An Intolerable Outrage: Forgotten Victims of 9/11

$87 billion for Iraq. Meanwhile, back on the home front....

David Rapp used to pride himself on being an active guy. A 250-pound construction worker, he drove piles on the Williamsburg Bridge and on projects all over the city. He could carry a sack of cement on his shoulder as easily as you carry an order of takeout sushi back to your desk. He liked fixing cars. He went crabbing in Jamaica Bay.

Then came September 11. Rapp spent several months at ground zero, drilling steel reinforcements into the “bathtub wall”—the slurry wall between the pit and the Hudson River that prevented the water from flooding the area.

Rapp’s illness began with a faint dizziness and shortness of breath, but it steadily got worse. Before long, he was useless to his former employers. They laid him off. Now Rapp is very, very sick. He’s suffering from severe pulmonary disease—meaning he never gets enough air. He has frequent respiratory infections. He’s on twelve medicines. He carries an oxygen tank wherever he goes. “I just went straight down,” Rapp says, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a rasp. “It’s real depressing.”

***

Rapp is one of perhaps thousands of people who are not cops or firefighters but who toiled at ground zero and are now sick, even disabled, from asthma, chronic infections, and other respiratory illnesses. These conditions, some experts maintain, were caused by the “crud”—the mixture of dust, ash, fumes from burning plastic, pulverized concrete, and vaporized human remains around ground zero.

Unlike the cops and firefighters whose heroism—and subsequent illnesses—have gotten huge amounts of attention, these other workers lack the medical safety net and pension enjoyed by the guys in uniforms. So they are scrambling for treatment in all kinds of ways. Some are on waiting lists for financially strapped private programs. Others are still battling for workers’ comp. Still others are defying doctors’ orders and working—because with a job comes health insurance. While some have found temporary treatment, they all share an uncertain future, with no guarantee that they’ll get the long-term care they’ll need.

The reason for this is not hard to divine. Two years have passed since the attacks, and there has been no comprehensive effort by the federal government to treat people who got sick helping out at ground zero. Incredibly, thousands of people are ill from a national disaster, and the federal government is AWOL.

Washington State Ergonomics Campaign Update

The campaign against Proposition 841 which seeks to repeal Washington's ergonomics standard goes on:

Every year, 50,000 Washington workers suffer these kinds of "soft tissue" injuries such as carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. These injuries are expensive. Nearly half the cost of our state's workers-compensation system is attributed to these injuries. When business complains about the increasing cost of workers' compensation, doesn't it make sense to look at proven ways to reduce costs?

From an Op-Ed in today's Seattle Times by Washington State Labor Council President Rick Bender.

The "No on 841" Web Page is here.

DOE to Sick Workers: Chill

This is certainly a surprise: The Department of Energy is dragging its feet coming up with data to determine whether former nuclear weapons workers were made ill by exposures on the job.

Worker advocates want the program moved from DOE to the Department of Labor.

A federal program established three years ago to help compensate thousands of workers made ill by exposure to toxic materials at government weapons facilities is "failing" and needs to be reorganized, according to a bipartisan group of senators.

The Department of Energy has not properly implemented the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, creating a seven-year backlog of claims, the senators said Friday in a letter to leaders of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development.

The 10 most dangerous jobs in America

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,524 Americans were killed on the job last year. This was down 6.6% from 2001, and the lowest level since 1992 when this survey started.

Nevertheless, that's still over 2,600 more than were killed on 9/11, yet the war on workplace death hasn't quite reached the same level as the war on terrorism. After all, these were "just accidents." Careless workers, acts of God, "just one of those tragic things."

Let's be careful out there.

(The actual BLS Survey can be found here.)

L.A. Strikes Over Health Care: The Hidden Issues

It always amazes me, although it really shouldn't after all of these years, how there can be so many news stories over a strike and many of the main issues still get lost.

For example, reading most news articles, one might think that three Southern California grocery chains are on strike. Actually, however, only Vons is on strike. In a show of management solidarity, Albertsons and Ralphs have locked their workers out.

