Hits

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Environmental Injustice

Greenwatch Today, a nice little daily environmental e-update, reports that the Bush's EPA is not carrying out President Clinton's Executive Order on Environmental Justice, signed 10 years ago. Clinton's initiative was intended to ensure that environmental hazards don't disproportionately affect minority and low-income populations.

EPA's Inspector General found that

the EPA has yet to develop "a clear vision or comprehensive strategic plan, and has not established values, goals, expectations, and performance measurements" for integrating environmental justice into its policies. As a result, any protections provided to minorities and low-income families from environmental hazards have been spotty and solely dependent upon regional EPA initiatives.

"After 10 years, there is an urgent need for the Agency to standardize environmental justice definitions, goals, and measurements for the consistent implementation and integration of environmental justice at EPA"

The administration defended its action by stating that it would provide environmental justice to "everyone."

Or no one.

Whatever.

More here.

Today's Popcorn Lung Trial Update 3

An industrial hygienist, Jay D. Keough, testified yesterday for the popcorn flavoring maker who is being sued for manufacturing diacetyl which destroyed the lungs of workers who were exposed to it. He maintained that the popcorn plant where Eric Peoples worked (and, by implication, not the flavoring producer) was responsible for warning workers about any hazards associated with the use of butter flavoring.

This is something I never knew:

Keough, who testified for the defense, said regulations issued by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration require employers to assess hazards in their company and develop plans to control those hazards.

Now that's a new one. Actually, the chemical that allegedly destroyed Peoples' lungs is not covered by any OSHA exposure regulation, nor is there any OSHA regulation that requires employers to control exposure. Although the Hazard Communication Standard requires the employer to inform and train workers about the hazards of chemicals they work with, there is no requirement that the employer actually control exposure to the chemical.

This is the theory, according to OSHA, of what's supposed to happen once the workers have the hazard information:

The HCS (Hazard Communication Standard) provides workers the right-to-know the hazards and identities of the chemicals they are exposed to in the workplace. When workers have this information, they can effectively participate in their employers’ protective programs and take steps to protect themselves. In addition, the standard gives employers the information they need to design and implement an effective protective program for employees potentially exposed to hazardous chemicals. Together these actions will result in a reduction of chemical source illnesses and injuries in American workplaces.

Note that there is no requirement that the employer actually control exposure to the chemical. And although workers have the right to know about the chemicals they are exposed to, they have no right to act on that knowledge or force the employer to act on that knowledge. And the statement that this information "will" result in a reduction of chemical source illnesses is often just wishful thinking.

There is no doubt that workers' right to know about the hazards to which they are exposed can be a powerful tool. But in order to effectively protect themselves, workers also need to know about their rights and feel secure enough to confront their employer if effective control measures are not being taken. And that usually means they need a union -- which these workers did not have.

The only exception would be if OSHA chose to cite under the General Duty Clause which requires employers to maintain a safe and healthful workplace. Complaints can be filed under the General Duty Clause if the hazard is "recognized" and are "causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm" to employees. But General Duty Clause citations are not easy to get, and are a far cry from a black-and-white requirement for employers to control exposures to all hazardous chemicals.

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Molly Ivins: Bush -- Bad Taste, Full of It

Remember the 9/11 Firefighters

Molly Ivins takes the Democrats to task for accusing Bush only of "bad taste" for including 9/11 scenes in his campaign commercials:

Dammit, the problem is not that the ad is in bad taste, the problem is that Bush screwed the firefighters in a famous case of his favorite bait-and-switch tactic, and now he has the chutzpah to exploit them anyway -- and that, my friends, is gall. Bait, switch and then claim credit anyway.

For those of you who have forgotten what happened (apparently including the entire Bush campaign) shortly after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush promised a $3.5 billion aid package to provide equipment and training in dealing with such attacks to local police and fire departments. For over 18 months, no money appeared, and when money finally did appear, it was nowhere near the promised levels (hey, he had to cut those taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans).

Furthermore, the New York City firefighters who worked Ground Zero were specifically screwed. They were promised $90 million to monitor the long-term health effects of breathing in all that ash for months while they cleaned up. The money was to have been included in the overall post 9-11 aid package for New York City, but it got shifted to another bill that Bush rejected the following August. About half the workers screened before the money ran out suffered from respiratory problems.

George Bush: Absolutely, irrefutably true.

This is one of the most honest anti-Bush ads I've seen. Unfortunately, you won't be seeing it on T.V.

Warnings:

1. Do not attempt to watch this while eating or drinking any liquids.

2. If you're watching this at the office (and everyone doesn't necessarily share your political persuasion) close your door and/or turn down the sound.

Check it out.

And Speaking of Regulations....

Businesses Just Want to Have Fun

It's amazing how their arguments are all the same, no matter what the crimes, or what the regulations. They just want to be left alone to rape and pillage.

Steven Pearlstein has an interesting column in the Washington Post today about business resistance to reform of accounting and corporate governance practices -- in the face of a new round of corporate indictments. It's interesting how similar their arguments are to their arguments against any kind of health adn safety or environmental regulations:

This is the same crowd, you'll remember, that once argued that the problem was only "a few bad apples." Now they are making the rounds in Washington peddling the nonsense that reform has gone too far, costs too much and even jeopardizes the risk-taking that gives the U.S. economy its competitive edge.

Let's start with the hokum about runaway compliance costs.

A survey by Financial Executive International found that the first-year costs to comply with new regulations ranged from roughly $280,000 for companies with up to $25 million in sales to $4.7 million for companies with more than $5 billion in revenue. By my calculation that works out to be somewhere between 0.1 percent and 1 percent of sales -- hardly an excessive fee for restoring investor confidence and reducing the cost of capital.

Much of the cost of compliance has to do with beefing up internal controls. Companies used to argue that they already had them. Now they argue that they are too expensive. It's hard to see how they could be both....

It is a tad disingenuous for corporate directors to say they knew nothing about the skulduggery that went on during their watch, as many have, and then turn around and argue there's no need for better internal controls.

And then there's the evil labor unions and other "public interests" who are seeking to undermine capitalism as we know it:

Nothing has the corporate class more riled up, however, than the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposal to allow shareholders to nominate competing directors if more than 35 percent withhold their votes for the company slate. In lobbying against the idea, the Business Roundtable sheds crocodile tears over the erosion of states' rights and raises the specter that labor unions and other "narrow" interest groups will turn corporations away from their only legitimate purpose, which is to meet the next quarter's profit number. What the Business Roundtable really means, but doesn't have the guts to say, is that corporate democracy is a sham and if investors don't like the way a company is run, they can sell their shares and put their money elsewhere.

Regulations: Bush Doesn't Get It

This is from a speech that President Bush made today at the Women's Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century Forum, in Cleveland, Ohio.

There needs to be fewer regulations on business owners in America. (Applause.) I bet you spend a lot of time filling out paperwork. (Laughter.) I bet not much of your paperwork is ever read. (Laughter.) The government needs to let you focus on your business, on developing goods and services. It needs to let you focus on hiring people, rather than spending hours filling out paperwork. In order for us to keep jobs here at home and expand the job base, we need better regulatory policy at the federal, state, and local level. (Applause.)

Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that OSHA regulations are meant to protect workers, instead of being meant to harass business owners. Then listen to the translation:

The government needs to let you focus on your business, on developing goods and services. It needs to let you focus on hiring people, rather than spending hours ~~filling out paperwork~~ protecting your employees.

Has a bit of a different ring to it.

More on Popcorn Lung Trial

The Eternal Song of the Canary

I've been closely following the lawsuit filed by a worker against a company that made microwave popcorn incredient that disintegrated his lungs. Eric Peoples, 32 and father of a 10 year old daughter needs a double lung transplant and is not expected to live past 50. Thirty of Peoples' former co-workers experiencing similar degenerative conditions

Why am I so interested in this trial? Maybe it's this:

In 1999, workers at the Jasper plant developed rashes and respiratory problems. A year later, Kansas City, Mo., occupational physician [Allen] Parmet, hired by workers' attorneys, isolated the problem by comparing records of eight victims.

"I said, `My gosh, they all work at the same plant. Holy smokes, they've all got bronchiolitis obliterans,'" Parmet testified last week. He was referring to a rare lung disorder that attacks roughly 1 in 40,000 Americans and causes breathing problems and airway obstructions.

