Well, duh!

A study by the University of North Carolina has found that workplace policies that allow employees to carry guns are more lethal than those that prohibit weapons, Forbes.com reported April 27.The report, published in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health, compared workplaces that allow employees to carry weapons and those that don't. It found that murders are three times more likely to occur in workplaces where employees may carry
weapons, and the risk doubles when the weapon is a gun.

.

Worker's Memorial Day, Arkansas
Angelica workers to join Workers Memorial Day events across California
Governor Schwarzenegger Proclaims April 28, 2005 Workers' Memorial Day, California
Local citizens recognize fallen workers, California (added)
Workers killed on job remembered, Illinois (added)
Worker Memorial Day observed, Iowa
State honors those who died on the job, Iowa (added)
Report: Maine Tops Nation In Workplace Injuries, Maine
AFL-CIO chapter remembers fallen workers with ceremony, Maryland (added)
Those who died doing their jobs are remembered, Massachusetts
Little pain for killing workers, unions say, Massachusetts
UAW members gather for workers' memorial, Michigan
MSU report shows number of on-the-job deaths remains unchanged, Michigan
Workers Who Lost Their Lives Remembered, Michigan (added)
MnDOT remembers transportation workers killed on job, Minnesota
Activists Rally for Safer Working Conditions, Mississippi
Voice of the reader: Safe workplaces need to become reality, Montana
Fallen Laborers Remembered, New York
PEF, LABOR ORGANIZATIONS AND THE PUBLIC OBSERVE WORKERS' MEMORIAL Day, New York
DOT honors highway workers killed in construction accidents, New York
Press lawmakers to make sure labor is not a cause of death, New York
Remembering Workers Killed on the Job, North Carolina
Early honor for workers killed on job draws 150 in Toledo, Ohio
Massillon remembers its steel history, Ohio (added)
Guest Viewpoint: Honor all who die on the job, here or abroad, Oregon (Steve Hecker)
Labor Forum Features Top Safety Experts, Oregon
Seven lost lives lengthen sad tally, Pennsylvania
WHEN YOUR JOB KILLS YOU, WHO REMEMBERS?, Pennsylvania (added)
Eleven SD Workers Killed on the Job Honored Today, South Dakota (added)
Workers Memorial Day, Tennessee
Texas had most fatalities of Hispanic workers in '03, Texas
Union holds Workers Memorial Day service, Texas (added)
Death at work: A memorial, Washington
Fallen not forgotten: Day honors those killed on the job, Wisconsin (added)
Workers killed on job to be honored, Wisconsin
Wyo tops nation in work fatalities, Wyoming
Worker Memorial Day Honors Those Who Have Died on the Job


Other Countries

Worker safety drive launched, Australia
Workplace deaths a wake-up call: widow, Australia
A special tribute to people who have died or been injured in the workplace, Canada
Flags half-mast for fallen workers, Canada
Politics intrude on memorial services, Canada
Workers killed on job mourned, Canada
Amicus Urges Speedy Introduction of Corporate Killing Legislation ..., Germany
Britain remembers workplace deaths
TUC commemorates International Workers Memorial Day, Ghana
Unions mark Workers Memorial Day with calls for accountability, Great Britain
Memorial day for workplace dead, Great Britain
Best memorial for workers would be tough new laws on corporate killing, Great Britain
Plaque erected to honour local workforce, Hong Kong
Malta joins the world to mark Safety and Health at Work Day, Malta
Workplace deaths remembered in rally, New Zealand
Planting hope for workers' welfare, New Zealand
Basque trade unions organise acts separately on the World Day forSafety and Health at Work Spain
WTO protest over health and safety, Switzerland
With job related deaths topping 2 million annually, UN calls for preventive steps, United Nations

More on worldwide events at Hazards Magazine.

.

Labels: AFL-CIO

Worker Memorial Day, although given birth by the labor movement of this and other countries, has become such an institution that even the most virulently anti-labor administration in this nation's history recognizes it each year -- at least in press releases.

But no Worker Memorial Day would be complete without the traditional Confined Space commentary on OSHA's ever shrinking observance of this day.

Shrinking? Since WMD '03, OSHA's tradional press release has been getting smaller and small, dropping every year to just over half of the previous year's size.

This year's WMD press release was a paltry 226 words, packed into 5 short paragraphs (compared to 415 words last year and a whopping 749 words the year before).

This is my favorite paragraph from this year's release:

"The dedicated men and women of the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration pause to reflect on their mission and its meaning for the well-being of our Nation. Those who enforce workplace standards, together with those engaged in outreach and compliance assistance, and all of OSHA's myriad tasks, today renew their efforts to ensure that all American workers return safely each day to their homes and loved ones.

Yes, they are dedicated. I used to work with them. It's true. But for some reason, this year, the only ones that are apparently truly dedicated are those who "enforce workplace standards, together with those engaged in outreach and compliance assistance."

What about those who develop new standards? That used to be a big part of OSHA's job. Now it's not even mentioned (OK, maybe it's part of those other "myriad tasks.")

Am I being petty and vindictive? Maybe. But it's my blog. If you don't like it, go write your own.

.

As we remember workers who have died on the job, we need to think about more than their "bad luck." The International Labor Office, in its report "A Fair Globalization." emphasizes the interconnectedness of economic insecurity and poor working conditions around the globe, and argues that a minimum level of socio-economic security is essential to cope with the strains of globalization. Economically vulnerable workers have little power to advocate for improved working conditions and job safety.

Lest we think that this is a problem only in faraway countries, one need only read the weekly toll of fatal workplace accidents in the U.S. to see that immigrant workers, an especially vulnerable segment of the workforce, are disproportionately represented. Beyond these tragic workplace deaths lies a vast global toll of ill health connected with various forms of economic and job insecurity, not to mention workplace exposures to hazardous substances.

From an Op-Ed by Steve Hecker, associate professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center

Using health and safety issues in an bargaining campaign? There's an idea.

Workers at Angelica Textile Services are bringing health and safety issues to the front of their stuggle to force the company to bargain in good faith. The workers, represented by UNITE, held Workers Memorial Day rallies in Oakland, Los Angeles and Fresno, California:

Laundry workers at Angelica toil in filthy, unsanitary conditions where repetitive strain injuries are common, amputations occur, and linen quality is questionable. Workers face dangerous working conditions, including handling material which may carry HIV. Although workers are exposed to Hepatitis B, Angelica doesn’t always provide vaccinations. The multi-million dollar company, based in Chesterfield, Missouri, faces over $435,000 in possible fines from federal and state health and safety agencies.

Angelica is the leading health care linen service provider in the United States. The company has been cited in 17 different OSHA investigations and faces proposed penalties of nearly half a million dollars for not providing the safety training or protective equipment, even though they're exposed to linens soaked with blood and feces, that frequently contain used hypodermic needles and surgical instruments. Despite their exposure to materials that could transmit hepatitis B, the Angelica workers are not provided hepatitis B vaccinations.

A contract covering several Northern California shops expires on April 30th and Angelica workers throughout the the nation have threatened to strike on May 5if the company continues to break labor laws, jeopardize their health and safety and bargain in bad faith.

.

This is from an article from Dr. Michael Lax, Medical Director of the Central NY Occupational Health Clinical Center about the injured workers he sees who have gotten injured or become ill on the job:

One of the most striking things I have noted is how badly workers are treated from the time they are first injured or sick. Time after time, I see workers who have been injured treated like worn-out pieces of machinery, tossed onto the junk heap without a thought as to what they have contributed to the workplace or what they are still capable of contributing.

When they try and access workers' compensation benefits, they are fought every step of the way by the insurance carrier, delaying needed medical care and needlessly prolonging the injury or illness. They find that many physicians refuse to take workers' compensation or see patients with work-related maladies. Finally, when they look for other work, they face the discrimination of employers who don't want to hire someone with limitations, especially if those limitations are the result of a work-related health problem.

And throughout this often long process, the injured worker is forced to confront the accusation, sometimes subtly stated, sometimes blatantly expressed, that s/he is a faker, just trying to milk the system for some easy money.

As might be imagined, the injured worker who finds him or herself facing this situation is often devastated. It is no wonder that serious depression, anger, anxiety and frustration so often amplify the distress of the injury or illness and the difficulties of accessing medical care and benefits.

***

Fixing the system so that injured workers are treated with the dignity and support they deserve, and so that workplace injuries and illnesses are prevented, will require changing this basic problem. We should support an agenda for specific changes in workers' compensation, more vigorous preventive efforts and universal health coverage. But more fundamentally, worship of the bottom line needs to be replaced with the simple justice of requiring employers to take full financial responsibility for workers injured in their workplaces. If employers paid what they owe, efforts to prevent workplace injuries and illnesses would increase dramatically and the toll of these calamities on workers' lives would be diminished. This would be something to celebrate on future Workers Memorial Days.

On March 23, 2005, a huge explosion ripped through the giant BP Amoco refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 contract workers. Twelve of the workers were in an office trailer located in the middle of the blast zone. As with most workplace fatalities, illnesses and injuries, these deaths were preventable. While a full investigation won’t be completed for many months, it is clear that refinery officials were aware that the process was outdated and hazardous. Refinery officials and the contractor were also aware of the trailer’s hazardous location.

Today, April 28, is Workers Memorial Day. Across the country, workers and labor unions will pause to remember the 15 Texas City employees and the more than 5,500 other workers killed in workplace incidents over the past year. Between 50 and 60 thousand workers perished from work-related illnesses caused by toxic materials like asbestos close to five million suffered injuries and illnesses. The toll is enormous: according to Liberty Mutual, the nation’s largest workers’ compensation insurance company, the direct cost of occupational injury and illness is $1 billion per week, with indirect costs many times higher.

Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act 35 years ago to assure “every working man and woman in the nation safe and healthful working conditions.” Among the tools given to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were the authorization “to set mandatory occupational safety and health standards” and the ability to penalize those who break the laws. But instead of making progress in workplace safety over the past several years, the Bush administration has taken the country backwards.

In the workplace safety field, the Bush administration’s aim to make workplace safety issues less “confrontational” is transforming this country from a nation of laws to a nation of fact sheets and web pages.

One of the first actions of the Bush administration was to repeal an OSHA standard that addressed the biggest source of injury facing American workers -- ergonomic hazards. Year after year back, shoulder and wrist disorders make up one-third of all workplace injuries and illnesses. Instead of a standard that would have forced employers to address this workplace epidemic, OSHA substituted voluntary guidelines, along with a new innovation of the Bush administration: the Alliance – a voluntary information sharing partnership between industry associations and OSHA.

Setting up voluntary alliances as a replacement for mandatory standards has become a pattern for the agency and a means to accomplish the long-term goal of President Bush’s corporate supporters – making OSHA irrelevant.

For example, when the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, an independent government agency, recommended in 2002 that OSHA revise a standard to prevent explosions that have killed over 100 workers between 1980 and 2001, OSHA’s only response was a voluntary alliance with the chemical industry.

When a butter flavoring chemical destroyed the lungs of thirty workers at one popcorn plant in Missouri, OSHA formed an alliance with the Popcorn Council instead issuing an emergency standard. The alliance has yet to produce even a fact sheet. This is not an isolated example. OSHA regulates only around 600 out of the thousands of chemicals used in industry, and the vast majority of those standards are based on information more than 40 years old. The only chemical standard close to completion, however, is being done under a court order.

There is nothing wrong with promoting outreach and information sharing. In fact, government agencies should do more of it. But outreach should accompany enforcement, not replace it. Educating drivers about the dangers of drunk driving is important. But education should not replace strict laws that punish drivers found guilty of drunk driving.

OSHA’s penalty structure is another problem. Even when an employer knowingly puts a worker into a dangerous environment that causes his death, the maximum penalty, which OSHA rarely pursues, is 6 months in jail. The penalty for harassing a burro on federal land is one year in jail. In fact, killing fish and crabs draw larger penalties than killing workers. After a chemical tank at a Delaware Motiva refinery exploded in 2001, dissolving a worker in sulfuric acid, OSHA issued a $170,000 fine. But because the acid was released into the atmosphere and the nearby river where it killed thousands of fish and crabs, the Environmental Protection Agency levied a $10 million fine on the company.

Earlier this week, a Brooklyn contractor pleaded guilty to the death of a worker and to cheating workers out of the wages the contractor was supposed to be paying its employees. For killing one worker and injuring others, the employer potentially faces six months in jail, OSHA's maximum penalty. But for committing mail fraud while underpaying its workers (the building was under contract with the Postal Service), the employer faces a possible 20 year jail term.

The purpose of Workers Memorial Day is to “mourn for the dead and fight for the living.” Worthy goals indeed. But forgotten in this motto are the millions injured on the job every year, many of whom are (were) dedicated workers that have been tossed into the garbage by their employers and our country’s disintegrating workers compensation system. Like the families of those killed in the workplace, most of those injured are left to their own devices without anyone to put their plight into a political context, without anyone out there organizing them for change. Confined Space has fallen into the same trap – focusing on the dead (who are easier to find and count than the injured and ill, and who make far sexier stories) – and forgetting about the millions who have lost their livelihoods, lost the useful lives they once lived, and too often have lost their homes and means of support.

The political issues raging in this country – over court appointments, social security, terrorism and the war in Iraq – are important, but they tend to overshadow many of the concerns of the vast majority of people who are not politically engaged. But ask people if they think that workers injured on the job should suffer economically for the rest of their lives, ask people whether the jobs and chemicals should be considered safe until we manage to count the bodies or lungs of people who prove otherwise, ask people whether they think they have the power to make their workplaces safer or whether they think there is a role for laws and government enforcement – and you’ll probably get answers that don’t line up with those who are in power in Washington (or in most state capitals) today. The challenge is to organize them into a potent political force – not just in New York city and Boston, but in Wichita, Kansas, Houston Texas, Boise, Idaho and Atlanta, Georgia.

This is the challenge we face if we are ever again to move forward on workplace safety issues – in Republican or Democratic administrations. And we’re not going to be able to depend excusively on labor unions to get there. They’re too small, they’re too consumed with fighting for survival, and health and safety has not (yet) risen to the level where enough labor leaders see it as one way to build the labor movement. This doesn’t mean that we give up on labor; they’re still the most potent progressive force out there, but it does mean that we can’t depend on them exclusively. Some states have COSH groups, some have injured workers associations and some states have strong, active and aware unions. But they aren’t enough. Unless and until those concerned about workplace safety make strong common cause with other progressive groups – environmentalists, womens rights groups, progressive churches, immigrant organizations and others, ours will be a difficult and ultimately futile struggle.

The American people are ready to listen. A recent poll showed that out of a variety of issues that Americans think Congress should be involved in (endangered species, gun control, gay marriage, steroids in baseball, "Schiavo" type family health cases), "Rules in the workplace that deal with health and safety issues" came out on top.

And I believe you'd get similar answers if you asked a few more questions:

• Do you think that the health effects of chemicals should be understood and the chemicals regulated before or after workers get sick and die from being exposed on the job?
  
  
• Do you think that 6 months in jail is an appropriate punishment for an employer who knowingly violates the law, putting a worker into a job where he is killed?
  
  
• Do you think that OSHA standards that protect employees from exposure to dangerous chemicals should be based on the most recent scientific information, or information that was gathered forty years ago?
  
  
• Do you think that public employees who fix your roads, work in your sewage treatment plants, care for the mentally ill, put out our fires and guard our most dangerous criminals should have the same guarantee of a safe workplace that private sector employees doing the same work have?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Finally, with more than 50,000 workers dying each year from work-related accidents and illnesses, with millions suffering injuries, with workers in the U.S. now working more hours than workers in most of Western Europe and Japan more than one quarter of workers in the mining, manufacturing and wholesale trade industries working more than 40 hours per week, and with mounting evidence that these conditions cause elevated levels of psychological stress, increased exposure to physical hazards and more repetitive stress problems, as well as other serious health problems like heart attacks -- with all of these problems increasing in American workplaces, with the labor movement spiraling into oblivion, why are we, on this Workers Memorial Day, worrying about whether the AFL-CIO is going to abolish its health and safety department? Why can't we seem to understand that the conditions people work under are among the strongest issues on which to build a labor movement that actually shows that it cares about what people actually do at work -- between 9:00 and 5:00 or between 5:00 and 1:00, or between 1:00 and 9:00.

These are the thoughts I'm having this Workers Memorial Day -- and they aren't happy ones.

.

Labels: AFL-CIO

The AFL-CIO has released its 14th annual Death on the Job report (Introduction here. Full 154 page report here.) The report is a national and state-by-state profile of worker safety and health in the United States. This version takes a look at not just the past year, but the entire first term of the Bush administration. It contains every bit of data you’ll ever need to back up your health and safety arguments or conduct a media interview. Read it, download it, print it out and save it.

Here are some of the "highlights."

• According to the BLS, there were 5,559 workplace deaths due to traumatic injuries in 2003, a slight increase from the number of deaths in 2002, when 5,534 workplace deaths were reported.
  
  
• The construction sector had the largest number of fatal work injuries (1,126) in 2003, followed by transportation and warehousing (805) and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (707).
  
  
• The number of workplace homicides increased for the first time since 2000.
  
  
• In 2003, 4.4 million injuries and illnesses were reported in private-sector workplaces, a slight decrease from 4.7 million in 2002, as well as 585,300 injuries and illnesses among state and local employees in the 30 states and territories where these data are collected.
  
  
• Injuries and Illnesses are Underestimated: While government statistics show that occupational injury and illness are on the decline, numerous studies have shown that government counts of occupational injury and illness are underestimated by as much as 69 percent.
  
  
• Musculoskeletal disorders continue to account for one-third of all injuries and illnesses with days away from work The occupations that reported the highest number of MSDs involving days away from work in 2003 were nursing aides, orderlies and attendants. MSDs are underreported by the BLS by at least a factor of two.
  
  
• Immigrant Workers: Fatal injuries to Hispanic or Latino workers decreased for the second year in a row, although Hispanic workers continue to record the highest rate of fatal injuries among the racial/ethnic groups reported.
  
  Thirty percent of the fatal injuries to foreign-born workers were a result of transportation incidents and assaults and homicides accounted for nearly thirty percent. The construction industry accounted for 260 or one-third of all Hispanic worker fatalities.

Enforcement

• In FY 2005, there are at most 2,138 federal and state OSHA inspectors responsible for enforcing the law at approximately 8 million workplaces.
  
  
• In FY 2004, OSHA conducted 638 fewer health and safety inspections than in FY 2003. At its current staffing and inspection levels, it would take federal OSHA 108 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once.
  
  
• In fiscal year (FY) 2004, serious violations of the OSH Act carried an average penalty of only $873.
  
  
• The average number of hours spent per inspection decreased between FY 1999 and FY 2004, from 22 to 18.7 hours per safety inspection and from 40 to 35.6 hours per health inspection.
  
  
• The number of citations for willful violations decreased from 607 in FY 1999 to 446 in FY 2004.
  
  
• Criminal Prosecutions: Of the 170,000 workplace deaths since 1982, only 16 convictions involving jail time have resulted—although 1,242 cases involving work deaths were determined by OSHA to involve “willful” violations by employers (violations in which the employer knew that workers’ lives were being put at risk).
  
  
• Coverage: The current OSHA law still does not cover 8.5 million state and local government employees. Although these public employees encounter the same hazards as private-sector workers, in 26 states and the District of Columbia they are not provided with protection under the OSH Act.

Budget

Overall funding levels proposed for OSHA, MSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) are insufficient to maintain current program activities of these agencies.

• At OSHA, the President proposes to eliminate all funding for worker safety training programs at the same time seeking increases for employer assistance programs. Taking into account inflation, this year’s proposed budget freezes OSHA’s and MSHA’s enforcement programs.
  
  
  
• For FY 2006, the Bush administration has proposed a $286 million budget for NIOSH, similar to the level of funds appropriated for NIOSH in FY 2005 ($285.4 million), but adjusted for inflation represents a $5.1 million cut in real dollar terms.
  
  
• The administration’s FY 2006 MSHA budget proposes $280 million in funding for MSHA compared with $279.2 appropriated in FY 2005. Adjusting for inflation, the FY 2006 proposed MSHA budget represents a $4.9 million cut in real dollar terms

OSHA and MSHA Standards

The Bush administration is the only administration in history not to issue a major safety and health regulation during its four years in office.

• During its first term, in addition to repealing the ergonomics standard, the administration has withdrawn 24 pending OSHA regulatory actions from its regulatory agenda, leaving few major initiatives on the regulatory schedule.
  
  
• OSHA still has taken no action on the Employer Payment for Personal Protective Equipment standard, which has been through the rulemaking process and is ready for final action.
  
  
• The one major regulation on which OSHA is working, hexavalent chromium, is the result of a lawsuit brought against the agency by Public Citizen and PACE International Union.
  
  
• There are currently 4 economically significant regulations still on the regulatory agenda in addition to Hexavalent Chromium: Crystalline Silica (in the pre-rule stage); Confined Spaces in Construction (proposed rule stage); Beryllium (pre-rule stage) and Hearing Conservation for Construction Workers (long-term action with the next action undetermined). There is no commitment from OSHA to propose the rules that are in the pre-rule or long-term action stages.
  
  
• Seventeen MSHA standards for miners have been withdrawn since the President Bush took office, including the Air Quality, Chemical Substances and Respiratory standard.

Challenges

So what are the issues that we need to work on, according to the report?

• Hispanic and Foreign-Born Worker Fatalities and Injuries: Fatalities among Hispanic workers rose 48 percent from 1992 to 2003, while overall workplace fatalities went down by 11 percent.
  
  Hispanic men have the greatest overall relative risk of fatal occupational injury of any gender or race/ethnicity group. In 2000, Hispanic construction workers made up less than 16 percent of the construction workforce, but they suffered 23.5 percent of the fatalities. In 2000, Hispanic construction workers were nearly twice as likely to be killed by occupational injuries than their non-Hispanic counterparts.
  
  In February 2002, OSHA announced an initiative to address the increased safety and health risks of immigrant and Hispanic workers. But at the same time, the administration has proposed terminating funding for worker training and outreach programs, many of which are targeted to these high-risk workers.
  
  
• Ergonomics: Despite repealing the OSHA ergonomics standard four years ago, the administration’s major activities consist of just three final ergonomics guidelines—for the nursing home industry, retail grocery stores and poultry processing and a total of 17 general duty clause citations since January 2001.
  
  
• Congressman Charlie Norwood has introduced four pieces of legislation, "a grab bag of political favors for business -- that threaten worker safety." More here (pdf).
  
  
• OSHA has not aggressively addressed work-related issues stemming from 9/11 like biohazards, emergency response, security and surveillance of workers cleaning up the World Trade Center.
  
  
• Long hours of work and the way work is organized: The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports that hours worked annually in the United States have been steadily increasing over the past couple of decades. Workers in the U.S. now work more hours than workers in most of Western Europe and Japan. Evidence that long hours of work cause injuries and illnesses is growing.
  
  
• Workers’ health is also affected by such elements as the pace of work, number of people performing the job (staffing levels), hours and days on the job, amount and length of rest breaks, work load, layout of the work and skills of those workers on the job. Work organization changes, such as machine-paced work, inadequate work-rest cycles, time pressures, and repetitive work are associated with musculoskeletal disorders, increases in blood pressure and risks of cardiovascular mortality.
  
  Ten states have passed legislation placing limits on the amount of mandatory overtime nurses or health care workers can be forced to work and some states are passing legislation establishing nurse-to-patient hospital staffing ratios
  
  
• Behavior-based safety programs, incentive programs and injury discipline programs attempt to shift the responsibility for injuries and job safety to workers instead of focusing on workplace hazards and discourage workers from reporting injuries or unsafe working conditions.

Workers Compensation

• Because workers’ compensation insurers are denying claims and workers are failing to file them in the first place, workers, their families, businesses, federal and state governments together are paying anywhere from $7.6 billion to $23.1 billion each year for occupational diseases that should be covered by workers compensation insurance.

• Led by the American Insurance Association, and the Chamber of Commerce, businesses from Hawaii to Alaska to New Hampshire and Maryland continued to demand cuts in workers’ compensation coverage and benefits in 2004-2005. For the most part, they succeeded.
  
