Congressman Richard Pombo: "Unprecedented Crescendo of Politicization"

The House Resources Committee is working with President Bush to ensure that snowmobilers have access to our National Parks and recreation areas. You can rest assured that the House Resources Committee and the Bush Administration are working together to protect your right to ride.

Ho hum, yet another Bush advertisement?

Not quite. It's actually "an aggressive mail campaign -- at taxpayer expense -- to promote the environmental work of President Bush and a few vulnerable committee members in recent months," sent by Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA), Chairman of the House Resources Committee.

Turns out that while there are restrictions on Congress members using their free postage priveleges 90 days before an election, there are no such restrictions on Congressional committees.

Not only has Pombo Pombo mailed fliers to 100,000 residents in Minnesota, Wisconsin and a few western states touting the president's push for snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park, but he's also given his staff a month's paid vacation right before the election.

(Lots of Congressional staffers head out on the campaign trail, but normally they use vacation time or leave-without-pay.

RoboCop at the Pentagon?

I spent 16 years working for AFSCME, the union representing state, county and municipal employees. Throughout that time, and beyond that time opposition to privatization of government functions was a major focus of countless studies, publications, conferences and op-eds.

Personally, I always thought that the best public relations vehicle opposing privatization was the 1987 movie RoboCop where the Detroit police force is turned over to a private corporation which, not unlike many real life beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars, abuses its privilege.

RoboCop, overlaid with Haliburton nighmares immediately came to mind when I read the last article in the Newsday series: Close ties at the Pentagon: The power, influence and bottomline of defense contractors has grown during the Bush presidency.

The article discusses the growing tendency of the Pentagon to contract out management of huge military systems. The concept is not new, of course:

Close ties between the Pentagon and defense contractors have existed in many previous administrations, Republican and Democrat.

But under the Bush administration contractors themselves increasingly are administering defense programs, including selecting subcontractors, and are venturing into areas that traditionally have been military functions -- from guarding military bases to interrogating war prisoners to analyzing battlefield intelligence.

Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a conservative national security think tank, said the Pentagon trend of outsourcing traditional management functions "is mainly a product of Republican political philosophy,"though it started modestly under President Bill Clinton.

Yet putting private contractors in charge of Pentagon management, critics say, has the potential of creating conflicts of interest and limiting competition, damaging to both the taxpayers and to the men in uniform.

The Pentagon has now contracted out to Boeing one of the costliest programs in the history of the U.S. military, the enormously complicated Future Combat System, a project to equip the next decade's Army with a new fleet of satellite-linked manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles. It’s huge. It’s incredibly complex. But somehow, this is not reassuring:

Boeing official Jack Paul says contracting the management of the project to the company and its junior partner, Science Applications International Corp., makes sense because the Army does not have the expertise to develop such a complex program.

"It's a very large, complicated, challenging program, and when you start to go into integration, the Army has not traditionally been organized to do that," said Paul. The shift of responsibility from the military to the private sector is taking place under a Pentagon leadership dominated by former executives of large companies. According to a Newsday analysis, nearly half, or 44 percent of Bush's Pentagon appointees requiring Senate confirmation were company executives, business consultants or lobbyists, compared with 23 percent in the Clinton administration.

For his first service secretaries Clinton chose a defense industry executive, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and an investment banker. Bush, selected executives from defense giants Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics and from the scandal-plagued energy company, Enron.

Last month Bush named Francis J. Harvey, vice chairman of federal contractor Duratek Inc., to be his new Army secretary. Harvey has spent his entire business career as an executive of three major federal contractors and has served on the boards of three companies controlled by the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm with large defense industry holdings and close ties to the Bush family.

Between companies like Boeing being given full responsibility for massive new weapons systems, Haliburton running the logistics during wartime (unimpressively, to judge by news accounts), and mercinaries taking care of security when we don't provide enough troups for the wars we get ourselves into, one wonders what's next....

Understatement of the Year

Bush's Health Care Ads Not Entirely Accurate
Campaign Offers Little Backing for Claims

Washington Post, October 13, 2004


But never fear. A little further on there's some truth to be read by Harold Meyerson on the Op-Ed page:

If either candidate has a Big-Government-Threatens-You plan, it's Bush. Using the power of the federal government to block Americans from obtaining safe and affordable drugs from Canada (because to do so would lower the profit margins of drug companies that are a mainstay of Republican campaign finances) sounds like a horror story out of Ayn Rand, or the Orwell of "1984." For that matter, Kerry and John Edwards have long supported a patients' bill of rights in dealing with HMOs (the most Kafkaesque bureaucracies on the American scene), but the Republicans have blocked all efforts to enact one.

But in the day-is-night, black-is-white world of the embattled Bush presidency, and the increasingly desperate Bush campaign, it's Kerry who threatens to transform American medicine into doctors' and patients' soviets. In fact -- as I assume Kerry will make clear tonight -- what he threatens is the Bush presidency, which has looked on with (at best) indifference as drugs and health insurance have increasingly moved beyond the reach of middle-class Americans.

Real Threats To Homeland Security (and air, workplace, food and drug security as well)

When George Bush is asked about his plan for economic growth and making more jobs, his solution generally revolves around tax cuts, tort reform and...reducing regulations that allegedly burden business. (Of course, he doesn't mean all regulations. Some regulations are good, like the new regulations that will keep millions of workers from earning overtime.)

The bad regulations that Bush blames for hurting job creation and economic growth are those that protect employees at work, that keep our air and water clean, and that keep our food and drug supply safe -- by putting restrictions on corporations that maximize profits by minimizing workplace safety, environmental protection and food & drug safety.

How to make life easier for his business buddies? It's far too loud and messy to actually change the laws in Congress, so the Bush administration has found a much easier -- and quieter way: Stack the agencies with representatives of the industries they regulate who will quietly and efficiently change the regulations that determine how the laws are interpreted and enforced.

Newsday continues to bring these practices to light in its excellent series on Erasing the Rules which "examines President Bush's efforts to curtail regulations and to loosen the reins on federal contracts to the private sector." It began with the story about OSHA's failure to address reactive chemical hazards and continues with stories about industry representatives taking over the regulatory reins at EPA and the Food and Drug Administration -- agencies that are supposed to regulate their former companies.

Today's article describes the rollback of EPA's New Source Review enforcement, which was mentioned by John Kerry in the last debate (although if you didn't already know what he was talking about, I doubt if you would know what he was talking about.)

So here's what we're talking about. Listen up America -- and Senator Kerry.

When the Clean Air Act was passed, power plants, as well as chemical refineries were expected to reach certain clean air goals. The industry argued, with some reason, that there were a lot of very old plants that were soon to be retired and it didn't make much sense to spend a lot of money upgrading them. So a compromise was reached which let the old plants off the hook. They wouldn't have to upgrade their pollution controls unless they made major improvements in the plant. Minor maintenance did not count.

But, like children who aren't constantly monitored, the power and chemical companies cheated by hiding major improvements (that should have triggered upgraded pollution controls) behind the mask of minor maintenance. To make a long story short, the Clinton administration finally lost patience and sued operators of more than 50 power plants in 12 states on behalf of EPA. As the Clinton administration was heading out, several of the companies had seen the wisdom of reaching some kind of settlement with the EPA.

Enter George Bush and...Guess what?

Perhaps no issue epitomizes the Bush administration's approach to environmental rulemaking than the high-stakes struggle over the "New Source Review" provisions of the Clean Air Act.

Lobbyists and political appointees with ties to industry played a central role in making policy changes that would, if upheld by the courts, let companies upgrade old power plants, refineries and factories without installing modern pollution-control equipment.

To make a long story short, Bush staffed EPA with ex-energy industry executives, the companies that were in settlement negotiations said "Nevermind," and the regulations were softened. EPA's top career enforcement personnel -- many of whom had been there since pre-Reagan days -- resigned. And the whole issue of New Source Review is currently in court.