The other piece of missing information is what the fight is really about. To read most of the papers, one would think that the strike is over a simple $5 co-payment and $15 a week for family coverage that the companies want to impose. BUT

On the surface, the changes proposed to the grocery workers' health benefits appear minimal: Where employees now pay no contributions to their health care premiums, they would have to contribute $5 per week per employee for single coverage, and $15 per week per employee for family coverage.

This is the only thing employees are directly being asked to pay, said Stacia Hill Levenfeld, a spokeswoman for Albertsons. She said no other changes were written into the proposed contract, which has not been disclosed.

But it's not the $5 or $15 a week the workers are striking over, said Mickey Kasparian, president of UFCW Local 135 in San Diego. What the union disagrees with, he said, are costs that would result from lowered employer contributions into a trust fund that pays for insurance premiums.

"This is not about us being stubborn and walking on a picket line for five bucks a week," Kasparian said. "It has to do with the entire cost of the plan."

According to Kasparian, the grocery stores now pay $3.78 into the employees' insurance fund for each hour an employee works. But he said the rejected proposal called for lower contributions for new hires, reducing them to $1.35 per hour.

As new employees are hired over the three-year contact, Kasparian said, that would reduce the fund to around 50 percent of its current worth. He said that would eventually force the chains to cut back on benefits and go with more bare-bones insurance options. These would most likely carry with them higher co-payments for out-of-pocket expenses such as office visits, prescription drugs and hospitalization.

Other cuts would also have to be made, Kasparian said, including the elimination of some of the health plans that union members choose from.

How most Americans would know this without reading several newspapers is beyond me. It's not beyond me, however, how too many Americans still view unions as selfish and unreasonable.

And then there's this. The supermarkets justify their hardline on the fact that Valdemort's Wal-Mart's coming. (See posting immediately below.) While it's true that Wal-Mart's growth has threatened supermarket chains (and workers) in many parts of the country, the spectre of Wal-Mart may serve as a convenient excuse for many companies' self-inflicted wounds:

The supermarket companies have all been warned by Wall Street to get their costs under control or risk seeing their stocks shunned like sour milk. But other than Kroger, whose management appears to be widely admired by investors, the companies have been struggling with self-inflicted wounds. Safeway has been dealing for years with the results of a series of mismanaged acquisitions it made across the country and with the aftermath of a 1986 leveraged buyout, which saddled the company with debt. Albertsons, whose operational systems are less efficient than those of its rivals, has been a chronic also-ran behind its two big rivals in many cities where all three compete.

These ills hobbled Albertsons and Safeway when the economy turned down. By some measures, in fact, most of the companies' losses of revenue over the last couple of years can be blamed on the recession, which discourages the purchase of high-profit goods such as fine wines and specialty foods. "If you look at comparable-store sales among food retailers today," Mark Husson, a supermarket analyst for Merrill Lynch, told the trade magazine Supermarket News last month, "if they're down 2%, I think 1.5% of that is due to the economy."

That suggests that the Wal-Mart issue is merely a convenient stalking horse for labor concessions the supermarkets would be asking for anyway. Although Wal-Mart has announced plans to create 40 California "supercenters," the behemoths that include grocery departments, none has been built in the state and the schedule for a rollout is murky.

To get more information from the horse's mouth, check out the workers' strike page here.

California Supermarket Strike and Lockout: Something Wicked This Way Comes

As usual, the supermarkets are acting like jerks, to put it mildly. But the real culprit may be here [See Above]: Wal-Mart.

Many factors explain Wal-Mart's ability to charge low prices, including economies of scale, the pressures it puts on suppliers and its embrace of imports — it imported $12 billion in goods from China last year, one-tenth of American imports from China.

Another big factor is Wal-Mart's relatively low wages. Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job. Mr. Flickinger said wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.

And check out Calpundit (a fellow blogger's) take, along with comments.

By the way, has anyone ever noticed how much Wal-Mart sounds almost like "he who shall not be named," Valdemort?

Where's Harry Potter when we need him?

Highway From Hell

This is an tragic story of death on the highway, unsuccessful government-citizen attempts to influence the work of the industry that creates many of the conditions for those deaths, and the inability of government to find the fiunding to make the highways safer.