Anyone remember the 1978 film "Song of the Canary?" Part of it was about workers suffering from brown lung. The other part was about workers making the pesticide DBCP at Occidental Chemical in Lathrop, California. Basically, they figured out by themselves that DBCP caused sterility by putting two and two together when they realized that almost everyone working with the pesticide was having trouble conceiving children. Yes, Occidental was aware of studies that showed that DBCP caused "testicular atrophy" in rats, but no one bothered to tell the workers or provide protection. They had to figure it out for themselves after it was too late.

I think most people are under the impression that there are lots of well funded, objective scientists out there whose mission in life is to make sure that chemicals don't harm people, and if they do, ban them or make sure they're strictly controlled.

Actually, however, no one's really looking out for the welfare of American workers, except for American workers, they're unions and far too few workplace health and safety activists and professionals. Today, as in the 1970's, 1950's and back into time, workers are like the canaries in the mines who were the first to keel over from bad air, warning the miners to get out.

Because no one else is doing it.

Under cross-examination, Peoples said no one at the popcorn plant ever suggested that he or other workers should wear a respirator and acknowledged that he did not know whether the company had a hazardous-materials plan.

Jeff Hollyhead, corporate vice president for occupational health and safety at International Flavors and Fragrances, said in a videotaped deposition that he was aware of the NIOSH report that concluded that his company's butter flavoring likely made the workers at the Jasper plant ill. He said he scanned the report and passed it on to a company industrial hygienist.

"We frankly did not believe it," Hollyhead said

Meanwhile, we have chemical laws that essentially consider chemicals to be innocent until proven guilty. And even when proven guilty, it's almost impossible to ban them. (We can't even seem to ban asbestos in this country). OSHA regulates fewer than 600 chemicals and most of those are based on standards that are almost 40 years old.

An effort is currently underway in Europe called the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) that is intended to address both workplace exposures and environmental pollution in the European Union.

Under REACH, chemical manufacturers and importers would be required to gather and report the quantity, uses and potential health effects of approximately 30,000 chemicals. About 1,400 of these chemicals are known or suspected to be carcinogens, reproductive toxicants, persist in the environment or to accumulate in body tissues. The initiative would subject these 1,400 chemicals to an authorization review similar to that used in the regulation of pharmaceuticals. Approval of any use that could result in human exposures would be predicated on a thorough assessment of safety considerations and alternative products.

The European chemical industry is furiously fighting this proposal. And the U.S. government and chemical industry are fighting at their side. Their great fear is that if something like that gets passed in Europe, not only won't American companies be able to sell many of their dangerous chemicals over there, but someone might get the same idea over here.

Meanwhile,

Each morning, Peoples takes at least five pills to help him breathe, according to medical testimony. He then breathes into a device for at least 15 minutes to clear his lungs of mucous that builds up overnight.

Peoples' father, David, fought back tears as he told the jury of his son's travails: his marriage nearly breaking up, debts and declining health. Sitting at the attorneys' table, Peoples' wife, Candy, sobbed.

In an unusual agreement for trial litigation, attorneys agreed to let Peoples testify sporadically because of his failing health. Last week, his attorneys showed the jury pictures of Peoples' family while he took the stand for 25 minutes.

Taking in air from a respirator, Peoples talked not of the best-paying job he ever had but of his family. Looking at a photo of his 10-year-old daughter, Audrianna, Peoples said softly: "Every father looks forward to giving away his daughter when it's time for her to start a family."

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Woman Fights to Gain Compensation for Cold War Victims

Denise Brock's father worked at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. plant in St. Louis from 1945 to 1960. The plant produced uranium dioxide for the Manhattan Project, exposing its workers to large doses of radiation. Brock's father died of lung cancer in 1978.

A law passed by Congress three years ago, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000 (EEOICPA) was supposed to compensate these hidden victims of the Cold War. But for many, the law requires identification of the names and doses of the chemicals that these workers were exposed to, a task that is difficult to impossible for many.

Luckily for the victims who are still alive, and their families, Denise Brock is fighting to get them compensated.

At Brock's urging, a federal advisory board that oversees the compensation program had a public hearing where a report on Mallinckrodt was unveiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It found workers were exposed to radiation up to 2,400 times greater than doses acceptable by modern standards. It referred to conditions at Mallinckrodt's uranium-processing plant as routinely dusty and hazardous.

In some cases, evidence of radiation exposure at Mallinckrodt was so overwhelming that the institute could bypass an individual determination of workplace exposure.

But for other Mallinckrodt workers, not all the proof is available, the report said. From 1942 to 1948, no one monitored workers' health.

Around the Blogs

Workers Comp Insider has a rather disturbing story about how more large firms are dropping health coverage for their employees, which is burdening workers compensation because problems that should be covered by regular insurance are getting dumped onto workers comp by uninsured workers. (The article doesn't cover the reverse problem: the cases that should be covered by workers comp, but get covered by regular health insurance because getting workers comp for many work-related illnesses is so difficult.)

Respectful of Otters has an interesting story of how a drug company press release spins the suspension of a drug study covering up the fact that the reasons the study was stopped was that it increased the risk of stroke and offered no protection against heart disease.

Chris Mooney, who wrote the article about Bush's Attack on science in the Washington Post last week responds to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's response to his article.

MiniSuperfund

So, let me get this straight.

Billions to find phantom weapons of mass destruction, billions in tax cuts to create millions of phantom jobs, but no money left to clean up very real toxic waste sites?

And this joker still has the support of 50% of the country?

Hard to believe.

Asbestos Hazards? -- Nevermind

We here at Confined Space are man enough to admit when we're wrong.

You know all that crap we've been writing about asbestos being so dangerous, how it will kill 10,000 Americans every year over the next decade, how it's destroyed the lives of millions over the past decades, what it did to the town of Libby, Montana, how Brazilian activist Fernanda Giannasi is being harassed for trying to protect workers, and on and on?

Nevermind.

Turns out it's perfectly fine, you can even make paper out of it, as the Canada-based Asbestos Institute proved by issuing a press release made out of chrysotile asbestos. The Asbestos Institute is a lobbying organization that is part of an effort by the asbestos industry to convince the Canadian federal government and the Quebec government to rehabilitate asbestos by demonstrating it can be used safely, according to an extensive report in Hazards Magazine.

It's actually true that a chrysotile press release was issued, but it's not true that chrysotile asbestos is innocent. There are many different forms of asbestos and the asbestos industry in Canada and elsewhere have been trying to convince the world for years that one of the most common types, chrysotile, is not harmful. Unfortunately, Canada, Russia, Zimbabwe and other pro-asbestos countries have had some recent success blocking increased restrictions on the selling of chrysotile asbestos.

The asbestos industry has argued that because chrysotile fibers are a different shape than other asbestos fibers, it's not harmful. How do they explain the cancers associated with exposure to chrysotile? It must be that the fibers have been contaminated with something else that causes cancer. Despite the fact that these theories have been disproven by David Egilman and others in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine,

The Canadian asbestos mining industry has a long history of manipulating scientific data to generate results that support claims that their product is 'innocuous'

"Researchers complicit in this manipulation seem to be motivated by a variety of interests, including a desire to support an important national industry and a pre-existing ideological commitment to support corporate interests over worker or community interests.

"Conducting industry-friendly research can also anchor an academic career by guaranteeing the steady stream of funding necessary to stay afloat in the 'publish or perish' environment of the university."

The report comes on the heels of a paper in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH) that concluded the continued use of asbestos "is testament to the effectiveness of a campaign, spearheaded by Canadian interests, to promote a product already banned in many developed countries."

Check out Hazards for the rest of the whole sordid story.

Oh, and the funny press release? According to Laurie Allen, editor of the British Asbestos Newsletter, the paper was found to have a surprisingly high asbestos content. It "would, upon tearing or rough handling be almost certain to liberate fibres into the atmosphere," according to Allen.

Labels: Asbestos

Better Late Than Never

EPA Tests Microwave Popcorn

As you are aware, a popcorn butter flavor manufacturer is being sued by workers who accuse the company of supplying a chemical, diactyl, that has destroyed their lungs. What about microwave popcorn consumers.

These workers are exposed to large quantities of the chemical on a daily basis, so us average popcorn consumers have nothing to worry about. Right?

Federal officials have said there is no evidence that consumers face a health risk from microwave popcorn. Until now, no one has directly studied the issue.

Oops.

Well, that's about to change. The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to do a study to determine what chemical are released when someone microwaves a bag of popcorn.

The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association says that flavors do not pose a risk to consumers."We are confident that flavored microwave popcorn is safe for all of us to enjoy."