  
• Insurance companies were largely successful convincing state legislatures in 2004 and 2005 to enact more restrictions on medical care and disability benefits, limit attorneys and resist attempts to regulate rates
  
  
• Workers’ compensation laws need to be reformed to expand coverage and eligibility, to increase benefit levels and to permit workers their choice of physician. Insurance reform is sorely needed.

What is to be done?

According to the AFL-CIO,

The OSH Act needs to be strengthened to make it easier to issue safety and health standards and to make the penalties for violating the law tougher. Workers need to be given a real voice in the workplace and real rights to participate in safety and health as part of a comprehensive safety program to identify and correct hazards. Coverage should be extended to the millions of workers who fall outside the Act’s protection.

A standard is still needed to protect workers from ergonomic hazards and crippling repetitive strain injuries and back injuries, which continue to represent the most significant job safety problem in the nation. OSHA needs to keep up with new hazards that face workers as workplaces and the nature of work change. Hazardous conditions in the service sector and in retail trade need greater attention. OSHA and MSHA need additional funding to develop and enforce standards and to expand worker safety and health training. Similarly, additional funds are needed for NIOSH to support enhanced research on safety and health problems.

.

Labels: AFL-CIO, Charlie Norwood

The Senate Judiciary Committe held a hearing yesterday on the asbestos compensation bill, S. 852, co-sponsored by Senator's Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Pat Leahy (D-VT).

AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario summed up the labor federation's main issues.

Over the past three years, as we have worked on this legislation, we have listened to the concerns and proposals put forward by business and insurers, and have attempted to be responsive. In the interest of reaching agreement on legislation we have compromised on our initial position that all claimants deserve a monetary award. We have accepted a much lower level of overall funding for the program than we think will be actually required to meet anticipated claims. And, while we have pushed for full transparency on the funding mechanisms and participant contributions, we have not made such disclosures a condition of our endorsement.

But on the fundamental issue of ensuring that the legislation will create a system that will, in fact, deal with victims fairly and pay timely compensation to those who are sick from asbestos disease, we can accept no compromise that does not achieve this basic objective. It is not in victims’ interests to trade one flawed system for another that has serious identifiable problems and deficiencies and threatens to leave many individuals worse off. These serious problems include the exclusion of thousands of asbestos-related lung cancer claims, leaving most victims with no remedy during the start-up period, the inclusion of restrictions preventing individuals with both asbestos and silica disease from obtaining access to the courts or fair compensation from the fund, unworkable statute of limitations provisions that could bar tens of thousands of worthy claims, and program sunset provisions that could leave claimants in limbo should the fund run out of money.

The main issue is 25,000 - 30,000 people would be left out of the fund. This group was extensively exposed to asbestos, have lung cancer with no obvious signs of underlying asbestos disease, but who also smoked.

The AFL-CIO is also supporting the ability of terminally ill and seriously disabled victims to continue to use the courts until the fund is functioning.

The insurance industry is opposing the bill because of "leakage" -- the ability of terminally ill and other disabled asbestos victims to continue to use courts until the fund becomes operational and after it runs out of money.

Despite the strong opposition of the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers continue to support the bill. Although the UAW recognizes some of the bill's flaws, UAW Legislative Director Alan Reuther explained that "The UAW firmly believes that the no-fault asbestos compensation system established under the Specter-Leahy bill would be vastly preferable to the current tort system."

In addition,

As a result of the mass of law suits filed against companies that produced or used products containing asbestos, a number of auto parts companies have been forced into bankruptcy. In addition, rising claims against major auto manufacturers threaten to expose them to significant liabilities in the future, posing a major threat to their long-term economic health and the jobs and benefits of hundreds of thousands of active and retired UAW members.

***

The system established under the Specter-Leahy bill would ensure that the costs of compensating victims of asbestos-related diseases are spread broadly across defendant companies and insurers in a rational, predictable manner. This will help to reduce business bankruptcies, thereby protecting the jobs and benefits of hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees.

The committee is expected to vote on the bill tomorrow. If it passes, it will be sent to the Senate floor. No bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives yet, and it is not clear whether they would pass the same bill.

Meanwhile, the The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) met with Senator Specter yesterda in Washington to demonstrate their opposition to the bill. ADAO Co-Founder and Executive Director Linda Reinstein outlined their opposition to the bill: the elimination of a person's basic right to have their grievances heard in court, vast under-funding, unwarranted ineligibility and exclusion of claims, faulty medical criteria, burdensome claims processes, insufficient up front funding, lack of equitable transition for current cases, under funding for research into potential treatments and a cure, lack of proper definition for financial awards and too much power in the hands of the Administrator.

According to Reinstein,

"The bottom line is that Senate Bill 852 was written without the voice of the victims. At the same time, it protects the asbestos industry and cuts its liability at every turn...I believe the victims' organizations gathered here today - and the thousands of victims we represent across the country - would support an asbestos resolution bill -- if it was fair and equitable. There are solutions to this problem. But, they are not represented in this bill. Ladies and gentleman, asbestos companies are not victims. Congress should only pass legislation that properly protects and supports those who are."

Labels: Asbestos

One of the most interesting -- and often upsetting -- parts about representing health care and social service workers was listening to stories about their working conditions -- conditions that few people are aware of and that fewer people would ever want to do, especially for the low wages.

This is what workers endure at the Latham Centers in Brewster, MA which specializes in children and adults with emotional and behavioral problems.

• A resident threw a flower pot at a counselor. The counselor who was injured during the flower pot attack could not seek medical help because she was the only employee present
  
  
• A week after the flower pot attack, after the union's request for additional staffing was denied, the same client bit the counselor eight times on the arms. The counselor now has nerve damage in one arm and will soon undergo surgery.
  
  
• Last October, a counselor suffered three broken ribs after trying to restrain a violent resident. There were two counselors on duty at the time watching three residents.
  
  
• A few months later, a resident tried to choke a staffer who was driving an agency van. In January, a resident threw feces and blood at a counselor.
  
  
• Last weekend, a resident assaulted a counselor as he tried to restrain her. The counselor, who was working alone, had to ask another client to call a different residence for help. But the residence did not have enough staff, so the counselor asked the client to dial 911. When the Yarmouthport police arrived, the resident attacked an officer and was later charged with assault and battery.

The union representing the workers has been negotiating with management for their first contract since November 2003.

The union, of course, is making outrageous demands. They want two staff members working together on all shifts and annual cost-of-living increases. The workers currently make $12 anhour, which comes to a princely $24,000 a year. Approximately 40 percent of staff at the centers has turned over in the last 18 months.

Executive director Anne McManus says the workers are a bunch of lying greedheads:

McManus questioned whether the six incidents of assault actually occurred and said Latham Centers adheres by state regulations.

McManus said that the centers do not lack adequate staff and that the unions are focusing on the assaults because of the contentious contract negotiations. "This is just a response to the union's anxiety over getting a contract signed very quickly," she said.

This brings a number of questions to my mind:

Are people like McManus born that way, or do they have to go to school to become mean and malicious? Are they truly ignorant or just cruel?

And finally, how can anyone read an article like this or talk to these workers and still believe that unions have outlived their usefulness?

.

Labels: Behavioral Safety

Nathan Newman has ranted and raved quite articulately about the extensive new paperwork requirements that the Bush administration has imposed on labor unions in retaliation for their support of Democratic candidates. Not only that the sheer detail is clearly punitive, but that labor corruption uncovered recently by federal prosecutors, while shameful, is insignificant in comparison to the huge scale of recent corporate scandals.

Can you imagine what would be said if liberals were demanding similar disclosure from every corporation? Actually, we already know since they are already whining about the Sarbanes-Oxley bill passed in the wake of the Enron-WorldCom scandals, and the disclosure to the public required for those forms are far less extensive.

Even as the Bush administration fails to fund inspectors to enforce the minimum wage or workplace safety, it's diverting money to audit unions-- clear political revenge against its perceived enemies. It has no evidence of any pervasive problems in union finances, but it's manufacturing a supposed crisis to justify its political attack.

Dan Haar at the Hartford Currant makes a similar point:

[Secretary of Labor, Elaine] Chao, like others in the Bush administration, has an annoying habit of couching anti-worker rules as pro-worker measures. This confusing and unwarranted mess of data is, the department insists, a way of letting union members know where their money is going.

Don't believe it, coming from an administration that has replaced rules with voluntary compliance for businesses, adopted few, if any workplace safety rules and slashed budgets for such items as worker safety training.

As one union leader put it, aptly, "If for-profit corporations had to have the same level of disclosure, there would be a general meltdown on Wall Street."

So what exactly does Wall St. think about all of this? Well, if one is to believe that the Wall St. Journal (subcription required) speaks for Wall St., all these rules have very little to do with uncovering corruption and everything to do with undermining unions:

Talk about eye-openers. Consider a LM-2 filed by a California local of the Communication Workers of America. While the union's spending is fairly routine, its dues base certainly isn't; 47% of its members are "agency fee payers." In plain English, these are members who, exercising their right under the Supreme Court's 1988 Beck decision, have withheld any dues that go to political or non-bargaining-related activity.

This suggests either that the members disagree with their leaders' agenda, or resent their forced enrollment in the union in the first place. It is especially notable because a vote of only 50% of a union's participants can oust the current leadership, or more drastically decertify the union altogether. Evidence of such disgruntlement in the ranks is exactly the sort of information that union chiefs would prefer to keep quiet.

Well, at least they're being honest.

.

Some excerpts from a Workers Memorial Day column by Canadian Autoworkers President Buzz Hargrove:

New chemicals are introduced into workplaces every day without adequate testing to prove they will not cause harm to workers. For centuries, workers have been the guinea pigs of health hazards. Toxic substances, which are concentrated in workplaces, find their way in greatly reduced concentrations to the environment where they may harm others.

We now know there are 25 carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) that cause lung cancer, the most common cancer among men and women in Canada. Twenty four of these carcinogens were discovered by counting excess deaths among workers. The only exception is cigarette smoke, but it too causes deaths among workers who are exposed at work.

What is to be done? Among Hargrove's suggestions:

• We can forbid use in the workplace of substances we know are harmful. We've begun to do that with cigarette smoke and we can do it for so many other substances. The Canadian Auto Workers has bargained a prohibition on the use of a number of carcinogens in our collective agreements with General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler. These prohibitions should be written into law.
  
  
• We can use the precautionary principle for new hazards. This principle states: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. It is wrong to wait for a body count of workers before we take action.
  
  
• We can use the ALARA principle (as low as reasonably achievable) to reduce workers' exposure to harmful substances.
  
  
• We can support workers who have the courage to stand up to employers by refusing to work with substances they know will harm their health and by insisting on the control of these substances or their replacement by safer substitutes.

.

Clifton Patterson of Benton, Mississippi was fatally shot at work last week in by a co-worker during a dispute over missing mechanic's tools.

Following the shooting, an article entitled "Workplace shootings in Mississippi" appeared in the Jackson Clarion Ledger. The article describes the killings of a dozen workers over the past 19 years. That's not bad, I thought. Only 12 workers shot in almost 20 years? But reading closer, I realized that these were all workers killed by co-workers who had "gone postal." But what about all of the workers shot to death in convenience store robberies? Don't they count as "workplace shootings?" What about law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, like Thomas Catchings, a 41-year-old Jackson motorcycle patrol officer who was killed last week in a gun battle. Wasn't he a worker?

Actually, so-called "worker-on-worker" or "internecine" violence amounts to no more than about 7% of all workplace violence, even though it receives most of the press. In fact, violence, mostly from retail robberies, is the leading cause of death among immigrant workers. But all of those workers who get shot in convenience or police officers who chose dangerous work somehow aren't as sexy as workers who "go postal."

Related Stories

Immigrants & Teens: Frontline Soldiers in the War Against Retail Crime?, July 28, 2004
Workplace Violence: Fashionable vs. Unfashionable, January 18, 2004

.

Labels: Workplace Violence

On April 23, 2004, an explosion ripped through Formosa Plastics Corp, killing 5 workers. OSHA has fined the company $300,000 and a report from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is expected this Fall.

ILLIOPOLIS - On the face of it, Bradford Bradshaw would be about the last person you'd expect to be rooting for a new chemical plant in Illiopolis.

On Saturday night, he attended an emotional candlelight service honoring the memory of his five co-workers who died after the Formosa Plastics Corp. plant was hit by a fiery explosion a year ago at 10:40 p.m. April 23.

Bradshaw escaped having his name added to the list of the dead by the merest fraction: burned over 60 percent of his body with his right eye destroyed, he went into kidney and congestive heart failure and was in a coma for 6½ weeks. His wife, Donna, said afterward that his face looked "like a marshmallow after you leave it in the fire too long."

And yet, reflecting back on the 12 months that now separate him from the disaster, Bradshaw, 48, thinks the greater good would be served by having those dozens of well-paying jobs back. He recalls co-workers, many related to each other and who had worked out there all of their lives, and says chemical plant paychecks sustained a lot of families.

"If it's rebuilt and run correctly and safely, then I don't have a problem with it, and I think a lot of people wouldn't have a problem with it," said Bradshaw. "For the sake of the economy and jobs, it would be good to rebuild."

Labels: Chemical Safety Board

WORKER KILLED AFTER FALLING 50 FEET OFF SILO

St. Lucie County, FL -- A construction worker fell 50 feet to his death Wednesday afternoon after slipping off the top of a concrete silo at the Tarmac America concrete plant along Selvitz Road, the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office said Thursday. Scott Rehm, 43, of Massillon, Ohio, died instantly. He worked for Ohio-based Mast-Lepley Storage Structures as a concrete finisher, according to a sheriff's office report. An autopsy has been scheduled, and the sheriff's office continues to investigate. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is also looking into Rehm's death.


2 die in I-95 construction zone crash

ORMOND BEACH, FL -- The driver of a tractor-trailer is blamed for a crash that killed two day laborers early Friday, when the construction trailer they were riding in was mowed down in a work zone on Interstate 95, authorities said. Richard Wilkes, 45, of Holly Hill and a 26-year-old Deltona man whose name was withheld pending notification of next-of-kin, were placing traffic barrels in a construction zone around 12:20 a.m. near State Road 40. The men were working on a six-lane widening project between State Road 40 and the Flagler County line. More here.


Missing cab driver found dead in Hall County

GAINESVILLE, Ga.-A missing taxicab driver has been found dead, lying in a wooded area about 10 miles from his abandoned cab. Jose Roberto Gomez-Javier, 37, was discovered by a passer-by Thursday night. His wife reported him missing the previous Monday. An autopsy confirmed the driver for El Mexicano Taxi service in Gwinnett had been shot, although authorities have not said where the wound was. More here.


Ponchatoula strawberry farmer killed by freight train

Ponchatoula , Alabama- A 64-year-old strawberry farmer was killed when she was struck by a freight train traveling through this town on Saturday afternoon, Ponchatoula police said. Scottie Kupper was a longtime strawberry farmer and frequently sold her strawberries along tracks where vendors line up to sell their vegetables, fruits and goods, Sgt. Chad Miller said.


Woman killed in crane accident at the Port of Miami

A Port of Miami employee died just after midnight Thursday morning after she was run over by a crane, Miami-Dade Police said.

The woman, identified 50-year-old Audrey McCollum, was on break at pier No. 164 at 1306 Port Blvd. when a crane ran over her at about 12:01 a.m., police said.

Construction worker dies in fatal fall

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. A north Alabama construction worker was killed yesterday afternoon when he fell three-stories to his death. It happened about 1:45 p-m at a new apartment/condominium development off University Drive.

The worker, 44-year-old Carlos Lopez of Madison, was pronounced dead at the scene.


Officer dies on way to accident scene

BELMONT, N.C. – The Belmont police force is in mourning Sunday for a fellow officer who died on the job. Capt. Byron Carpenter collapsed behind the wheel of his cruiser Saturday while rushing to an accident, one that claimed the life of a 13-year-old.


Man falls to his death at industrial park

AMBRIDGE, PA - A man died around 1:15 p.m. Monday after falling about 60 feet through the roof of the WorldClass Processing Corp. plant in the Port Ambridge Industrial Park, Police Chief David Sabol said. Beaver County Deputy Coroner Bill Pasquale said the Honduras native, Saul F. Martinez, 27, of North Carolina, who was working with a subcontractor's crew replacing the plant's roof, died almost instantly after the fall. Pasquale said the coroner's office didn't have an official cause of death Monday evening because an autopsy was not complete.


Worker Killed on Interchange Project

Burke, VA -- A 35-year-old iron worker on the Virginia Department of Transportation's Springfield Interchange Project was killed in an accident on site on Saturday, April 9.

According to project manager Larry Cloyed, Darren Havermale of West Virginia, a foreman with Williams Steel, the steel contractor for the seven-phase, seven-year project, was killed while working overnight in a man-lift installing large beams to form part of a bridge connecting I-395 South to I-the Outer Loop of 495 East.

Cloyed said both VDOT and the Department of Labor are still conducting investigations into the particulars of the accident, but details reveal that Havermale was working in the lift, 70 feet in the air, in proximity to a steel beam when his head became "pinched" between the man-lift cage and the beam.


Pensacola Construction Worker Killed in Partial House Collapse

PENSACOLA, FL (AP) -- Workers for Ambercombie Construction say they were trying to elevate a house in Pensacola when a construction worker died. They say the side of a house collapsed and pinned him under it.

An Escambia County emergency management spokeswoman says that's when the house either shifted or its center beam collapsed. The spokesperson says 22-year-old James Peter Griffith of Pensacola died, and another worker suffered a leg injury.


Worker dies in elevator shaft plunge

Boston, MA -- A 35-year-old elevator repairman plunged to his death last night when he fell down an elevator shaft in a Beacon Street office building. The man was working inside One Beacon Street yesterday at 8:40 p.m. when he fell 20 feet from the ground floor to the basement and suffered head injuries, said Scott Salman, spokesman for the Boston Fire Department. Salman said the man was repairing the elevator, but it's unclear what caused the fall. Ladders were left in the area, he said. Boston police and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are investigating.


Worker dies of explosion injuries

Louisville, KY -- An employee of Transformer Decommissioning LLC, a transformer recycling company located at Marble Hill, died Saturday after an empty transformer he was working on exploded Friday.

Rodney Dwayne “Rod” Skirvin, 40, of 219 W. Skyline Drive, was taken by Stat-Flight to the University of Louisville Hospital. He died Saturday due to massive brain damage, his wife, Donna Skirvin, said today.

Rob Van Vliet, president of Transformer Decommissioning LLC, said it is not known what caused the transformer to explode, but the company is investigating. “It was an accident, plain and simple,” he said.


Store clerk shot to death in Gaffney

Gaffney, GA -- The clerk at a gasoline station here was found shot to death in a restroom and police said her boyfriend turned himself in to sheriff's deputies in Georgia.

A co-worker found the body of Pamela Ownby, 43, of Gaffney about 6:10 a.m. Tuesday, Police Chief John O'Donald said. Ownby had opened the store at 5:30 a.m.

It appeared she was shot several times while moving some merchandise that had been stored in the restroom, O'Donald said.

Mark Pearson, the victim's boyfriend, turned himself in to sheriff's deputies in Franklin County, Ga., shortly before noon Tuesday, O'Donald said.


1 worker dead, 1 hurt in Kearny

KEARNY, NJ - One man was killed and another injured yesterday after the pair fell about 20 feet from a manlift while fighting a transformer fire, authorities said. Roldan Lauro, 37, of Pacific Street in Newark, was pronounced dead at University Hospital in Newark yesterday, police said. Carlos Fonseca, 32, of Windsor Street in Kearny, was listed in fair condition at the hospital yesterday, a hospital spokesman said.


Employee dies at Dan River facility

DANVILLE, Va. - Dan River officials say a long-time employee died today when a forklift she was operating flipped over. Human Resources Vice President Calvin Barnhardt says 58-year-old Joanne Deshazor had worked at the Martha Lane distribution center since 1967. It happened around 11:30 this morning. Danville Police Lieutenant Scott Eanes says the lift bar on the machine was up, and that as Deshazor drove down an aisle, the bar struck an overhead shelf. That caused the forklift to overturn. Police say she likely died instantly. The company is cooperating with an Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation.



Deputy killed during late-night standoff

Wichita, KS -- Ron Potter said he knew there was trouble brewing Saturday across the street in Newton when he saw the six patrol cars. About 3 a.m., all hell suddenly broke loose.

"I heard about a half-dozen, maybe nine shots," Potter said. "Pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow -- it was just that quick."

Hours later, Potter and the rest of Newton learned that those gunshots had killed Harvey County sheriff's Deputy Kurt Ford, 38. They left Hesston police Detective Chris Eilert, 33, critically injured.

Investigators said the officers were shot when they tried to force their way into a house where they could hear a man beating a woman.

The shooting marked the second time this year that a Kansas law enforcement officer was killed in the line of duty. Greenwood County Sheriff Matt Samuels, 42, was shot to death in January while serving a search warrant.

Road flagman killed in hit-run

Denver, CO - A construction flagman died early Friday morning after being struck by a vehicle near Porter Adventist Hospital.

The victim's identity and his employer were not released Friday.

According to Denver police, a witness saw a pickup crash through road barricades on South Downing Street and Vassar Avenue and strike the flagman.


Weekly Tolls Since Workers Memorial Day 2004

April 10, 2005
March 27, 2005
March 13, 2005
February 27, 2005
February 13, 2005
January 30, 2005
January 16, 2005
January 2, 2005
December 19, 2004
December 5, 2004
November 22,2004
October 25, 2004
October 12, 2004
September 28, 2004
September 13, 2004
August 13, 2004
August 1, 2004
July 18, 2004
July 7, 2004
June 20, 2004
June 5, 2004
May 23, 2004
May 9, 2004

Labels: taxi drivers, Weekly Toll

A journalist who grew up amidst the refineries on the Gulf Coast:

In the wake of the explosion, after the sirens and helicopters and chaos, each resident would know someone killed, or someone who did, as well as survivors who lost legs, or eyesight, or were burned in the fire — human beings whose lives were now irreparably changed.

And in the local cafes and taverns, there would be discussions about how the disaster occurred after a maintenance "turnaround" performed by a nonunion contractor offering the lowest, cost-saving bid. There would be hushed conversations about the lack of safety in the refinery — about corners cut, rules routinely broken, poorly trained contract workers — and the inevitable cover-up from federal regulators in bed with the industry.

And there would be some truth in what was being said, of course, although all concerned would be circumspect in saying so too loud, or too publicly. After all, as a condition of employment, company workers have sign a document bidding them to talk to the media. Their jobs are at stake. Why forfeit one's livelihood for a cause — strict but "costly" enforcement of industrial safety standards— that corporate and government officials loudly embrace but habitually rationalize away?

Because it does come down to that, in the end: jobs. The jobs of the refinery workers, the jobs of the corporate executives, the jobs of the regulators, the job of every American who works for an employer where "affordable" energy prices mean economic success or failure in this "new global marketplace."

So I was not surprised to learn that the BP refinery in Texas City has a history of safety violations. Nor was I surprised to learn that federal regulators in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have assessed large fines in the past, then quietly dropped or reduced them later. That's how the game is played.


***

And down in Texas City, and all along the Gulf Coast where the giant cauldrons cook oil for the nation, residents are returning to an uneasy truce with their economic sustenance. Many are recollecting the good old days "before Reagan" when trained union workers operated the refineries and chemical plants, when union craftsmen maintained them. Some are consulting lawyers.

As for me — far away on the banks of the Vltava River in this Central European city —I am remembering the gas flares of my youth, the acrid air, the rainbow-colored water. I am curious if it's still there. I am wondering if anything changes.

Labels: BP

The AFL-CIO has announced that it is opposing the Specter Asbestos Compensation Bill. The labor federation had originally offered support for a draft of the bill if certain changes were made.

But,

After reviewing an earlier draft of the Specter bill, the AFL-CIO pointed out numerous provisions that would unfairly deny compensation to victims or result in unnecessary obstacles or delays in the processing of many types of asbestos claims. For example, the AFL-CIO strongly opposed the elimination of coverage for 40,000 asbestos-related lung cancers (the so-called level VIIs) without permitting these individuals to document asbestos exposure through CT scans. Although changes were made to permit use of CT scans for one category of claims, the bill as introduced still would result in denial of compensation to an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 victims of asbestos-related lung cancer, even though many would qualify if permitted to use appropriate diagnostic technology.