In a nutshell, the Port of Los Angeles is only open during regular work hours when it disgorges 47,000 trucks onto the 24 mile Long Beach freeway each day, "a number that is expected to double or triple in coming years." Efforts are underway by the LA County Council to get the Port to move cargo 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so that much of the freight can move at night when the freeways are emptiest instead of "flooding the freeway with trucks while commuters are traveling to and from work."

The most recent accident involving one of the trucks occurred when "A northbound tractor-trailer hit a compact car and tore through the center divider at Olympic Boulevard, crushing another car," killing seven passengers in the two cars.

I found one of the most troubling parts of the article to be the California government's inability to come up with funding to modernize the freeway "designed in the 1950s largely for cars but now carrying 15% of the nation's international cargo."

An ambitious plan to rebuild 18 miles of the freeway faltered this spring when residents complained that they had been left in the dark about a project that could remove 800 or more homes in poor neighborhoods. A lack of federal and state funds means that any plan is unlikely to proceed soon, officials say.

"The bottom line is that we need to improve the corridor physically by expanding the freeway, by upgrading the freeway to state standards, and also adding truck-only lanes," said Stephen Finnegan, transportation policy manager of the Automobile Club of Southern California. "The physical improvements need to happen."

The truck crashed into a metal-and-wood barrier on the freeway median. Such barriers on the Long Beach Freeway were to be replaced with concrete barriers as part of a $400-million improvement, but a Caltrans spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail Friday afternoon, "There is no funding at this time to install the concrete barriers" on the Long Beach Freeway from the San Diego Freeway to the San Bernardino Freeway.

In other words, we have situation where the anti-tax foes of "big goverment" are killing people trying to get to work.

Of course, if this were an industrial hygiene problem, fixing the freeway might be considered more of an engineering control -- putting up barriers so that if an accident happens, loss of life will be minimal.

Substitution -- the first choice of the industrial hygiene hierarchy of controls -- would mean getting the truck traffic off of the freeway during peak commuter hours by keeping the port open 24 hours a day. So far, the Port is resisting, citing objections from truckers and warehouses. The City Council isn't buying it. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA),

said he had told the ports he would willingly sit down with the warehouse owners, truckers, shippers and union representatives to try to help work out a new system.

He added, "They've never called on me yet."

Source: My Mother

Good News For A Change

Government-Business-Labor Coalition Helps Immigrant Workers

This is interesting. Hispanic workers in Texas are having some success getting back pay and making their workplaces safer by working with Justice and Equality in the Workplace, a coalition organized in July 2001 to help inform Hispanic immigrants about their rights as workers and to uncover illegal employment practices and discrimination.

The coalition is made up of the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance and Wage and Hour Division, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Mexican, Colombian, Guatemalan and El Salvadorian consulates, the City of Houston, the Harris County AFL-CIO, the Catholic Diocese of Galveston-Houston, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Hispanic Contractor's Association in Houston, the Associated General Contractors of America's Houston chapter, the Houston Chamber of Latino Business Owners and, lately, OSHA.

Realizing that a disproportionate number of Hispanics die in construction-related accidents, Randy Magdaleno, chairman of the Hispanic Contractor's Association's Houston chapter, wanted to get involved with the coalition.

He said that workers need to get safety training and be encouraged to point out unsafe conditions.

"It may hurt us, but we need to start making changes," Magdaleno said. "We're going to have to speak out and say this is not a safe work environment."

Last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and joined the coalition. Since the coalition formed, the U.S. Department of Labor has received more than 700 complaints and recovered $1.5 million in back wages for immigrant workers. OSHA has issued 35 safety and health standard citations with penalties of more than $90,000 to employers that have broken labor laws by putting immigrant workers in danger. And the Mexican Consulate and the mayor's office have received hundreds of complaints, mostly from those like Herrera who allege they were not paid their wages.

See, I don't just report bad news.

No On 841

More on this later, but in the meantime, check out the No On 841 website, especially the Lies and Lying Liars of 841 page. (That's the Washington State referendum to kill the ergonomics standard.)