And the Popcorn Board agrees. Popcorn is "one of the most wholesome and economical foods available....'Popcorn is the type of thing that always evokes smiles,' Popcorn Board executive director Deirdre Flynn said. "That's why you've seen the industry rally as much as it has."

I feel better now. I'm definitely smiling.

Here are a couple of interesting factoids for your next boring dinner party: The average American eats 59 quarts of popcorn a year, according to the Popcorn Board. Consumers bought $1.33 billion worth of microwave popcorn in the United States in 2002, according to the Snack Food Association.

The EPA study is expected to be finished this Fall.

OSHA Alliances: Meaningless Media or Bureaucratic Incest?

I admit to being rather skeptical of OSHA's frenzy to form "alliances" with everything that moves.

Over the past three years, OSHA has formed over 140 alliances with "organizations committed to workplace safety and health to collaborate with OSHA to prevent injuries and illnesses in the workplace." (Virtually none of OSHA's alliances are with labor unions, which is perfectly understandable as one of the goals of alliances is to "build trusting, cooperative relationships with the Agency.")

Not that it's bad to work with other organizations, share information, provide assistance, go to each others' conferences, etc. Those are good things. But these are not activities that Republicans invented over the past couple of years; OSHA has always done these things. It used to just be called "outreach," and OSHA used to be able to perform these outreach activities at the same timethat they worked on issuing new standards and enforcing the law. Now it seems like it's either one or the other.

With OSHA sunk into a state of suspended animation (some would call it a coma) and closing down its standard making operation, the agency apparently needed to find a way to justify its increasingly irrelevant existence in this anti-regulatory, anti-enforcement, business-controlled Republican administration. The answer was to issue a steady stream of press releases announcing new alliances whenever some industry association wiggles its butt in OSHA's direction.

But now OSHA has gone from the silly to the absurd: The agency has just announced an alliance with the New York State Safety Council and the New York State Department of Labor's Consultation Program.

So what's wrong with that?

Well, OSHA has always worked with the National Safety Council and their state affiliates. Every Fall for decades half of OSHA's staff troops merrily (or dutifully) to the National Safety Council's annual conference. And until recently, they did it without forming an Alliance or issuing a single press release.

And the NY State Consultation Program? Consultation programs are basically an extension of OSHA's compliance assistance programs: they are authorized under the OSHA Act and funded out of OSHA's budget. Forming an alliance between OSHA and a state consultation program is like me issuing a press release announcing that I was forming an alliance with my daughter to help with her homework.

So what's the deal? Is OSHA running out of industry associations to form alliances with? I mean what are they going to do if (God, please don't strike me dead for even thinking this) they somehow get ~~re-~~elected? and have to find alliance partners for four more years? Clearly alliances with unions are out of the picture.

Hmmm.... I can just imagine.........

March 8, 2007

Washington -- Improving workplace health and safety by enhancing the efficiency of the Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA is the goal of a new alliance between the left hand and the right hand of Assistant Secretary of Labor, John Henshaw.

OSHA alliances are part of U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao's ongoing efforts to improve the health and safety of workers through cooperative partnerships.

Henshaw's arms and fingers will also take part in the alliance. The purpose of the alliance is to provide Henshaw's hands with information, guidance and access to resources he needs to be able to type, write, gesticulate and scratch his nose.

This Alliance follows last week's successful Alliance between Henshaw's brain and his mouth. Two weeks ago, OSHA announced the formation of 134 new Alliances when each of OSHA's ten regions formed alliances with every other region.

OSHA also announced today that it will rescind its plan to order all OSHA employees to form alliances with other OSHA employees. After careful consideration, the Solicitor of Labor determined that such alliances could be interpreted as violating employees' marriage vows and could, in some circumstances, also be in conflict with the new constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage.

Since 2001, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has created more than 32 million alliances with organizations, companies, hot dog stands, contributors to the Republican party, Mrs. Sewel's third grade class, various stray cats, dogs and large insects who are committed to fostering safety and health in the workplace. OSHA is dedicated to saving lives, preventing injuries, regulations and illnesses and protecting the health and safety of American workers. For more information, visit www.osha.gov.

Update: There is apparently NO truth to the rumor that OSHA was in the process forming an alliance with Martha Stewart prior to her unfortunate conviction. In response to a question, a high-ranking OSHA official is reported to have replied: "I did not form an alliance with that women!"

No Comment

Worker Dies in Trench Collapse

By Rick Hightower, WISH TV, Indianapolis

A plumbing sub-contractor was buried alive while working in a trench at a northeast side subdivision in the Geist area Monday afternoon. There was no escape for the man who experts say was working in the trench that may not have been properly shored up.

The victim, an Hispanic male in his 30's, had been working with another man in the trench when one man went on a break. When he came back he saw the 12-foot deep dirt walls collapse on his co-worker.

It took a team from the fishers rescue task force assisted by a Pike Township rescue team over two hours to find the body.

The two men had been laying sewer pipe in what authorities say is a trench between 12 and 15 feet deep.

“We noticed there's no box in this trench. That's what shores up so if the walls do come in the box holds the walls from collapsing,” said Ron Lipps of the Fishers Fire Department. “And unfortunately since those weren't there, there was nothing to keep the dirt from falling on this gentlemen."

***

UPDATE: The victim's name was Javier Marquez, age 33.

And the company's defense?

"We take our safety training pretty seriously," [R.T. Moore Company Vice President John] Bennett said. "We comply with all the safety guidelines we're expected to." Bennett disputed the size of the trench as reported by fire officials, claiming it was 11 feet deep.

Nice try John, but the OSHA regulation states that the trench has to be supported if it's more than 5 feet deep. I'm putting you in the running for the "Stupidist Statement Following a Fatality" contest.

More information here.

Labels: Trench Hazards

See the World, Travel to Exotic Lands, Get Sprayed With Pesticides

All buckeled in next to child and your pregnant wife, ready for your exotic trip to far away lands when you wife and kid starts getting violently ill. What's going on. "Oh," the flight attendant tells you, "There are other getting sick too. It may be the pesticides they sprayed on the plane."

Yes, believe it or not, several countries still require all incoming aircraft to be sprayed for pesticides. The Association of Flight attendants, whose members endure repeated exposure, is distributing an on-line petition to show the airlines and the Department of Transportation (DOT) that passengers and crew do not want to be sprayed with pesticides when they fly. For more information on aircraft pesticide spraying, check out the AFA webpage.

The AFA is trying to show that there is strong public support for a change to the current practice of spraying people with pesticides on planes.

Please do just take a moment and sign the on-line petition with your mouse. Just click on "sign petition."

If you are not comfortable sending your signature on-line, just use your mouse to print your name. And then forward this message to one and all...

The Weekly Toll

Worker killed by forklift at job

CANAL WINCHESTER, OH -- A Stoutsville man was killed when he became pinned between two large concrete septic tanks while at work at the E.C. Babbert Co. in Canal Winchester.

G. Bryan Hart, 38, died shortly before 7 a.m., according to Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen.

"Hart was moving a concrete septic tank with a forklift to set next to another septic tank. He apparently had gotten off of it to readjust several two-by-fours to set it up off the ground," Phalen said. "He had left the forklift in neutral. Because it was also on a slight incline, the forklift rolled forward and pinned him between the two large concrete septic tanks."

Construction worker killed after truck backs over him

LAKE WORTH, Fla. - A construction worker was killed when a truck backed over him at a site where sound walls are being installed along Interstate 95.

Maxime Cheriscat, 30, of Boynton Beach, was killed in the accident, the Florida Highway Patrol reported. Cheriscat had worked for Hubbard Construction of Orlando for the past five years.

Cheriscat was apparently standing behind a large tractor-trailer that is used to store fluids for the heavy equipment used on the project. The truck backed up and ran over him Thursday morning, troopers said. More here.

Construction Collapse Traps Worker

DALLAS -- A 60-year-old construction worker was in critical condition Friday after being trapped in a building collapse.

The accident happened at about 11:30 a.m. at 4122 Avondale Ave. in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas when a parking garage under construction caved in.

Fire rescue officials said the man was pinned under heavy wooden beams and a wet cement mix.

NY Worker Crushed, Killed by SUV

A KeySpan worker died yesterday after losing both legs in a grisly crash in Brooklyn, moments after he fixed the boiler at a home-nursing office.