Similarly, S. 852 would prevent 60,000 to 80,000 individuals with varying degrees of illness from access to any forum for as long as two years in the event that the trust fund is not operational. The bill also includes provisions establishing medical criteria for lawsuits by individuals who have both asbestos-related disease and silica-related disease that will bar many of them from seeking redress in the courts for their silica-related injury, while at the same time limiting their compensation from the asbestos fund to $25,000.

As drafted, the bill fails to establish clear and workable criteria to trigger the statute of limitations for bringing claims for specific disease levels, particularly for victims of non-malignant diseases that get progressively worse. It is also unclear what circumstances will trigger the sunset of the Fund, which claims will be allowed to go forward in court if the Fund sunsets, and what statutes of limitation will apply. The victims of asbestos disease deserve to have these issues clearly and squarely addressed. We cannot support legislation that leaves such critically important questions to be resolved through litigation in the courts, which may further delay justice for thousands of asbestos victims.

Labels: AFL-CIO, Asbestos

Recognizing the very real pain that ergonomic disorders cause, there is still something deliciously ironic about this:

Sandy Boyd's BlackBerry had become her passion. Now it has also become a source of pain.

About three months ago, the National Association of Manufacturers vice president noticed that, as she started to type, the area between her thumb and wrist would begin to throb.

Orthopedists say they are seeing an increasing number of patients with similar symptoms, a condition known as "overuse syndrome" or "BlackBerry thumb." In some patients, the disability has become severe.

For those of you just tuning in, the National Association of Manufacturers was one of the leaders in the campaign to stop OSHA from issuing an ergnomics standard, to repeal the standard in March 2001 after it was issued, and is leading the current effort to force OSHA to withdraw voluntary guidelines issued over the past three years because of the lack of "hard, verifiable scientific evidence."

NAM questions not only whether there is enough science behind ergonomics, but also whether musculoskeletal injuries like tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome are even real "injuries" or just (probably imaginary) undefinable pain, and whether MSDs are caused by work or perhaps extracurricular activities (been staying up late playing your kids' video games, Ms Boyd, or perhaps sneaking out for midnite bowling?).

As the musculoskeletal disorders spread from the meatpacking floor, nursing home and cubicle to the corporate and goverment suites of the nation's powerbrokers, one wonders what effect an epidemic of "BlackBerry Thumb" will have on the how the power elite views ergonomics.

Finally, in all seriousness, as millions of American workers can testify, these injuries are serious, painful and nothing to laugh about. Ms. Boyd, all of us here at Confined Space wish you a speedy recovery.

.

Labels: Ergonomics

I rant and rave a lot in this blog about the need for increased penalties for employers and corporations that cause the death of a worker. Ranting and raving feels good, but it doesn't get much done. Organizing does:

A national coalition of workplace safety advocates has launched a campaign for increased criminal prosecution of corporations responsible for workplace deaths.

The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health has launched a "stop the corporate killers" campaign.

The campaign will seek to pressure local prosecutors to bring criminal homicide prosecutions against corporations that flagrantly and consistently violate safety and health laws and whose actions result in worker deaths.

The campaign will also seek passage of tougher new criminal penalties at the federal level.

The council is a federation of 22 non-profit organizations around the United States that advocates for worker safety and health.

Roger Cook, director of the western New York Council on Occupational Safety and Health, is leading the campaign for a criminal crackdown.


Cook said that campaign was sent into overdrive last month when 15 workers were incinerated, and more than 70 injured, following an explosion at BP's sprawling refinery in Texas City, Texas.

After years of meetings, negotiations and false starts, Senator Arlen Specter has finally introduced an asbestos compensation bill. The bill calls for a $140 billion asbestos compensation fund. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy (VT) is one of the co-sponsors, but many Republicans announced opposition to the bill.

Judging from the critics and supporters, there still may be a long way to go:

• The AFL-CIO has called for changes in the bill while the United Auto Workers backs it. According to an AFL-CIO press release,

  The draft proposal includes some important improvements such as increases in award levels for some disease categories and a bar against any liens on workers compensation awards. At the same time, however, the draft has a number of serious deficiencies that must be corrected. These include the elimination of compensation for a large group of lung cancer victims, without allowing these individuals to document asbestos exposure through CT scans, and the absence of remedies for victims during the startup period before the Fund is able to pay claims. In addition, there are a set of issues, such as the statute of limitations, preemption and the treatment of claims if the Fund sunsets, that will determine whether the compensation system works as intended for deserving claimants.

• Insurers, who would have to pay $46 billion to the fund,

  complained the draft would let some asbestos injury claims leak back to the courts instead of being paid by the fund. It also criticized a provision that would prohibit liens on workers' compensation awards to asbestos victims who are also compensated by the fund.

• Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate minority whip, says the $1.1 million award for victims of mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos, is too low. Sen. Durbin also dislikes a provision limiting plaintiffs' attorneys fees to 5% of awards to victims.
  
  
• Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn said he could not support the proposal as written, and Republicans were divided over it.
  
  
• Trial lawyers, who are big contributors to the Democratic party, oppose the bill.
  
  
• The "Asbestos Study Group" whose members include General Electric Co., General Motors, Honeywell International Inc. and Viacom Inc. has come out in support of the plan.



• The bill is strongly opposed by the Advisory Board of the Mt. Sinai - Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. An article summarizing their position can be found on the NYCOSH website here.

The bill creates a trust fund to pay the victims of asbestos. Workers would no longer be able to sue companies for asbestos disease. Former asbestos companies (or their successors), as well as insurance companies would pay into the fund. The bill has been slowed by debates over how large the fund should be, what medical criteria should be used to determine who is eligible, whether workers should be able to go back to court if the fund runs dry, what to do about workers who smoked and were exposed to asbestos, workers who were exposed to asbestos and silica, and numerous other issues, many of which are still outstanding.

NYCOSH has posted the bill here.

More on the pros and cons of the debate later.

Related Articles

• Asbestos Bankruptcy: Not As Bad As It Seems?, April 07, 2005
• Asbestos: Cruel, Deadly and Uncompensated, February 19, 2005
• They Were Killing Us, They Were Killing Our Wives and Children. February 12, 2005
• W.R. Grace Goes To Jail: "Why not all the others?". February 10, 2005
• Asbestos Compensation Hearing Today, January 11, 2005
• Asbestos "Compensation" -- Return of the Living Dead, January 10, 2005
• Asbestos Compensation Bill Crashes, Burns, May 10, 2004
• Senate Blocks Asbestos Comp Bill, April 22, 2004
• Companies Stand To Save Billions On Asbestos Victims Bill, February 4, 2004
• Asbestos Comp: Who Benefits?, July 30, 2003
• Hatch Expected to Introduce Industry's Asbestos Compensation Bill; Stocks Drop, May 22, 2003
  
  .

Labels: AFL-CIO, Asbestos

I'm not sure what to make of this. Any conspiracy theorists out there?

At the beginning of March I reported on how the crimes of asbestos polluter W.R. Grace had spread far from Libby, Montana, all the way to (among many other places), Hamilton, New Jersey. Grace had an attic insulation plant there that contaminated the area with asbestos. The company claimed to have cleaned up the site in the mid-1990's, but an EPA investigation in 2000 and 2001 showed concentrations of asbestos as high as 40 percent in some surface soils on the property. Over 9,000 tons of contaminated soil had to be removed from the site, which had since been purchased by Accurate Document Destruction Inc.

Then last week, New Jersey state lawmakers announced an inquiry into Grace's contamination of the site. Hearings were planned for May 5. Last month, the NJ Department of Health and Senior Services reported that "that neighboring businesses and residents and employees of the building's current occupant, Accurate Document Destruction Inc., may have been exposed. "

Yesterday, the former Grace building, now housing Accurate Document Destruction, Inc., burned to the ground.

.

Labels: Asbestos

It's baseball season and the teams have taken the field. Tyson Foods isn't exactly a baseball team, but it does have "team members" (known more commonly as employees) -- about 114,000 of them -- who work at Tysons' 300 facilities and offices in the United States and around the world.

One of Tyson's team members was 35-year-old Luis Donaldo Diaz-Roblero. Diaz-Roblero came over from Guatamala to play on Tyson's Temperanceville, Virginia team. He had limited English skills, but was perfectly able to follow the orders of his coach. Last October 2, the coach told Diaz-Roblero that he needed him to sacrifice for the team. Even though the area was designated "off limits," the coach told his player to take a plastic shovel out scoop out chickenwaste and other debris that floated on top the water in a collection pit. The problem with these pits full of animal wastes is that they rot, eating up the oxygen and producing toxic gases like methane and hydrogen sulfide. They're called "confined spaces" and are strictly regulated by OSHA. No one is supposed to enter a confined space without a permit certifying that the air is breatheable, someone is observing and there is a means to rescue the worker(s) if something goes wrong.

But the coach wasn't going to follow any of those unfair, business killing OSHA regulations. Diaz-Roblero fell 7 feet to his death in the waste pit. It's unclear whether he slipped or passed out form the fumes. The umpire, in this case Virginia OSHA, determined that this was an illegal play, and that the coaching team knew ahead of time that it was an illegal play, called it a "willful" violation and imposed the maximum penalty on the company - $70,000.

Maybe they think they shouldn't have to pay the penalty because Fortune magazine named them "America's Most Admired Company in Food Production," the second time they've won the award for attributes "such as innovation, employee talent, financial soundness, quality of management, use of corporate assets, social responsibility, long-term investment, and quality of products/services." Nothing there about safety, although you can read about Tyson's safety program here.

But hey, accidents happen. Anyone can have an off day every once in a while and accidentally send someone to his death. But as I always tell my kids, when you make a mistake, admit it, apologize and pay the penalty.

Tyson apparently never learned that lesson. They're challenging the citation. $70,000 must be a lot of money for the number 72 company on the Fortune 500 list with $72.4 billion in sales last year. Or maybe they're just afraid admitting to a willful violation will hurt morale on the "team." Or maybe they fear that a willful citation will hurt their chances of winning the award for "America's Most Admired Company in Food Production" a third time.

According to their "core values" Tyson strives to be "honorable people," a "faith-friendly company" and to "to honor God and be respectful of each other, our customers, and other stakeholders."

I'm sure all that will make it easier for Diaz-Roblero to slide into home and enter those pearly gates. His wife and five-month old son should be pleased.

More here.
.

Workers are not allowed to sue their employers. That right was given up in the early part of 20th century in return for workers compensation -- a no-fault guarantee of some portion of lost wages and medical benefits. Before that, a worker's only remedy was to sue the employer. Sometimes that resulted in big awards, often it resulted in nothing.

Workers comp is called the "exclusive remedy" of workers injured or made sick on the job. Of course things haven't turned out quite so well. Workers comp almost never fully compensates workers for the injuries they suffer and does a particularly poor job when it comes to compensating workers for occupational diseases acquired on the job.

So the question naturally arises, "Is there any way to get around workers comp and sue my employer?"

The answer is "sometimes" in some states, often depending on the court's decision in individual cases. Workers Comp Insider goes into some of the ways around the exlusive remedy: when the employer intentionally harms a workers (which is difficult to prove) , or when an injury or illness is found not to be covered by workers comp. Workers Comp Insider also reported last year about a case where the worker was awarded $12 million because of fraud perpetrated by the workers comp insurance carrier.

.

As previously reported, twelve of the 15 workers killed in the BP Amoco explosion were inside a nearby construction trailer when the blast hit.

"It was just instantly black," Leining said.

When the smoke cleared, he said he could hear his cell phone ringing in his shirt pocket — later he learned it was his panicked wife, another BP employee, calling — but he couldn't reach his pocket.

***

"I saw that fire and I felt that heat and I started getting motivated," Crow said. "I was just trying to get away from the fire."

Workers were running in all directions. Bleeding from the head, Crow said he hobbled and stumbled to a nearby road, where another worker drove him to safety in the back of his pickup truck.

His thoughts went right to his co-workers. "Where's Morris? Where's Larry? Where's Andy?"

Leining, still in the rubble, began calling for help on his radio, the microphone of which was still attached to his collar.

"This is Dave Leining," he recalled saying over the loud roar of the nearby fire. "We're in Morris King's office. We're trapped in this trailer."

Seconds later a voice responded, "You can't be. There ain't nothing left."

Leining said back, "Well that's where we are."

***

Crow said he is at times angry that the trailer was so close to the isom unit and felt that its location was unsafe. Although he never complained about it, he felt uneasy going to work there.

"It was right close to this other unit," he said. "They (BP officials) said there just wasn't enough space."

Leining declined to comment when asked if he also felt unsafe in the trailer. But he and Crow both said they were surprised to later learn that the blast occurred during the start-up of the isom unit. Leining, a 35-year BP employee, said he did not remember another time when workers were not cleared from the site when a startup began.

"That's not normal operating procedure to do that during the daytime," he said.

BP has refused to comment on that issue, as well as on the location of the trailer. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which is investigating the accident, has said both issues are major areas of their inquiry.

It will be at least six months before either Crow or Leining will be able to walk again. Meanwhile, both said they will spend countless hours wondering why they survived.

"I felt myself disappear," Leining said. "I was seconds away from being killed. Where I was, I should have been killed. But I've been given a second chance."

Related Articles

• BP Amoco Texas City Update: Plant Owners Aware of Venting and Trailer Location Hazards, April 10, 2005
• Workplace Safety Enforcement: A Tale of Two Countries, April 5, 2005
• Transparency? Or PR Savvy?, March 26, 2005
• BP In California: "callous and intentional noncompliance purely for economic reasons", March 24, 2005
• BP, site of fatal explosion, is Nation's Leader in Accidents, March 24, 2005
• At Least 14 Dead, Hundreds Injured In Huge Refinery Explosion, March 23, 2005
  
  .

Labels: BP, Chemical Safety Board

I wrote last week about KFM Joint Venture, the chief contractor on the Oakland Bay Bridge project that earned it's outstanding safety record by punishing workers who were injured and rewarding those who did not report injuries. And then there was the little matter of the "KFM Flu", a lung disease suffered by KFM welders because they were overexposed to manganese welding fumes and not provided with proper respirators. Despite that, Cal/OSHA though their safety record was so great that the safety agency formed a partnership with them.

Meanwhile, exposure to toxic welding fumes continued. The KFM workers complained to Cal/OSHA last Fall about the fumes, but their complaints kind of fell through the cracks. OSHA didn't bother to look into the workers' complaints for six months until Tribune reporters asked the agency about them while researching the original story a few weeks ago.

But it's not like the Cal/OSHA inspectors didn't have an opportunity to detect the hazard.

Meanwhile, Cal-OSHA inspectors have been on the new eastern span job site every week or two for nearly a year but apparently never asked, looked or climbed down holes to see what equipment the workers were using.

"The guys were on the site throughout, but did they ever specifically look at this complaint? No, I don't think so," [Cal-OSHA spokesman Dean]Fryer said.

"Would it have been diligent for us to go and take a look? Yeah, I would say most likely. Did we? No."

The reasons? Changes in the inspectors' assignments, the fact that it wasn't consider to be an "imminent danger, and, who knows?

***

I'm not sure what the problem is, but before just reflexively blaming the inspectors, let's look at what might be some of the root causes of this problem -- organizational and resource problems at Cal/OSHA that were illuminated recently by the California Association of Professional Scientists -- the Cal/OSHA inspectors' union.

For example:

• Cal/OSHA has not had a permanent Chief since July 2002 and has not had a Deputy Chief for Health since November 2000. The last time all three top Cal/OSHA chief/deputy chief positions were filled was October 2000.
• In 1975, the Cal/OSHA Medical Unit had seven physicians and three registered nurses. In 2005, 30 years later, it has one physician and one nurse.
• In February 2005, California had 232 Fish and Game Wardens working in the field, as compared to 181 Cal/OSHA compliance officers making workplace inspections.
• To have the same inspector to worker ratio that Federal OSHA had in April 2004, Cal/OSHA should have 303 inspectors. Cal/OSHA had 181 inspectors actually at work in the field in January 2005 covering 17.7 million workers and 1.15 million work sites.

.

Labels: Behavioral Safety

My mother always told me that it was impolite to stare or point or pay any undue attention to crazy people standing out on the street corner ranting and raving about all sorts of things that don't make sense except in their altered state of mind. They couldn’t help it and we should just be thankful that we were in possession of all of our faculties.

I was reminded of Mom's advice when I read an article in the latest issue of Inside OSHA (paid subscription) that impolitely stares and points at the crazy people, in this case, the National Coalition on Ergonomics, the notorious anti-ergonomics, anti-truth business coalition that led the successful campaign against the Clinton administration's ergonomics standard.

The National Coalition on Ergonomics (NCE) is petitioning OSHA to revamp its ergonomics guidelines for the poultry processing, retail grocery and nursing home industries. The coalition claims OSHA has violated the Information Quality Act (IQA) by asserting there is adequate science to support the guidelines.

The Information Quality Act (also known as the Data Quality Act), which according to OMB Watch is an

unnecessary bureaucratic requirement that unfairly allows industry to delay, dilute and derail environmental, health and safety protections. The act, and its subsequent guidelines developed by OMB and federal agencies, allow affected parties to challenge and recommend corrections of information disseminated by agencies.

What they’re really trying to say, if we can read between the lines of their ravings, is that there is no science behind ergonomics. No science that says lifting 37,000 pounds a day might cause shoulder injuries, no science that says lifting ten thousand live chickens above your head every day might cause some kind of repetitive stress injury. (On the other hand, one labor observer remarked that it’s really much ado about nothing; OSHA didn’t bother to actually put any science into the wishy-washy guidelines.)

Sure, they may be one beer short of a six-pack, but it's hard work not to laugh at them when they claim that OSHA is “relying solely on a report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health," their minds denying the reality of the NIOSH report (actually a survey of more than 600 scientific studies) that concluded that

A substantial body of credible epidemiologic research provides strong evidence of an associationbetween MSDs and certain work-related physical factors when there are high levels of exposure and especially in combination with exposure to more than one physical factor (e.g., repetitive lifting of heavy objects in extreme or awkward postures.

And we try not to make fun of them for blocking out the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences reports requested by Congressional Republicans (a short one and a longer one commissioned because Republicans didn't like the results of the first), that reviewed 800 scientific studies and found that there is strong scientific evidence that workplace exposures cause musculoskeletal disorders and that the kinds of measures required by the OSHA standard are the most effective means to prevent these injuries.

Can’t our society find a way to put these people someplace where they won’t endanger themselves or other innocent people, somewhere where they can perform some useful service -- making license plates, for example -- far away from the stresses of modern civilization?

Note: It is not my intention to degrade or debase any real people, living or dead, who suffer from mental illness by associating them with the unsavory subjects of this article. If I have offended anyone (aside from members of the National Coalition on Ergonomics,) I apologize.

Related Articles

• Civil War Brews over Ergonomics: OSHA vs. Anti-Ergo Industry, August 6, 2003
• The Data Quality Act: Industry and Bush Officials Act As If They Really Care About Data Quality, December 8, 2003
• What If The Canary Stops Singing, But No One's Listening , December 21, 2003
• The Data Quality Act Again: The Issue that Sounds Very Boring, But Gets Scarier and Scarier All The Time, January 11, 2004
• Data "Quality" Act -- First, Stop No Harm, August 19, 2004
• Anti-Ergo Industry Remains In Deep Denial, April 8, 2005

.

Labels: Ergonomics

A blog carnival is kind of a one-day group blog that migrates from site to site. This week the Carnival of the Uncapitalists -- Markets and Health Edition -- is being sponsored by the always interesting Majikthise and includes a contribution by yours-truly, as well as blog-brother Revere at Effect Measure.

According to C-un-C founder, Charles Norman Todd (author of Freiheit und Wissen), "If you do not know already, this project has emerged as an attempt to provide an alternative to the long-running and well-known Carnival of the Capitalists." Its purpose is to illuminate some of the flaws and exesses of our capitalist system an what improvements might be possible.

The first two Carnivals of the Uncapitalists, in case you missed them are here and here. Get ye over there and read.

Guess what Elaine Chao's Department of Labor Harassment is doing instead of watching over workplace safety and other apparently non-essential tasks that the Labor Department used to do to help workers?

Harassing Unions, of course. And more here.

We're glad to see they've got something to do with the money they're saving by wiping out OSHA worker training program, stopping the collection of data on women workers, an cutting back enforcement of wage-and-hours laws, as Congressman George Miller (D-CA) points out:

Funding for staffing at the Department’s Wage and Hour Division, which enforces overtime, minimum wage, and child labor laws, dropped $113 million between 2001 and 2005...Meanwhile, funding for staffing at the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), which investigates labor unions, increased $74 million (28.2 percent) over the same period.

Ninety-four years after 146 young immigrant garment workers died behind locked doors in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York, there still seems to be a need for a law that raises the fine for locking workers behind closed doors. NY City Councilman David Yassky's bill

would increase inspections of stores suspected of locking in employees and increase fines on stores found in violation, to $5,000 from $500, for the first offense and as high as $20,000 for repeated offenses. The bill comes less than a month after three janitors filed a lawsuit against two C-Town supermarkets in the Bronx, accusing them of endangering their lives by locking them in while they cleaned overnight.

.

In today's New York Times magazine Jeffrey Rosen writes about the advocates of the "Constitution in Exile" who argue that "many of the laws underpinning the modern welfare state are unconstitutional." (Rosen had a shorter article on the same subject in the New Republic that I wrote about previously.) The greatest right of all, according to this bunch, are economic rights, particularly the right to property, and anything that take away those rights -- such as environmental or workplace safety laws -- are, or should be, unconstitutional. The exile that this crowd criticizes began in 1937 when the Supreme Court finally stopped declaring Roosevelt's New Deal programs unconstitutional.

The implications of this movement are enormous and need to be remembered in the current struggles over Bush's court nominees:

Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago (and a longtime colleague of Epstein's), will soon publish a book on the Constitution in Exile movement called "Fundamentally Wrong." As Sunstein, who describes himself as a moderate, recently explained to me, success, as the movement defines it, would mean that "many decisions of the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and possibly the National Labor Relations Board would be unconstitutional. It would mean that the Social Security Act would not only be under political but also constitutional stress. Many of the Constitution in Exile people think there can't be independent regulatory commissions, so the Security and Exchange Commission and maybe even the Federal Reserve would be in trouble. Some applications of the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act would be struck down as beyond Congress's commerce power." In what Sunstein described as the "extreme nightmare scenario," the right of individuals to freedom of contract would be so vigorously interpreted that minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws would also be jeopardized.

Interestingly, with all of the criticism of "judicial activism" that one hears from Republicans these days, these guys are strongly in favor of judicial activism, bringing them into conflict with conservatives like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. One of the Exiles' chief advocates is University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein who insists:

that judges should be much more aggressive in protecting economic liberty. "There are many blatantly inappropriate statutes that cry out for a quick and easy kill," Epstein said, citing minimum-wage laws and other "legislative regulation of the economy." He excoriated the Supreme Court for refusing to strike these laws down. "One only has to read the opinions of the Supreme Court on economic liberties and property rights to realize that these opinions are intellectually incoherent," he concluded. "Some movement in the direction of judicial activism is clearly indicated."

Their theory is based on the Constitution's "takings clause," which says that private property cannot be taken for public use "without just compensation." This is how it works. Suppose you you buy a piece of land intending to quintuple your investment by cutting down the trees, filling in the lake and building a shopping center. But that stupid Endangered Species Act gets in the way and stops yo in your tracks. According to the "takings" theory, the government has effectively taken from you the money you would have made by building the shopping center. Similarly, employers are having money stolen from them through unconstitutional minimum wage laws and occupational safety and health regulations that are "taking away" the profits they would have earned had these laws not interfered with their right to do whatever they want with their property.

Of course in the case of workplace safety, one might ask where the employer's property ends and the workers' property starts. For example, one might fear that they're only concerned with the owners' property, and any property taken away from workers, such as their lungs, doesn't factor in..