See No Evil: OSHA Declares “Mission Accomplished” on Ergonomics in Nursing Homes

On the ergonomics front, OSHA is moving from Operation "Hear No Evil" on the recordkeeping form, to Operation "See No Evil" in its enforcement program.

Just over a year ago, Assistant Secretary for OSHA, John Henshaw announced with great fanfare a new Nursing Home Initiative that would attack the high rate of ergonomic injuries, as well as other hazards suffered by nursing home workers.

Henshaw originally justified the program by the fact that:

Nursing and personal care facilities are a growing industry where hazards are known and effective controls are available. The industry also ranks among the highest in terms of injuries and illnesses, with rates about 2 ½ times that of all other general industries. By focusing on specific hazards associated with nursing and personal care facilities, we can help bring those rates down.

On Tuesday Henshaw announced that he was ending the program: Mission Accomplished.

The "National Emphasis Program for Nursing and Personal Care Facilities" was an attempt by OSHA to show that it was serious about ergonomics. Nursing home workers, as Henshaw said, had 2 1/2 times as many injuries and illnesses as private sector workers. And over half of those injuries are from overexertion and other ergonomic problems. (And just to put all of this in perspective, OSHA estimated during the Clinton administration ergonomic hearings that only around one-half of all ergonomic injuries were even reported.)

Nursing homes had been part of OSHA's regular "Site Specific Targeting" program. In fact, 2500 nursing and personal care facilities, out of a total of 13,000 in the private sector, were notified by OSHA last year that their injury and illness rates were higher than average and that they therefore had a higher than average chance of being inspected. Approximately 800 nursing homes would have been inspected under the targetting program, but Henshaw announed that under the NEP, 1000 would be inspected.

Nursing homes were a good place to show that it was serious about enforcement in workplaces that had a high rate of ergonomic injuries. In addition to MSDs, OSHA also targetted bloodborne pathogens, tuberculosis and slips & falls.

So what's the deal? Henshaw had promised to inspect 1000 nursing homes they have inspected almost that many. And despite the fact that they are ending the program, "We will continue to inspect workplaces where there are numerous MSDs, and we will cite employers if they have ignored their responsibility to protect their workers from injury."

So what were the results of those 1000 inspections? According to Henshaw, OSHA has citing a whopping 7 facilities under the general duty clause for failing to protect workers from ergonomic hazards, and issued "alert letters" to 104 additional sites.

The average penalty? Just over $1600, with penalties ranging from $230 to $2975. So out of 2500 nursing homes with injury and illness statistics above average, out of almost 1000 that have been inspected, a total of 7 have received citations for ergonomic hazards -- in an industry where over half of the injuries are related to ergonomics. (For those of you who are mathmatically challenged, that's about 7 tenths of one percent of all of those inspected 3 tenths of one percent of all those on the list.)

That should be enough to strike terror into the hearts of nursing home workers from coast to coast.

But wait, says Henshaw

Of course, the bottom line is not the numbers of inspections or citations we issue. It is reducing workplace injuries and illnesses.

Hmm. Hard to argue with that. So have workplace injuries and illnesses been reduced?

Who the hell knows!

When Henshaw announced the program, the latest statistics available, from 2000, showed that Nursing Home workers were 2.3 times as likely to be injured on the job as the average private sector worker. The current figures (from 2001) show that nursing home workers are 2.4 times as likely to be injured on the job. 2002 numbers won't be available until December.

So, on one hand, Henshaw says that the proof of the pudding is not the number of inspections completed, but the reduction of injuries. On the other hand, we have no idea if injuries have been reduced as a result of the program, but the most important thing is that we've done the inspections. Time to close up shop:

We said we would conduct about 1,000 inspections, and we have done that. I want to let you know today that we have now completed that emphasis program, and we are not renewing it.

Nevertheless, nursing homes are doing so well that instead of inspecting 800 nursing homes next year that would have been expected as part of the targeting program, OSHA will only inspect 400, or half that number.