Alfonse Ferrandino, 41, was loading his tools into a company van double-parked in front of the Midwood building when an SUV rammed into his vehicle, first pinning him, then sending him flying into the air, according to witnesses. More here.

Trash hauler killed on job

SALEM, CT -- A 43-year-old Lisbon man and father of three was killed at work Wednesday after he was pinned and crushed between two garbage trucks.

William Tracy of 110 Rimek Road was driving a recycling truck in a neighborhood off Route 85 in Salem. He was followed by another unidentified worker driving a refuse truck.

Both men, who work for Sterling Superior Services of Bozrah, had stopped in the area of 16 Skyline Drive to pick up garbage at about 8:18 a.m., police said.

Tracy was standing between the two vehicles, at the back of his own truck, when the refuse truck started to roll forward, pinning him between the two, police said. More here.

One worker dead, 1 hurt in SWFIA construction accident

NAPLES, FL -- A construction worker was killed and another injured Tuesday morning when a form broke loose from its concrete column at a construction site at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers.

Jebel Polanco Zuniga, 22, was killed in the accident. Gustavo Facio Orosco, 20, was airlifted from the scene to Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers. Orosco was listed in serious condition Monday night.

The two men were employed by D.H. Griffin Construction, a Raleigh, N.C., firm.

Construction worker killed

HILO, Hawai'i — A 48-year-old construction worker was killed yesterday morning when he was run over by a grader on a South Kohala construction site.

Fire officials were called to the Kolea condominium construction site on Waikoloa Beach Road at 8:20 a.m. and found that Gordon Cagampang of Kailua, Kona, had died at the scene. Cagampang apparently was lying on the ground and reaching into a manhole to work when he was run over by the grader and suffered head injuries, police said.

Franklin worker killed in Elkton plant accident

ELKTON -- A Franklin, Ky., man working on the roof of Elkton Die Casting in the Industrial Park fell to his death early Saturday morning.

Todd County Coroner Jimmy Shemwell said George T. Shelton, 50, of Franklin, was employed by DCD Inc., of Franklin. He was cleaning air ducts on the roof at the die casting plant at the time of his accident.

Worker Killed in U of U Industrial Accident

Salt Lake City -- A construction worker is dead after an industrial accident on the University of Utah campus. 42-year-old Michael Begay and three other men were working for a re-bar subcontractor.

They were putting up a foundation wall on an addition to the health-science building yesterday afternoon.

The two-and-a-half ton wall toppled over, killing Begay. The other men were not seriously injured.

OSHA looks into Brownsville mill worker's death

BROWNSVILLE, OR - Officials are investigating the Jan. 28 death of a worker at the Bear Mountain pellet mill.

Dean Corliss, 34, was an employee of the Bear Mountain Forest Products Golden Fire Wood Pellets Plant on Lake Creek Drive southwest of Brownsville.

Medics were called to the mill at 6:01 p.m. Jan. 28 for a report of an employee who had passed out. Corliss was taken to Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital, where he later died.

"It was initially reported as a heart attack, but there were enough circumstances surrounding the death that it warranted opening up an investigation," said Kevin Weeks of Oregon OSHA.

Sgt. Art Sprague of the sheriff's office said that while Corliss had some health problems, the medical examiner also found burn marks on the body consistent with an electrocution.

2 TA bosses slain, ex-worker quizzed

Two Transit Authority supervisors were shot and killed execution-style in a Coney Island train yard yesterday, and police were questioning a recently fired employee.

A security guard on patrol discovered the bodies of Luigi Sedita, 61, of Staten Island, and Clive Patterson, 46, of Queens, at 5:30 a.m. They were lying in pools of blood in a work trailer at the southern edge of the sprawling Coney Island Rapid Transit Car Overhaul Yard, police said.

Man killed in wall collapse

The man killed while working at a house in Bethesda Tuesday afternoon has been identified as Juan Vasquez Izara.

Izara, 36, of the 8000 block of 14th Street in Hyattsville, was using a jackhammer to break up concrete at 8315 Woodhaven Boulevard in Bethesda on Tuesday when a 14 feet high and 5 feet wide section of the brick siding fell outward onto him, according to a release from Montgomery County police. He was killed instantly.

Izara, along with two other individuals, had been hired as day laborers to build an addition to the left side of the Bethesda home.

Worker Dies On Construction Site

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- The Forsyth County Sheriff's Department is investigating the death of a construction worker.

Investigators said 41-year-old Jose Cristino Berrios died when he fell from a scaffold. It happened around 7:30 a.m. at a construction site of the future Ronald W. Reagan High School on Transou Road in Pfafftown.

Officials said Berrios fell 31 feet.

KIN RIP DRIVER AS CON ED WORKER DIES

February 25, 2004 -- The Con Ed worker run down while checking an electrical hot spot at a Queens intersection has died of his injuries, and his relatives are furious.

"I want that kid to know that he destroyed a family" by running down Thomas Verderosa, 35, said family spokesman John Cahill. "There are three boys out there who had a very loving father taken away from them."

Verderosa was crossing a street last Thursday night to test a manhole cover for stray voltage at Sutphin and Fochs boulevards in South Jamaica, when he was hit head-on by Andre Mattis, 21, in a 2003 Nissan, cops said.

Tire explosion kills airport employee

A Toledo Express Airport employee was killed early yesterday when a tire he was repairing exploded, and he was struck by the tire’s rim.

Brian J. Bergeon, 34, of Whitehouse had removed a tire from a jetway - used by airplane passengers to connect an airplane to the terminal - and taken it into a maintenance building.

The force sent the heavy rim upward, striking Mr. Bergeon and knocking him 10 feet backward. He was hit in the neck by the rim. The rim and tire continued upward, striking the garage door 20 feet overhead, according to Dr. Diane Barnett, Lucas County deputy coroner.

Wickliffe paper mill worker dies in accident

WICKLIFFE, Ky. — A Western Kentucky paper mill worker was killed on the job, state police said yesterday.

Kenneth Jones, 27, of Wickliffe, was working in the finishing area of the MeadeWestvaco paper mill on Saturday night when he was fatally struck in the head by the arm of a machine as he bent down to pick something up, Kentucky State Police said.

Labels: Weekly Toll

Classic Employer Misconduct

I wrote an article in December about the death of William Steadman in a trench collapse. At the time, Baruch Fellner, the attorney representing Steadman's employer, American Contracting Inc., claimed that Steadman's death was likely due to "classic employee misconduct." According to Fellner, Steadman had allegedly been told by his supervisor not to go into the trench.

But OSHA wasn't buying it. The safety agency fined American Contracting $20,000 for Steadman's death. Not much for a man's life, or for the five children he left behind. But it's good to see that his employer didn't get away with blaming Steadman for his own death.

Labels: Trench Hazards

Wow. This is Surprising: Energy Industry Buys Bush Environmental Policy

The New York Times has a long article on how energy industry lobbyists won the battle to weaken EPA's pollution control policies. It's a story that's gotten so common in this administration, it's almost getting boring.

But this one has a few twists: the energy industry's usual lobby, the Edison Electric Institute wasn't radical enough for the power plant owners -- EEI only wanted to weaken clean air regulations, the energy companies wanted to kill them. So Republican lobbyists Haley Barbour (now an Alabama Senator) and Marc Racicot (currently heading up the Campaign to Re-elect the President), formed their own lobbying group dedicated to eradicating the regulations. By lobbying the White House (Cheney) and the Energy Department, topped off with lots of campaign cash, by changing regulations out of the public eye, instead of debating the issues in Congress -- guess who won? The regs have been emasculated. Lawsuits brought during the Clinton Administration have been dropped, scores of top enforcement officials at EPA have resigned.

Ho, hum. Just another day of work in the Bush Administration.

Asbestos Companies Gag, Threaten Workplace Health Activist

Join the Campaign to Help Fernanda Giannasi

In the United States, fighting for workers’ health and safety can be a frustrating experience. In Brazil, it can bring criminal prosecution and death threats.

Brazilian safety inspector Fernanda Giannasi, known around the world for her struggle to protect Brazilian asbestos workers, is facing trial for offending the honor of a former Brazilian government minister and death threats for fighting to protect Brazilian asbestos workers. A worldwide campaign is being organized to assist her.

Fernanda Giannasi has been a Labor Inspector in Sao Paulo State for more than 20 years. She is a founding member of ABREA, the Association of Asbestos-Exposed Workers in Brazil, a member of the prestigious Collegium Ramazzini and received the International Award from the Occupational Safety and Health Section of the American Public Health Association in 1999.