But no, say the exiled ones:

If they win -- if, years from now, the Constitution is brought back from its decades of arguable exile -- and federal environmental laws are struck down, the movement's loyalists do not expect the levels of air and water pollution to rise catastrophically. They are confident that local regulations and private contracts between businesses and neighbors will determine the pollution levels that each region demands. Nor do they expect vulnerable workers to be exploited in sweatshops if labor unions are weakened: they anticipate that entrepreneurial workers in a mobile economy will bargain for the working conditions that their talents deserve. Historic districts, as they see it, will not be eviscerated if zoning laws are scaled back, but they do imagine there will be fewer brownstones and more McMansions. In exchange for these trade-offs, they insist, individual liberty -- the indispensable guarantee of self-fulfillment and happiness -- would flourish far more extensively than it does today.

Ah, yes, "entrepreneurial workers in a mobile economy will bargain for the working conditions that their talents deserve." And the lamb will lie down with the lion. Believe it! Amen!

But wait, their Golden Age was "the era of Republican dominance in the United States from 1896 through the Roaring Twenties." Now I'm no historian, but weren't those the days of unregulated sweatshops, child labor, teeming tenements, young women jumping from burning buildings and Upton Sinclair's Jungle?

This "constitution in exile" stuff may have started out as a right-wing fantasy a couple of days ago, but Rosen warns us that the wolves are at the door, in the person(s) of Bush appellate court nominees William Pryor (the exiles' hero), Janice Rogers Brown (who called the New Deal "the triumph of our socialist revolution" and praised the court's invalidation of maximum -hour and minimum wage laws in the early 20th century) and William G. Myers III (advocate for mining interests).

Our one hope, Rosen points out (and the exile's agree) is the fact that all of these stinken' workplace and environmental laws are very popular with the public (as we saw in a recent poll).

What does all of this mean for the rapidly approaching national struggle over Bush's court nominations and the filibuster battle that will accompany it? It means that we need to make the American people know what's at stake -- nothing less than the advances ths society has made over the past 100 years. Not just the fate of legal abortion, but also the fate of workplace safety, the environment, minimum wage laws, consumer wage laws, the 8-hour day, child labor prohibitions -- in other words, issues that strike at the very heart of 20th and 21st century American values.

.

A food additive chemical, the hazards of which were known to manufacturer, destroys the lungs of dozens of workers who were not informed of the hazard or provided with protective equipment. A muckraking story from the early 20th century? A third world horror story from the back pages of the New York Times?

Nope, actually this is a current event that happened in Missouri, USA, just a few years ago -- and may still be happening in workplaces throughtout the United States.

Surely laws were broken, regulations ignored, citations written, major fines imposed! This is the 21st century, after all. Crimes like this aren't tolerated!

Think again. No laws broken, no citations issued and not one dollar paid in fines or penalties.

The "popcorn lung" story is the tragedy used in an excellent article about industry's influence on our regulatory and tort system by David Michaels, Associate Chairman of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at he George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services and Celeste Monforton, Research Associate in the same department, published in the Brooklyn Law School's Journal of Law and Policy.

Their conclusion is something that every American worker needs to understand: Our system of regulating and controlling workers' exposure to toxic chemicals is broken, kaput, dead.

The article describes in depressing detail how industry's influence on our regulatory system has all but stopped the issuance of regulations that protect workers from exposure to hazardous chemicals. And now they're going after the last weapon that workers and consumers have at their disposal, the ability to use the tort system to sue chemical manufacturers who produce products that sicken and kill workers, consumers and communities. It's essential reading for those who continue to rest quietly under the illusion that the government has the tools to protect us from chemical hazards or that corporate America is working in good faith to learn the truth.

In a perfect world, society would approach the use of chemicals with a public health approach -- not permitting workers to be exposed to chemicals until they are proven safe. Instead, we live in a topsy-turvey world where chemicals are given the same rights that human beings have -- to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, chemicals are generally only proven guilty when someone -- usually a labor union -- notices that bodies are piling up. But thanks to the chemical industry's influence, even body counts are no longer sufficient to actually regulate workers' exposure to chemicals.

Michaels and Monforton use the ongoing "popcorn lung" tragedy to illustrate their arguments. For those of you just tuned in, dozens of microwave popcorn workers in one factory have contracted a rare and devastating disease of the lungs called "bronchiolitis obliterans," named for the obliteration of the pulmonary airways that put oxygen into the blood. In March 2004, a jury awarded Eric Peoples, a 32-year old former employee of a popcorn plant in Jasper, Missouri, $20 million dollars as a result of a lawsuit against the manufacturer of diacetyl, a butter flavoring chemical used on the popcorn. Peoples is currently waiting for a lung transplant, which, if successful, will allow him to live for an additional ten years. If he’s lucky, he’ll live to see 50.

In addition to Peoples, thirty workers at the plant have similar problems and are suing the flavoring maker. Some cases have settled before a jury verdict, but earlier this month a jury awarded another plant worker $15 million. And the Jasper plant was not the only one to harm workers. Workers at Con Agra plants and possibly others have also contracted bronchiolitis obliterans.

It all could have been prevented. In 1993, BASF corporation conducted studies showing that exposure to the chemical had destroyed the lungs of rats in a very short time. 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.

In an earlier Confined Space article, I wrote about the testimony of Brown University professor David Egilman, who testified at the Peoples’ trial,

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.

When OSHA heard about the problem from the Missouri Department of Health in early 2000, the plant was inspected, but the company was never cited. OSHA had no standard regulating diacetyl. OSHA can still cite a company even if there is no hazard using its General Duty Clause, as long as they show that it's a recognized hazard that is seriously endangering employees. But the General Duty Clause was never invoked in this case.

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, the government agency that conducts research in occupational safety and health issues, conducted a study of the chemical in 2002, finding results similar to the BASF study. "The study's lead investigator, Dr. Ann Hubbs, reported that these finding s were "the most dramatic case of cell death ever seen."

(You can find much more information on popcorn lung here.)

Workers are not generally allowed to sue their employer, instead being forced to rely on workers compensation. Third-party lawsuits -- in this case against the maker of the chemical used by their employer -- are allowed. In this case, the target of the lawsuits was the company that manufactured the diacetyl and who provided the faulty Material Safety Data Sheets to the factory.

Why this hazard was not addressed before condemning thirty workers at one factory to an early death, and why government agencies to this day have taken no action to regulate diacetyl or thousands of other potentially hazardous chemicals that workers are exposed to every day is the story that Michaels and Monforton tell.


Regulatory Impotence

As Eric Peoples and his co-workers got sicker and sicker, did they reassure themselves that if there was anything wrong with the chemicals they were working with, the government would have done something? Surely, most people think, there must be laws that protect workers from exposure to toxic chemicals.

Yes, there are laws -- the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act, to name the main ones -- but they don't work. The primary agency created by Congress to regulate worker exposure to toxic chemicals is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Congress gave OSHA the authority "to set mandatory occupational safety and health standards" and, as Michaels and Monforton point out,

Congress afforded the agency a great deal of leeway in identifying hazards and setting protective exposure limits to enable the agency to act before large numbers of individuals became sick.

But even under Democrats, political attacks, in addition to the burden imposed by Congress, the White House and the courts on OSHA's ability to issue health standards has all but killed the prospect of any new health standards to cover the thousands of chemicals in use today, and most of the existing OSHA standards are antiquated:

In the last ten years, OSHA has issued standards for a total of two new chemicals. Indeed, since its inception, OSHA has issued comprehensive standards for only thirty toxic materials. Additionally, the agency enforces permissible exposure limits for only about 500 chemicals of the more than 12,000 chemicals characterized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as high volume chemicals. Of these 500 standards, all but a handful were borrowed in whole from the voluntary industry levels established prior to OSHA’s creation in 1971.

When Congress created OSHA, there was some understanding that because full health standards might take some time to issue, and that there might be a need for faster, emergency action in some cases. So in addition to OSHA's regular standard-making process the OSHAct also gives the agency to issue The Emergency Temporary Standards (ETS). If the Assistant Secretary determines that "employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards," OSHA can issue an ETS, which also serves as a proposed standard until the final standard is issued within six months. But OSHA has rarely used this provision of the act, and even in the rare cases that the agency has issued an ETS, the courts have often overturned it. No successful ETS has been issued in over 25 years.

Would an ETS regulating diacetyl be successful? I don't know, but one might argue that the popcorn lung case was the classic example that Congress had in mind when it passed this provision of the Act.

So what has OSHA done instead of a General Duty Clause citation or standard making? In September 2002 OSHA Region VII, representing four midwestern states, established an "Alliance" with the Popcorn Board to “help foster a culture of prevention.” Alliances between industry associations and OSHA are a creation of the Bush administration. They have been promoted as a "voluntary" information sharing arrangements, and have acted as an alternative to mandatory regulations, which the Bush administration has essentially ceased issuing. Unlike other voluntary arrangements sponsored by OSHA, such as the "Voluntary Protection Program," , even in highly unionized industries.

The results of this alliance have been less than spectacular, according to Michaels and Monforton:

According to OSHA’s 2002 alliance agreement with The Popcorn Board, the two entities would work cooperatively to develop an internal document to be sent to OSHA field compliance officers. Nearly two years later, the hazard bulletin that supposedly would help OSHA inspectors understand the butter flavor hazard and conduct effective inspections has not been issued.

OK, so much for OSHA. What about the Environmental Protection Agency? The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires chemical manufacturers to test their products to determine whether they pose a “significant risk of serious or widespread harm to human beings" and if such a risk is found, the EPA can take action to prevent or reduce the risk.

Two problems there. First, diacetyl is a food additive and food additives are exempt from TSCA coverage. Second, even if food additives were covered under TSCA, the law hasn't had much effect on chemical safety:

Indeed, Congress’s General Accounting Office (now known as the Government Accountability Office) reported that only four chemicals were restricted under TSCA in the period between 1976, when the Act became law, and 1994, when the study was carried out.

Last, and in this case, least, is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Although the FDA is charged with ensuring “the safety of the nation’s domestically-produced and imported foods,” because the FDA has concluded that diacetyl is “generally recognized as safe . . . as a direct food ingredient,” the FDA has satisfied its statutory mandate. That is, diacetyl is safe for humans to consume; however, the FDA makes no attempt to determine whether diacetyl is safe for workers to inhale.

So much for the public health approach to chemicals.

Workers are thus left with only one alternative, according to the authors:

Given the inability or unwillingness of the nation’s regulatory apparatus to address workplace hazards, litigation by Mr. Peoples and similarly situated popcorn workers is a logical alternative. In fact, it may be the only means of compelling employers to protect their workers.

In other words, sue the bastards!

In the popcorn lung case, it worked, but Michaels and Monforton describe in depressing detail how industries that have been the targets of potential regulatory activity or lawsuits -- from tobacco to cotton dust -- have made it their business to "manufacture doubt" not only about the science behind proposed regulations and lawsuits.

Led by the tobacco companies,

An entire industry has emerged to lend support to the generic assertion, made with great frequency by opponents of regulation, that science is uncertain and that regulation cannot proceed until more conclusive data are collected. This industry specializes in magnifying and manufacturing uncertainty about the science supporting public health regulation.

Yet although the courts, Congress and the White House (through the Office of Management and Budget) has loaded the regulatory process with more and more regulatory justification, the fact remains that the OSHAct does not require scientific certainty, but rather the best available scientific information in order to justify a regulation. The authors illustrate, for example, how OSHA's cotton dust standard virtually eliminated brown lung (or byssinosis) in the United States despite the fact that much was not known about the exact mechanism by which cotton dust caused the serious lung disorder.

Despite a handful of regulatory successes, the industry's crusade against potentially costly regulations has been relentless and creative:

By raising the cry of “junk science” and questioning the validity or strength of scientific evidence, polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products have been able to delay, often for decades, regulations and other measures designed to protect the health and safety of individuals and communities. This strategy, which has been readily employed by the textile industry and tobacco manufacturers, has been embraced by many industries facing new regulation. Through the promotion of the “junk science” movement, polluters and manufacturers have sought to influence public opinion by ridiculing scientists whose research presents an economic threat, irrespective of the quality of the scientists’ research. Further, industries facing regulation frequently challenge the scientific studies (and even scientific methods) used in the regulatory and legal arenas as fundamentally flawed, contradictory, or incomplete. Thus, they assert, it would be unfair or premature to regulate the exposure in question or to compensate the worker or community resident who may have been made sick by the exposure.

Not only have the regulatory agencies been intimidated by corporate attacks and accusations of junk science, but the courts have also fallen for the corporate arguments. The Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v.Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., gave federal judges

an obligation to serve as scientific gatekeepers, allowing into evidence only expert testimony that meets specific standards for relevance and reliability. In fact, a recent study found that courts are now asking doctors who testify as experts to meet standards that exceed those that the doctors use to diagnose and treat their own patients.

But the courts have often taken the Daubert decision to the extreme. Instead of determining the validity of hazards (and the need for regulation) by using the traditional weight-of-the-evidence approach that OSHA proved successful in its early days, the courts are requiring that "that each piece of scientific data be evaluated independently for relevance and reliability."

Despite increasing difficulty in the courts, lawsuits remain a more effective deterrent to the production of unsafe chemicals than the regulatory process. The scientific evidence (from BASF and NIOSH), the relatively fast acting nature of diacetyl, its horrific life-shortening effects on young workers and the clear negligence of the companies involved combined to convince the juries that high awards were needed to send a message to companies who play fast and loose with the lives of workers.

After all, in the words of their attorney, "The only thing this group of people ever did wrong," he said of the plaintiffs, "was go to work."

What Is To Be Done?

While Michaels and Monforton do a good job describing the world as it is, we are still left with the task of figuring out how to rewrite the laws and customs of this country so that employees can go to work with the reasonable assurance that they are protected from toxic chemicals.

Although the tort system -- or the ability of workers and citizens to sue the producers of harmful products -- worked in this case, it has come under the threat of "reform" by the Bush administration. Having dismantled the regulatory system, the business community and Republican party are intent on limiting damages to $25,000.

As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said in a recent Washington Post article:

The administration can't have it both ways. Either it should move to strengthen regulatory agencies or it should maintain the present system of tort liability. Take away both, and consumers are in deep trouble.

Now I'm no economist, but it seems clear that $35 million for two popcorn lung cases, an unknown amount in undisclosed settlements, and numerous cases to follow are going to make American industry think twice before continuing to expose workers to these specific chemicals again. $250,000, in contrast, would barely be noticed.

But what about the tens of thousands of other chemicals in commerce, most of which have been inadequately tested? The bottom line is that until we have a mandatory system in this country where companies are required to test all new (and old) chemicals, and release all results to relevant government agencies and the public; until we make easier for government agencies to protect workers by regulating exposure to 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 continue to occur.

The European Community is making some progress in this arena with the REACH proposal. REACH stands for Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, and invokes the "precautionary principle" which states that governments should protect their populations against risk, even before all the data are compiled. In other words, chemicals should no longer be considered innocent before proven guilty.

There are some signs that the American people are willing to listen to alternatives. A recent Wall St. Journal-NBC News poll showed that 84% of those polled think that Congress should be more involved with "Rules in the workplace that deal with health and safety issues," a level of support that exceeded any of the other options. Coming in a close second with 80% was "Environmental laws that involve restricting development to protect endangered species."

But it's up to all of us to get out there and burst peoples' balloons. Every workshop I conducted for union members on their right to know about chemical hazards began with the sentence: "Legal does not mean safe." In other words, just because you are being exposed at the legal limit, or just because there is no legal exposure limit, does not mean that working with these chemicals is safe. It was not the message they had been hearing from their employers, it is not the message that Americans are hearing from chemical companies or their government.

But it is the message that we need to spread -- along with the real-life story of Eric Peoples and his co-workers -- if we are to bring about needed change in this country.

Go forth....

.

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Last week I wrote an article about the anti-ergonomics industry pissing in their pants about a settlement reached between OSHA and a Supervalu warehouse over a 2003 ergonomics citation.

"Oy," they said. "This agreement settlement implicitly recognizes ergonomics hazards, which cannot be backed by scientific evidence. No, no, no. Bad precedent."

Well now that the details of the settlement are out, it turns out the workers are the ones who should be upset by the agreement. According to the Bureau of National Affairs:

• The penalty for the citation was reduced to from$6,300 to $1,000.
  
  $1,000? Supervalu is a Fortune 100 company with annual revenues of $20 billion!
  
  And who knows, if Supervalu doesn't get its act together this time, OSHA just might double -- or even triple -- their fine next time. Deal with it, Supervalu.
  
  
• The ergonomics violation--cited under the general duty clause--would be rewritten to omit any specific references to weight lifted by employees or specific musculoskeletal disorders suffered by Supervalu workers.
  
  The original citation read:

  At the Supervalu warehouse facility, order selectors were required to lift weights up to 77 lbs or more (at an approximate average of 1714 pieces per day and a total weight of 37,025 pounds), and to twist, reach, bend, and lift when selecting pieces and loading them onto pallets.

  The "old" citation also mentioned that employees were suffering

  low back pain (LBP) and shoulder related MSDs, as shown by a review of the company's injury and illness records from 1998 to the time of the inspection, which document that a significant number of MSDs have been caused by exposure to stressors; including 6 shoulder surgeries in 2001 and 2 shoulder surgeries in 2002.

  The new, improved citation will read:

  the employer did not furnish employment and a place of employment which were free from recognized hazards ... in that order selectors performed certain lifting tasks with stressors that had caused, were causing, or were likely to cause musculoskeletal disorders.

  I guess we wouldn't want the workers to actually be able to decide for themselves whether they are lifting too much or what injuries all that lifting might cause. They might actually start associating their shoulder and back injuries with lifting 37,000 pounds a day. Don't want to trouble their pretty little heads with details like that when there's work to be done.
  
  
• Supervalue will institute a behavior-based safety management program.
  
  Hello? Behavior based safety program? Didn't we just read about that somewhere?

Oh yeah, here.

Behavioral safety is where, instead of actually making the workplace safer, you just change workers' behavior by giving them awards for not reporting injuries, and punishing them for getting hurt. And the pressure is so great not to report injuries that the term "bloody pocket syndrome" has been coined because workers hide their injured hands in their pockets.

OK, so let me get this all straight.

Instead of setting some kind of weight limit that workers are allowed to lift (or even letting workers know how much lifting might be dangerous and what injuries can develop), Supervalu's program -- sanctioned by OSHA -- will likely consist of punishing workers for suffering back or shoulder injuries (because if they get hurt, they clearly weren't lifting their 16 tons a day "properly") and rewarding those who are still standing at the end of a work week.


• The citation will apply to only one of Supervalu's 1500 locations. This means that whatever improvements might be made at this site, all of the other locations will have to be addressed individually.
  
  Which is a problem, particularly in Washington State where the state OSHA is also investigating Supervalu for ergonomics problems and has been forced to subpoena records. Supervalu is fighting the subpoena based on the results of the 2003 Washington state Proposition 841 which repealed their ergonomics standard. I wrote last summer about the Building Industries Association of Washington (BIAW) having a hissy fit because Washington OSHA was intending to issue an enforcement directive, which according to the BIAW was "a blatant violation of the law and subversion of the will of the voters" who had passed Proposition 841.
  
  State OSHA officials responded that the referendum did not nullify the General Duty Clause under which OSHA was able -- before and after the Washington state ergonomics standard -- to cite employers for unsafe conditions (including ergonomics), even where there was no standard.

It's almost as if OSHA woke up and said "Oops, we really didn't mean it. Let's see how we can make this as insignificant as possible."

One more thing. You may be interested to know that James L. Koskan, Corporate Director of Risk Control for Supervalu, the company whose workers were lifting more than 16 tons a day, was a member of OSHA's National Advisory Committee on Ergonomics, one of OSHA's many excuses for doing virtually nothing about ergonomics injuries for the past four years since repealing the ergonomics standard.

Yup, takin' care of the ergonomics problem, one store and $1,000 at a time. No wonder Republicans in Congress are so pleased.

And the whining industry types? Their associations obviously miss the good old days when they could raise money hand-over-fist by warning that the sky would fall if American businesses had to address ergonomics hazards -- which are costing our economy $2.8 billion annually in health care and lost work hours.


.

Labels: Behavioral Safety, Ergonomics

"Patients love anything that keeps them from waiting,” Pugh says. “They don’t really care what you did to make that happen, but it leaves them with a much better feeling about your Emergency Department."

-- Dayle Pugh, RN, BSN, CEN, Clinical Director, Emergency Services, St. Charles Mercy Hospital, Oregon, OH

I wouldn't be so sure about that after the patients read the letter from an R.N. reprinted below. Among all of the stories I've heard over the years in the workplace safety field, this is one of the most disturbing.

As anyone who’s recently had the misfortune of going to an emergency room knows, you're probably in for a long wait. With health care costs rising and the E.R. being the primary health care destination for the growing number of Americans without health care insurance, the situation promises to get worse.

One hospital in Ohio has decided to do something about it – with disastrous results for hospital workers and patients. Instead of dealing with the root causes of the problem (underfunding, understaffing, too many patients), the hospital had a brilliant idea: attract more patients and make the staff work harder.

How did they do it?

The "30 minute Promise" policy. The hospital promises E.R. patients that "If you are not seen within 30 minutes of your arrival by an ER doctor that you will receive a $15.00 coupon for gas, movie tickets or a gift certificate to a store." Domino's Pizza tried this a few years back (Pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it's free), but the policy put so much pressure on the delivery drivers that they were getting into accidents rushing to get the pizzas delivered on time. After losing a $78 million lawsuit, the pizza company dropped the policy.

This hospital apparently failed to learn the pizza lesson. And at least one worker will pay for their negligence for the rest of her life. This is her story:

On March 7,2004, I was injured at work because of a horrible policy set forth by my hospital. This policy is known as the "30 minute Promise" policy. It says to patients that come to our ER, "If you are not seen within 30 minutes of your arrival by an ER doctor that you will receive a $15.00 coupon for gas, movie tickets or a gift certificate to a store."

As nurses and doctors, our requirement is to meet this 30 minute requirement or face the consequences. Physicians have been told that they would lose their jobs if they did not abide by this policy. I have seen many ER doctors and residents leave the side of a critically ill patient to quickly run over to another room to see a sprained ankle because the sprained ankle patient only had 2 more minutes left before he or she would be given a $15.00 coupon. How can this be a safe and appropriate policy for any administration to consider? How can ER residents and student nurses truly learn anything in an environment that supports quantity rather than quality patient care?

I have actually had people come in off the street and ask, "What is the prize today?". We have had entire families come in and expect "a prize" for each family member because they where not all seen within the 30 Minute Promise policy. How sad!!!

My injury occurred because of this "30 minute Promise" policy in March of this year. I had taken a patient up to CCU from the ER. This patient weighed about 250lbs and I along with another ER nurse waited for the CCU nurses to come and help transfer the patient to the CCU bed from the ER cart. In my mind I was considering the 30 minute policy and that there were many patients in the ER yet to be seen. I was conscious about the fact that this lost time of waiting for the appropriate amount of nurses to safely transfer this patient was going to certainly cost me and the hospital a $15.00 movie ticket or gas coupon. Finally, one CCU nurse showed up. She announced that the other nurses where not available to help. She was way to small to really help and the ER nurse with me already had a back injury and so she took the patients feet. I was left to take the rest of this patients body weight. As I pulled on the sheet to bring the patient over to the CCU bed, I felt two incredible pops in my lower back with pain, numbness and tingling down into both my legs and feet. Later MRI showed that I had herniated my L3-L4 and my L-5 - S-1 with severe impingement of those nerve roots. I have had 2 major back surgeries since then with little hope of returning to hands on patient care again.

ER nursing was my life and I loved my career. But I do not love where I have seen nursing going. I did not go into nursing to hand out coupons or to work in a "fast food ER" environment. Where has the professionalism gone? Where has safe and appropriate care lost way to commercialism? My greatest question to my hospital and any other hospital administration that has adopted such a policy as this: "Was it worth it for you to lose a highly skilled RN for the sake of a $15.00 coupon?" I'm trying to understand. I have lost so much for so little gain by this hospital's decision to implement this 30 minute promise.