OK, the number of citations and level of penalties haven't exactly been overwhelming and there is no evidence that the number of injuries is coming down significantly. So what's going on here?

The only thing I can think of is the intense pressure that OSHA has been under by industry anti-ergo zealots that I've written about before.

Or, as SEIU's health and safety director Bill Borwegen says,

OSHA apparently does not see the need to treat a workforce of low paid women who are disproportionately compirsed of people of color - many working as single mothers, with the same degree of protection afforded workers in other high hazard sectors typically with different gender and/or race demographics. And this, after Chao, a former member of the board of directors of a large nursing home chain, promised the Congress and others that she would focus on the needs of nursing home workers soon after becoming the Secretary of Labor.

Henshaw's ergonomics program makes about as much sense as...as...as Bush's economic program. But Henshaw was perfectly clear about one thing:

I want to be very clear about one thing when it comes to enforcement. We do not, have not and will not enforce voluntary ergonomics guidelines. We make this point on page six of the guidelines. And I have made it in letters to senators and representatives, in the frequently asked questions section on our ergonomics webpage, in news releases and in speeches I have given.

And just in case you missed that...

We've also made very clear to our inspectors that when they issue citations and provide examples of ways to fix problems, they should NOT use the guidelines for these recommendations. Rather they should turn to the literature -- there are plenty of examples available.

(And the guidelines are based on what, if not the literature? Oh, nevermind!)

OK, so we have an enforcement program that consists of no standard, wimpy, unenforceable guidelines, fewer inspections, a tiny handful of citations, puny penalties and a flawed recordkeeping system that will further encourage underreporting....

In other words, OSHA's COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ERGONOMICS.

Ergo Barbarians Pillage ANSI Ergonomics Standard

The foes of ergonomic protections for workers often remind me of the Barbarian hordes early in the first part of the last millennium.

You know, behead the men, rape the women, enslave the children, burn the village, mow down the crops and then sow the earth with salt. Kill the farm animals and throw them down the wells. And eat their pets.

First, they repeal the federal OSHA standard. When they fail to pass legislation to kill the Washington state standard, they try and fail to convince the courts to kill the standard. Now they're trying to kill the standard with a referendum.

Hmm, did we miss anything? Curses, there's that pesky ANSI standard. Shoot it, stab it, then strangle it and drown it. Make it swim with the fishes.

Since 1990, a committee sponsored by the National Safety Council has been attempting to adopt a "consensus" standard on upper extremity musculoskeletal injuries. Now, after 13 years, the ANSI “Z365” committee is close to finalizing an ergonomics standard.

But not so fast, in response to an appeal from the same ergonomic foes that pushed the assassination of the federal standard, ANSI handed down a decision that both labor and industry spokespersons say will ultimately kill the standard.

I'm really to tired to go into all the details (That's "tired" as in "tired of," as opposed to sleepy tired.)

So this is it in a nutshell:

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) issues voluntary "consensus" standards on a variety of health and safety issues. Industry safety people get together with union safety people, along with a few academics, and they hammer something out that is satisfactory to all parties.

Because they're "consensus" standards, they often aren't as tough as OSHA standards, but because these aren't mandatory government regulations, they can usually work much faster than OSHA, with less political interference. That is, until the ergo barbarians got them in their sites.

See, the ergo Barbarians want no trace of ergonomics left upon this earth. Even a seedling could a giant standard grow. If they could, they'd probably wipe all reference to the Clinton administration's standard from the history books.

But I digress....Where was I?

Oh yes, ANSI doesn't develop the standards themselves. They appoint a "secretariat" that puts together a committee that writes the standard. In this case, the National Safety Council is the secretariat.

The committee, which only addresses upper extremity injuries (not back injuries) has been making steady, but slow progress for over a decade. Last year, they had a final draft and asked for final comments. This was too much for the ergo Barbarians who filled an appeal with ANSI, questioning whether NSC was an appropriate secretariat, due to a number of stupid procedural red herrings issues similar to the procedural red herrings issues made against the federal OSHA standard.