Her crime: helping asbestos workers protect themselves, get information, get medical checks and learn about the deaths of their co-workers from asbestos-related disease. For this, she has earned the wrath of the multinational asbestos industry.

When Giannasi came across her first cases of asbestos poisoning, the workers were reluctant to take on their employers. 'They were scared to death of losing their jobs. It wasn't until a number of companies had shut down that they came to us. All of them were very ill. Nobody had ever told them that asbestos was dangerous. If it was brought up at all, they were told "it was safe because it's white."' She rolls her eyes and raises her fists: 'Can you believe it!' Today, wherever she goes Giannasi imposes strict security measures, including industrial masks, exhaust and climate control installations and launderettes, to prevent the workers from carrying the asbestos particles home with them. If necessary she personally shuts down an operation. She resolutely points at a picture: 'I closed that factory.'

But just cleaning up the workplaces wasn't good enough. She tried to pass a national law to ban asbestos in Brazil. When that effort failed,

She changed tactics and began fighting for local bans in the cities and states instead. At the moment there are 70 bills for a ban on Brazilian asbestos being discussed. As for Giannasi, someone is always fighting her in court somewhere. When she finally managed to get the hazardous mineral banned in four states, one of the companies complained it was being discriminated against, since asbestos is legal in the rest of Brazil. It would have to fire 400 employees. The judge allowed the appeal, and Giannasi had to start all over again. 'The industry always manages to find some other loophole. Their crimes are either ignored or trivialized.

For this work, Giannasi became a familiar face on TV, in magazines and at public meetings. But she also made powerful enemies. In 1998, she was sued for defamation by Eternit S.A., a leading Brazilian asbestos manufacturer, for articles she wrote about the fate of Brazilian asbestos workers and her public condemnation of hundreds of “highly questionable” extra-judicial agreements with former asbestos employees. The charges were dismissed the next year and the company chose not to appeal.

Despite this attack, Giannasi refused to be intimidated. She continued to travel to asbestos mining communities throughout Brazil and has publicized the plight of the asbestos workers and their communities.

Asbestos is a big – and deadly -- business in Brazil.

Brazil is now the fifth largest producer in the world. But unlike Canada, for example, which exports 98% of its asbestos, 70% of Brazilian asbestos is used on the national market. Of those 70 - 90% goes to the building industry. Over half the production is controlled by two companies, Saint Gobain (French) and Eternit (Swiss), both of whom would face charges if they were to take their Brazilian operations home.

Fernanda Giannasi: 'The big boom was in the 70s, when there was large-scale construction of cheap housing made from un-isolated asbestos. It's insane, especially if you realize that the material is unsuitable for Brazil's hot and humid climate. It's even worse in the North, where there's a lot of poverty. The fibres begin to disintegrate after five years. Moreover, until a few years ago at least 90% of all houses had asbestos rooftop water tanks, and 60% of all houses are still fitted with asbestos tiles. Asbestos is also widely used in the car industry, for roofing and isolation purposes, for pots and pans, even for children's toys!'

Under pressure from the asbestos industr, Giannasi was informed by her employer last November that she was no longer no longer authorized to carry out inspections or mobilize workers and was being restricted to the Brasilia office. According to Hazards Magazine

The latest charges say Giannasi insulted an ex-Labour minister who supported a "yellow" trade union created by asbestos multinational Saint Gobain. In 1985, the company union illegally replaced an independent union which had organized a strike at the company's biggest factory.

The trial has been postponed until Fall because the presiding judge has been jailed on corruption charges.

This action came not-so-coincidentally a few weeks after the breakdown of negotiations between ABREA and Brazil's major asbestos companies over how to provide compensation and medical care for 2,500 affected asbestos workers. The discussion had been going on for three years and Giannasi had played a major role She characterized the final offer made by the companies as "derisory and insulting."

Declining demand due to rising public awareness of the hazards of asbestos has hit the Brazilian asbestos industry hard. Yet the industry blames Giannasi and ABREA for the dramatic decline in the fortunes of the Brazilian asbestos industry.

Giannasi has also received death threats which are to be taken seriously in Brazil.

The use of physical violence is not unusual. It is widely believed that the execution-style murder of Labor Inspectors Nelson Jose da Silva, Eratostenes de Almeida Gonsalves and Joao Batista Soares Lage on January 28, 2004 was related to a raid on a soybean plantation which was, it is alleged, using illegal slave labor. According to Reuters, “Labor Ministry inspectors travel around Brazil’s interior, usually accompanied by armed federal police officers.” The lack of protection which enabled the assassins to attack the inspectors on a public highway illustrates how cut-backs are compromising both the physical safety of Labor Inspectors and their ability to protect Brazil’s workers.

Jim Mowatt, National Secretary of the British Asbestos Workers Union has written to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio LULA da Silva:

We are profoundly disturbed to learn of the predicament confront Labour Inspector, Fernanda Giannasi. From reports we have received from all around the World, it would appear that there have been serious attempts in Brazil to silence Ms Giannasi. We understand that criminal charges have been taken out against Ms Giannasi and that she has had her Inspector's right to inspect workplaces withdrawn.

An international campaign is being organized to help Giannasi. You can help by writing to the Brazilian president Luiz Inacio LULA da Silva and to the Labour and Justice ministries asking them to assist Giannasi.

Check out the Hazards site for addresses and sample letters.

Labels: Asbestos

10,000 Deaths American Asbestos Deaths a Year

"Ten thousand Americans die each year -- a rate approaching 30 deaths per day -- from diseases caused by asbestos," according to a report issued today by the Environmental Working Group Action Fund." The report finds that over 100,000 people will die of asbestos-related disease over the next decade.

This report comes as the U.S. Senate prepares to rejoin the debate over asbestos compensation legislation

that would nullify tens of thousands of asbestos lawsuits and transfer all pending and future claims to a newly created $108 billion victims compensation fund financed by manufacturers and insurance companies.

The Senate is expected to take up this bill at the end of this month or in early April. The measure is backed by the business community, which is seeking to cap its liability and get out from under a flood of lawsuits, but it faces opposition from organized labor and trial lawyers who argue the fund will shortchange victims.

The EWG report calls for two measures:

Any solution to the asbestos epidemic, be it litigation, a trust fund, or a combination of the two, must help everyone hurt by asbestos. The current proposal by Senators Frist and Hatch does not come close to this goal.
All uses of asbestos must be banned immediately. This is the only way to put an end to the ongoing tragedy of asbestos illness and death.

The site also contains extensive documentary proof of the asbestos industy's cover-up of the hazards of asbestos that lead to the massive death rate

These papers, just a handful of which we present here, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the companies and their insurers knew the hazards of asbestos and concealed this information from workers for decades. More than any other piece of evidence, it is the companies' own internal papers that have convinced juries of citizens across the country that workers and their families deserve compensation to help them manage the severe and often fatal health consequences of working with asbestos.

More here.

Labels: Asbestos

Schwarzenegger Tackles Workers Compensation

There's one thing almost everyone in California can agree with: The workers compensation system is a mess.

The central problem in California now is that the costs paid by employers are the highest in the country, while the benefits received by workers are about average - in part because many cases are disputed, which wastes resources.

Total costs for California employers increased to $29 billion in 2003 - eight times the gross domestic product of Haiti - from $11 billion in 1998. By one estimate, the average employer in California pays 5.2 percent of payroll for workers' compensation insurance, more than twice the average of other states. Rates are much higher in hazardous occupations: 43 percent for loggers, 33 percent for roofers, 22 percent for carpenters and 18 percent for truck drivers.

And Arnold has pledged to do something about it.

The problems include too many disputes between workers and employers, too much litigation, rising medical costs, overly complex system for determining permanent partial disabilities, and dueling doctors among other things.

What to do? No one agrees.

Many of Arnold's suggestions would be a disaster for ailing workers:

A draft ballot initiative by Mr. Schwarzenegger would raise the burden of proof for workers to receive benefits; require physicians to use objective, observable medical evidence to assess injuries; restrict an employee's choice of doctor to those agreed to by his or her employer; deny compensation for impairments that result from cumulative activities, like back sprains, unless they are proved to be "predominantly caused by actual activities of employment"; and deny compensation for other impairments unless a single work-related incident caused at least 10 percent of the disability.

In fact, according to workers compensation expert John Burton, some of these suggestions would be counterproductive

not compensating employees for injuries that arise from work but cannot be pinpointed to a particular event could have a major unintended consequence: employers could possibly be sued for large damages outside the workers' compensation system.