I have written this with hopes that any Nursing Administrator, Director or Clinical supervisor will see that there is absolutely no justification for choosing thoughtless policies over care and safety of your highly skilled nurses.

But wait, there's more. Just as I was about to publish this, I thought, "Hey, I wonder if this hospital is uniquely stupid." So I googled "30 Minute Promise" and guess what? A bunch of hits. The "30 Minute Promise" seems to be quite popular, at least among a number of Ohio hospitals. One article in "Hot Topics in Health Care," published by Thomas American Health Consultants boasts of the efficiency gains that this policy forced.

Another article concluded that the program had produced "dramatic results," faster service, happier patients, fewer walk-outs and more "business."

One Ohio emergency room doctor, writing in 2003, had major reservations, but he was concerned mainly with quality of patient care and professional satisfaction. Not a word on the toll it takes on the health care workers who literally do the heavy lifting.

One thing I don't understand is that one of the purposes of this program is to attract more patients when there's already a problem dealing in a timely manner with the ones they have. So they introduce a program that attracts more volume to be dealt with by the same staff in a shorter amount of time.

I'm not sure if it's the total ignorance of worker safety that I find most astounding, or perhaps just the indifference -- the fact that these policies can be implemented, studied, analyzed and measured without even taking a moment to consider the impact on the workers doing the job. And the pure lack of common sense and knowledge about how the job is done among managers who are supposed to be able to run organizations is perplexing and distressing.

There ought to be a law, or at least an OSHA standard.

Oh wait, we had one ... until George Bush and his industry friends took it away. Compassionate conservatism rears its ugly head again.


.

The Centers For Disease Control has withdrawn a guidance document for protecting health care workers in the event of a bioweapons attack after receiving letter from a group of unions criticizing the document for recommending that health care workers wear surgical masks to protect themselves. The unions pointed out that there is no evidence that surgical masks -- as opposed to air-filtering respirators -- offer any protection.

CDC announced that it was withdrawing the guidance “additional review and discussion."

The guidance document also came in for criticism because it stated that in the event of an acutal biological warfare attack, some OSHA respirator requirements, such as fit testing and medical clearance may have to be suspended.

I just hope the CDC doesn't get rid of the obviously absurd surgical mask recommendation, but leave in place the suspension of the OSHA respirator requirements. Our health care workers deserve better.

.

One thing you can be confident of in Washington is that when Republicans are happy with what OSHA's doing, it's a sure sign that the agency isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing: protecting workers.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education held OSHA's appropriation (funding) hearing on April 7. Jim Nash at Occupational Hazards reports that the Republicans had a great old time, yukkin' it up an back slapping and telling OSHA what a great job it's doing.

Ostensibly the hearing was about the administration's fiscal year 2006 budget request, but the subject of money never arose as Republican members of the panel praised OSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) for emphasizing education, compliance assistance and other business-friendly voluntary programs.

"We didn't get a lot of complaints about OSHA, so you must be doing something right," Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, told Acting OSHA Administrator Jonathan Snare, after Snare completed his testimony. Regula chairs the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education.

The only Democrat to show up for the hearing was Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California who sharply questioned Acting Assistant Secretary Jonathan Snare about a 6 year old OSHA proposal to force employers to pay for their employees personal protective equipment.

"Why has OSHA failed to finalize this rule?" asked Roybal-Allard. "Will it take you another 6 years?"

Snare replied that "the issues raised by the rulemaking are complicated …[the rule] is currently under active consideration." But his inability to give a specific date when the standard would be issued did not satisfy the congresswoman.

"That's the same answer I get every year," countered Roybal-Allard.

Actually, it's not all that complicated. In fact, it had always been OSHA practice to require employers to pay for their employees PPE such as gloves, boots, hearing protection and other protective equipment required by OSHA standards, although this requirement was not specifically written into OSHA's 1994 PPE revised standard. The OSHA Review Board ruled in 1997 that OSHA could not require employer payment unless it was written into a standard. So, in 1999 OSHA proposed the "Payment for PPE Standard," took comments and held hearings. Witnesses at the hearings, including most industry witnesses, were strongly supportive of the proposal.

The standard, is particularly important for immigrant and other low wage workers who can't afford to buy and replace gloves and boots, was on the verge of being issued when the Bush administration took over in 2001, and it lay in a vegetative state until it was miraculously semi-resurrected on the eve of OSHA's Hispanic Summit last summer, when OSHA opened up the record for more comments -- only to see it relapse again into its semi-permanent vegitative state.

Groundhog Day In The House

One good thing about Republicans in the House of Representatives is that they make it easy for us bloggers by introducing and passing the same stupid OSHA-weakening legislation year after year. For the second year in a row, the House Education and the Workforce Committee voted today to send legislation to the House floor that would change the OSHA act and stengthen the hand of employers fighting OSHA citations and for the second year in a row, Republican committee leadership declared Democratic proposals out of order.

The bills were introduced by Congressman Charlie Norwood (R-GA), whom I will always remember as the lovable Congressman who accused OSHA of killing the tooth fairy when it issued the bloodborne pathogens standard.

The four bills (H.R. 739, H.R. 740, H.R. 741 and H.R. 742), which Congressman Major Owens (D-NY) called the "More Worker Deaths & Injuries Bills" were passed by the full House last year, but died in the Senate.

In summary, the bills are:

• HR 739, Contesting Citations, would extend the time period allowed to challenge a citation if an employer accidentally misplaces the citation or his dog eats it. (Keeping track of all of that paperwork is hard work. Which reminds me, I have this parking ticket I, uh, forgot to pay by the deadline.....)
  
  
• HR 740--OSHA Commission, which would stack expand the three-member Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC), which already has a one seat Republican majority.
  
  
• HR 741 -- Independent Review which clarifies that the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission is an independent judicial entity and makes clear that the commission, and not OSHA (which it said is the prosecutor in certain disputes), would be the party that interprets the law and provides an independent review of OSHA citations.
  
  
• HR 742, Attorney Fees, which would require OSHA to pay all court costs when it loses a case against a small business. The bill encourages the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to better assess cases before bringing "unnecessary enforcement actions to court against small businesses," according to a committee summary.
  
  Norwood argued that some small businesses could not afford to challenge OSHA citations, even when they thought they were right and this bill would keep OSHA from harassing companies for no good reason. Personally, I'm not so sure about that. My observation is that it's actually just the opposite. Even when companies are caught red-handed in violation of a standard that kills a worker, they still file an appeal, hoping that the underfunded and understaffed agency will settle at a lower price. They're usually right and this bill will only make it worse.

Democrats were not confident that the bills would help anyone, according to Occupational Hazards:

Democrats on the panel, led by Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., disagreed.

"An all-out assault on workers' rights and labor unions," is how Owens characterized the legislation.
Owens offered an amendment to the Norwood bills that would have made it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison when a worker dies as a result of an OSHA willful violation. The amendment was deemed "not germane" to the legislation and therefore ruled out of order by Boehner.

H.R. 742, which would award attorneys' fees to small companies who prevail in court, provoked the most vehement opposition by House Democrats.

"This is the most dastardly of all these bills," contended Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J. "It's a 'look the other way' bill … it takes the incentives away from [OSHA] inspectors to do the right thing."

Jim Nash at Occupational Hazards reports that the bills might have a better chance in the Senate this year

as its OSHA subcommittee's new chairman, Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., is a former House member who voted for the Norwood bills before winning a Senate seat in the 2004 election. Asked if Isakson's committee will take up the Norwood bills this year, a spokesperson said, "He thinks they have merit and deserve consideration in the Senate."

UPDATE: AFL-CIO Fact Sheet here.

.

Labels: Charlie Norwood

The Oakland Tribune has a series of articles about quality and safety problems with the new Bay Bridge construction project.

The first article is about the immaculate safety record of KFM Joint Venture and their lead firm Kiewit Pacific Co and addresses a problem we've discussed many times before: behavioral safety programs, or the system of giving workers awards for not reporting injuries, and penalizing them for reporting unsafe conditions and accidents. The contractor is also being investigated by the FBI for alleged management attempts to conceal widespread welding defects and overall quality concerns on the bridge project.

According to their records, the bridge project is five times safer than the average heavy construction project, "even safer than your average flower shop." But workers at the site say all is not as it seems.

The company has a "Foreman Safety incentive Program" in which they dole out $100 to $2,500 bonuses, depending on the number of worker hours logged without a recordable injury....On the Bay Bridge project, crews were given cash bonuses - bundles of two to six $100 bills in an envelope - for not having any so-called recordable injuries for about a month's worth of work.

In addition to the carrot, Kiewit also uses the stick:

At least three of the eight workers who suffered injuries requiring more than basic first aid in 2004 were suspended for up to a few days without pay. In one case, the worker's 16-member crew was suspended for a day after the man sliced his ear on a ladder after slipping on a walking surface. The management considered it a safety lapse by the entire crew, according to Cal-OSHA inspector Roy Berg.

Several welders said the combination of bonuses and discipline created a work environment that intimidated workers into minimizing injuries or simply not reporting them at all.

"I called it blood money," said one former worker who didn't want to be identified because of a pending worker's compensation claim. "You don't make people cut their own throats for it. Management's whole point was to buy us off."

But CalOSHA acting Chief Len Welsh believes the company's numbers and argues that

the combination of rewarding good safety behavior while disciplining bad is a common practice and one that he sees as effective in reducing injuries.

"They take their safety discipline very seriously," Welsh said of KFM.

Federal OSHA's chief of recordkeeping, on the other hand, says something doesn't quite smell right:

Back in Washington, D.C., OSHA's chief of recordkeeping Bob Whitmore said punishing injured workers, especially an entire crew "is outrageous."

It sounds like, "behavior-based safety out of control," he added.

That means, instead of concentrating on hazards, the company concentrates on people's behaviors, Whitmore said. That takes the focus off eliminating hazards and puts it squarely on workers to not only avoid injuries, but avoid reporting them as well.

And there's other evidence that Kiewit's recordkeeping procedures are not quite kosher. On worker was hit on the head with a piling, knocked unconscious and was bleeding from the ears. He regained consciousness and was taken to the hospital. Even though the law says that loss of consciousness is a recordable injury, the incident was never recorded by the company because they claimed he never lost consciousness and the ear was bleeding from a cut. Another worker had a piece of metal stuck in his eye and had to be taken to a clinic to have it removed, but that was also not recorded even though OSHA requires companies to record such an injury if more than irrigation or a cotton swab is needed to remove the object.

But why would companies want to cheat on their injury and illness reporting?

"With all the incentives - such as personal bonuses, worker's compensation policy savings, the ability to bid successfully on jobs - the pressure to hold these rates down is enormous," [federal OSHA's Whitmore] said.

The low injury rate reported by KFM on the Bay Bridge project could save the joint venture as much as $7 million a year on a common worker's compensation insurance policy, according to industry experts, because insurers discount premiums on companies with safe track records.

The safest company, depending on the policy, could pay half the industry average. A typical premium on big marine construction jobs could cost half of a worker's wages, which average around $30 an hour on the Bay Bridge.

Ultimately, there's no downside to cheating on the records, especially in states like California that have their own OSHA programs, Whitmore said. Even when a citation is issued, the amount of the fine - often less than $1,000 - is negligible.

"There is definitely an incentive to cheat," said one veteran industry expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing future contracts.

"All employers want to report no more than they have to and some are more aggressive than others about not wanting to report to OSHA," he said. "It may effect your ability to get big private contracts."

In other words: Keeping injury rates down saves money on claims and makes money in the guise of future bids.

The KFM Flu

Another article describes workers being overexposed to manganese and other welding fumes:

For about a year, Lupe Gaytan climbed up and down the 50-foot cofferdam ladders to weld inside the steel legs of the partially built Bay Bridge.

When he started, his lungs were fine, he said, referring to a piece of paper indicating he was healthy enough to be fully cleared to use a safety respirator while welding on June 19, 2003.

Today, Gaytan climbs into bed every night and straps on a mask that helps him breathe while he sleeps. The Union City man said he never had such problems before he worked on the Bay Bridge.
"I don't smoke," the 49-year-old Gaytan said. ``Now I've been diagnosed with restrictive pulmonary disease."

Gaytan and more than a dozen other current and former welders on the bridge job came forward after an Oakland Tribune report in June showing the contractor for more than a year knowingly exposed workers welding particulate and fumes, including manganese, in excess of Cal-OSHA standards. Cal-OSHA records show prime contractor KFM Joint Venture didn't tell the workers about the overexposure, require respirators or fix the problem.

Many of the welders on the bridge project were laid off after the night shift was eliminated. The Pile Drivers Union accused the company of retaliating against the workers who had complained about safety problems. The union lost the arbitration, but testimony revealed a number of shortcomings:

Welder James Krudwig testified in an arbitration hearing on March 10 that he often wore a respirator even though they weren't required, but that management sometimes lacked new filters for it.

Krudwig, who declined to comment for this story, also said in the sworn statement that ventilation was inadequate; night-crew welders would watch welding smoke and particulates float up in the cofferdams but be pushed back down by the cold night air.

Several welders testified and said in interviews that their personal air quality monitors beeped so often, they turned them off, much like apartment tenants often take the batteries out of overly finicky smoke detectors.

Worksite photos show some ventilation hoses bent double, sending fumes back on welders' heads. Other pictures show globs of residue gathering on the undersides of plastic sheets which shielded welders from rain.

***

One current worker said he has seen several cases of summertime pneumonia in the last two years. He and several co-workers said they feel fatigued and out of breath.

"We call it the KFM flu," the worker said, asking for anonymity for fear of losing his job.

Despite all of these problems, CalOSHA is so enamored of Kiewit that they've formed a parternship with the company, which means that instead of issuing citations for hazards, Cal-OSHA inspectors simply notify the company of problems and expect the company to fix them. The effect:

To date, Cal-OSHA has issued just one citation with a $750 fine against KFM on the Bay Bridge project for a failure to certify a crane. No other citations have been issued for safety hazards or recordkeeping violations.

By contrast, the state issued 87 citations and proposed a total of $347,000 in fines stemming from accidents and inspections on all Bay Area tollbridge work since 2001, a Tribune analysis of Cal-OSHA records shows.

The average fine was just shy of $4,000. Kiewit and its partners FCI Constructors and Manson Co. were not one of eight firms fined.

From mid-May through September last year, Cal-OSHA inspectors recorded about 60 safety problems on the work site. Several were considered "serious," meaning the hazard could result in death from falls, amputation or electrocution.

None resulted in formal violations, which could have resulted in fines against the contractor.

Given the accusations leveled by workers and the absence of any formal citations for the manganese exposure or other alleged safety problems, it begs the question as to why some of the outspoken workers are still working for KFM on the project.

"There's not a lot of work out there right now," said one welder, asking to keep his name anonymous so he could keep his job. "It's a good job, but we just think they've let us down."

Related Articles

• Bloody Pocket Syndrome in the Steel Industry, April 6, 2005
  
• Deaths and Injuries at US Steel: Blame the Workers?, February 24, 2005
  
• Behavioral Safety Comes To The Railroads, November 15, 2004
  
• So Cal Edison Screws Itself With Safety Incentive Programs, October 22, 2004
  
• Safety Bingo: Bad Behavior, October 1, 2003

And more about Kiewit's other subsidiaries here and here (scroll down)

For more on union responses to BS in the US and worldwide, check out Hazards.

.

Labels: Behavioral Safety, Recordkeeping

When writing about ergonomics statistics and enforcement and other workplace injuries, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re talking about real people – people who get hurt at work and left in the dust like so much human cannon fodder of the modern American workplace.

Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and an excellent article by Rachel Brahinsky in the San Francisco Bay Guardian discuss California’s failing workers compensation system and the victims it’s leaving behind, particularly those suffering from repetitive strain injuries (RSIs) like carpal tunnel syndrome and back injuries.

As we’ve discussed many times before, the California Workers Compensation system was a mess: direct cash payments to workers were at or below the national average, but California employers paid the nation's highest rates for coverage due to the high number of claims that were filed and higher medical costs in California. In California and around the rest of the country, workers comp carriers started raising rates when they started losing investment money in the stock market troubles earlier this decade.

When Arnold was elected Governor, one of his first pledges was to "reform" the system. But instead of addressing some of the real causes of the problem (primarily mismanaged insurance companies, high health care costs – and workers suffering preventable injuries on the job), he bullied the California legislature into passing legislation addressing his interpretation of the problem. As Brahinsky describes,

The actor turned pol insisted the problem was litigation-happy attorneys and the injured workers themselves – a group he painted as cheats and scammers. Only by strictly limiting cash payouts to workers and keeping the attorneys at bay could he right this upside-down program – a system so shaky that more than 20 insurance carriers had gone belly-up in recent years.

***

But the real story behind workers' comp is still unfolding. Just days after the new law kicked in last April, life began to change dramatically for injured Californians. Once-routine medical visits were heavily scrutinized as potential crimes. Insurance companies started saying no to just about everything – according to doctors, workers, and attorneys I interviewed – almost as if they were testing the limits of the new law.

Barbara Harlan, a woman I met in the San Francisco court, had to wait so long for postsurgery physical therapy that thick scar tissue built up around her shoulder joint – enough that it had to be surgically torn off before she could finally begin therapy. She was battered when 40 heavy sheets of Plexiglass and hard lighting gel snapped against her legs with a force so powerful that the meniscus in both of her knees was split in two. She came away from the accident, which happened while she was working on a movie set, with back, neck, and shoulder injuries from clawing through more than a thousand pounds of plastic, and has had to stay away from her job as a stagehand for the better part of five years.

Several surgeries and court appearances later, Harlan has a stomach-grinding $40,000 debt on the credit cards she's used to support herself while the insurance company delays her health care.

Who Loses?

Although Arnold declared the reform a success, the fact is that the system has almost completely broken down because no one really knows yet how it’s supposed to work, according to the Times:

Because of the uncertainty, insurers have been slow to slash rates on workers' comp policies, although a premium reduction recommended by a key ratings bureau last week gave hope that significant savings may not be far off — achieving a prime goal of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he shepherded the overhaul through the Legislature in April.

Meanwhile, an estimated 100,000 workers' comp cases have been stalled as doctors rewrite medical evaluations to meet the new, more stringent standards mandated by the law. And sparring over what now constitutes appropriate medical treatment and who should pay for it has forced injured workers to wait a year or more for their cases to be reviewed by independent medical specialists.

***

Throughout the state, trial postponements rose 21% last year as lawyers balked at settling, and orders to take cases off the calendar — in effect setting them back to square one — rose by a similar percentage.

Meanwhile, with more workers' comp claims going to trial, it now takes 93 days to get a case into court in Santa Monica, 55% longer than a year ago and almost twice as long as in 2003.

As the society moves increasingly toward a service economy, the biggest slice of work related injuries is repetitive strain injuries. Schwarzenegger’s plan was to address those injuries – not by preventing them, but by making sure that compensation for its victims didn’t cost too much. And with other cutbacks in the social safety net at the state and federal level, RSI sufferers are facing a perfect storm of neglect. Brahinsky, who herself suffers from an RSI, describes how

He's allowing insurance companies to rely on a set of medical guidelines doctors say don't acknowledge pain as a factor when determining how injured a person is. RSI sufferers will still get some temporary treatment under the new law, but the new time limit imposed on benefits ignores the reality of chronic pain. In his zeal to cut costs, the governor is relying on guidelines that insist on objectively measurable physical changes, and pain is sometimes impossible to witness from the outside.

***

Repetitive strain injuries emerged as an epidemic in the mid-'90s, propelled by the tech boom. Since then they have taken a steady toll. In 2002 repetitive motion was the fourth-highest cause of injury on the job, costing at least $2.8 billion nationally in health care and lost work hours, according to Liberty Mutual, an insurance company. The top injury cause was overexertion, a category that includes a lot of RSIs as well, costing $13.2 billion.

Without much help from workers' compensation, the ranks of office employees working wounded is likely to swell – as is the number of them applying for state-funded disability payments, welfare, and Medicaid. So the insurance companies will save, but someone will have to take on the burden. Exacerbating the problem is a lack of federal recognition: under former president Bill Clinton, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration agreed to ergonomic standards to force employers to create safer work spaces, but President George W. Bush's OSHA repealed them.

At the same time, the social safety net is under attack, both by the governor – who wants to cut welfare grants and trim pensions – and by Bush. The moves to change personal bankruptcy laws and privatize Social Security are especially ominous for injured workers.

Although pain won't be fully acknowledged by workers' comp insurers, people will still be struggling. One RSI sufferer told me he goes through periods where he can't even sit and read because his neck aches. His whole life is arranged around the injury: groceries have to be carried in small bags, dishes often don't get done, and he can no longer drive a car for more than an hour. His work has slowed to a painful pace: his body lags behind his mind, leaving him depressed. Meanwhile, he's been refused disability benefits and has to continue working through agonizing pain. "I feel like I'm living in a cage," he said.

And discounting pain isn’t the only significant change made in the law:

It limited compensation for lost wages, gutted the state's job-retraining program, gave insurance companies the right to strictly manage medical treatment, and – perhaps most significantly – slashed the amount of money an injured worker can get to pay for the medical costs that will come with a lifetime of disability. Rules being promoted by workers' comp chief Andrea Hoch have made these changes even more severe.

Linda Lajes told me she filed a claim after slipping while cleaning a meat grinder at the Fremont FoodMax. She and her daughter had been waiting in the airless room for hours to see if she'd be allowed more medical care.

Lajes hurt herself more than a year ago, just before the reforms. She told me that in addition to a chest-wall injury from the meat-room tumble, she has carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrists that she thinks comes from her years as a checkout cashier. Now, Lajes said, she's in fairly constant pain. "Whenever I grip, push, or shove, my hand and elbow hurts," she said. Her insurance company won't pay for carpal tunnel surgery because of a dispute over what caused it. Her regular doctors will turn her away the moment she says the injury is work-related. So she may not ever have surgery that could help her heal.

Surrounding Lajes were rows of anxious people, some pawing through medical reports, others just waiting, with dead looks on their faces. The smell in the place was strong – many of these folks had been camped out here since 8:30 a.m., and it was now well past 2 in the afternoon.

Who Wins?

So who’s benefiting from these changes? One guess:

So far the reforms have been kindest to insurance firms. Financial reports at the end of 2004 showed they were pulling in dramatically higher profits – just eight months after the law's passage.

AIG, the largest private carrier in the state, reported $11.05 billion in profits for 2004 – up 19 percent from 2003. The California Applicants Attorneys Association, which represents lawyers for injured workers, reports that this is in spite of a dramatic 1,300 percent increase in payout by AIG for hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Another one of the big guys, the Zenith National Insurance Co., also saw income rising. The CAAA's review of Zenith's books shows workers' comp income shooting up 250 percent, from $29.3 million in 2003 to $104 million last year.

From this perspective, the "reforms" start to look more like a massive corporate-bailout scheme: keep rates unregulated and give the insurance companies the right to cut costs any way they can. Some smart investors may have seen the bonanza coming: billionaire Warren Buffett, one of Schwarzenegger's top financial policy advisers, opened a new line of workers' compensation insurance just a few months after the law was signed, through his company Berkshire Hathaway.

Meanwhile, the cost of insurance has dropped slightly for business owners – about an average of 16 percent – and prices may come down again later this month. But many businesses, particularly small companies or those with high-risk employees, are reporting little to no change, and some are even seeing rate hikes as insurance companies get creative with their billing plans.

(AIG, Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffet are currently being investigated by NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer for wide-ranging corruption)

The good news is that injured workers are fighting back. A group injured worker and their allies have formed a group called Voters Injured at Work which is planning a series of demonstrations against Schwarzenegger. The next demonstration will coincide with an April 19 legislative hearing on the impact of the comp reforms. California’s Workers Memorial Day on April 28 will also focus on workers comp reform. Labor and injured workers groups are organizing a demonstration at the state capitol.

Mario Reynoso [is] one of the workers waiting for a hearing in Santa Monica last month....The truck driver, who hurt his left knee while lifting boxes of produce in 2001, is going to court rather than accept the $26,000 settlement offer from his employer's workers' comp insurer.