I won't even go into the details of ANSI's decision, but basically they placed a number of burdensome and expensive hurdles on NSC. NSC, not the most worker-oriented organization, has been looking for an excuse to dump the costly, never-ending, and politically controversial hot potato standard for a number of years. Both industry and labor sources agree that ANSI may have given them the reason:

Randy Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was "pleasantly surprised" by ANSI's decision.

The AFL-CIO's Bill Kojola argues that "ANSI has basically caved into the rantings and ravings of the National Coalition on Ergonomics."

If anyone really wants the gory details of the ANSI decision, you can find it here. But I wouldn't bother. Go rent some movie about Genghis Khan instead. You'll get the basic idea.

Strikes in Los Angeles

This is an interesting article about the grocery store and transit strikes, and police sick-out in L.A

All three unions are protesting proposals that would require them to shoulder higher health-insurance costs, an issue that has been percolating nationwide for more than a decade. In California, the sluggish economy and yawning budget deficit have brought the issue to a head this year, particularly for the sheriff's deputies and the MTA's mechanics, who are in the midst of contract negotiations.

In addition, surging union membership in Los Angeles combined with several recent successful strikes here have likely helped convince union leaders that such actions have
a better chance for succeeding than they did in the past, experts say.

Reality Bites

The holidays are coming. And you know what that means. Those tiresome arguments with your Republican relatives about what a great job the Bush Administration has done in relieving the “regulatory burden” on the poor suffering business community. But it ain’t so.

A standard refrain from Congress all throughout the Clinton Administration was “Help, help. Too many costly regulations. We’re all going out of business. The sky is falling. Woe is us.”

Well, now we have a former EPA administrator of the Republican persuasion arguing pointing out the environmental regulations are good for the economy – even better than EPA has argued.

Bill Reilly, EPA administrator under the first President Bush, writes about the OMB study that came out a couple of weeks ago showing that “the benefits of Environmental Protection Agency regulations -- benefits to both health and the economy -- significantly exceeded the economic costs of complying with those regulations”

Industry representatives, of course, disagreed. Reilly is not convinced:

An industry spokesman quoted in The Post responded to the report by claiming that the EPA typically underestimated the costs when proposing new regulations. That is no doubt a widely held view. It is dead wrong.

And not only was the industry wildly overestimating costs (no surprise there), but even the EPA overestimated the costs of regulations.

Referring to acid rain regulations issued while he was at EPA, Reilly describes reality:

The electric power industry estimated that eliminating one ton of sulfur dioxide (the bill aimed to eliminate 10 million tons) would cost more than $1,300.The EPA, CEA and OMB ultimately agreed on a cost estimate of $600 to $800 per ton. We got it wrong: Over the ensuing decade the cost proved to be less than $200 per ton.

In fact, a review of some of the major regulatory initiatives overseen by the EPA since its creation in 1970 reveals a pattern of consistent, often substantial overestimates of their economic costs. Catalytic converters on cars, the phaseout of lead in gasoline, the costs of acid rain controls -- on each of these, overly cautious economic analysts at the EPA advocated proposals they considered important but projected high-end costs that undercut the acceptance of, and heightened the opposition to, their initiatives. In fact, the OMB report makes clear that the weakness in analyzing the likely impact of new environmental rules lay in a highly conservative calculation of benefits. Where the costs of four major EPA rules in the 1990s were $8 billion to $8.8 billion, the benefits are now calculated to have been between $101 billion and $119 billion.

The main reason estimates of costs and benefits have been off is that official analyses fail to take into account technological innovation in response to regulations.

A 1995 study by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on several OSHA regulations showed the exact same thing. The OTA

looked at several OSHA standards that had been in effect for a number of years to determine the accuracy of cost and benefit estimates by OSHA and the regulated industries. The study showed that not only does industry grossly overestimate expected costs, but even OSHA routinely overestimated the costs and underestimated the benefits of standards. OTA found that part of the reason that OSHA overestimates costs is that the agency fails to take into account the fact that American businesses are especially talented at developing new technologies that are much more cost effective and efficient than OSHA had predicted.

So cut this article out and take it with you when you head home for the holidays.

Hear No Evil…..