This type of collateral damage would set workers' compensation insurance back a century.

Airport Screeners Suffer Highest Government Injury Rate

Next time you're in an airport take a look at how much how much awkward lifting and twisting these workers do, especially those who are x-raying the heavy checked bags. It hurts just to watch.

According to a new OSHA report, airport baggage screeners suffer an injury rate 3-1/2 times higher than the average federal government workers. Most of the injuries are back injuries and other strains and sprains from lifting and twisting with heavy bags. Other injuries include cuts from reaching blindly into bags and even broken bones when bags fall.

"That’s extraordinarily high,” said Dr. Laura Welch, medical director for the Center to Protect Workers’ Rights, a Silver Spring, Md., organization that tries to improve safety for construction workers. “It suggests there’s a really big problem and they’d better figure out what it is.”

The main problem seems to be design of the workplace. Neither airports nor the machinery used by the workers were built with ergonomics in mind.

“We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the physical systems, the mechanical systems,” Hatfield said, explaining the problem is due partly to lack of time to prepare work areas.

The TSA had only a year to recruit and train tens of thousands of people to screen passengers and baggage at 429 commercial airports. Airports couldn’t be renovated fast enough to properly install new security equipment, so the large machines that screen luggage for explosives were hastily placed in many airport lobbies, requiring screeners to lift heavy bags from the floor onto conveyor belts.

“It’s a very physical and tough job, and in many situations we are still operating under less-than-ideal conditions,” Hatfield said.

For more information, check out the OSHA webpage on Airline industry hazards.

Labels: Ergonomics

Bush Haiku

Far too much seriousness. Things start to get depressing. The center cannot hold.

We need to take some time to clear our minds and refresh our spirits. And what better way to cleanse our souls and set ourselves afloat on a cloud of tranquility than by reading a bit of haiku, using the lines of our esteemed fearless leader, none other than George the W.

Verily, these are actual quotations by George W. Bush, arranged, only for aesthetic purposes, by Washington Post writer, Richard Thompson.

Take a deep breath....

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope,
Where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

Popcorn Workers Lung Trial Begins

The trial of the first worker affected by "popcorn workers lung" began today.

Former microwave popcorn factory worker Eric Peoples told jurors this morning that the biggest loss in his life since being diagnosed with an irreversible lung disease is not being able to "rough house" with his two young children.

"In my home, if you were on the floor, you were fair game," Peoples said.

Peoples used a portable oxygen tank to ease his breathing as he testified in his lawsuit against International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. and a subsidiary. His suit claims his lungs were ruined after months of mixing their butter flavoring oils at a popcorn factory in southwest Missouri.

Attorneys on both sides agreed to break up Peoples' testimony into short segments because his lung capacity is severely diminished and he tires easily.

More here.

Unions Ask OSHA To Prevent Further Weakening of TB Protections

Several labor unions concerned about workplace tuberculosis exposure are meeting Assistant Secretary for OSHA, John Henshaw, to request that the agency not weaken current respiratory protections for workers exposed to tuberculosis or other airborne pathogens.

You may recall that on New Years Eve, OSHA officially withdrew its tuberculosis proposal. At the same time, OSHA announced that health care workers potentially exposed to TB would now be covered by the revised 1998 respiratory protection standard, instead of the old 1974 standard. Respiratory protection for workers exposed to TB was originally going to be addressed in the TB standard instead of the new respiratory protection standard because in 1998 there were still outstanding TB-related respirator issues and release of the TB standard was thought to be imminent. So, instead of bringing these workers into the new standard, they were to be covered "temporarily" under the old respirator standard. Once the TB standard was deep-sixed, OSHA brought health care workers under the new standard.

Fresh from their victory in killing the TB standard, however, the health care industry is having fits because the new standard requires that workers who wear respirators must be medically examined and fit-tested. The Association of Professionals in Infection Control (APIC) and the American Hospital Association wrote to OSHA protesting OSHA's decision. The AHA made the rather curious argument that "The dynamics of exposure and transmission for biologic agents contrast dramatically with the airborne chemical contaminants or particulate matter (e.g., asbestos) for which the General Industry Respiratory Protection Standard was developed."

In a letter to OSHA responding to the AHA letter, Marc Nicas, Adjunct Associate Professor at U.C. Berkeley, responded that

With regard to technical applicability, the standard does apply, because M. tb bacilli are carried on airborne particles that behave aerodynamically just like other airborne particles of comparable size, and although health care facilities cannot yet measure airborne M. tb concentrations, they can assess exposure potential.

The Coalition to Fight TB in the Workplace, wrote to OSHA pointing out that

As you know, proper and regular fit testing at least on an annual basis as is required by 1910.134 has proven crucial to protect workers from airborne hazards. The quality of the face seal that provides workers with protection has nothing to do with the airborne hazard confronted, but everything to do with how the respirator is designed to perform. As was reported by the CDC from the SARS experience in Toronto, a number of workers supplied with respirators, but who were not fit tested, ended up contracting SARS (MMWR May 16, 2003). Finally regular fit testing is particularly important when you are dealing with an airborne agent such as TB that does not possess any warning properties, and where no safe level of exposure has been established.

The Coalition, which includes more than a dozen unions, petitioned OSHA for a TB standard almost ten years ago.

Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, also wrote OSHA, noting a study that highlighted the lack of understanding on the part of many healthcare facilities about the components of effective respiratory protection programs.

Ergo Battle in Michigan

You think gay marriage, weapons of mass destruction, and massive budget deficits are problems? Wait until you hear this one. Michigan OSHA may be considering an ergonomics standard!! Are you still on your feet?

In 2002, Michigan OSHA formed a steering committee to develop a framework for addressing an ergonomics rule and appointed members to the Ergonomics Standard Advisory Committee from management, labor and the public. Around half of the states run their own OSHA program and are able to issue their own workplace safety standard. Currently, California is the only state with an ergonomics standard. Washington state's was repealed last year.

After three meetings, Charles Owens, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business resigned from the Ergonomics Standard Advisory Committee because, he said, he realized that the mission of the committee was to develop a standard. Owens said that he had been under the impression that the purpose of the committee was to determine if a standard was needed. National NFIB was one of the most active business associations behind the repeal of the federal ergonomics standard in 2001.

"At a time when Michigan is shedding manufacturing jobs by the thousands, I find it incredible that we are about to become only the second state in the country, besides California, to have our own state-specific ergonomics standard replete with fines, penalties and compliance enforcement. Certainly this does not seem to indicate that we are serious about saving and creating jobs in Michigan," Owens wrote in his resignation letter to Doug Kalinowski, director of the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

In testimony before the House Commerce Committee in Lansing, Owens predicted the cost to taxpayers of administering new ergonomics rules could reach millions of dollars a year.

Meanwhile, a Detroit Free Press columnist, Tom Walsh, echoing the business community's tiresome "sky is falling" threats warns that

This fixation on jobs is understandable in a state with a jobless rate of 7.2 percent, or 1.6 percentage points higher than the national rate. Each point of unemployment translates to more than 50,000 Michigan friends and neighbors without work.

But along with mulling big ideas about the jobs dilemma, it's also important to remain vigilant in the bureaucratic trenches about new rules and red tape that can dump job-killing extra costs upon Michigan business. In that spirit, let's hear a little applause for Charlie Owens.

Let's not.

I've never been very confident that the Michigan ergo standard was gong to get anywhere, despite their best intentions. The business community has long ago declared a nation-wide jihad against any ergonomics standard anywhere, and has been willing to spend any amount of money and tell any lie to stop or repeal any standards.

The Michigan NFIB webpage doesn't exactly hold out any hope that it representatives will be open minded:

MIOSHA is currently being directed to promulgate a state-based ergonomics standard for Michigan business. NFIB was successful in urging the Bush administration to rescind the Clinton administration's Executive Order that would have created a mandatory federal ergonomics standard. Now Michigan is seeking to move forward on a state ergonomics mandate on business. NFIB supports voluntary ergonomics best practices guidelines, but we will oppose a state mandated program that will cost small business millions of dollars and result in more enforcement and fines from MIOSHA.

"Voluntary ergonomics best practices guidelines?" That wouldn't be like the ANSI standard that the business community also managed to scuttle, would it?

Labels: Ergonomics

UPS Cited For Tampering With Evidence

Utah OSHA has fined UPS $71,000 for tampering with evidence following the electocution of an employee last August.