By why stop with the environment and workplace safety? There are still other regulatory agencies to be taken over; the Food and Drug Administration, for example. What to do when you're the walnut industry and you think it would be a fine idea to put unsubstantiated claims on labels saying walnut consumption reduces the risk of heart disease?

Even three outside experts the FDA hired said a link between walnuts and heart disease was "uncertain."

But then the agency relaxed its standards. And on March 9, it reached an unprecedented decision: Labels could claim that walnuts "may" reduce heart-disease risk while noting that research was "not conclusive."

The eased standards were long sought by the food industry, which found key allies in the Bush administration FDA. Top appointees who once advocated for FDA-regulated industries have heeded industry lobbying in ways that medical groups and consumer advocates say jeopardize public health.

After food-industry groups complained, a top appointee killed a measure to discourage consuming a cholesterol-raising fat. Plans to eliminate misleading sunscreen labels have been tabled following cosmetics-industry complaints. A post-Sept. 11 plan to help contain food contamination is nearly a year late as food-processing groups have objected.

And then there's the old "revolving door." Come into a regulatory agency from the industry that it regulates, do your best to soften regulations and enforcement on the industry you once worked for, then leave government "service" and head back into your old job. It's an old story, but the Bush administration has taken it to a new level.

Take, for example, Lisa Jaeger, who "worked for three years in the Washington office of Houston-based Bracewell & Patterson, a powerhouse law and lobbying firm with close ties to the Bush family and a client list that includes some of the nation's biggest electric, oil and chemical companies." Bracewell also happens to be the lawfirm that housed the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, set up by six of the largest coal-burning utilities to lobby against New Source Review enforcement. Bush appointed Jaeger EPA deputy general counsel, the agency's second-ranking lawyer.

Then last March, after rising to the position of acting general counsel at EPA, Jaeger resigned and found a new job: her old job.

She rejoined Bracewell & Patterson, where she's now a registered lobbyist for the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association and the Council of Industrial Boiler Owners, among other clients.

Jaeger is hardly the first industry lawyer to be given a senior job as an environmental regulator, but experts, critics and personnel records all suggest that the Bush administration has raised the technique to high art.

Compared to his predecessor Bill Clinton's choices, Bush's appointees to senior environment-related jobs are much more likely to have been working as corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and executives at the time of their appointment, according to a Newsday analysis of government records.

Charged by the White House to make environmental regulations more flexible and less costly, these high-level Bush appointees at EPA, the Interior Department and elsewhere have launched a broad effort to rewrite pollution rules, ease curbs on development of natural areas, and allow more drilling, logging and mining on federal lands.

And what has the Bush administration accomplished in the field of environmental protection?

Bush's EPA, for example, has rejected mandatory curbs on emissions linked to global warming while easing anti-pollution requirements on old power plants and factories, all in the name of boosting the economy and saving jobs.

As part of its push to make environmental rules more flexible, the EPA has also proposed but not yet finalized plans to require reductions of three major pollutants: mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The EPA would set an overall cap on emissions, while allowing plant operators to essentially decide among themselves how much each should cut as long as they comply with the overall cap.

Meanwhile, Bush's Justice Department, saying it wants to avoid long lawsuits that delay environmental cleanups, has adopted a more conciliatory style in enforcing the Clean Air Act and other bedrock environmental laws.

Over at the Department of the Interior, a series of administrative changes has lowered barriers to drilling for oil, mining minerals and raising livestock on federal lands, moves administration officials say are needed to boost the struggling economies of Western states and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

And the Department of Agriculture is pushing for more commercial logging in national forests, citing the need to protect towns from wildfires that start in forests that have become unnaturally dense because of decades of fire-suppression efforts.

There have been some exceptions to the pattern, such as the EPA's adoption earlier this year of tough new emissions standards for diesel engines. But critics and many analysts say the common thread that ties together almost all of the administration's other environmental initiatives is to cushion the impact of regulations on business. (More damage here.)

What Is To Be Done?

Read these articles. Bookmark them. Send them to all your friends -- and especially to everyone you know who still can't decide who to vote for. (Especially "security moms" who may not realize that most real dangers their children and husbands face is in the air they breathe, the food they eat, the drugs they take and the workplaces they go to.)

The bottom line is that while these jokers control the White House and both houses of Congress, there's little that can be done.

So, request some vacation time, get in the car or get on the web and buy a ticket to a swing state (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Missouri, etc.), and go work to get the vote out so we can send these guys back to their former jobs once and for all.

Weekly toll

Construction worker dies in accident at Gulfstream

A construction worker died on Thursday afternoon from injuries suffered while working on renovation of Gulfstream Park.

Desmond Wickham, 35, suffered serious head injuries when he was struck by a forklift while working in the barn area, the Miami Herald reports.

Hallandale Beach, Florida, police and the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration were investigating the accident


Hilton Head worker dies in collapse of pool deck

HILTON HEAD ISLAND - A worker was killed when a pool deck collapsed and buried him in freshly poured cement, officials said.

William Gonzalez Sanchez, 24, of Bluffton, was killed Tuesday at a Hilton Head Island home. An autopsy Wednesday showed Gonzalez died of asphyxiation, said Lt. Bob Bromage of the Beaufort County Sheriff's Office. It took about 20 minutes to get him out of the cement, police said.

Four other men were standing on the deck when it collapsed, and two were treated for minor injuries, police said.


BNSF Worker Dies

A machinist at Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway has died after an accident at the shop complex in Topeka.

57-year old Geoffrey McIntyre died on Monday from injuries he sustained after an accident last week.

Officials say McIntyre was working on a rail press when a component struck him in the face and knocked him back. He fell and hit his head on the concrete floor.

Officials are still investigating the accident and aren't sure exactly what happened because no one witnessed the accident and no machines were broken.


Poultry plant worker found dead in holding tank

TEMPERANCEVILLE, Va. (AP) _ Police are investigating the death of a poultry plant worker on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

Authorities say the body of 35-year-old Luis Diaz Roblero was found around 2 a-m on Saturday in a holding tank at the Tyson poultry processing plant in Temperanceville.

Fellow employees said they think Roblero slipped and fell into the water holding tank. The tank -- about 15 feet deep -- holds grease, water, chicken parts. Employees say Roblero was missing for several hours before his body was found.

Roblero leaves behind a wife and five-month old son. Family members say he moved to the Eastern Shore from Guatemala nine years ago, then began working for Tyson a few years later.



Worker Dies When Crane Collapses On Boston Waterfront

BOSTON -- A worker died on Wednesday when the crane he was operating collapsed and pinned him at a South Boston waterfront construction site, authorities said.

Adam Boudreau, 45, of Seekonk, suffered severe injuries to his stomach after the accident at about 8 a.m., authorities said.

Boudreau was lifting steel I-beams off of a truck and attaching them to the crane during construction of a luxury apartment complex on Northern Avenue when the boom buckled and collapsed on top of him, witnesses said.


Wisner police officer killed making arrest

WISNER -- This Franklin Parish town's assistant chief of police was killed Sunday while trying to arrest a burglary suspect, State Police said.

Bill Linder, a veteran police officer, was responding to a burglary about 10 a.m. when he was shot during a fight with the burglary suspect, Ray Bingham, said Trooper Julie Lewis, a spokeswoman for Troop F.
Bingham, 43, of Wisner, was accused of shooting Linder several times with the officer's own weapon, Lewis said.


Death of construction worker is second in two days

For the second day in a row, a construction worker died while working on a project, authorities in Hallandale Beach said Thursday.

Desmond Wickham, 35, died Thursday afternoon after suffering serious injuries when a forklift struck him, police said.

The incident happened about 2:30 p.m. near the horse barns on the north side of Gulfstream Park, 901 S. Federal Hwy., where some construction is going on.

