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Past roundups have emphasized the many things wrong with veterans’ health and safety, so this week seems like a good time to highlight some of the efforts that the military and the Veterans Administration are making to address the problems.
- The WSJ’s Theo Francis reports that the Defense Department is giving the Brain Trauma Foundation $4.6 million to develop a device that can assess traumatic brain injuries in seconds on the battlefield.
- For the Associated Press, Pauline Jelinek and Lolita Baldor describe a new Pentagon campaign that aims to get troops with mental health problems into counseling; one important change is that mental health treatment will no longer count against them in future applications for security clearance.
- NPR’s Joseph Shapiro explains the changes the Army has made at military hospitals to prevent accidental drug overdoses like the one that killed Sgt. Robert Nichols.
In other news:
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 247-165 to approve the Worker Protection Against Combustible Dust Explosion and Fires Act (H.R. 5522), which requires OSHA to issue an interim final combustible dust standard within 90 days and a final standard within 18 months.
This legislation wouldn’t be necessary if OSHA were doing its job. Combustible dust is a serious workplace hazard; according to the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), 281 combustible dust incidents between 1980 and 2005 killed 119 workers and injured 718. In fact, the CSB recommended in 2006 that OSHA issue a new national regulatory standard designed to prevent combustible dust fires and explosions in general industry.
OSHA failed to act, though, even as more combustible dust incidents occurred. Since CSB made its recommendation, there have been 67 combustible dust explosions that injured 75 workers and killed 14, including the February sugar dust explosion at the Imperial Sugar Company refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, which killed nine workers and injured many more. Georgia Representative John Barrow, along with House Education and Labor Committee Chair George Miller, introduced the legislation.
In Congo, an estimated two million artisanal miners account for as much of 90% of the country’s mineral exports. The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen reports on how this unofficial economy works:
The diggers usually work in groups of three, heaving out bags of ore. The haphazard tunneling undermines the stability of the earth above, which often collapses. Every week, about 10 miners die in accidents, provincial officials said.
[Freelance miner Innocent] Luamba’s three-man team can produce perhaps two 220-pound sacks of copper ore a day, a bounty quickly consumed by a slew of dubious taxes, fees and prices.
After those costs, each miner ends the day with about $4, perhaps a fifth of the value of one 220-pound sack. The going rate for a decent loaf of bread is $1.50.
A middleman sells the ore to buyers such as Daniel Tam, a British citizen from Hong Kong who declined to give his company’s name. Though he has his own mining concession, Tam said he buys only from diggers working other spots, “because it is cheaper.” With a single phone call, he can find a buyer abroad.
“The Chinese, the Indians, the South Africans,” he said, naming all the buyers. “The selling is easy.”
The diggers are not the only ones suffering in such transactions. Congo is also losing out on taxes and jobs as the less-valuable raw ore is hauled out of the country before being processed into a final product worth four times as much.
Congo’s government is trying to build a modern, mechanized industry to extract copper and cobalt, but it’s a difficult transition given how entrenched the artisanal mining system is. Crews hired by foreign mining companies often arrive at their new concessions and find thousands of diggers already there – which in some cases leads to riots, or growing militancy among diggers who’ve been chased from sites they feel they have a might to mine.
In other news:
Just as the 60-day deadline approached for filing a legal challenge to a new health standard to protect mine workers from asbestos exposure, mining industry trade associations submitted their petitions in federal court. MSHA’s rule was published on February 29, and tick-tock, like clockwork, the National Mining Assoc, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Assoc (NSSGA) and others filed suits in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting judicial review of MSHA’s rule. Under both the OSHA and MSHA statutues, ”any person who may be adversely affect by a [newly promulgated] standard” may file a petition in the US Court of Appeals challenging the “validity of the standard.”