Mark D. Hills was electrocuted while working at UPS, 2040 W. Parkway Blvd. (2600 South) on Aug. 19. Hills was trying to get a package that had fallen under a conveyor chute. He touched a large piece of machinery called a Mobile Distribution Unit (MDU) while lying on the ground to retrieve the package.

The MDU's grounding system was not working, and Hills' body provided the path to ground for the energized MDU, according to the UOSHA report.

But before UOSHA investigators could properly investigate the accident, UPS "deliberately and knowingly removed and/or altered equipment, materials or other evidence" related to the accident, according to the report.

The report further stated that after the equipment was removed, "such information was withheld from Utah OSHA personnel" by UPS management. It wasn't until the second day of UOSHA's investigation that UPS disclosed it had removed key evidence, according to the report.

UPS denies that it tried to hide anything and is appealing the citation, claiming it was a misunderstanding.

B.S., says OSHA. "UPS has a documented history of dealings with OSHA (both federal and state), and to claim unawareness was not understandable or a feasible excuse."

IBM Settles Birth Defect Lawsuit

After winning a lawsuit brought by two workers who alleged that on-the-job chemical exposures had caused their cancers, IBM settled a lawsuit today brought by a former worker who had blamed her daughter's birth defects on exposure to chemicals at an IBM plant in New York.

IBM spokesman Chris Andrews said the maintained that it held no responsibility for the birth defects of the daughter of Heather Curtis, who took a job at an IBM computer chip plant in Fishkill, New York in 1980.

Curtis' daughter, Candace, who is 23, was born with a rare brain disorder and severe physical deformities.

"The Curtis case has been concluded and dismissed," Andrews said. "IBM firmly believes, based on facts and evidence, that it had no liability in this case and its workplace did not cause the plaintiff's injuries."

This was not the first birth defect lawsuit that IBM has settled

Three years ago, IBM settled a $40 million lawsuit brought by the parents of a boy who was born blind and with physical deformities that prevent him from breathing through his nose or his mouth.

Attorneys who have followed the IBM cases said lawsuits involving injured children are far more difficult to defend than cases of sick adults.

"IBM does not want its name associated with severe birth defects caused to innocent children of its employees, and as such it risked severe reputational damage if the case went to trial, even if it came out in their favor," said Scott Ferrell, a defense attorney at Call, Jensen & Ferrell, whose firm has not been involved in the IBM cases.

"Any time you've got a young child and substantial damages, you are essentially taking a spin on the roulette wheel if you take it to a jury," he said.

IBM may have taken the best way out considering the story that the jury would have heard.

When Heather Curtis took a factory job at IBM in 1980, the pregnant, 22-year-old was assigned to dip silicon wafers into acids and solvents as part of a process used to make computer chips.

Despite complaints that fumes from the job gave her headaches and a sore throat, IBM assured Curtis her workplace was safe, according to her lawyer. Months later, Curtis gave birth to a daughter so severely deformed that she lacked knees and had a skull too small to accommodate her brain....Candace, 23, requires a tube in her throat to breathe. Her hips are deformed, giving her an exaggerated gait and a rare condition called microcephaly gave her a head too small for her brain, leaving her with a low IQ.

Another reason that IBM may have been anxious to settle without a trial is that the burden of proof was lower in this case than in the California cancer case:

In the Silicon Valley case, California's workers' compensation law required that two former IBM employees prove the computer giant fraudulently withheld information about their exposure to toxic chemicals they contend caused them to develop cancer.

The plaintiff's attorneys in the New York case do not face such a hurdle because Candace Curtis was not an IBM employee. But Curtis' attorneys still must convince a White Plains, N.Y., jury that toxic chemicals caused her birth defects and that IBM was negligent in allowing her mother to be exposed to such toxins in the workplace.

"It's a huge, huge difference,'' Curtis' attorney, Will DeProspo, said of the New York case. "There is a traditional negligence theory, such as failure to warn that chemicals used were known to cause cancer and birth defects. . . . We are very excited and optimistic about our chances in New York.''

Chinese Chastise US For Workplace Safety, Human Rights

Angered by the U.S. report on human rights in China, the Chinese government issues its own report on human rights violations in the U.S. In addition to problems with poverty, health care coverage, homelessness and womens rights, the report noted workplace safety problems:

Work safety in the U.S. was another concern of the Chinese report, which pointed to a survey of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration which said from 1982 to 2002 there were 1,242 cases involving the death of workers caused by the employers' "intended" violation of safety rules. "Yet 93 percent of the cases were not brought to court," the Chinese report noted.

I guess they've been reading the NY Times. The entire Chinese report can be found here.

And I seem to recall they've got a few workplace safety problems of their own.

Right to Organize Clear for 2004 Dem Candidates

Carter Wright at the Joe Kenehan Center has an interesting article about how all of the Democratic presidential candidate have actively embraced labor's right to organize and the problems inherent in our labor laws.

Now if we can just hold them (Kerry) to it once he's elected.... And a change in one or both houses of Congress might help matters as well.

CalOSHA Considers Lowering Glutaraldehyde Exposure Limit

SEIU Conducting A Survey

The CalOSHA Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (OSHSB) is considering reducing the permissible exposure limit for glutaraldehyde, also known as Cidex, from .2 parts per million (ppm) to .015 ppm. Glutaraldehyde is a widely used hospital disinfectant.

According to NIOSH, exposure to glutaraldehyde can cause throat and lung irritation, asthma, asthma-like symptoms, nose irritation, nosebleeds, burning eyes and conjunctivitis, rash—contact and/or allergic dermatitis, headaches and nausea.

Glutaraldehyde is a sensitizer. This means some workers will become very sensitive to glutaraldehyde and have strong reactions if they are exposed to even small amounts. Workers may get sudden asthma attacks with difficult breathing, wheezing, coughing, and tightness in the chest. Prolonged exposure can cause a skin allergy and chronic eczema, and afterwards, exposure to small amounts produces severe itching and skin rashes.

In preparation for the CalOSHA hearings on lowering the standard, SEIU is conducting a web survey. If you use glutaraldehyde at work, please click here and fill out the survey.

More information on glutaraldehyde can be found here.

Lungs of the Living Dead

"The only thing this group of people ever did wrong was go to work."

In a rational, responsible society, a company that invented a new chemical to add buttery flavor to popcorn (called diacetyl) would test it for health effects on humans. And if this is what you found....

After breathing diacetyl vapors for just four hours, some rats gagged and gasped for breath. Half the rats in the study died within a day.

All rats exposed to diacetyl rapidly showed signs of distress. Those exposed to medium and high levels died within seven days, according to the industry data. Of the 10 rats with highest exposure, nine died the first day.

Examination of their tissues after death showed that parts of their lungs had collapsed and filled with blood and fluid. Tissue swelled in the liver and cells in the kidney died.

Oops. Hmm. What would you do then?

a) Trash the new chemical and go back to the drawing board?

b) Put it into commerce, but with strict warnings to downstream users, NIOSH and OSHA that the most protective measures should be taken so that workers can’t inhale it.

c) Send information to the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, a trade group based in Washington, and hope they take care of the problem.

Well, if you're BASF and the year is 1993, looks like you chose c), which (predictably) didn't work out so well because a few years later, here we are:

Former workers at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant are slowly suffocating from breathing a chemical that was known to be toxic long before most of them got sick, according to documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch.

At least 31 people who worked at a popcorn factory in Jasper County have been diagnosed with severe lung disease linked to breathing vapors from a butter flavoring. Eight are on waiting lists for lung transplants.

One of the problems with writing Confined Space is that sometimes you feel like a broken record. How many times can you write the same story about workers getting sick or dying because they are not provided with lifesaving information or well-recognized precautions? If you published this same article, but changed the dates back 50 or 75 years, most people would have been shocked, then shaken their heads about the way things used to be, smugly thinking "Thank God, we're not doing THAT to workers any more. That was back in the old, unenlightened, uncompassionate days when we needed unions and regulatory agencies like OSHA.”

Well, wake up, it's the 21st century. We’re sending robots to explore Mars, we’re fighting wars on video screens, we have computers in our kids’ bedrooms that are thousands of times more powerful than the computers that sent men to the moon. Yet when it comes to protecting workers, we seem to be back in the smoky dawn of the industrial revolution.

Linda Redman started working as a packer at the Jasper popcorn plant in 1995, two years after the original study. Within two years, her breathing was so bad that she had to quit.