On Wednesday, Mario Alberto Orozco, 29, an employee of Engineering Control Systems, died after the saw he was using to cut through a sewer line suddenly kicked back and struck his neck about 10:30 a.m., police said


FREIGHT TRAIN DERAILMENT

WAND, MO A 31-year-old rail worker is dead after being crushed by a freight train that derailed this morning in Springfield.

Springfield police say the worker was from Waterloo, south of St. Louis. He was walking alongside the train with other crewmembers when seven rail cars went off the tracks at about 1 a.m. Authorities aren't yet releasing his name.

The derailment spilled grain from the rail cars, and two were left hanging over the edge of the Sangamon overpass, forcing authorities to close the lanes below to traffic.

Police and the union pacific railroad are trying to determine what caused the derailment. Clean up is continuing. Amtrak's passenger trains also run through the area, but those trains aren't reporting any significant delays today.


Worker killed in power saw accident

Hallandale Beach, FL -- A construction worker was killed Wednesday when he lost control of a gas-powered saw as he helped dig a water main. Mario Alberto Orozco, 29, and about four other Engineering Control Services employees were working at Southeast 10th Street and Southeast Third Avenue when the saw cut into Orozco's upper torso.


Worker killed in Volta tomato cannery accident

A tractor-trailer rig rolled backward down an unloading ramp and killed a sanitation worker at a Merced County tomato packing plant last week.

Perfecta Mendoza, 45, of Keyes was working at Ingomar Packing Co. in Volta at about 7 a.m. on Sept. 30 when a truck arrived with two trailers loaded with tomatoes, said sheriff's Sgt. Jason Goins.

According to Goins, the driver took the rig up the unloading ramp and parked it, but failed to properly set the brakes. Mendoza was standing in the path of the vehicle when it began to roll, and she was unable to get out of the way. Goins said the vehicle struck Mendoza and pinned her against another piece of equipment.


Worker Dies in Holstein Dairy Silage

Ramon Leon Felix, 22, of Storm Lake died Sept. 29 after being trapped in a silage pile at Holstein Dairy LLP at 5311 130th St. in Holstein.

The Ida County Communication Center received a 911 call Wednesday at 6:45 p.m. from the dairy stating a subject who had been trapped in a silage pile was not breathing.Holstein Ambulance was dispatched to the scene. CPR was in progress when personnel arrived. Felix was later pronounced dead at the scene by the Ida County coroner.

Ida County Sheriff Wade Harriman said, "Ramon was working by himself and he either fell from the top of the pile or the pile gave way covering him with a couple tons of silage. Other employees at the scene said he had been by himself 30 to 45 minutes before he was found and pulled free


Police Report: Worker dies at retirement complex

A 32-year-old man was killed, possibly in an electrocution, as he worked on a ceiling light fixture at Bridgewood at Four Seasons Retirement & Assisted Living Community.

Christopher M. Clark of Vancouver died at the retirement home at 11700 N.E. Angelo Drive, in the Burton area, said an investigator for the Clark County medical examiner's office. Officials were called to the scene Tuesday afternoon.

Clark, who worked at the complex as a maintenance man, had been working on a ceiling light fixture. He believed the power had been turned off, but it hadn't, the investigator said.


Farm worker's death ruled accident

ZEPHYRHILLS, FL - As he did most days at his job in the hen houses of Zephyr Egg Co., Santiago Gomez was pushing a metal cart through the rows of chickens.

But on Friday the walk proved fatal for the 18-year-old Mexican immigrant. Somehow - the egg company can't say for sure - the cart touched a live power cord. Santiago was electrocuted.

They said Gomez rammed his cart into a cord that powered a large exhaust fan in the hen house at about 8:30 a.m. and the impact probably sliced the cord's insulation.


OSHA investigating worker death at Erie plant

ERIE, Pa. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the death of a man crushed in a machine Monday.The victim's name has also been released. Authorities say Brian Bongiorno of West Springfield was crushed in a machine on which he was performing maintenance at the Accuride Corporation.

Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook ruled the death accidental yesterday, but is delaying a decision on the cause of death. Accuride primarily makes aluminum truck and trailer wheels.


Yell County worker killed in mill accident

Danville, AK - A former Ola High School student was killed early Friday morning when his clothing apparently became tangled in machinery he was operating at Deltic Timber Corp.


Juvenile Justice Worker Died Breaking up Fight

DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, Fla. (AP) -- An employee at a state-funded halfway house in the Panhandle has died trying to break up a fight between two teenage inmates.

Authorities say Bert Radford died over the weekend of what may have been a heart attack or seizure. The boys involved will be disciplined for the fight, but will receive NO additional punishment for the death.

Radford worked for the North American Family Institute, which is a private residential treatment facility for male juvenile delinquents near DeFuniak Springs. Counselors have been sent to the facility to meet with boys who may have seen the fight.


Vermont OSHA Probes Fatal Construction Accident

One Springfield man was killed last Thursday morning and a Perkinsville man was badly injured when a construction vehicle known as a boom truck tipped over. They fell from its basket more than 20 feet to the ground.

Michael Benoit, 50, was pronounced dead at Springfield Hospital on Thursday. Mathew Odice, 23, was flown by helicopter to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., and was listed in serious condition Friday, upgraded from critical on Thursday.

The two men were subcontractors working with the Quinn Company of Rutland on a series of condominiums behind the Castle Hill Resort that overlooks Okemo Mountain.
Odice's mother, Deborah Varney of Perkinsville, said she was told Friday by another construction worker at the site that loose ground below the topsoil may have caused one of the machine's four wheels to sink in, tipping the vehicle over.


Construction worker dies in south Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS - It took authorities nearly two hours to recover the body of a construction worker who was killed Tuesday morning after the collapse of a retaining wall of a building he was working in.

The worker was in the basement of an old, dilapidated building in south Minneapolis when the rubble fell, leaving a gaping hole in the alley at the side of the building. Two other workers were able to escape.

The dead worker's name has not been released. More here.


Pepco Worker Dies From Electrical Shock

Washington (AP) - A Pepco worker has died after being severely shocked Sunday by a live electrical wire.The utility company says 47-year-old Michael Boxley died late Monday at the Washington Hospital Center. Boxley was a senior line mechanic who had been with Pepco for 17 years.

Officials say he came in contact with the live wire while completing repairs atop a distribution pole in the Landover area of Prince George's County.


Fatal accident under investigation

An investigation is continuing into an accident at Brazier Mine Construction in Wright that killed a man Wednesday.

"Some can take a couple of months and some can take more than nine months," said J.D. Danni, federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration program manager in Cheyenne.
Zachary Childs, 23, of Wright, was killed when a large piece of sheet metal fell on him from a forklift just after 2 p.m. at the company's site just south of Wright, officials have said.
Childs was taken by ambulance to Campbell County Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.


Police identify DOT workers killed by motorist

SUWANEE, Ga. - Flags outside Gwinnett County facilities were at half-staff Thursday, a day after two county transportation workers were killed and another badly injured when they were hit by a motorist.

Police say the workers were painting a road when the car hit them and crushed them against a nearby Department of Transportation truck at about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The victims were Raymond Williams, 57, of Hoschton, and Kathy Blevins, 43, of Conyers.
A third worker, Kenny Anderson, 51, of Dacula, remained hospitalized Thursday at Gwinnett Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition.


Macy's Employee Killed On Escalator

Police are investigating a tragic accident at Macy's Manhattan department store on Friday morning. Authorities say an employee was killed while working on an escalator.

Co-workers found the man slumped over equipment with burns on his face around 7a.m. They immediately called for help. "As we went into the lobby, we had confirmation from the manager that there was a confirmed electrocution on the fifth floor, not the lobby. We went up to the fifth floor, assumed it was an electrical panel maybe he touched it and got jolted back on the floor but it turned out it was only like a two by two foot opening elevator pit, actually an escalator pit," explains FDNY Captain Napolitano.