"My doctor, who did two surgeries on me, told me I better close the case because the laws are going to change," he said, shakily supporting his heavy frame on two wobbling canes in the crowded waiting room.

"They're just throwing me a bone. I'm going to trial," he said. "I'm 61 years old and got five more years to retirement. Who's going to hire me without a driver's license and with crippled legs?"

.

Labels: Ergonomics

What is it about health care workers that makes people think they somehow don't need the same protections as normal human beings? Way back in the mid-1980's when we started organizing for a standard to protect health care workers from hepatitis B and AIDS in the workplace, we regularly received incredulous looks from people who should have known better, but somehow assumed that health care workers had some magic immunity to the communicable diseases of their patients. OSHA standards, personal protective equipment, all that stuff was for real workrs, not hospital workers. Some people, like Congressman Roger Wicker, still seem to think that ill-fitting respirators will somehow magically protect health care workers from tuberculosis, even though he's not making the same argument for a worker exposed to asbestos

Unfortunately, even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seems to fall prey to this misconception. A coalition of 12 unions* has asked the Centers for Disease Control to immediately withdraw the "Interim Guidance for Protecting Health Care Workers Caring for Patients Potentially Exposed to Aerosolized Yersinia pestis (Plague) from a Bioterrorism Event" that "advises that a surgical mask is sufficient to protect healthcare workers caring for patients exposed to plague." The guidance also states that in the event of an acutal biological warfare attack, some OSHA respirator requirements, such as fit testing and medical clearance may have to be suspended.

This guidance is completely at odds with scientific evidence, legal requirements under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, existing NIOSH and OSHA guidance and recommendations for protecting responders, and the Worker Safety and Health Support Annex of the of National Response Plan issued in December 2004. This guidance, if followed, would put healthcare workers at risk of serious and potentially deadly exposure. We ask that this inaccurate and harmful document be withdrawn immediately.

To begin with, a surgical masks are designed to protect patients, not health care workers. They are essentially sneeze guards, designed to keep surgical personnel from breathing or sneezing into a patient's exposed wound, chest cavity or brain. Surgical masks are not respirators designed to filter out contaminants. Unlike properly fitted respirators, surgical masks do not form a tight seal around the face, which means that airborne particles can easily bypass the mask, and be inhaled by the health care worker.

Second, OSHA respirator requirements are not useless, bureaucratic procedures only to be used when there is no "real" emergency. As the letter states, in order for workers to be assured that a respirator is actually protecting them against contaminants, it must be NIOSH certified and workers must have "individual respirator fit testing to rule out those respirators that cannot achieve a good fit on individual workers; and proper training of employees that must wear or have the potential to wear respirators."

In other words if a respirator is not certified by NIOSH, it may not be an effective protective respirator. (It may just be a dust mask or a surgial mask). Even if a worker is wearing a certified respirator, it won't be protective if it doesnt fit properly and airborne contaminants are find their way through the edges. Finally, if workers aren't trained to put on respirators and make sure they are working properly, they won't work properly. It really doesn't matter if the hazardous particles come from terrorists or the rat next door. The faulty guidance is particuarly puzzling as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is part of the CDC. Don't they talk?

And, as the letter points out, the need to follow proper respiratory protection protocols is not some lefty union propaganda, but was also confirmed in the Worker Safety and Health Support Annex of the National Response Plan issued in 2004,to which CDC's parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services was a signatory.

Finally, we've seen (and we're still seeing) what can happen when proper respiratory protection is ignored. Hundreds of World Trade Center rescuers and cleanup workers still suffer high levels of disabling respiratory ailments, such as asthma, sinusitis, persistent coughs and impaired breathing, among the workers who labored to clean up the World Trade Center site.

As the letter concludes:

Failure to provide healthcare workers and other responders adequate protection not only endangers these workers, it undermines the effectiveness of any emergency response and thus endangers the public as well.

CDC's interim guidance on protecting healthcare workers caring for patients in the event of a bioterrorist plague attack is irresponsible and puts workers and the public in danger. It should be immediately withdrawn.

Our members are facing these threats now and they need protection today.

The bottom line is that even in an emergency, you can't just toss a bunch of respirators at health care workers and assume they're protected. They aren't. And giving them a false sense of security will only make them less careful. Without proper equipment, they will get sick. And they will die. And if we lose our front-line health care workers in a real emergency, where will we be?



*The letter was signed by Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO Director of Occupational Safety and Health, on behalf of the American Federation of Government Employees, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, American Federation of Teachers, Building and Construction Trades Department, Communications Workers of America, International Association of Firefighters, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, International Union, UAW, Service Employees International Union, United American Nurses, United Food and Commercial Workers and the United Steelworkers of America.

.

We're learning more about some of the causes of the Texas City BP Amoco explosion that killed 15 workers last month. We're also learning that the plant had been warned previously about the same hazardous conditions.

Surviving witnesses report seeing a spout of liquid and vapors erupting from a 100-foot tower in an area of the refinery known as an isomerization unit just before the explosion. Investigators from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board are asking why the pressure relief system allowed flammable liquids and vapors to vent to a "vent stack," instead of a much safer and more commonly used flare system that burns the material.

Turns out this was not the first time plant owners had been alerted to this problem:

In 1992, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited BP predecessor Amoco Oil Co. for using equipment, including a splitter — the same type of machinery at the center of the current investigation — in a manner "that allowed toxic gases to vent to the atmosphere ... thus exposing employees to flammable or toxic gases." The four-month investigation was part of a broader initiative launched by OSHA after a string of fires at industrial facilities.

To correct the problem, OSHA recommended that Amoco reconfigure the unit so that liquids and vapors discharged go to a flare, or set up air monitors. The company settled the case, which cited 15 violations and fined the company initially $50,000 in 1994, according to OSHA records, but it is unclear whether they followed the agency's recommendation, since it is not required.

BP spokesman Bill Stephens said an initial review of the company's records "indicates that OSHA withdrew that alleged violation."

OSHA records suggest that the plant fixed the problem in May 1992, and the case was settled in August 1994. At some later date, the citation was deleted and the fine was withdrawn. Further details were unavailable late Thursday.

The OSHA violation is supported by anecdotal reports from former employees who worked on the isomerization unit over the years. The unit was constructed from another unit in the mid-1980s, according to state permits. The vent stack has been in place since the mid-50s, but BP said it replaced it in 1997.

Stephens said the stack and a collection tank at its base called the blow-down drum are part of an emergency pressure release system designed to redirect liquids and vent gases.

A longtime employee on the unit said the stack and drum has had problems over the years.

"All of that stuff should have been taken out of that blow-down drum and put to a flare system," said Wydell Dixon, an operator on the isom unit from 1975 to 1999. Dixon later sued and settled with Amoco over an employment dispute.

Facility Siting

Meanwhile, there was another serious problem about which plant owners had plenty of warning: the location of a temporary office trailer only 100 to 150 feet away from the vent stack that exploded, many of whom were inside the trailer. Other major refiners and BP Amoco guidelines call for trailers to be located far from refinery equipment as possible. Some also call for the evacuation of non-essential personnel before a hazardous unit is restarted, one of the most dangerous times of refinery work.

OSHA's Process Safety Management standard calls on companies to perform a "process safety analysis" that addresses "facility siting" issues, such as where office space and control rooms should be located and how blast-resistant they must be.

The Center for Chemical Process Safety published Guidelines for Facility-Siting and Layout in 2003, which also addresses the issue:

Offices and warehouses should be far enough away from ventilation stacks and process units to be "outside of vapor cloud explosion damage areas." Those guidelines also say the typical spacing requirement between offices and equipment is 200 feet.

Ten years ago, there was an explosion at a Pennzoil plant in Rouseville, PA in which three of the five workers killed were in in tool and break trailers near the explosion.

And the plot thickens:

Jacobs, the engineering firm that lost 11 employees in the Texas City explosion, was a contractor at the Rouseville plant. Jacobs executives refuse to comment on trailer placement or contract worker safety.

In the Rouseville case, a Jacobs safety manager filed a legal affidavit saying the "placement of trailers" at the Pennzoil plant was done "in conscious indifference and disregard to the safety and welfare of workers at the plant." Federal investigators castigated Pennzoil, saying lives could have been saved in Pennsylvania had the trailers been farther from the volatile area.

***

Two years later, Pennzoil said it had developed a trailer permitting process that would never again allow the mobile break rooms, offices, laundry facilities or clothing-changing stations to be put in the most dangerous areas of the plant.

Lawyers looking at the Texas City devastation find it hard to understand why trailers are again an issue a decade later.

Indeed.

***
Related Articles

• Workplace Safety Enforcement: A Tale of Two Countries, April 5, 2005
• Transparency? Or PR Savvy?, March 26, 2005
• BP In California: "callous and intentional noncompliance purely for economic reasons", March 24, 2005
• BP, site of fatal explosion, is Nation's Leader in Accidents, March 24, 2005
• At Least 14 Dead, Hundreds Injured In Huge Refinery Explosion, March 23, 2005

Labels: BP, Chemical Safety Board

Worker Crushed By Plane-Pushing Vehicle At Indy Airport

INDIANAPOLIS, IN -- A man working at the Indianapolis International Airport was crushed to death on the tarmac Tuesday morning by a vehicle that pushes airplanes airplanes backward, an airport representative said. The man, whose name wasn't immediately released, was an employee of GSRX, an Ohio-based maintenance contractor operating at the airport for U.S. Airways, Indianapolis television station WRTV reported.


Employee trapped in machine dies

ELK GROVE VILLAGE, IL -- A Schaumburg man died of injuries he received when he was trapped in a punch-press machine at an Elk Grove Village industrial metal manufacturer, police said Tuesday. William Naras, 48, of the 300 block of South Cedar Crest Drive was pinned against the machine by an I-beam or metal arm about 4 p.m. Monday, said Cmdr. Lynn Atkinson.


Central Texas man killed by electrocution

College Station, TX- A 22-year-old Central Texas man is dead, following a tragic accident in Bryan this weekend. Donald Wilcher Smith of College Station was electrocuted at the Sanderson Farm's processing plant Saturday morning. Investigators with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration spent three days at the plant, but do not expect to complete their investigation for at least two months. Smith was born in Bryan, but grew up near Temple and attended Academy schools, graduating in 2000.


Worker Dies After Fall From Bridge

Columbia, TN- A construction worker was killed Friday morning in Columbia when he fell off a bridge while preparing to sandblast it, authorities said. Investigators believe he was painting underneath the bridge over the Duck River on Highway 31 when he fell about 50 feet onto a rocky area. He died instantly. Investigators are now trying to figure out what kind of safety harness or equipment he was using.


26-Year-Old Texas Firefighter Dies After Completing Overtime Shift, Father of Three Suffered Dissecting Aortic Aneurysm

Keller, TX -- A Texas firefighter died in the line of duty March 30th after completing an overtime shift and suffering a dissecting aortic aneurysm. Firefighter/Paramedic Brandon Scott Phillips, 26, had served the Keller Fire Department for three years. He responded to multiple calls during an overtime shift on March 29th, reported the U.S. Fire Administration. Two hours after completing the overtime shift, he suffered a dissecting aortic aneurysm, a split in the inner lining of the aorta.


Trucker killed in I-5 crash

ARTOIS, CA- A truck driver from Spokane, Wash., was killed Thursday night after his tractor-trailer drifted off the shoulder of northbound Interstate 5, then slammed into an overpass pillar at County Road 28. The California Highway Patrol identified the victim as Robert S. Banning, 47.


Vigil Held For Richmond Man Killed On The Job

RICHMOND, Calif. -- People who live in a Richmond housing complex are looking for answers after their maintenance man was shot and killed. Emotions ran high as friends and relatives of Jimmy La held a vigil Wednesday night. La was killed early Sunday morning. Managers say he had worked at the complex for eight years.


Machinery Company Worker Dies After Being Pinned

FRANKLIN, Pa. -- An employee at Joy Mining Machinery in Franklin, Venango County, died following an accident. Authorities said Richard Aiken, 56, died after he was pinned between two pieces of steel. Aiken had worked for the company since 1971 and was taken to a Youngstown, Ohio hospital after he was hurt on Thursday. Frank DeMain, the coroner's investigator in Mahoning County, Ohio, said Aiken's death was accidental and was caused by multiple internal crush injuries. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating.


Worker killed when forklift overturns on him

BENTON, Ind.- A delivery man died after the forklift he was driving overturned and landed on him. Greg L. Harman, 53, was pronounced dead on the scene after the accident Wednesday afternoon, said Anthony G. Coleman, an Elkhart County deputy coroner. He died of massive head injuries. Harman was making a delivery at a lawn-care company in the town about 15 miles southeast of South Bend when the accident occurred. Company employees heard the commotion when the forklift overturned and rushed to help Harman, Coleman said.


Dundee Store worker found dead after robbery

Orlando, FL- A Dundee convenience-store employee was shot to early Friday during a robbery, the Polk County Sheriff's Office reported. Priteshkumar "Pat" M. Amin, 31, of Winter Haven was killed between 6:30 and 7:15 a.m. at the Superway 6 on State Road 542, said sheriff's spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers.


Tree Trimmer Killed After 30-Foot Fall, Worker Killed While Cutting Palm Tree

FULLERTON, Calif. -- The owner of a Lynwood tree-trimming business fell about 30 feet to his death Friday while cutting a palm tree during gusty wind conditions in a Fullerton back yard, police said. The man, whose name was not immediately released, was working at 612 Paseo Place when the accident occurred about 11 a.m. Co-worker Juan Vega, 34, of Lynwood, left to refuel a chain saw. He found his boss on the ground when he returned to the back yard, said Fullerton police Sgt. Steve Matson.


Worker Buried In Trench Is Identified, 8-Foot Trench Collapsed On Construction Worker

RICHMOND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- A construction worker who died when a trench collapsed around him Thursday has been identified. According to the Cuyahoga County coroner's report, Charles Pitsinger, 52, died of asphyxiation while working on the foundation of a newly constructed house in Richmond Heights.


Worker killed in on-site accident in Philadelphia

Philadelphia, PA- An industrial worker died early yesterday morning after an on-site accident in the city's Brewerytown section. Police said Gregory Mayor, 43, of Erial in Camden County, was picking up debris with a forklift when the bucket came down and he was crushed. He was pronounced dead minutes later. The accident happened about 7 a.m. at a construction site in the 2900 block of Oxford Street.


Intertape Polymer explosion kills one, closes plant temporarily

Columbia, SC - An explosion rocked Intertape Polymer, formerly known as Anchor Continental, in Columbia near Shop Road and South Beltline just before 11:00pm Wednesday evening. Tommy Jarvis, 47 , of Lexington County was killed in the explosion.


Pilot in fatal crash failed to pull out of spin

Fort Lauderdale, FL- Champion aerobatic pilot Ian Groom crashed in the ocean before last year's Air & Sea Show simply because he failed to pull his plane out of a flat spin, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.


OSHA checks into grain terminal death

Corpus Christi, TX- The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the death of a 53-year-old man late Wednesday at Interstate Grain Port Terminal on Up River Road, officials said. Lt. Mike Lowrance of the Nueces County Sheriff's Department's Criminal Investigation Division said Thursday that Jose Luis Gutierrez was employed at the terminal and that his job was cleaning the area where grain is moved by a conveyor belt. Lowrance said Gutierrez had been in the room about 90 minutes when co-workers noticed he was missing. He was found just after_9 p.m. after being entangled in the conveyor belt, officials said.


Man killed during holdup

TEMECULA, CA- Police say a 34-year-old clerk was apparently shot to death by robbers. A liquor store employee was shot and killed during a late night robbery, police said Saturday. The California Highway Patrol received a 911 call Friday night that a man may have been shot inside the Rancho Liquor store, 28322 Old Town Front St., in Temecula, police said. Temecula police officers arrived at 9:39 p.m. and found a man who had been shot multiple times inside the store, police said. The victim was identified as Rafi Ibrahim, 34, of Temecula, who worked at the liquor store, police said. Investigators believe Ibrahim was shot during a robbery.


Benton police officer dies in shooting at 2nd officer's home

Benton, AR- Benton Police Sgt. Bryant Dorminey, 35, died early Saturday of what is believed to have been an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound.


Romney man killed in weekend vehicle crash

CAPON SPRINGS, WV - At approximately 11:15 p.m. on April 3, Hampshire County 911 Center received a call in reference to a vehicle crash on Route 259 near Capon Springs, W.Va., in Hampshire County, which resulted in the death of a Romney man. Deputies Norm Launi, Bruce Johnson and Travis McBride of the Hampshire County Sheriff's Department responded to the vehicle crash which took the life of 50-year-old Steven Method, an Allegheny Power employee.


Police seek suspect in fatal shooting

St. Louis, MO- An Allen Cab driver was fatally shot in the 4000 block of Garfield Avenue by a fare who then took his cab early Tuesday morning, St. Louis homicide detectives said. The driver, Samuel K. Starks, 37, was shot about 1:45 a.m. and he died at Barnes-Jewish Hospital at 4:22 a.m.


Man killed doing roadwork

Gainesville, FL- 25-year-old construction worker died Wednesday morning when he was crushed by a dump truck at a Gainesville construction zone on South Main Street. Justin Garland of Gainesville had been positioning orange cones in the southbound lanes of Main Street near the Williston Road intersection shortly before 8 a.m. Nearby, trucks were lined up so they could be loaded with asphalt removed from the roadway, officers reported.


Duane Morris partner dies in plane crash

Philadelphia, PA- Duane Morris partner Barbara W. Freedman was killed Tuesday night in a single-engine plane crash in Cape May County, N.J. Freedman, an avid pilot, was one of two occupants killed in the small plane crash, according to the Center City law firm.


Plant fire claims worker; 3 others hospitalized

Fort Wayne, IN- One of five workers who was seen fleeing from a magnesium fire at National Magnesium and Aluminum Foundries Inc. with his clothes engulfed in flames died Wednesday at St. Joseph Hospital, the Fort Wayne Fire Department said. Edel Laguna, 42, died of severe thermal injury, Allen County Coroner Dr. E. Jon Brandenberger determined after an autopsy Wednesday. Kevin McNabb, a son of company owners Robert and Nancy McNabb, was hospitalized Wednesday at St. Joseph Hospital in critical condition along with two other employees who were in serious condition. Another worker was treated for minor injuries. Fire officials have not released the names of the other injured employees.


Gruesome crash kills trucker

Henderson, NC-A tractor-trailer driver was killed on Interstate 85 South Wednesday afternoon when his windshield was smashed by a spare tire that fell off another vehicle, investigators said. The victim's name was being withheld Wednesday night because family members had yet to be notified, according to 1st Sgt. Larry Parker of the North Carolina Highway Patrol.


Driver killed in fiery crash on I-95

St. Augustine, FL- A driver died in a fiery crash with a tractor trailer Sunday night on Interstate 95 near the Flagler County line, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. Due to extreme fire damage, the driver and vehicle have not been identified, Highway Patrol Lt. Bill Leeper said Monday.


Driven By Fear

Rochester, NY -- As Rochester police search for the person who killed taxi cab driver Neville Bailey on Wednesday, other cab drivers in the city say that the news does not really surprise them as dealing with violence on the job has become the norm rather than the exception.


Officer Dies Trying To Save Pedestrian

Chicago, IL- They sign on to protect and serve. Early this morning a north suburban police officer was killed in a crash trying to do just that. CBS 2's Rafael Romo reports that a Niles police officer was speeding to a call when he lost control of his squad trying to avoid a person in the road. The squad car overturned, killing four-year Niles police veteran, Steven Zourkas.


Worker dies in sinkhole at campus

Charlotte, NC- Gophers, erosion cited amid 15-foot-deep cavity at Southern Wesleyan. Groundhogs tunneling under a road may have caused the 15-foot-deep sinkhole in which a worker fell and died, a Pickens County road official says. The tunnels brought water from a nearby creek under the road, removing dirt from under the asphalt. Eventually, enough soil eroded to create a hole in the street, said Troy Porter, head of the county's road department. David Summey, 35, was investigating the sinkhole on Southern Wesleyan University's campus with two other employees when he accidentally fell in it around 2:30 p.m. Tuesday. Summey suffocated minutes later because there was little oxygen available, Pickens Coroner James Mahanes said.


Man killed in Hollywood when car jack fails

Fort Lauderdale, FL- When the jack broke Thursday morning in Hollywood and his black 1990 Lincoln Continental came crashing down, Dennis Bixler didn't have a chance, police said. Bixler, 67, was tinkering with the engine about 7:30 a.m. when the tire jack gave.


Power line kills two in Floral Park

Mineola, New York - Two workers were killed on Thursday in Floral Park after they came in contact with a high-voltage wire. Police said the two men had just finished putting up siding at a residence at Calla Avenue and Zinnia Street at 5:34 p.m., when the accident happened. The charged wire came in contact with scaffolding that the men were dismantiling, police said. The two men were taken to Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, where they were pronounced dead. They were identified as David Coy Sanchez, 25, and Elkin Astaiza Ceballos, 19. Both were residents of Elmont.


Hit-and-run claims hard worker

Orlando, FL- Alix Vital is killed by a semi on Interstate 4 after stopping to fix a flat on his Honda, troopers say. Alix Vital had worked hard to earn a living and bring his daughters from his native Haiti to Central Florida. Vital, 38, was proud of his two girls -- a sophomore and a junior at Colonial High School. And he also took pride in his purple 1996 Freightliner truck cab, which he parked near his job in Polk County. On Tuesday morning, another semi-truck driver struck and killed Vital on Interstate 4 and then sped away. The Orange County resident had pulled to the side of the road to fix a flat tire on his Honda Accord.


Worker, 36, falls to his death while painting water tower

Baton Rouge, LA- Two co-workers grab rope, survive A man hired to paint a central Baton Rouge water tank fell more than 100 feet to his death Tuesday after the scaffolding he shared with two co-workers broke loose and tumbled to the ground. The co-workers survived by grabbing ropes and pulling themselves to safety, Baton Rouge Police spokesman Cpl. Don Kelly said. Danny Rico, 36, of Plaucheville landed facedown on the grass below with the scaffolding on its side several feet away.


Mine accident kills trona worker

GREEN RIVER, WY -- For the second time in just over a year, a Green River trona miner has been crushed to death by a piece of equipment while working underground at the OCI Wyoming LP Big Island Mine and Refinery. Terry Bigler of Green River died from massive chest trauma in the accident, which occurred about 3:30 p.m. Monday. Officials said Bigler died after being struck by a forklift while working in the mine's underground maintenance shop. Bigler, 47, was pronounced dead in the emergency room at Memorial Hospital in Rock Springs about an hour later, Sweetwater County Coroner Dale Majhanovich said.


Trench collapses; 22-year-old man dead

Lubbock, TX- Rescue workers recovered the body of Rafael Castillo, 22, Tuesday night from the collapsed trench where he laid for more than 10 hours, trapped underneath several feet of dirt. "He's up out of the hole, and he's not alive," Rhea Cooper, deputy chief of the Lubbock Fire Department said after workers recovered the body at about 7:30 p.m.


Turnpike crash kills guardrail installer

Leesburg, FL- A 37-year-old Leesburg woman dies when a car plows through a work crew in the median. Lorraine Ann Barton and the crew installing guardrails in the median of Florida's Turnpike knew it was dangerous work. But the 37-year-old Leesburg woman and the others also knew those guardrails would make the turnpike safer: 54 people were killed last year in so-called crossover accidents in which out-of-control vehicles crossed medians into oncoming traffic.


Worker found dead at Dinwiddie plant

Richmond, VA- A worker at a Dinwiddie County wastewater-treatment plant was found dead yesterday at the bottom of one of the facility's tanks, authorities said. Officials said the victim was a 52-year-old man who was the daytime operator for the plant, located on the 18000 block of Bishop Street, near the county courthouse complex. They did not release the man's name.


Worker crushed to death by tree

NORWALK, CT -- A landscape worker died at a Cranbury home Thursday when he was crushed beneath a tree that fell while he was attached to it, police said. Alex Garcia, 28, of Stamford, was pronounced dead at the scene after emergency personnel arrived at 1 Dawn Road and found him pinned under the trunk of a large tree, Norwalk police Lt. Peter Randall said.