Redman used to work 12 hours a day and then come home to garden, cook dinner, and do her family's laundry. Now, she lives alone in Joplin, relying on home health nurses four days a week to help with basic chores around the house.

Redman, 55, doesn't have the stamina to change her bedsheets or cook herself dinner, unless it's something out of a can.

Only 15 percent of her lung capacity remains. Redman bides her time while waiting for a lung transplant by taking breathing treatments every four hours. She is constantly tethered to an oxygen tank, but she still gets exhausted walking from the bedroom to the couch.

"There's no amount of money that can ever buy back what we've lost - our health," Redman said of herself and the other sick workers. "There's a couple of us I don't think can make it much longer."

Eric Peoples, 31, and the father of two small children, will be the first plaintiff to have his case heard. He started work at the plant in 1995 and now is on the waiting list for a double lung transplant.

Angela Nally, 51, started working at the plant in 1993 and quit eight months later. She has 20 percent of her lung capacity left.

Dustin Smith, 24, started at the plant in 1999 and didn't quit until NIOSH told him he had lost half his lung capacity.

Thirty workers affected with “popcorn workers lung” are suing two manufacturers of the butter flavoring. A judge separated the suits into separate trials and Eric Peoples, the most seriously ill, comes up first, this week.

The health and safety information developed by BASF was passed on to the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA), although it is unclear when it was placed on FEMA's database and when members had access to it. According to FEMA's webpage, the association's "Critical Objectives" are:

To maintain a credible, globally recognized scientific program.
Achieve and maintain a consistent, scientifically valid approach to safety evaluation of flavor ingredients.

Continue to support the ongoing role of the FEMA Expert Panel for independent evaluation of the safety-in-use of flavor ingredients.

Identify and address emerging issues.

well, this one apparently "emerged" when no one was looking. While most of FEMA's website is closed to non-members, its "General Information" page notes that it has approved the safety of hundreds of flavoring agents over the past ten years. The names of the agents are not listed. FEMA, which is not named in the lawsuit, had previously issued statements saying that "flavors are safe when handled properly." A January 2001 entry on their database stated that "diacetyl carries a risk of serious damage to eyes, is harmful by inhalation, and is irritating to skin."

The sad thing is, it all could have been prevented.

Dr. David Egilman, an expert on occupational lung disease at Brown University, said that all of this misery could have been avoided if the chemical and flavoring industries responsibly followed up on the 1993 rat study.

The BASF study proved that the chemical was lethal to rats at a level similar to that which could be experienced by plant workers, Egilman said.

"That's why it's so sad," said Egilman, who is scheduled to testify as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. "It wasn't hard for (the flavor manufacturer) to prevent people from dying. They had enough information to prevent people from getting sick."

Instead of warning its customers appropriately, Egilman said, International Flavors & Fragrances led its customers to believe that the product wasn't dangerous.

The company distributed a safety sheet with its butter flavoring that read, "Respiratory protection: none generally required. If desired, use NIOSH-approved respirator." The Material Safety Data Sheet is dated 1992.

A safety sheet written in 1994 by flavoring manufacturer Bush Boake Allen, another defendant in the lawsuit, said that respirators were not normally required for its butter flavoring, unless vapor concentrations were "high." The company is now a subsidiary of International Flavors & Fragrances.

Egilman is no shrinking violet. Last July, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine refused to publish a letter from him about a corporate cover-up of adverse toxicologic study results. Not to be silenced, he placed the material in a two- page advertisement in the back of the journal along with a poll coupon that sought to survey the readership on the interest that they have in this topic.

The issues we raised at that time are just as relevant now:

Most chemical testing in this country is done by the companies that manufacture the chemicals.... In an ideal world, this information will be peer-reviewed and then publicized. The regulatory authorities could then use the information to decide whether or not exposure to the substance needs to be controlled or eliminated. Even without regulation, workers and consumers could use the information to take some kind of action.

But none of this works – the regulatory process or (mythical) worker choice – if scientific information about the health effects of chemicals is covered up.

Again, I sound like a broken record, but until we have a mandatory system in this country where companies are required to test all new chemicals, and release all results to relevant government agencies and the public; until we make easier for government agencies to regulate these chemicals, and until workers have the clear right to refuse to work with chemicals unless they have been tested and the information made available, tragedies like this will keep happening.

Every couple of weeks, I publish “The Weekly Toll,” a compilation of all of the articles I run across about workers being killed on the job. But workers like Linda Redman, Eric Peoples, Angela Nally and Dustin Smith will never show up on that list. Their lungs have been shredded by the chemicals they work with and they will likely die years or even decades earlier than they should have, but they won’t even get the short article in the paper that a trench collapse victim gets. While they’re not easy to count or to see, and the exact origin is difficult to prove (as we have seen I in the recent IBM trial) experts estimate that between 50,000 and 60,000 people silently die every year from occupational illnesses, most from exposures suffered years or decades before.

Many of these cases are never recognized by knowledgable medical authorities as job-related, and even the, workers compensation is often refused unless a definite link can be made to their on-the-job exposures. Third-party lawsuits are often all workers have to fall back on to cover their medical and living expenses adquate, but even this course is often unsuccessful, despite the right-wing frenzy over runaway lawsuits.The bottom line was summed up by Ken McClain, an attorney representing the plaintiffs:

"The only thing this group of people ever did wrong," he said of the plaintiffs, "was go to work."

***

More here.

NIOSH has a webpage and documents on "Preventing Lung Disease in Workers Who Use or Make Flavorings"

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Labor Arts

My buddy Saul Schneiderman, President of the AFSCME Local at the Library of Congress, sent me this link to Labor Arts, an amazing webpage and "a virtual museum; we gather, identify and display images of the cultural artifacts of working people and their organizations. Our mission is to present powerful images that help us understand the past and present lives of working people. "

The newest exhibit is "Sixteen Tons: Nuggets from the United Mine Workers" There's also an exhibit on Union Square in New York city ("one of the few national historic sites related to labor") which also contains a section on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

This is one of the most interesting and well-put-together websites I've seen. Spend some time there.

The plight of this terribly disabled mine worker is a cause of grief, love and concern for his children.© Copyright Labor Arts Inc.

A Worker Dies: Who is Ultimately to Blame?

Occupational Hazards magazine has an article by Jim Nash continuing the NY Times story that revealed that OSHA failed to seek criminal prosecution against 93 percent of the companies whose willful violations of safety rules caused workers to die. And then the Justice Department declined to prosecute most of those cases that were referred by OSHA.

One of the causes most often cited is the fact that OSHA prosecutions is that killing a worker due to a willful OSHA citation is only a misdemeanors and not a felony. For this reason, Senator Jon Corzine had introduced legislation making the death of worker due to a willful violation a felony.

But a representative of the Justice Department doesn't necessarily agree that this would solve the problem:

A Justice Department official countered that simply making these cases felonies might not lead to many more prosecutions. The problem, according to the official, is that according to the OSH Act, only employers can be charged with a crime. In large companies, the supervisor responsible for violating the OSHA rule is not the employer, while the company's owner -- the legal employer -- usually has no knowledge of the OSHA violation, making it almost impossible to prove that the violation was willful.

As a result, DOJ can usually prosecute only small companies where the employer also supervises the work, while large corporations are passed over.

"If you want to increase the number of criminal prosecutions," argued the DOJ official, "you need a 'wrong-doer provision' added to the current law that would allow us to go after the supervisor who committed the willful violation." That, along with increased penalties for willful fatality cases would lead to far more criminal prosecutions than simply making it a felony to kill a worker, the official contended.

I'm not sure I like the idea of going after the immediate supervisor in most cases. Generally, the immediate supervisor, especially in large companies, is acting within the system that is handed to him. The immediate supervisor generally doesn't set the deadlines, determine the pace of the work, the training the workers have, or even the equipment that's available. He, himself, may not have been properly trained to get the job done safely:

"I want that tank cleaned out by the end of the week. I don't care how it gets done. Oh, and by the way, don't spend any more money getting it done."

In other words, in larger companies, the responsibility for safety generally resides far higher up than the general supervisor. In the L.E. Myers case that I wrote about last week, L.E. Myers itself is being prosecuted, and there is a move to take the prosecution to the L.E. Myers' owner, MYR Group which had taken responsibility for the safety programs of its subsidiaries.. It seems to me that this makes much more sense -- if you're interested in changing the entire safety system -- than going after immediate supervisors.

Your view? Use the comment link right here:

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