Worker falls 21 stories

A construction worker fell 21 stories to his death at the 7 World Trade Center building yesterday, the second accidental death of a worker since the massive rebuilding effort after the Sept. 11 attack.

The worker, whose name was not released, fell down an elevator shaft in the main lobby of the building at 11:45 a.m., according to workers at the scene. He died on impact when he landed in the basement.Workers at the site said the man was an employee of Prince Carpentry in Manhasset, which did not return calls for comment. They said he was probably in the shaft building the barriers that are designed to prevent the type of accidental fall that killed him.


Police Officer Mourned By Seguin Family

SEGUIN, Texas -- A family in Seguin is remembering a Prairie View police officer fondly.
Christopher Sobieski, 39, had finished a routine traffic stop on U.S. Highway 290 when a pickup rear-ended his 1999 Ford Crown Victoria police cruiser. Sobieski was sitting in the car when it was struck and burst into flames.


Worker’s Death Prompts Investigation and Reflection

People who knew Montgomery “Monte” Thornton say he had a sense of redemption that was contagious. Thornton, 46, was killed Aug. 25 in a bizarre accident that is under investigation by the Virginia Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

It was a Wednesday afternoon around 2:20 when Thornton, a maintenance worker for the city of Richmond, drove a riding lawn mower around a tree, alongside a tall patch of grass and down a steep embankment to his death. Thornton was with a crew of four or five Department of Public Works employees cutting grass in the 700 block of Oregon Hill Parkway, near the Gazebo that overlooks the river.

The patch of land Thornton was traversing is flat, but drops off sharply. According to Bill Farrar, spokesman for the public works department, none of Thornton’s coworkers saw him plunge over the embankment and out of sight. The riding lawn mower flipped on top of Thornton, trapping and crushing him.


Man Crushed To Death In Northeast Auto Repair Shop

A worker at a northeast Rochester auto repair shop died Monday afternoon when a truck fell on him and crushed him. Rochester Police report that at about 3 p.m. an employee was working underneath a delivery truck belonging to Matco Tool Company at the U Need A Tire Shop at 180 Hudson Avenue.

A worker told News 8 over the phone the worker's name was Robert Hollingsworth and that he was in his fifties. The truck was up on jacks, but for some reason rolled off the jacks and crushed him. Workers lifted the truck off him using tools, and he was taken to Rochester General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short while later.


Va. records year's first miner deaths

Virginia's first two mining fatalities of the year occurred in the past few days when two miners were killed performing routine underground work in different mines.

The first accident happened Friday in Lee County. The second occurred Sunday in Buchanan County.

In the first incident, a worker at the Cumberland River Coal Co.'s Fork Ridge mine was killed at 8:40 p.m. Friday as he worked on electrical equipment, according to a spokeswoman for the state Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy.

Spokeswoman Jan Zentmeyer in the agency's Big Stone Gap office said Leonard Holcomb, 51, of Dryden was preparing a receptacle for a new transformer when he made contact with a 7,200-volt terminal.

In the second incident, which occurred at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Consolidation Coal Co.'s No. 1 mine near Oakwood, a miner was killed as he worked to repair a conveyor belt, Zentmeyer said. She said Hassel G. Payne, 46, of Cedar Bluff became entangled in the top and bottom conveyor belts and was crushed to death.


Worker Dies from Burns

Huntsville, AL - One of the workers severely burned in a fire at a Hampton Cove home has died.
The fire happened Friday. 30-year-old Larry Lee and 45-year-old Bill McDonald were burned scraping glue from the floor of a Hampton Cove home.

Lee and McDonald were both flown to UAB Burn Center. Lee died from his injuries on Saturday.
As of 9:00 Sunday night, McDonald was listed in critical condition.

Foxes Remove Guard Costumes; Eat Chickens

Looking for yet another reason to send the President back to Texas?

Newsday began a series today on business domination of regulatory agencies under the Bush administration. The article focuses on the refusal of former chemical industry executive, now OSHA director John Henshaw, to comply with the recommendation of the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) to revise OSHA's Process Safety Management standard to include reactive hazards. Henshaw chose to set up a voluntary industry "Alliance" instead.

The article points out that

Henshaw represents an important facet of the Bush administration: he is one of the scores of corporate or industry officials, or their lobbyists and advocates, appointed to political jobs, high and low, across the executive branch.

Nearly half -- 47 percent -- of the Bush administration's 400 top-level Senate-confirmed appointees to cabinet departments came from corporations, law and lobbying firms, or business consulting, a Newsday analysis found.

That gives business and industry a much greater influence than it had in the Clinton administration -- just more than a third, or 34 percent, of President Bill Clinton's appointees came from corporate, law and lobbying, or business backgrounds.

And although these they're perfectly legal,

the appointments cast in sharp relief the priorities of a presidential administration, because personnel is policy. In rolling back a wide variety of new or proposed rules, Bush appointees are achieving what they view as an important goal of eliminating burdensome regulation and freeing companies to grow.

And let's not forget the first high crie of the Bush administration:

The first congressional act signed by Bush as president was a repeal of a mandatory standard on ergonomics, which had sought to address hundreds of thousands of repetitive motion injuries a year.

Organized labor and others hailed the regulation as an important safeguard for the more than half a million workers injured each year, creating $9 billion in benefits at a cost of $4.5 billion. Industry groups complained the regulation would cost business more than $100 billion for questionable results.

But just because Bush will be the first president in the existence of OSHA not to issue a single "economically significant" regulation, doesn't mean that this administration is opposed to regulation. It has issued the overtime regulation, cutting overtime for millions of American workers, and issued or modified a number of regulations weakening environmental regulations.

The articles main example is OSHA's failure to act on reactive hazards in the chemical industry. The CSB issued its recommendation to OSHA over two years ago after a series of chemcial reactive hazards that had killed numbers of workers. Last January the CSB called OSHA's inaction "unacceptable."

The CSB was created in 1990 in an effort to prevent catastrophes like the Bhopal chemical disaster in India twenty years ago where thousands died in the cloud of a chemical release.

One of the tragedies that stimulated the CSB's action was an explosion caused by reactive chemicals that killed five workers at Napp Technologies in Lodi, NJ, in 1995. Following the explosion, a number of unions petitioned OSHA for a standard.

Eric Frumin, health and safety director for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, which represented 70 workers at the Napp plant, remains bitter about the company and the fact that workers still face dangers they shouldn't have to.

"These are not accidents anymore," he said. "They are predictable. We have the means technically and organizationally to control the risk of unintended chemical reactions."

Read the article. Cut it out. Pass it on to any of your co-workers who are still "undecided." Who knows, maybe the subject will come up in the nexe Presidential debate.

Work Late. Get Hurt.

4:00 a.m. and 1:23 a.m. What do they have in common?

Shortly after 4:00 a.m.on March 28, 1979a malfunction occured at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, PA, which was followed by errors made by workers on the night shift.

At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, mistakes by night shift workes at the nurclear reactor in chernobyl, USSR,led to a catastrophic nuclear disaster.

A paper by Kenneth N. Fortson in the Monthly Labor Review found that accidents that result in injuries are much more likely to occur at night than in daytime hours and the best explanation is that working at night is dangerous due to disturbance of the body's biological clock or circadian rhythms.

Fortson used data from Texas workers' compensation claims which showed that the injury rate is higher during off-hours late at night than during the regular 9-5 shift. He first looked at three possible explanations: a younger and less experienced workforce late at night; more dangerous jobs being done at night; or fatigue because night workers work longer hours. The study found that none of these were good explanations of the higher late-night injury rate.