St. Charles officer dies during chase

St. Charles, IL — A Saint Charles police officer has died after responding to a call at a local high school. About 1:20 Saturday morning police were called to Saint Charles East High School to check out reports of a suspicious person. Sgt. Daniel Figgins was apparently involved in a foot pursuit with someone. When other officers lost contact with him they began looking for him. They found that he had collapsed and was not responsive. Figgins, 53, died at the hospital. His death is under investigation. He was a 27-year veteran.


Firefighter dies while training

SOUTHINGTON, CT -- An 18-year-old resident training to be a firefighter died Sunday at St. Mary’s Hospitalin Waterbury after falling off a 20-foot ladder at the Wolcott Regional Fire School. Justin M. Wisniewski was at the fire school on Boundline Road in Wolcott Saturday when he fell at about 1:30 p.m., according to Paul Perrotti, president of the Waterbury Area Fire Chiefs Association, which runs the Wolcott school.

Guam man dies after fall

Washington,D.C- A Guam man died Sunday after falling from a golf cart Saturday night following a concert for sailors and the Guam public at U.S. Naval Base Guam’s Polaris Point, Navy officials said Monday. Roland Boudrau died at 11:59 a.m. Sunday at the the U.S. Naval Hospital Guam, said Lt. Arwen Consaul, Naval Base Guam spokeswoman.


Man dies in workplace accident

EDISON, NJ –– A 35-year-old man’s work day had barely started last week when his life was cut short after several 300-pound boxes toppled on top of him. The man, Earl Lising of Union Township, was unloading a truck at the M&M International Corp. warehouse, 160 Raritan Center Parkway, when another employee was using a forklift to remove heavy boxes that contained metal tubing from the same truck at about 9:40 a.m. on March 30, Patrolman Robert Dudash said.


UNCG staff member dies in car wreck

Greenboro, NC- Fatal car wreck under the W. Market overpass claimed the life of Betty Harden, Director of Advancement Service. UNCG lost one of their own Wednesday March 30 in a tragic car accident that claimed the life of Betty Hardin, director of University.


Accident at plant kills 1, injures 1

Roanoke, VA- Robert Lee Burton was killed while reinstalling a fan at a Giles County lime production plant.One man was killed and another injured in an industrial accident at a Giles County mine and lime production plant Friday evening. Robert Lee Burton, 50, a maintenance worker at a Chemical Lime Co. plant in Kimballton, was killed as he reinstalled a fan on a large piece of machinery, said his brother-in-law Alvin Holt, 38. The pipe became dislodged and struck both men in the head, knocking out Collins and killing Burton, Holt said.


Cattle farmer killed when his tractor rolls

Ann Arbor, MI- A Bridgewater Township cattle farmer was killed Saturday evening when his tractor rolled over on him while he was out feeding cattle on his farm, Washtenaw County Sheriff's authorities said. The farmer was identified as 43-year-old Kevin Keith Clark, who lived in the 11700 block of Burmeister Road.


Farmer Dies In Tractor Accident

CREIGHTON, Neb. -- Norman Horstmann of Creighton, Neb., died Friday in a tractor accident, according to the Knox County Sheriff's office. The Creighton Fire Department and ambulance responded along with the sheriff's office Friday afternoon to the emergency call. Horstmann was found on his rural Creighton farmland pinned beneath an overturned tractor. He had passed away before rescue personnel arrived on the scene.


Coal miner dies in Lincoln County roof fall

ALUM CREEK, W.Va.- Mining officials are investigating the death of a Kentucky man at an underground mine in Lincoln County. Richard Hughes Jr., 40, of Belo died in a "fairly large roof fall at an intersection" about 5:45 p.m. Thursday at the Coal River Mining, LLC-owned Tiny Creek No. 2 Mine near Alum Creek, said Terry Farley, administrator for the state Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training.


Search for tugboat operator suspended

San Francisco, CA- The U.S. Coast Guard reports that a search near the Oakland-Alameda Estuary for a missing tugboat operator was suspended this afternoon. The search was suspended after the tugboat operator's co-worker told the Coast Guard that the missing man did not frequently wear a lifejacket, the Coast Guard reported. Salvage teams also discovered two lifejackets in the tugboat after it was raised. One lifejacket belonged to the missing man; the other belonged to his co-worker, according to the Coast Guard. The tugboat sank near the estuary entrance around 8 p.m. on Tuesday. A salvage company raised the 45-foot tugboat from the water today around 9 a.m. The name of the missing man is being temporarily withheld at the request of his family, the Coast Guard reported.


An Amish farmer died after being kicked in the head by his horse

SMICKSBURG, Pa. — An Amish farmer died after being kicked in the head by his horse, authorities said. John Weaver, 54, of Smicksburg, died shortly after midnight Saturday at Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown. Weaver, a married father of 10, was injured at about 6 p.m. Friday after the plow the horse was pulling came loose, said Jeffrey Lees, deputy coroner in Cambria County. The horse kicked Weaver when he bent over to reconnect the plow, Lees said.


1 dead, 3 wounded in MB nightclub shooting

SC- A man kicked out of a Myrtle Beach nightclub early Saturday morning returned with a gun, killing a club employee and wounding three others, according to police. Ardon Percival Cato II, 26, of Burcale Road, fired shots inside the Red Room at the corner of 12th Avenue North and Kings Highway about 4:47 a.m., Capt. David Knipes said. Anthony Hemingway, 32, a club employee who had thrown Cato out of the club minutes earlier for fighting, was hit and died at 5:38 a.m. at Grand Strand Regional Medical Center.


Deputy killed responding to dispute; suspect held

Newton, Kan. -- A man suspected of fatally shooting a Kansas sheriff's deputy and critically injuring another officer barricaded himself inside his home for hours before surrendering to authorities Saturday. Kansas Bureau of Investigation spokesman Kyle Smith said Gregory Moore, 46, is suspected of shooting the officers when they barged into his house after hearing a woman being struck. Harvey County Sheriff's Deputy Kurt Ford, 38, was killed, and Hesston Police Detective Chris Eilert, 33, was shot four times but survived and was in stable condition at a hospital.


Construction Worker Dies at Mixing Bowl

SPRINGFIELD, Va..- A construction worker died early Sunday morning, making this the second fatality on the Springfield mixing bowl project. Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman Steve Titunic says two workers were in a steel cage about 70 feet in the air, preparing to move the last of four large steel beams into place, around 2 a.m. Titunic says it's believed one of the workers looked over the side of the cage, accidentally moved it and hit his head on the beam, suffering a fatal head or neck injury. The man, identified as 35-year-old Darren Havermale, of Berklet Springs, W.Va., was pronounced dead at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Havermale worked for Williams Steel Co. based in Manassas.


St. Charles officer dies after chasing suspects

ILL- A St. Charles police sergeant died early Saturday after chasing burglary suspects at a local high school, but police suspect a heart attack -- not foul play -- caused his death. Sgt. Dan Figgins, 53, was the first officer to respond to a report of suspicious people at St. Charles East High School at 1:20 a.m.

.

Labels: taxi drivers, Weekly Toll, Workplace Violence

Last week's post "NIOSH By the Numbers" prompted several emails from NIOSH staff and former staff to further enlighten us on their dire situation. A couple of examples:

Example #1 - NIOSH staff are given a $1,000 training budget for each staff person, placed in a separate account (a personal account?). Yet no money is allocated for travel so in effect the money cannot be used, except for local meetings or perhaps on-line classes.

Example #2 - One branch of NIOSH (document development) has lost 6 senior staff in the past year, but only 1 of the positions can be filled permanently. The rest are to be filled with 2-3 year "fellows," temporary assignments. The "increases" NIOSH has gotten in their budget will not help reduce the workload as positions can't be filled or are eaten up by salary increases.

Further evidence of the need for lobbying Congress to increase the budget going directly to NIOSH and investigate the diversions of NIOSH's budget to CDC for "business support services." Meanwhile the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) and the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) have weighed in and asked for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study the possibility of moving NIOSH to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the Department Of Labor (DOL). Moving it to DOL would probably further politicize the agency. NIH may be a poor fit, as its research mission tends more toward the basic research, while NIOSH is more geared toward the applied.

Keep posted for further developments and keep those cards and letters coming.

.

You have friends who think they have their finger on the pulse of the American people? Who think that Dems and labor are totally out of touch with real workers?

Ask them to guess which issue, above all others, the American people think Congress should be more active and directly involved, according to the latest Wall St. Journal-NBC News Poll (Question 10)?

Maybe "Issues of family illness and health, such as the Terri Schiavo case?" Nope. In fact that came in LAST, with only 22% thinking Congress should be more involved.

Or maybe the issue upon which the last election was allegedly decided -- Gay Marriage? Oooh, better luck next time -- a pathetic 34% think Congress should be more involved in Gay Marriage issues.

So what's the answer? What's the most important issue that Americans think Congress should be involved in? "Rules in the workplace that deal with health and safety issues," ringing in at 84%.

And following closely behind were "Environmental laws that involve restricting development to protect endangered species" at 80% and "Discrimination and affirmative action" at 76%.

You don't recall workplace safety, the environment or affirmative action being major issues in the last election? (Only in some peoples' fantasies) You don't recall workplace health and safety being pushed by any AFL-CIO presidents in current debates as an issue crucial to reviving the labor movement?

Hmmm.

I can think of a few good questions for the next poll, if any of you have any friends or spouses who do polling. For example:

1. What is a fair penalty for killing an employee in a workplace that they employer knew was hazardous?
   
   a) $70,000 (the current OSHA penalty for a "willful" violation
   b) $1 million
   c) $1 million and a 10-year jail term
   d) $3,000 if they promise not to do it again.
   
   
2. When should workers have the right to refuse to do a job
   a) Pharmacists who don't believe in birth control should be able to refuse to dispense it to customers who have legitimate doctors' orders.
   b) Construction workers should be allowed to refuse to go into an unprotected trench that is much deeper than OSHA allows.
   c) Doctors should be able to refuse to treat trial attorneys or their families because they oppose medical malpractice "reform."

Check out the rest of the poll. Most of the American people agree with Democrats on most of the issues. Yet most of the people polled voted for George W. Bush.

What does this say about the issues that need to be stressed during elections? What does this say about politicians who try to portray themselves as Republican "lite?" And although it wasn't the main point of the poll, what does this say about good issues for unions to organize around?

.

Someone should strap an ill-fitting respirator on Roger Wicker (R-MS) and lock him in a ward with infectious tuberculosis patients for a couple of weeks.

Wicker is the Congressman from Mississippi whose focus in life seems to be making sure that health care workers get exposed to tuberculosis (TB). Whether the source is the usual payola (e.g. campaign contributions) from the health care industry, or some bad childhood experience with an evil nurse, only Roger (or his shrink) knows for sure.

You may recall last Fall, Wicker successfully introduced a rider on OSHA's appropriations bill prohibiting enforcement of annual fit-testing for workers who wear respirators to protect themselves from tuberculosis. (Technically, the way riders work is that Congress is not telling the agency to actually change the standard, it's telling the agency that it's not allowed to spend any Congressionally appropriated money to enforce that part of the standard.)

A little background, in case you don't recall. When OSHA issued its new respirator standard in 2000, they didn't cover health care workers exposed to tuberculosis because they were going to be covered in the new tuberculosis standard. When Bush's OSHA killed the tuberculosis standard at the end of 2003, the agency (correctly) decided that health care workers who may be exposed to TB would be covered under the general respirator standard (like every other worker who wears a respirator) and required to have annual respirator fit tests (like every other worker who wears a respirator.) Ask any industrial hygienist: respirators don't work real well if they don't form a tight seal around the face. OSHA has estimated that 5 percent to 50 percent of workers would lack a proper fit without annual testing.

The American Hospital Association and the Association of Professionals in Infection Control (APIC) were aghast that they would be forced to fit test health care workers and appealed to Congressman Wicker for help. Wicker sent a letter to OSHA, protesting the respirator requirements. After considering a six-month delay, OSHA finally decided to do the right thing and start enforcing the requirement on July 1, 2004. In a letter to APIC, Assistant Secretary John Henshaw rebuked the association for opposing fit testing when it was already required for hospital workers exposed to ethylene oxide or formaldehyde.

But appropriations riders expire after the end of the Fiscal Year (September 30) and it's kind of a drag having to submit a rider and lobby for it every single year. Wicker figured it was better if he could just OSHA to permanently change the standard. So in January, Wicker sent Henshaw a letter requesting that OSHA permanently withdraw health care workers exposed to TB from the respirator regulation.

To its credit, OSHA refused, and acting Assistant Secretary Jonathan Snare was forced to explain in a letter to the good Congressman that in order to permanently change an OSHA standard, OSHA would have to conduct full notice-and-comment rulemaking. It must have been a shock to Wicker, but it also turns out that in order to issue or change a standard, OSHA has to have some kind of scientific justification.

As part of sustaining a successful rulemaking, the agency would need to scientifically justify that TB droplet nuclei behave differently than other airborne particulate contaminants and necessitate a different regulatory approach to the question of respiratory protection. OSHA is not presently aware of a body of scientific evidence demonstrating this relationship.

Snare also cited the inconvenient fact that the Centers For Disease Control recognizes the importance of "periodic fit testing."

So, now that it's appropriations season again, the odds-makers are betting that being as Wicker has failed to get OSHA to change the standard permanently, he will once again show his industry friends that their campaign contributions are well spent, and re-introduce a rider ensuring that health care workers continue to be exposed to tuberculosis.

These are the kind of "little things" that happen in Washington, far from the headlines or evening news that have very real and potentially devastating impacts on workers -- in this case, our nation's caregivers. While normal tuberculosis is curable with a long, difficult drug treatment (rife with side-effects), drug resistant TB can often mean a death sentence to workers, or family members that they may inadvertently expose.

It's not enough that they repeal the ergonomics standard, sentencing health care workers to disabling career-ending back injuries.

We'll keep you posted. Might not be a bad thing to talk to your Congressman about when the time comes.


Related Articles

• How Did Workplace Safety & Health Fare in the Budget?, November 23, 2004
• Major Owens on Congressional TB Language, September 15, 2004
• House Passes TB Restrictions, September 9, 2004
• Shameless Congressman Continues To Oppose TB Protections, July 14, 2004
• OSHA Wavers On Protections for Health Care Workers, June 8, 2004
• OSHA Announces "Enhancement" Of Worker Protection by Withdrawing TB Standard, January 3, 2004
• OSHA TB Standard: R.I.P. -- Public Health System Approaching Breakdown?, June 5, 2003
  
  .

Way back in August 2003, I wrote about the anti-ergonomics fanatics getting themselves all in a hissy fit over an OSHA citation against a Supervalu warehouse (one of 14 ergonomics citations that OSHA has issued over the past 4 years.).

The citation was pretty straight-forward:

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

The problem back then was that OSHA Director John Henshaw had said that he wasn't going to cite employers who had "implemented effective ergonomic programs" or who are making "good-faith efforts" to reduce ergonomic hazards. I guess OSHA couldn't reconcile multiple shoulder surgeries with the idea of an "effective program" or a "good faith effort" (at least not with a straight face).

Nineteen months later, OSHA has reached a settlement with SuperValu. According to Inside OSHA (subscription required) Supervalu has agreed to hire an outside consultant to conduct worksite analyses, launch a medical management program, and implement feasible and effective engineering, administrative and work practice controls, as well as training for workers and managers. Ho hum. What this amounts to is your basic, generic, white-bread health and safety program, focused on ergonomic hazards. Not too much controversial there.

Or one would think...

Turns out industry attorney's are once again having hissy-fits because of the evil precedent this settlement will set. In the worst criticism they can muster, the industry attorneys accuse Bush's OSHA of "following in the footsteps of the Clinton regulation." What's the problem? According to Inside OSHA, the settlement implicitly recognizes ergonomics hazards, which they maintain cannot be back by scientific evidence.

These types of agreements acknowledge that ergonomics will solve problems," another industry official says. "These abatement provisions are costly and set a terrible precedent that is spiraling. We certainly hope that every citation doesn't end up like this.

No, no! Analyzing the workplace? Medical management? Fixing the problems that you find? Training workers?

Horrors! What will this dastardly administration think of next?

Update: You can read the NCE petition here.

.

Labels: Ergonomics

There are two specters haunting environmental activism today: the growing power and control of polluting corporations, and the often irrational fears generated by 9/11. Together, these forces generate a force that threatens many of the gains made over the past 35 years. Willie Fontenot, who some call the "grandfather of Louisiana environmentalism," may have been a victim of both. Fontenot was forced to retire this week as "community liaison officer" for the state Attorney General’s office, a job he had held for the past 27 years.

***

Life in Louisiana’s cancer ally has never been easy. Living in the shadow of chemical plants spewing cancer-causing chemicals, citizens have a difficult time gathering information on what they’re exposed to and what they can do about it. Fontenot’s job for almost three decades was to help them find the information they needed, learn about Louisiana’s environmental laws, and to file complaints with public officials.

In addition, Fontenot helped found and support numerous Louisiana non-profit environmental organizations:

He assisted in the formation of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, the state's largest environmental organization, which today represents more than 70 separate environmental groups, many assisted in their formation by Fontenot.

He also helped form RESTORE and the Calcasieu League for Environmental Action Now, two major environmental organizations in the Lake Charles area, and the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation in New Orleans.

Part of his job is showing reporters and school groups around the area, explaining the problems and introducing them to activists and people affected by the chemical industry.

Which is where he seems to have gotten in trouble:

He believes his firing was precipitated by an incident that happened while he was accompanying one of those groups — 15 college students from New England — on a tour of a Baton Rouge neighborhood being bought out by the ExxonMobil refinery. The group was stopped and questioned by law enforcement concerned about homeland security after taking pictures of the plant.

The students from Antioch New England Graduate School in New Hampshire were touring the state to learn about environmental racism, and the photographs were required for their class, said Abigail Abrash Walton, a professor who led the trip.

Walton said the group met Mayor Kip Holden, then drove around looking at industrial plants in the area. When directly across from one facility, the students began taking photos.

"Two or three minutes later, two security vehicles showed up," Walton said, and off-duty Baton Rouge police and East Baton Rouge sheriff's deputies pulled the van over and demanded the licenses of those inside.

Fontenot was asked to collect the student's driver's licenses; he refused, saying he wasn't leading the trip.

The security officers then contacted the attorney general's office by phone, Fontenot said. He was told later that a complaint was filed by the Sheriff's Office with the attorney general's office about his refusal to cooperate.

Fontenot said he was given a choice of retiring or facing a disciplinary hearing that would end in his firing. Fontenot, 62, is not in good health. He’s legally blind, suffered a mild stroke last year, and is being treated fro prostate cancer. Facing the loss of his pension and health insurance if he was fired, he chose to retire.

The state says the Fontenot didn't let them know where he was going or what he was doing that day. Fontenot, a survivor of 27 years in hostile territory, says he followed all of the rules. The state says Fontenot had already decided to retire. Fontenot says that’s not true.

The fundamental underpinning of much of the environmental law passed over the past thirty years has been the involvement of the communities affected by environmental pollution. A number of federal and state environmental laws have forced companies to reveal the substances they use, what they release into the air and the potential consequences of catastrophic accidents for surrounding communities.

In the wake of 9/11, all of those rights – strenuously opposed by the chemical industry since their introduction -- are under attack. Federal and state governments, without much consultation with Congress or affected citizens, are erecting higher barriers to access to chemical exposure information.

As we’re seeing from Fontenot’s fate, it's not just our laws, but also citizens and government officials may fall victim to these attacks if they continue to insist on the right of the public to know what their exposed to. Of course, as we've seen from recent events in Texas City, Texas, and Graniteville, South Carolina, we probably have more to fear from ourselves than any outsiders who would deliberately do us harm. And our strongest weapons -- an informed citizenry and activists and government officials free to do their jobs -- are under attack.


.

Who Are The Real Asbestos Cheats?

When not ranting about social security “reform,” the Bush administration has spent the first few months of its second term raving against "frivolous asbestos claims" and passing legislation that ensures that people driven to bankruptcy by high health care costs can’t cheat by declaring bankruptcy.

But just because easy personal bankruptcy corrupts the very essence of what makes America great, the same is, of course, not true when it comes to asbestos companies declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying compensation to the victims of their products.

Stuart Levit and Jeff Milchen have written an article in the American Prospect describing how asbestos companies have exploited bankruptcy laws to avoid compensation victims is particularly interesting. Recognizing that some smaller businesses that have done no more that resell asbestos-containing products have gotten caught up into the web, “Many of the several dozen business bankruptcies -- touted as the tragic results of “runaway lawsuits” -- are examples of corporate planning to shield assets from victims rather than a function of being “broke” in any traditional sense.”

The ability of companies to declare bankruptcy in order to avoid paying asbestos-related compensation is a result of a 1994 law “law permitting bankruptcy protection for companies with asbestos liability -- a major benefit to those with substantial liabilities. This effectively made bankruptcy the most sensible response for many corporations facing asbestos claims."

W. R. Grace is one good example. You will recall that in February the Justice Department indicted W.R. Grace executives alleging that the company had exposed its workers and the community to deadly asbestos for decades with telling people or taking measures to prevent exposure.:

While WR Grace delayed taking any action to protect workers, once they began dying, it wasted little time protecting shareholder assets from the inevitable lawsuits. Between 1988 and 1998, WR Grace executives “eliminated” more than three-quarters of the company’s $6 billion in assets by redistributing them to legally separate entities with no liability to compensate victims or creditors. WR Grace filed for bankruptcy in 2001, after most of its former assets had been removed.

Among other companies using bankruptcy as a shield is Halliburton, which faces $4.3 billion in pending asbestos claims. As of March 2005, its Web site boasts that “Chapter 11 is very good for out investors.” According to Halliburton, nobody goes out of business, business operations don’t change, and bankruptcy allows to it to “cleanse the company” of its asbestos liabilities and keep the company strong.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is among those who blame asbestos litigation for “forcing” Owens Corning into bankruptcy in 2000, and subsequent layoffs at its Granville, Ohio, facility were touted as evidence of litigation’s pernicious effects. However, many jobs terminated were in Owens Corning’s litigation department, not manufacturing or industry. Oh, yes, CEO David T. Brown took home $3.8 million in 2004.

The authors note that WR Grace CEO Paul J. Norris made $5 million last year. Not bad for a company that’s declared bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, the never-ending battle over an asbestos compensation bill continues in the U.S. Senate, with Arlen Specter (R-PA) getting ready to introduce a bill. The prospects for passage remain somewhat cloudy. The insurance companies think Specters $140 billion compensation fund is too high, and are threatening to drop support for the legislation

Levit and Milchen warn, however, that setting a level for any asbestos compensation fund may be premature, given the long (up to 30 year) latency period between exposure to asbestos and the development of disease, and the fact that asbestos is still used in this country in brake linings and other products.

.

Labels: Asbestos

New news, old news: Four years after George Bush and the Republican Congress bowed to their corporate benefactors and repealed OSHA's newly issued ergonomics standard, ergonomic injuries (musculoskeletal disorders or MSDs) stubbornly remain the number one workplace injury. Knowing the news would not please me or the readers of Confined Space, the Bureau of Labor Statistics cleverly released this information in its annual report on the characteristics of lost-worktime injuries and illnesses for 2003 while I was on vacation.

Despite four years of the Bush administration's "CompRehensive APproach" to ergonomics (outreach, enforcement, and research -- but not regulations), ergonomic injuries not only remain stuck at one-third of all serious workplace injuries and illnesses that involved days away from work, but they are also more severe than other injuries, causing workers to stay out of work longer.

The service sector had the most MSDs, with 71% of all cases. Health care and social assistance were the industry sectors that reported the most cases, with 19 percent of all MSD cases. Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants were the occupation with the most MSDs. Laborers and material movers, along with heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers and the second and third most MSDs.

Carpal tunnel syndrome had the highest median days away from work (32 days), even more than fractures (30 days), and amputations (30 days). The longest absences from work were caused by repetitive motion, such as grasping tools, scanning groceries, and typing.

Despite this news, Acting Assistant Secretary Jonathan Snare remains firmly locked in see-no-evil, hear-no-evil" mode.