Of course you don’t have to worry about whether those pesky regulations designed to keep workers from being injured are good or bad for the economy if you don’t see any injuries in the first place.

The Washington Post’s regulatory columnist, Cindy Skrzycki describes OSHA’s new recordkeeping form and how it seems to be missing a column for musculoskeletal injuries.

This is as business/Republican dream come true. Sure, they could make the federal ergonomics standard go away. They can get away with wimpy enforcement. But those pesky ergonomic injuries kept accounting for one-third of all injuries and illnesses year after year. So what to do? Make it has hard to count them as possible. Presto Chango, problem solved.

But no. The business community says the numbers will go down because it’s suddenly because of their good deeds:

They argue that the incidence of such injuries is declining because of voluntary actions taken by employers. They insist there is no agreed-upon definition of an ergonomics injury; hence, they are uncountable.
"No one could agree on a definition, so how could you have a separate recording column on it?" said Randel Johnson, vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits at the chamber. "There is no agreed-upon scientific definition. They made the right decision."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics differs.

The bureau uses the same definition to count days away from work caused by such injuries as the Clinton recordkeeoping rule would have used: A musculoskeletal disorder is “an injury or disorder of the muscles, nerves, tendons, joints and cartilage and spinal discs.”

Including that definition in an official OSHA rule would have supplied some of the answers tin a longstanding unresolved debate. What exactly is a musculoskeletal disorder and how does one prove it is work-related? It may have also made it easier for the agency to cite employers for an unsafe workplace due to problems with ergonomics.

And that was the problem. Even though their on course to sweep the problem under the rug, their still having fits about OSHA’s feeble enforcement effort, as I’ve written about before (scroll down).

Business groups have monitored closely and worried about OSHA's approach to ergonomic problems ….. The agency has issued 11 citations, but the penalties in those cases have been small. It also has issued or proposed guidelines for several industries to follow, but these are not mandatory, and the agency can't enforce them. It did create a National Advisory Committee on Ergonomics to study the issue.

So ergonomics situation in the American workplace may soon look better – on paper. But to nurses and poultry processing workers life will only get worse. More pain. More disability. More careers ended. Only no one will notice.

If a worker falls to an ergonomics injury, but no one counts it, did it really happen?

Too Much of a “Good” Thing?

If that first dessert tasted good, why not have another – with whipped cream this time. Now we’re faced with the biggest deficit in the history of this country, probably in the whole history of mankind, and what are House Republicans planning? A huge tax increase. What else?

The World Trade Organization says that U.S. export subsidies are illegally subsidizing American businesses and to avert a trade war with the European Union, we have to get rid of them. Fair enough.

The Senate says, OK, we’ll cut those subsidies benefiting businesses and make up the the harm it may do to those businesses by cutting their taxes. But then we’ll make up the loss to the budget that those tax cuts would cause by closing existing business loopholes. Makes sense, given the deficit.

But not according to the Republican-Taliban party ruling the House of Representatives.

House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) hopes to complete a bill this week or next that would reduce the Treasury's revenue by around $100 billion over 10 years, but lobbyists say the true cost could be considerably more than the $130 billion version Thomas drafted this summer.

And this coming one week after

The Congressional Budget Office reported that corporate tax receipts in the fiscal year that ended last month had fallen by 11.1 percent, to $132 billion. Measured against the size of the economy, corporate taxes fell to the lowest level since 1983, and the second lowest level since 1936. After tax loopholes and deductions were included, the effective corporate tax rate in 2002 was 24.6 percent, according to a study
released last month by the non partisan Congressional Research Service.

Yeah, that second dessert tasted really good. But tomorrow morning you have to step on the scale and face reality.

Why? Because They're Evil

Teach Your Children Well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Provisions Benefiting Energy Industry Are Folded into Bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

The author of the report, Joby Fortson:

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

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

This one's good too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worker Trial Against IBM Toxic Chemical Exposures Begins

This will be an interesting case:

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

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

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

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

And there's more to come:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Finkel,

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Good Vintage? Ergonomically Correct Wine

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is interesting:

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

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

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

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

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

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