So what was the answer to the problem? Disturbance of the body's 24-hour biological patterns known as circadian rhythms. Studies have shown that the lowest point of the circadian cycle occurs in the early morning hours and can influence the short-term memory, reaction time and visual vigilance. The article concluded that there was

strong evidence that workes are not optimally alert during night shifts, contribuing to hazardous work conditions for themselves as well as their fellow employees.

He notes that there are two basic reasons that workers work at night. Some workers would rather work at night, for example single mothers, because of lack of affordable childcare during the day. Business often feel they can increase the productive capacity of plant with night shifts. Fortson warns, however, that there is a tradeoff: night work is inherently more hazardous than day work.

New Mexico Takes Action Against Retail Worker Violence

Elizabeth Garcia was working alone overnight at Hobbs convenince store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2002 when she was raped and stabbed 56 times. It is in her sister's memory that Celia Garcia is urged the Albuquerque City Council to endorse a regulation designed to protect late night retail workers from workplace violence. State records show that 16 convenience store workers died on the job in the past five years. In the same time period, 24 were raped and another 27 were kidnapped.

Workplace violence is a familiar subject of Confined Space. Workplace assaults were the third leading cause of death in the workplace in 2003 and had been the second leading cause throughout most of the 1990's. It is the leading cause of death among immigrant workers in this country.

Contrary to the myth that nothing can be done to prevent workplace violence, OSHA has issued guidelines to prevent workplace violence against health care and social service workers as well as late night retail workers. Although federal OSHA had cited some nursing homes and other facilities for workplace violence hazards in the 1990's, the agency has not cited in this area in a number of years.

The regulation being considered in New Mexico was proposed by the Environmental Improvement Board which is charged with developing OSHA standards for New Mexico state OSHA. State senator Richard Martinez sponsored legislation directing the Department to draft the original regulations. He has said he was prompted to act out of concern over murders, rapes and other crimes committed against lone store clerks working the midnight shift.

The regulation was originally adopted last Spring, but a lawsuit was filed by the New Mexico Petroleum Marketers’ Association and parts of the regulation was stayed.

Sen. Dianna Duran, R-Alamogordo , issued a statement Thursday saying that the regulations as originally adopted by the board might prove so expensive that they would force smaller convenience-store operations out of business.

“Many convenience-store owners told me that they may have to shut down their businesses because of these regulations,” Duran said. “If they are forced to close, residents would have to travel many miles for goods and services because, oftentimes, the small, privately owned convenience stores are the only place to shop.”

Martinez said he disagrees. “I don’t believe that at all,” he said of the prospect of smaller stores going out of business. “The majority of the momand-pops close early anyway. This is for the large convenience stores that are open 24 hours and have employees working after hours.”

In response to the lawsuit, the court ordered the agency to hold additional public hearings on a requirement to have two workers or a security guard on duty between the hours of 5:00 pm and 5:00 am. But the court allowed certain parts of the regulation to go into effect last Spring: requirements for safety cameras, panic alarms and adequate lighting, and making sure that clerks have a clear line of sight outside the stores. They also require either time-lock safes or some sort of money-drop and limit cash in the register to $50.

Following additional hearings in September and October, the Board will consider the final regulatoin.

Unions, Public Citizen Unhappy with OSHA Hex Chrome Proposal

OSHA issued a proposal for a standard to protect workers against hexavalent chromium at the court-ordered deadline, but Public Citizen and the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), which petitioned the agency for the standard and filed a successful lawsuit, are not happy with the results. Hexavalent Chromium has been shown to cause lung cancer.

The agency is proposing three rules, one for general industry, one for construction and one for shipyards. All three would lower the PEL from 52 micrograms per cubic meter of chromium (100 micrograms per cubic meter of chromic acid) to 1 microgram per cubic meter of chromium (2 micrograms per cubic meter of chromic acid), whereas Public Citizen’s 1993 petition sought a PEL of .5 micrograms per cubic meter of chromic acid. OSHA’s proposal is thus four times weaker than the PEL sought by Public Citizen.

Moreover, the agency would require exposure monitoring only in its proposed “general industry” standard for hexavalent chromium, but not in its shipyard or construction standards. Engineering and work practice controls (as opposed to the less-desirable approach, personal protective equipment) would be required for all three industries if the PEL were exceeded for more than 30 days a year, but since exposure monitoring would not be required in shipyards or construction, no one would know if this threshold were met. Personal protective equipment would be required in most cases if the PEL were exceeded at all in the three industries, but, again, exposure would not be measured in two of them.

"This is OSHA’s equivalent of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group said. “It seems the agency would rather not know about exposures than have to compel a recalcitrant industry to take action to protect its workers."

Another sensitive issue was the inclusion of Portland Cement, which contains hexavalent chromium and causes skin irritation. OSHA decided not to cover Portland Cement in the construction standard where most exposure occurs. Why not? According to the proposal, "OSHA believes that guidance efforts by the Agency may be more suitable for addressing the dermal hazards associated with portland cement use in construction settings." In other words, no regulation is need for construction companies. Voluntary "guidance" efforts should do.

And in case anyone’s counting, this would be the first major health and safety standard proposed by OSHA under the Bush administration. And its being done under court order.

***

The entire proposal can be found here.

Written comments are due January 3 and hearings will start on February 3.

U.S. Appeals Court for the 3rd Circuit gives the agency until January 2006 to issue a final rule.

The Life and Death of Gary Puleio – And a New Blog

"The world can never have enough blogs that deal with workplace issues."

-- Jordan Barab, October 5, 2004

And it is with that sentiment that I welcome Mick Arran’s “Dispatch from the Trenches: News and Commentary on the Class War by Workers in the Front Lines” to my blogroll (That’s the list of blogs and other resources over on the left).

I want to point out two recent articles that he’s written. I’ve written a number of times about health and safety activist Donna Puleio Spadaro (here and here) whose brother was killed in a workplace accident.

Mick goes into some disturbing detail about Gary Puleio’s death:

On August 15, 2001, Gary Puleio climbed a 20-foot concrete tower at Meadville Readi-Mix in Pennsylvania. The tower housed the hopper where the cement was mixed and then loaded into trucks waiting beneath it. At the top was a narrow platform running around the rim of the tower. At the end of the day the loose material which had blown onto the platform had to be shoveled back into the hopper. Gary went up there to do that shoveling. A few minutes later, he fell into the hopper. He was dead when they found him.

The question is: Why the hell was Gary up there with a shovel? He was a truck driver. The job he died trying to perform wasn’t his job. He hadn’t been trained to do it, and he hadn’t been given any of the standard safety equipment.

Plant Operations Manager John Shartle claims that he wasn’t ordered to go up on the platform. He just wanted to help out, so he volunteered. Those close to him find that hard to believe.

According to Gary’s sister, Donna Spadaro, her 53-yr-old brother was afraid of heights and ‘had trouble with his knees’. And his widow, Linda, says he told her the day before he died that he had ‘been sent’ up the tower to clean it because he was the new guy. ‘Been sent’ is NOT ‘volunteered’. And nobody who’s got acrophobia goes climbing up a 20-foot tower for the hell of it or because he’s a swell guy. They go because they have to, and a lot of the time not then. Trust me on this—I’m acrophobic, too. If Gary went up there—and he did—it was because he was told to go, and Shartle is lying through his teeth to cover his ass.

A strong indication that what I say is true comes from the company itself, who paid a $6000 penalty after the OSHA investigation into Gary’s death without a whimper. ‘They basically paid the full penalty,’ [OSHA Area Director John ]Stranahan said. ‘They just paid it as issued.’ I don’t doubt it. Little enough after ordering a man to his death doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing and that you knew he wasn’t supposed to be doing. I bet they were figuring they got off cheap. I hope they were, because they did. Dirt cheap.

Mick’s second installment talks about Gary Puleio who

wasn’t just an example of possible corporate malfeasance and/or negligence. He was a human being, too, a 53-yr-old man with a wife, two young sons, and a long history of choices, decisions, and hardships, of meeting and overcoming obstacles, of getting through the days and weeks of his life like the rest of us, one halting, uncertain step at a time

Check it out.