Today's data, along with the seven-percent decline in workplace injuries and illnesses from 2002 to 2003 that BLS reported last December, validates OSHA's policy of targeting outreach and enforcement resources where they will have the most impact. This data tells us our Strategic Management Plan is on the right track.

Yeah, right. So where did the "CompRehensive APproach" go wrong?

Where did it go right, might be the question. In the last four years, federal OSHA has issued three wishy-washy ergonomics guidelines (for the nursing home, grocery and poultry processing industries), done no research, issued fewer than 20 14 ergonomics-related citations and formed over 70 worthless ergonomic-related alliances.

And hundreds of thousands of seriously disabled workers is all they have to show for it.

Related Articles

• Just Another Disposable Worker, December 20, 2004
• Big Crybabies: Anti-Ergo Coalition Upset About OSHA Symposium, January 13, 2004
• If You Try To Re-Build It, They Still Won't Come: Ergonomics Expert Boycott OSHA Symposium, December 21, 2003
• See No Evil: OSHA Declares “Mission Accomplished” on Ergonomics in Nursing Homes, October 16, 2003
• Ergo Barbarians Pillage ANSI Ergonomics Standard, October 16, 2003
• Hear No Evil….., October 15, 2003
• OSHA Ergo Advisory Committee to Meet Sept. 24, September 10, 2003
• Civil War Brews over Ergonomics: OSHA vs. Anti-Ergo Industry, August 6, 2003

Labels: Ergonomics

In past posts I've noted that a contributing factor to the high number of deaths in the steel industry are new contracts between the steelworkers union and the steel companies that have given companies more flexibility to move workers around to different jobs where they may have less experience. Downsizing in many companies has also meant that workers are doing a variety of new jobs that they may not have been trained for.

Take, for example, the story of Dave Triplo, a pipefitter at U.S. Steel Corp.-Granite City Works plant. After U.S. Steel Corp. bought out National Steel Inc. and downsized, life changed at the plant:

The downsizing meant steelworkers would each have to assume additional duties to fill the void. Which is why Triplo was not only working as a pipefitter, but he also joined the millwrights in performing mechanical work overnight.

"It's all hands-on when you work with another guy," he said. "That's when you learn."

The casting machine Triplo was told to clean back in December 2003 was a metal-sorting machine that forms steel into 9-inch thick and 6-foot wide slab of varying lengths.

The only way to get inside to clean the 20-foot-tall machine's water sprayers is to enter atop the apparatus' 6-foot-long, 9-inch-wide opening. Triplo was given the task after he and fellow steelworkers were given a "fit test." Because he could fit his 5-foot-7, 160-pound body through the entry, Triplo was assigned to clean the machine.

"He told me that if I fit in that mold, I (would have to go in)," he said. "No 'ifs,' 'ands' or 'buts.'"

Triplo decided to go inside, but almost inside he said he could not stabilize himself. The machine has a series of about a dozen steel rolls. He was supposed to use them as a ladder to get down inside and climb back out.

But he said his large leather steel-toed boots kept him from standing on the rolls and he felt that he would fallen the rest of the way -- about 16 feet -- if he went in all the way.

Triplo climbed out and refused to go back in.

He was fired on the spot.

Another theme of past articles, illustrated by Triplo's experience, is that workers are being disciplined and fired for complaining about unsafe conditions or reporting accidents:

In Granite City, United Steelworkers of America Local 1899 financial secretary Gary Gaines said it is understood that those reporting accidents on the job will be blamed for being careless, "not paying attention" or "not following procedures."

As a result, workers face suspension, or as in Triplo's case, termination.

"It's a near guarantee you'll receive disciplinary action if you're hurt at work," said Gaines, who has worked in some capacity with at the Granite City steel mill for the past 33 years. "The worker's story is basically ignored. It's you were doing it, so it's your fault."

A safety chairman from Local 1899 said supervisors are looking for a reason to discipline workers for most injuries reported.

"The pattern is clear that that is what is occurring," said Dennis Barker.

The situation has gotten so bad, that steelworkers have coined a name for it "Bloody Pocket Syndrome" which Steelworkers Health and Safety Director Mike Wright describes as

steelworkers who may have as little as a cut on their hand while on the job and in fear of retribution will hide it and wait until after their shift to go to the hospital.

"U.S. Steel has pretty much determined their problem is their workers, and that accidents are caused by people performing unsafe acts," Wright said.

He also said the problem is not limited to U.S. Steel, or the steel industry. He said today's industrial workers are under more strain and pressure than before.

"I think that's due to the economic conditions," he said. "People are working very large amounts of overtime, crew sizes are (smaller) and people are being put into jobs that are insufficiently staffed."

Triplo eventually got his job back along with $38,000 in back pay. But the main problems are still there:

Wright said the steel industry and others need to do a better job of designing safety procedures and make sure workers are properly trained.

"When people believe they are going to be disciplined as a result of reporting an accident, they are not going to report the accident," he said. "That's just human nature."

"They believe the company will add insult to injury."

Related Stories:

• Sudden Death In The Steel Industry, March 22, 2005
• Safety Pays? Maybe. But Workplace Fatalities in The Steel Industry Don't Pay Much, March 9, 2005
• Deaths and Injuries at US Steel: Blame the Workers?, February 24, 2005
• Steelworkers Continue to Die, February 6, 2005
• Steelworker Deaths and Injuries on the Rise, January 6, 2005
• Steelworker Deaths Climb: Manage Change or Manage Funerals, August 30, 2004

.

April 28 is Workers Memorial Day, a day set aside each year by unions and health and safety activists around the world to remember the more than 60,000 workers who die from job injuries and illnesses and another 6 million who are injured at work each year. It's also a time to to recharge our batteries for another year of fighting to make real the guarantee of safe workplaces for all American workers.

As the AFL-CIO decides whether working conditions and workplace safety is a priority issue it is particularly important this year for union and health & safety activists to organize events or join in existing events -- to show both union leaders and corporate leaders that we have no intention of backing off the promise of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Check out the AFL-CIO Workers Memorial Day webpage for fliers, factsheets and clip art.

And check out the Hazards Workers Memorial Day website for materials from around the world.

And finally, for "inspiration" go back and re-read the Weekly Toll. For almost two years, with the invaluable help of Tammy Miser and friends, I've been listing every worker killed on the job that I can find. Behind each of these names is a wife or husband, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers who can't understand why their loved ones are no longer with them. It's a sobering read, even realizing that I'm only able to find less than half of those killed in workplace accidents, and none who die of work-related disease. The last few are here, here, here and here.

Be there on April 28.



.

Labels: AFL-CIO

Sometimes you don't know whether to be pissed off at the guy making the dumb quote or the reporter who just scribbles it down without any follow-up or background research.

Twenty-two year old Rafael Castillo was killed yesterday when he was crushed under tons of soil when a trench collapsed on top of him. It took rescuers 10 hours to dig out his body. He had a one year-old daughter.

This is what Rhea Cooper, deputy chief of the Lubbock Fire Department said about the trench collapse:

The cause of the collapse also is unknown, and Cooper said when trench walls cave in, the reason often is never determined.

"It's called 'trench collapse,' and it's something that happens sometimes, but we aren't sure why," he said.

Well who the hell cares "why?" (If you're truly interested in why and how, it has something to do with physics and gravity -- go dig a hole in the sand at the beach and see what happens) The important thing is not the cause of trench collapses or "why" they happen. The point is that they do happen, they happen frequently and they kill workers. And most important, there are widely recognized ways to prevent trench collapses and a clear OSHA standard detailing what must be done to prevent them.

But I never cease to be amazed at how often, after a fatal trench collapse, people (including reporters) scratch their heads as if it's just the most puzzling, freakish thing in the world.

And here's something strange: Another article contains the following quote:

Richard Tapio, Area Director of the Department of Occupational Safety and Health says that the the Utility Contractors of America has had violations. He couldn`t be more specific as to the exact violations, but he emphasized that about eight of every 10 contractors that do this type of work have some sort of violation, mostly technical and not safety-related.

Yeah, right, everyone gets citations. No big deal. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Except when you check out the OSHA web page and find that Utility Contractors of America has been inspected by OSHA five times since 2000. Why so many times. Probably has something to do with the three willfull trenching citations and $101,000 fine in 2000 (later oveturned by an administrative law judge). And in January of 2004, the company recieved a serious trenching citation and $875 fine.

Incidentally, the company claims that Castillo had been working inside a trench box, but for some reason stepped outside it just as the trench collapsed.

Suicide? Stupidity? Coincidence? Fantasy? Who knows? And we'll probably never know. OSHA is investigating, and will undoubtedly cite the company in around six months. But I'd wager this will be the last time you'll see mention of this incident in the media.

.

Labels: Trench Hazards

Read blogs. So now I'm catching up on my favorite blogs after my vacation

I find that Workers Comp Insider has found a website that describes what it would be like to be working at the worst jobs in history:

The Worst Jobs in History is a journey through 2,000 years of British history and the worst jobs of each era. It is an alternately amusing and horrifying look back at the types of jobs our forebears held, and a description of the work conditions they faced. So if you ever wondered what it would be like to be a Medieval fuller or leech collector, a Tudor woad dyer or groom of the stool, a Stuart nit-picker or plague burier, or a Victorian rat catcher - now's your chance to find out.

I missed my favorite holiday while I was gone, but luckily Jonathan Tasani celebrated it for me:

How about this? The media is doing extensive coverage of a huge labor battle, with the networks sending their anchors down to the site, cameras set up to record the daily struggle; CNN has a full-time correspondent on the scene. Here are the details.

For many years, workers having been trying to organize at Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina, where 6,000 workers slaughter 34,000 hogs a day to produce retail pork items at the largest such plant in the world. The company’s union-busters have lead a campaign over several years that includes threats to close the plant, interrogations, surveillance and firings. The company has its own private policy force, with a holding cell. During one recent campaign, they used riot-clad police during the election.

Read on.

Feeling left out of the world-wide mourning for Pope John Paul II? Nathan Newman talks about John Paul II on labor:

For those committed to labor rights, John Paul II wrote a landmark encyclical, On Human Work in 1981 that laid out tough pro-labor views that conservatives routinely ignored.

John Paul II saw the rights of labor as THE issue for economic justice; "human work is a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question, if we try to see that question really from the point of view of man's good." John Paul II rejected market relations as delivering justice for workers and emphasized "solidarity" between workers as the critical element that the Church must support

Mick Arran notes that the Bush Administration is practicing union-bashing on the cheap, with a one-person Labor Department office hunting down labor corruption in Nevada:

Not that a one-person outpost couldn't do some damage, but it's a sign that the Bushies are taking this about as seriously as they took pre-war planning, which is to say, not very. Still, it means they intend to use Elaine Chao's so-called 'Labor Dept' to attack unions. In this Orwellian Republican world, the most corrupt administration in history is going to 'investigate' unions for financial irregularities. We're reaching the laugh-til-you-cry stage in Bush's destruction of workers' rights.

And finally, for all the general labor news you'll ever want, check out rawblogXport.

Victories in battles over working conditions and pay are few and far between for America's farm workers -- or any workers -- these days. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, has an op-ed in the NY Times today describing the victory of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers over Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, A&W All American Food Restaurants and Long John Silver. The victory was largely a result of a 4-year long boycott against Taco Bell, a major purchaser of tomatoes grown in Immokalee.

As Schlosser says, "the need for a corporate edict against slavery in the United States reveals just how bad things have become for farm workers."

Migrant farm workers have long been the nation's poorest group of workers. Although wages and working conditions greatly improved during the 1970's, thanks to the efforts of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, the rise of illegal immigration and anti-union sentiment later eroded those gains. In California, where more than half of America's fruits and vegetables are grown (and mainly picked by hand), the hourly wages of some farm workers adjusted for inflation have fallen by more than 50 percent since 1980.

Today the majority of America's farm workers are illegal immigrants. They often live in run-down trailers, sheds, garages and motels, where a dozen or so may share a room. Their status as black market labor makes them fearful of being deported, wary of union organizers and vulnerable to exploitation. The typical migrant farm worker is a young Mexican male who earns less than $8,000 a year.

The working conditions in the fields of Florida are especially bad. According to a recent study by the Urban Institute, perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants. They are usually employed by labor contractors, who charge them for food, housing, transportation - and, on occasion, smuggling fees. These charges are often deducted from workers' paychecks, trapping migrants in debt. Since 1996, six cases of involuntary servitude have resulted in convictions in Florida; many others have probably gone undetected. In one of these cases, hundreds of farm workers were held captive by labor contractors based in La Belle and Immokalee, Fla., forced to work without pay and warned that their tongues would be cut off if they tried to escape. The Florida legislature has done little to help migrants. Agriculture is the state's second-largest industry, after tourism, and many legislators have close ties with leading growers.

The boycott worked:

With coalition members conducting hunger strikes and staging demonstrations in front of Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine, Calif., it seemed increasingly unwise for the nation's leading purveyor of Mexican food to be publicly linked with the exploitation of poor Mexicans. And the coalition's wage demand was by no means outrageous. It was asking for a pay raise of one penny for every pound of tomatoes picked - the first major wage increase in Immokalee since the late 1970's.

And that penny per pound -- which may cost the $9 billion corporation several hundred thousand dollars a year -- doubles the take-home pay of the migrant workers.

Schlosser also points out the underlying causes of the abuse, a system that bears similarities to the way Wal-Mart relates to its suppliers:

Although farmers are often demonized in reports about migrant labor, it's important to point out that they are under tremendous pressure from the leading fast food chains to reduce costs. Food-service companies now purchase the majority of fresh produce in the United States - and farmers often believe that cutting wages is necessary to cut prices for their largest customers. Meaningful change, therefore, will have to come from the top.

And where, you might ask, have the federal and state goverments been while this abuse has been going on? Ignoring the problem and weakening workers rights and the agencies that are supposed to enforce them.

According to Schlosser:

The failure of government to protect the weakest and most impoverished workers in the United States has left the job to corporations and consumers. Taco Bell deserves credit for acknowledging its responsibility on this issue. Now McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and Yum's other brands need to do the same.

And in addition to corporations and consumers, let's not forget to give some credit to the workers themselves and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. With the turmoil and hand-wringing embroiling the labor movement these days, the lessons of this victory of the weakest over the strongest shouldn't be overlooked: First, creative organizing can overcome the greatest obstacles. And second, while the debate rages over the role of health and safety in the labor movement, don't underestimate the power of working conditions as an organizing tool.

Related Stories

• Agreement For Immokalee Farmworkers, March 9, 2005
• Immokalee Farmworkers: Still A Harvest of Shame After All These Years, March 1, 2005

.

For the second time, a jury has found in favor of the victims of "popcorn lung."

A Jasper County jury on Friday de-livered a $15 million verdict in favor of a former Jasper Popcorn Co. plant maintenance man and his wife in their lawsuit against the makers of a butter flavoring used at the plant.

The jury deliberated one hour and 35 minutes before returning the verdict that awarded Richard "Hank" Brand $12 million and his wife, Lana Brand, $3 million at the conclusion of a two-week trial in Jasper County Circuit Court.

The Brands, who live at 20116 County Road 160 in Jasper County, were seeking redress from International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. and Bush Boake Allen Inc. for injury to Hank Brand's health suffered during 17 years of work at the plant in Jasper.

Their lawsuit claimed that Hank Brand, 50, contracted bronchiolitis obliterans, a rare lung disease, as a consequence of breathing fumes of a butter flavoring manufactured by the defendants.

The workers had charged that International Flavors and Fragrances and Bush Boake Allen, the manufacturers of 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.

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."

Last March, a jury awarded Eric Peoples, another worker at the factory, $20 million for the damage caused to his lungs. In another trial, the jury found against four workers in a combined trial last year, but that verdict was overturned when it was learned that a juror had failed to disclose relevant information during jury selection. Three other trials ended in settlements before the jury verdict.

Previous Popcorn Lung stories here.

.

Labels: Diacetyl, Popcorn Lung

Back in the days when Republicans were in favor of balanced budgets, they would also criticize liberals when they attempted to explain some of the sociological reasons for violence in our society.

But now Republican politicians seem to have reached a deeper understanding -- and even sympathy -- for justifiable violance (some might even say terrorism) -- at least against those who wear judicial robes and dare to disagree with the will of God, as interpreted by the disciples of George W. Bush.

First we have House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX):

"Mrs. Schiavo's death is a moral poverty and a legal tragedy. This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.

And yesterday we have Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) suggesting, shall we say, a different form of "term limits" for judges. After all, misbehaving Godless judges are different than misbehaving Godless politicians....

Of course the difference is that they can throw the rascal -- the rascal out -- and we are sometimes perceived as the rascal -- if they don't like the decisions that we make. But they can't vote against a judge because judges aren't elected. They serve for a lifetime on the federal bench. And, indeed, I believe this increasing politicalization of the judicial decision-making process at the highest levels of our judiciary have bred a lack of respect for some of the people that wear the robe. And that is a national tragedy.

And finally, I – I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news. And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in -- engage in violence. Certainly without any justification but a concern that I have that I wanted to share.

Well, as you might imagine, the blogosphere has been lighting up with commentary about this quote. I've got some links below if you're interested. As for me, this whole affairs brought me back almost ten years to a time when I was spending quite a bit of time on workplace violence.

In 1996, I wrote a chapter in Occupational Medicine: State of the Art Reviews about violence against public employees. Among the issues I discussed in wake of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city, and bombings at Bureau of Land Management and Forest serive officies in Nevada, was public employees as victims of ideologically motivated violence motivied by rising hostility toward government in general.

While the number of purely ideologically motivated violent acts against public employees is unknown, a growing disenchantment with government in general, fanned by certain politicians and talkshow hosts, may have relaxed traditional inibitions that people have had when confronting what they see as a hostile government authority. This perception may be heightened by some talk show hosts and others who have portrayed public employees as lazy, spiteful bureaucrats and jackbooted thugs spewing out silly and costly regulations an vengefully enforceing them against innocent citizens and small businessmen. As one talk show host said when counseling his radio oudience on the best method for murdering officers of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Riearms: "They've got a big target there [on their chests]. Don't shoot at that because they've to a vest on underneaty that . Hrad shots, head shots...Kill the sons of bitches." Following the Oklahoma City bombing, a United States Senator insisted that federal emloyees who worked at the Murrah buiding but who had not been accounted for by the authorities "...were playing hooky that day, maybe had left early, maybe had gone out [oin breaks] that were not authorized or something."

Seriously, my feeling is that there are more than enough wackos in this country who think that the only entities with any rights are the pre-born and the pre-dead. Some of them only need a tiny nudge to be sent over the edge.

And the sayings of Tom Delay and John Cornyn may be all they need. Way to go guys.

More on Cornyn here, here and here.

Labels: Workplace Violence

Boy, talk about being trapped in a dead-end job.

A restaurant deliveryman who immigrated from China and speaks virtually no English spent three days unnoticed in a stalled high-rise elevator in the Bronx as an intensive search swirled around him, the police said today. He emerged this morning thirsty but appearing otherwise all right after someone finally heard - or he finally figured how to trigger - the elevator car's alarm.

Ming Kuang Chen, 35, had gone to deliver dinners to Tracey Towers, two apartment buildings that rise 38 and 41 floors, respectively. When he failed to reappear after delivering the food, a massive searched was launched. Delivery people are often the target of crimes, so foul play was suspected.

Meanwhile, the Tracey Towers elevators are notoriously troublesome, so no one thought twice about them being out of order for a few days.

Mr. Chen is reported to be from the coastal Fuzhou region of Fujian Province in southeastern China, where his wife and 12-year-old son live. His family told the police that he had entered the United States illegally and paid off a $60,000 fee to the people who smuggled him in, the police said.

He has worked six days a week at Happy Dragon, making about 40 deliveries a day on weekdays and as many as 60 on weekends. His last delivery on Friday was to an off-duty police officer who lives in Tracey Towers, the police said.

Workplace safety enforcement in the United States is largely a cat and mouse game, with the mouse usually coming out on top. Although American companies are required to keep a log of injuries and illnesses suffered by their employees, they are not required to actually report incidents to OSHA unless three or more workers are hospitalized as a result of a single incident, or if a worker is killed. A single incident could theoretically injure dozens of workers, but if only two were hospitalized, OSHA may never hear of it. Even where workers are killed and the company cited, the citations start out relatively low, and often are negotiated down from there.

Take BP Amoco, for example. The giant oil company, where 15 workers were recently killed in a huge explosion, was fined $109,500 last month as a result of an accident that killed two Texas City workers when pressurized, superheated water was released from a 12-inch check valve. But the fine is clearly too much for the poor company that only made $285 billion in profit last year. They're appealing the citation. And why not? Last August, OSHA issued a press release boasting of a $63,000 fine for 14 serious violations of OSHA standards that resulted in a fire where no one was injured. Despite the statement from Charles Williams, OSHA Houston South area director, that "OSHA will not tolerate this disregard for worker protection," OSHA negotiated the fine down to $13,000.

Things are a bit better in Great Britain according to the Houston Chronicle: When a BP refinery in Grangemouth, Scotland had three incidents in 2000 that didn't injure any workers, British authorities leapt into action:

Authorities in the United Kingdom didn't wait for anyone to die in Scotland before taking action. The government filed criminal charges against BP after the accidents in 2000. Eventually a Scottish sheriff, equivalent to a U.S. judge, imposed a record fine for a noninjury industrial accident of £750,000 or about $1.4 million, based on current exchange rates.

But British unions are understandibly not satisfied:

Even the large fines imposed in Scotland were nothing more than flea bites to multinational petrochemical companies like BP, among the world's largest players in big oil, argued Pat Rafferty, a regional industrial organizer for the Transport and General Workers Union branch in Scotland that represents workers at BP's Scottish refinery.

"When you get a fine — for a company like BP that means nothing," Rafferty said. "The corporate image was damaged but not the corporate purse."

Rafferty said he would like to see more cooperation between refinery workers worldwide to try to counteract pressures on safety produced by rising prices and shrinking work forces.

The British labor movement has also been trying, unsuccessfully to pass a law that would allow Britain's Health and Safety Executive, to have the power to bring criminal manslaughter charges against plant managers whose actions result in worker deaths.

The news reports of a fast-food customer’s discovery of a severed human finger in their bowl of Wendy’s chili led many of us to react with “E-gads!” “Gross!”... or worse. The ever-interesting Paul Revere of Effect Measure wrote on March 25 about this incident in a post called “Menu Tip: Meatpacking is Dangerous Work.” A loyal Confined Space reader, who, shall we say, has seen first-hand the extent of OSHA’s interest in accurate recordkeeping, reacted thoughtfully to the Chili ala fingertip story, noting its value as a controlled experiment (granted, n=1) to assess the efficacy of OSHA’s recordkeeping rule (Part 1904).

Unless this is some sick person’s idea of a practical joke, it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which the fingertip does not belong to a worker. OSHA’s recordkeeping rule is supposed to ensure that if someone is injured on the job and requires more than first aid, the employer will record information about the injury on the OSHA 300 Log. But in this case, investigators have been looking high-and-low for the owner of the displaced finger, with no success. They have been asking employers about entries on their OSHA 300 Logs, including inquiries to all the Wendy’s restaurants in the area, the suppliers of beans, meat, and other Chili fixin' ingredients, but they can’t find any company that will admit to a recent finger-losing incident.

This true tale says many things about the state of workers’ safety and health in the US, including that our injury and illness recording system is a JOKE. A serious injury occurred at a workplace---a finger was severed and became part of some unsuspecting person’s lunch---but it apparently isn’t recorded on any company’s log. The fact that these injuries occur thousands of times each day in the US is bad enough, but that we have no reliable system for recording them, and apparently less and less interest in enforcing the system we have, is a disgrace. Somewhere in Louisville, OSHA's former Asst Secretary John Henshaw’s mouth may still be on autopilot bragging about the “triple bottom line” of reducing injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. Given that we have no system at all for tracking occupational illnesses, and that the fine for concealing an employee’s injury is currently running at about 0.1% of the fine for uttering a “dirty word” on the radio, shouldn’t that be “triple bottom LIE?”