UPDATE: The third installment of Mick's series about the life of Gary Puleio can be found here.

Kerry Focuses On Key Election Issue: Ergonomics

With the media obsession with such weighty issues as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs, health care and stem cell research, it’s good to see that John Kerry hasn’t forgotten one of the first high crimes of the Bush administration:

Kerry accused Bush of taking the wrong turn not only on stem-cell research but also on a host of other scientific issues, from ergonomics in the workplace to global warming. And he pledged to lift Bush's restrictions on research into potential disease cures.

"He's out of touch," the Massachusetts senator said, portraying Bush as a stubborn president more interested in solidifying his conservative Republican base than in listening to scientists.

You go guy!

Bush's OSHA Standards: A Net Negative

"I've seen what works and doesn't work on the shop floor," says Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA (presumably with a straight face) to explain why, as Washington Post columnist Cindy Skrzycki headlines, "OSHA Withdraws More Rules Than It Makes."

As I've written here over and over (and over and over) again, OSHA has pretty much gone out of the rulemaking business, preferring the softer approach of voluntary programs. And it's working, boasts Henshaw:

the approach has resulted in safer workplaces with fewer fatalities, injuries and illnesses -- what he calls the triple bottom line. "I've seen what works and doesn't work on the shop floor," said Henshaw, reflecting his own career as a safety and health professional at chemical companies, Monsanto Co. and Astaris LLC, before he came to the safety agency.

Sorry John, but you don't really see "what works and doesn't work on the shop floor" unless you actually work on the shop floor. Visiting doesn't count.

And as AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminnario notes: "Setting and enforcing standards is part of their mission. 'So why aren't they?'"

Good question.

Reviewing the recent OMB Watch report that called OSHA the "black hole of government," Skrzycki reviews how

Since fall 2000, the agency has not been regulating in the traditional sense, OMB Watch found in a series of reviews. Twenty-four rules that were in some stage of development on OSHA's agenda were withdrawn by the administration. Nine rules were completed, but none were major and several were related to recordkeeping.

And let's not forget the first major action of the Bush administration -- repeal of the ergonomics standard.

Of course, industry hacks aren't even satisfied with this sorry record on standards because OSHA has the gall to actually cite employers for ergonomic hazards under the General Duty Clause:

Randel Johnson, vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits for the Chamber [of Commerce], called the trend troubling. "The agency has aggressively pursued ergonomics citations . . . demanding abatement measures that sound much like the repealed regulation and micromanaging targeted employers with a laundry list of requirements. Despite what the unions may allege, our life with OSHA has been no rose garden."

What's got Johnson so upset? "Since Congress killed the ergo rule two years ago, OSHA has opened cases against seven companies for ergonomic-related violations."

Actually, I think it's more like 14 companies during the entire Bush administration, but seven companies or forteen companies -- hardly what I'd call "aggressive" for a workplace hazard that causes one-third of all work-related injuries and illnesses in the United States year after year.

Truly shocking. The gestapo must be back in town even before John Kerry gets elected.

Federal Office of Personnel Management Fights Terrorism Under Every Desk

In an effort to do her part to fight terrorism following 9/11, Kay Coles James, Director of the U.S. Government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) "was determined to make sure OPM would be without peer in the quality of our personnel security program."

Imagine her surprise and shock when she was told that some OPM employee files could not be located and that some may have been inadvertently destroyed.

What to do, what to do? Why any one of OPM's 3,500 employees could be a terrorist, an evil-doer -- an obedient servant of Osama bin Laden -- waiting to wreak havoc on the Government of the United States by um, well, uh by sowing discontent among this nation's government employees or maybe even selling employees' confidential personnel records to Al Qaeda. After all, OPM is the federal government's human resource agency, responsible for overseeing personnel practices across the government. In other words, the very heart and soul of our federal government.

Using her President as a model, James quickly decided to take action against terrorism (and the lost files) by making sure current OPM employees don't pose security risks. After all, we were attacked!

Employees are being asked to undergo credit checks, have their fingerprints taken, and answer questions about divorces, overseas trips, run-ins with the law and other matters.

"It is causing a lot of anxiety among employees," said Carlos Brathwaite, first vice president at [AFGE] Local 32.

Yeah, I should think so. It's also causing a bit of confusion; OPM employees' jobs don't generally involve sensitive information or national security.

Afraid you'll get fired for being behind in your mortgage payments or having the "wrong" friends or surname? Fear not, Doris Hausser, senior policy adviser to James,

said the employee reactions were understandable, but she added that investigators will be looking at an employee's "total picture" and that "there isn't any one thing that will necessarily put a suitability determination at risk." In instances where investigators turn up information that "could be called derogatory," employees will be given an opportunity to respond and put the information in context, she said.

I'm sure everyone feels much better now.

Talks are continuing between OPM and AFGE.

Stay tuned.

The Dracula Congress

I would wager that there are few graduates of American Government classes who know that this is how things work in the venerable House of Representatives. In fact, I doubt that few Americans realize the threat to democracy that the Republican control of the House presents.

The Boston Globe is publishing a disturbing three-part series on how legislation is really made. A House of Representatives

where a Republican leadership has sidelined legislation unwanted by the Bush administration, even when a majority of the House seemed ready to approve it, according to lawmakers, lobbyists, and an analysis of House activities. With one party controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, and having little fear of retaliation by the opposing party, the House leadership is changing the way laws are made in America, favoring secrecy and speed over open debate and negotiation. Longstanding rules and practices are ignored. Committees more often meet in secret. Members are less able to make changes to legislation on the House floor. Bills come up for votes so quickly that elected officials frequently don't know what's in them. And there is less time to discuss proposed laws before they come up for a vote.

What's the problem?

• The House Rules Committee, which is meant to tweak the language in bills that come out of committee, sometimes rewrites key passages of legislation approved by other committees, then forbids members from changing the bills on the floor.
  
  
• The Rules Committee commonly holds sessions late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, earning the nickname "the Dracula Congress" by critical Democrats and keeping some lawmakers quite literally in the dark about the legislation put before them.
  
  
• Congressional conference committees, charged with reconciling differences between House- and Senate-passed versions of the same legislation, have become dramatically more powerful in shaping bills.
  
  
• Bills are increasingly crafted behind closed doors, and on two major pieces of legislation -- the Medicare and energy bills -- few Democrats were allowed into the critical conference committee meetings, sessions that historically have been bipartisan.
  
  
• The amount of time spent openly debating bills has dropped dramatically, and lawmakers are further hamstrung by an abbreviated schedule that gives them little time to fully examine a bill before voting on it.
  
  
• # The dearth of debate and open dealing in the House has given a crucial advantage to a select group of industry lobbyists who are personally close to decision-makers in Congress.

For more details, read the articles. The first two parts are here and here.

Thanks to Tapped for alerting me to this. You'll find more commentary on these articles there.

Rights? What Rights? Hispanic Workers Continue to Die On The Job

The number of workplace fatalities among Hispanic workers dropped slightly last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but their rate of fatalities among remains 25 percent higher than the rate recorded for all workers, and foreign-born Hispanic workers are more likely to die than Hispanics born in this country.

Two students at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley have written an interesting article about the lives and deaths of Hispanic workers and why the problem remains. They write of the death of 27-year old Ignacio Calixtro, who had gone to the U.S. from Mexico to raise money to support his ailing mother. He was killed when an attachment on a forklift came loose and a wall fell he had been helpign to raise fell and crushed him.

They also write of the delemmas faced by those who work construction jobs every day in this country without even knowing their rights, much less being able to stand up for them:

In Contra Costa County ... where new housing developments stretch as far as the eye can see, immigrant day laborers can be found most mornings on Concord's Monument Boulevard, amid the tidy strip malls, hoping general contractors will hire them to work as roofers, to dig or to do odd jobs on construction sites.

One of those laborers, Francisco Cid, from Mendoza, Mexico, has been working on construction projects in the United States for eight months, sending whatever money he can spare home to support his wife and four kids. He usually makes $10 per hour, often working

10 to 14 hour days without overtime pay. He said the most dangerous jobs are the ones where he works up high, such as roofing and painting, and he rarely wears a harness.

"I'm scared sometimes, but I have to do it because I need the money," said Cid. "If you say 'I'm scared,' then (the bosses) say 'I'll find another.'

"If you die, the company doesn't have to pay anything," Cid said. Workers' rights advocates said that is a common misconception among Latino workers. California worker's compensation laws apply to any individual hurt or killed on the job, documented or not.

Day laborers like Albarado and Cid are often undocumented, as was Calixtro, but Flores says immigrant workers who are citizens or have the right to work in this country are as likely to be abused.

"Employers aren't honest. They don't tell workers their rights," said Flores.

Flores often works from the offices of the Instituto Laboral de la Raza in San Francisco's Mission District. The organization's bilingual staff helps immigrant workers file worker's compensation claims for injuries and back wages. Sarah Shaker, the organization's executive director, estimates "virtually none" of the 140 new workers that seek help each month are aware of their rights.

In other words, what we have is a group of workers who don't know their rights, who are willing to work long hours with low pay, under dangerous conditions and who are afraid to complain because they need the money. It's an old and all-too-common story, but one we shouldn't be living with in 2004 in the United States of America.

"I don't look to ever get anything but grief"

The horrible working conditions and decades long coverup of resulting health effects was one of the most tragic and shameful chapters of Cold War history. The Amarillo Globe has two articles today about the problem of compensating the veterans (here and here).

The thousands of workers who produced the nuclear warheads, bombs and artillery shells worked with almost no protection from the radioactive and other toxic materials that they were exposed to every day. Then when the cancers and other diseases began to develop years, or decades later, the federal government refused to recognize them as work-related or to provide for compensation.

So it was a great relief to those workers and the unions and other organizations that had been fighting for them when Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced in April 2000 that here was reversing

the government's long-standing policy of opposing employees' claims that work-related exposures to radioactive and toxic materials were killing or sickening them by the thousands.

"We are moving forward to do the right thing by these workers," Richardson said as he announced government plans to begin compensating sick workers and their survivors. "The men and women who served our nation in the nuclear weapons industries of World War II and the Cold War labored under dangerous conditions with some of the most hazardous materials known to mankind."

In 2000 the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act was passed, providing $150,000 to nuclear weapons workers sickened by exposure to radiation, silica or beryllium.

Not everyone believed they would ever see a dollar of compensation, however.

Ted Shutt died waiting - just like he thought he would.

Shutt, a soft-spoken man with a friendly smile, testified in an Amarillo public hearing four years ago that he retired from his Pantex job healthy as a horse. But soon afterward, doctors cut a cancerous lobe from his lung.

In March, the former Pantex worker died after cancer spread throughout his body and took its deadly toll. Shutt, 68, left behind a wife, a son, a daughter and two grandchildren.

Two years before his death, Shutt predicted he'd never hear the Labor Department's decision on whether 20 years of dismantling and assembling nuclear weapons caused the cancer that finally killed him.

"I don't look to ever get anything but grief," Shutt said then. "Everybody who has filed a claim will probably be dead before they ever hear they've been denied."

While there are some nuclear sites where certain kinds of cancers are assumed to be work-related, others required the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to perform a long, complicated, tedious "dose reconstruction."

In other words, NIOSH has to try to figure out how much radioactive material each worker was exposed to 30, 40 or 50 years ago in order to determine whether there is a greater than 50 percent likelihood that the worker's cancer was work-related. The job isn't easy:

Investigators at NIOSH receive a claimant's request from the Labor Department and then ask Energy Department officials for a worker's original dosimetry badge, which measured the worker's radiation dose.

"We prefer to use original badge data or bioassay results. We don't ask the Department of Energy to provide us annual summary data. We want the individual badge results or bioassay data," [Dr. Larry Elliott, who heads up NIOSH's Office of Compensation Analysis and Support] says. "We have to verify the integrity and the credibility of the data."

The agency also wants to know how and when the original badge data was collected. Workers decades ago may not have been monitored for different types of radiation because the technical know-how wasn't available, Elliott said.

"We factor in what might not have been monitored for or what might have been missed," Elliott said.

Years ago, record-keeping procedures for Pantex workers were limited, and government officials acknowledge not all employees were monitored.

"They only monitored a select few and then applied that dose to everybody else," Elliott said. "We look at that as well and try to factor in what the uncertainty is associated with assigning dose versus actually monitoring the person for their dose."

Unfortunately the proces hasn't been working as well as envisioned by lawmakers or by the workers who beleived that they would finally get some small token for the sacrifices they made:

According to Labor Department records, one Pantex cancer claim has been paid and another 19 claims have been paid for chronic beryllium disease, a potentially fatal lung disease.

But more than 480 Pantex workers haven't heard the last word on their claims. And many are critical of a program they see as slow to respond and mired in mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Thousands of former Pantex production technicians were exposed to radiation and gritty, black radioactive dust while building and dismantling nuclear warheads, bombs and artillery shells during Pantex's Cold War heyday. Others developed lung problems from beryllium exposure.

Former Pantex workers, like former production technician Robert Tolley, who worked with Ted Shutt, remember how bad the working conditions were:

Protective clothing consisted of coveralls back in Pantex's early days. Workers didn't wear respirators or masks. The plant gave employees underwear that the plant washed to keep them from carrying radioactive contamination back to their homes.

And many production technicians were caked with radioactive dust after their Pantex workday was done, Tolley said.

"You'd go in there with a pair of white socks on and when you went home they'd be black. You'd sneeze the black out of your head or blow your nose," he said. "Really, none of that serious monitoring took place until the early '90s."

Other parts of the nuclear veterans program have also failed to provide the promised compensation. Particularly troublesome is the program assigned to the Department of Energy that was supposed to assist nuclear veterans get workers' compensation for diseases other than cancer.

The sad part is that these workers were proud of what they were doing and the contribution they were making to their country. They deserve more than grief:

Brenda Britten, another former Pantex worker, said Shutt, who retired from the Air Force before starting at Pantex, was proud of his country and serious about his job. When some other workers gabbed and gossiped after meetings, he talked about the work at hand or his family, Britten says.

"When he walked down the ramp, he could have been in uniform," she remembers. "He carried himself with dignity."

***

More information on EEOICPA can be found at the Government Accountability Project. The Glove will run additional articles on Pantex workers who died before their claims could be processed.


Update: The Globe's series continues today with the story of Willis Marlin Collie, a former Pantex employee who died of cancer in 1999.

Post Debate Analysis

Americans from coast to coast are asking one question tonight: What does Jordan think of the Bush-Kerry debate Thursday night? Unlike those who offered instant polls and analysis, I decided to wait until the emotion had ebbed, until I was able to think about it a little, until I could objectively and dispassionately consider both candidates' presentations, and of course until the dust settled so that I wouldn't look too foolish if I was completely off base.

Having rear-ended a vehicle on my bike today, turning my rear tire into something out of MC Escher drawing, and rending my aging body bloodied and bruised (but unbroken), I seem to have a few extra minutes to write.

So, here goes:

1. Like most of America, I thought Kerry looked serious and Presidential, and the President looked like a frustrated, peevish kid, totally lacking in gravitas, knowledge and a sense of reality about what a mess he's made of the world. In other words, they were both true to character

The difference between what I thought and what the rest of the 62 million Americans who watched thought is that I wasn't a bit surprised. Living in Washington and being a total political junky, I watch these guys all the time -- on T.V. and sometimes in person. I thought Bush was totally consistent with the way I have seen him in press conferences and unscripted interviews that most Americans never see. And Kerry, from what I know and have seen, is an extremely intellegent and serious person, more than capable of leading this country.

2. On the other hand, it was painful to see Kerry try to deal with Iraq. To put it mildly, Iraq is a hopeless mess and it's only getting worse. We'll be lucky at this point (as I think the recent CIA intellegence analysis confirmed) to get out of there without turning it into a Taliban-like haven for radical Islam, spewing terrorism to the four corners of the earth. Kerry understands that it was a mistake from the beginning and that it's a disaster now. But he can't say it because: he's supported the war at the beginning, he's vulnerable to appearing like he's "flip-flopping again, and like everyone else, he doesn't know what the hell to do. Neither pulling out immediately nor staying in seem at this point like options that will make things any better. We broke it, we own it, and it's toxic waste, so we can't just toss it in the trash.

3. OK, lets go to a subject that we actually know something about. Kerry raised the issue of chemical plant safety which we have discussed here many times before:

The president also unfortunately gave in to the chemical industry, which didn't want to do some of the things necessary to strengthen our chemical plant exposure.

What he's talking about here, of course, is the unanimous passage last year of the Corzine bill (S. 157), by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee committee. Corzine's bill would have required chemical plants to do a hazard assessment and consider the introduction of inherently safer technologies. The bill was later killed by the Republicans at the urging of the American Chemistry Council.

Bush's response to Kerry's criticism, as well as Kerry's comments about cutting the COPS community policing program, the administration's failure to protect tunnels, bridges, ports and subways, as well as failure to inspect containers coming into ports and airplane cargos:

I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap. Anyway, that's for another debate.

Yeah Dude, and like why is it "like a huge tax gap?" Three guesses.

And then he says:

My administration has tripled the amount of money we're spending on homeland security to $30 billion a year

Sounds impressive, unless you happen to know the real story, according to a recent Mother Jones article by Matthew Brzezinski

Like much about the homeland security effort, DHS's balance sheet looks healthier on paper than it is in reality. At $40 billion, the figure sounds impressive at press conferences and allows the president to say that he is spending big bucks not just in Baghdad, but at home as well. But that number is somewhat misleading. For one, about a third of the total doesn't go to DHS, but to other agencies such as the Pentagon. And most of the remaining $27 billion is not new money—as opposed to the $150-plus billion that has been spent toppling Saddam Hussein. Much of it simply lumps together the pre-existing budgets of the 22 federal agencies that make up the department. Between them, the Coast Guard, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab alone accounted for $19 billion in federal spending before 9/11. The Transportation Security Administration and its roughly $5 billion annual budget are new expenditures, but most of the other agencies have received only marginal increases since being folded into DHS. The truth of the matter is that homeland security is very much a shoestring operation—so much so that worried Democrats in Congress keep trying to throw more money at it.

To prove his seriousness about homeland security, Bush boasts that:

My administration worked with the Congress to create the Department of Homeland Security so we could better coordinate our borders and ports. We've got 1,000 extra border patrol on the southern border; want 1,000 on the northern border. We're modernizing our borders.

But according to Brezezinski,

Money woes got so bad at DHS this year that in March the department had to announce hiring freezes at its two largest frontline agencies—the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, and the Citizenship and Immigration Service, as the INS is now known— due to a $1.2 billion budget shortfall. (The freeze apparently didn't apply to DHS's public affairs division, which at the time was advertising a $136,466-a-year position for the director of an Entertainment Liaison Office in Hollywood, whose principal responsibility is to make the department look good in the movies.)

4. I won't even stoop to comment on the rumor going around the Bush was wearing an earpiece during the debate through which he was getting instructions on how to answer the questions.

So, that was my totally unbiased view. You may doubt my objectivity, but apparently most Americans agree with me.

On to St. Louis (with a stopover at the VP debate.)

Neiman Marcus Employees to Keep Their Heads

It's nice when OSHA issues a big fine before someone gets their arms or legs or heads cut off. OSHA has cited Needless Markup Neiman Marcus. Paul Brantley, OSHA's Austin area office director said that "Employees were routinely crawling into the compactor chute to smash down trash while the machine was energized, risking death or injury."

OSHA issued the $93,000 willful citation for failing to enforce "lockout/tagout" procedures before employees enter a machine. The citation was levied against the Austin, Texas, Neiman Marcus "Last Call" discount clearance center.

The Last Call stores offer the same upscale Neiman Marcus merchandise at 50% to 75% off retail. Wouldn't want to jeopordize the discounts by taking the time to shut down the compacter before someone crawls in, would we?

OSHA Issues Hex Chrome Proposal

Responding to a court order to propose a standard to protect workers against exposure to hexavalent chromium by October 4, OSHA will issue a proposal on October 4. Hexavalent Chromium has been shown to cause lung cancer. The court order was in response to a lawsuit filed in 2002 by Public Citizen and the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union. The lawsuit claimed that OSHA was aware that its current exposure limit posed a cancer risk to workers, but has continually delayed any action. The groups have urged OSHA to lower the limit for more than a decade.

According to the press release:

OSHA is proposing to lower its permissible exposure limit (PEL) for hexavalent chromium and for all CrVI compounds in construction, shipyards, and general industry from 52 to one microgram of CrVI per cubic meter of air as an 8-hour time weighted average. The proposed rule also includes provisions for employee protection such as preferred methods for controlling exposure, respiratory protection, protective work clothing and equipment, hygiene areas and practices, medical surveillance, hazard communication, and recordkeeping.

Hexavalent chromium (CrVI) compounds are widely used in the chemical industry in pigments, metal plating, and chemical synthesis as ingredients and catalysts. CrVI can also be produced when welding on stainless steel or CrVI-painted surfaces. The major health effects associated with exposure to CrVI include lung cancer, asthma, nasal septum ulcerations and perforations, skin ulcerations (or chrome holes), and allergic and irritant contact dermatitis.

Written comments are due January 3 and hearings will start on February 3.

U.S. Appeals Court for the 3rd Circuit gives the agency until January 2006 to issue a final rule.

More on this next week when I get a chance to look at the proposal in the Federal Register.

Taxi Drivers: Arm Yourselves

I've written a number of times about the dangers faced by taxi cab drivers who are often assaulted or murdered(here and here), and OSHA's fact sheet which calls for

• automatic vehicle location or global positioning systems (GPS) to locate drivers in distress;
  
• caller ID to help trace location of fares;
  
• first-aid kits in every car for use in emergencies;
  
• in-car surveillance cameras;
  
• partitions or shields;
  
• protocol with police -- owners and police to track high-crime locations;
  
• radios to communicate in emergencies (e.g., with an "open mike switch");
  
• safety training for drivers;
  
• silent alarms;
  
• use of credit/debit cards ("cashless" fare systems) to discourage robberies.

But Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, is giving OSHA a hard time for neglecting the most obvious and effective solution: recommending that taxi cab drivers carry guns to protect themselves.

Now, this is a truly amazing and shockingly close-minded admission. You have an OSHA official who says that her agency wanted to "do something" to help make taxi drivers safer. But, the one thing that really would make cabbies safer - allowing them to keep and bear arms - she opposes! In fact, she is so anti-gun that her position is, literally, don't confuse me with the facts. Her position is that even if it could be demonstrated that an armed cab driver is a safer cab driver, she still wouldn't recommend that cabbies be armed.

So taxi cab drivers should shoot anyone who threatens their lives on the job? Hmm, do you think Mr. Pratt would advocate this type of action for any worker whose life is threatened on the job?

"What, you want me to climb down into that 15 foot deep unprotected trench? No way suckah! You put a trench box in there or I blow you away. Come on, make my day."