These legal challenges to worker health and safety standards are typical—nearly every final OSHA health standard was challenged by some industry association—It’s just part of the standard-operating due-process protections afforded hazardous materials to which workers are exposed. Even in this case, for ASBESTOS, a known carcinogenic and respiratory toxin which has been responsible for the death and disability of hundreds of thousands of individuals, is still granted its “day in court.”
Today is Workers’ Memorial Day, when we remember the victims of workplace deaths, injuries, and illnesses. According to the International Labor Organization, 2.2 million people die from work-related accidents and diseases every year, and another 430 million suffer from work-related illnesses or nonfatal accidents. These are preventable deaths, as the ILO Director-General Juan Somavia emphasizes:
Millions of work related accidents, injury and disease annually take their toll on human lives, businesses, the economy and the environment. We know that by assessing risks and hazards, combating them at source and promoting a culture of prevention we can significantly reduce workplace illness and injuries.
In the U.S., an estimated 49,000 deaths each year are attributed to work-related disease; in 2006, 5,840 workers died from injuries sustained on the job. Workers have successfully fought for many improvements since the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire; in fact, the CDC has recognized “Safer workplaces” as one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century. But workers are still losing their lives in workplaces here and around the world, and the ILO reports that work-related deaths are on the rise. On Saturday, a massive fire in a Casablanca mattress factory killed 55 workers. Accounts bring the Triangle disaster to mind: inflammable fabrics, blocked exit doors, and women sewing on an upper floor trapped by the blaze.
Yesterday, Celeste pointed us to Ken Ward’s excellent article on the Willow Island disaster that took 30 construction workers’ lives, and suggested that we thank Ken Ward and his Charleston Gazette editors for their consistently top-notch coverage of worker health and safety issues. On that note, I’d like to link to some of the excellent special reports on workplace hazards that have been published over the past year:
On the eve of international Workers’ Memorial Day (4/28), Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette displays again his journalist acumen, particularly on health and safety issues for workers. Thirty years ago today, at the construction of the cooling towers at the Pleasants Power Station at Willow Island, West Virginia, workers were hoisting up a massive bucket of concrete. As Ward writes:
“The cable hoisting that bucket of concrete went slack. The crane that was pulling it up fell toward the inside of the tower. Scaffolding followed. The previous day’s concrete, Lift 28, started to collapse. Concrete began to unwrap off the top of the tower. First it peeled counter-clockwise, and then in both directions. A mess of concrete, wooden forms and metal scaffolding crumbled to the ground. 51 construction workers were on the scaffold at the time. They all plunged to their deaths.”
“Thirty years later, the Willow Island disaster is still considered the worst construction accident in U.S. history.”
Cong. Woolsey’s Workforce Protections Subcommittee held a hearing today on OSHA’s inadequate enforcement of safety and health standards at large, multiple-facility corporations. Members of the Committee heard the gruesome details of the death of Mr. Eleazar Torres-Gomez in an industrial dryer at a Cintas Corp. laundry and how the deadly hazards encountered by Mr. Torres-Gomez are standard operating procedure at Cintas workplaces. Cintas Corp. has more than 400 facilities in the U.S and Canada, boasts it has 700,000 customer-businesses, and reported sales in 2007 of $3.7 Billion and more than $334 Million in profit.
At the hearing, witnesses and Members expounded on whether “enforcement” is more effective than “compliance assistance” for eliminating workplace hazards. One witness insisted that financial costs associated with injuries cause employers to work diligently on prevention, while another countered that workers are actually discouraged from reporting injuries and even given turkeys and other gifts for maintaining an “injury-free” worksite. Well, it sounded like all the same-old same-old to me until Frank White (ORC Worldwide) said something like “a negative story in the Wall Street Journal is bound to be more effective than a $2 million penalty from OSHA.”
The longer fighting in Iraq continues, the more disturbing news we get about the troops’ mental health.
The latest and most comprehensive study on veterans’ mental health to date (by the Rand Corporation) finds that nearly one in five Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is suffering from depression or stress disorders, and that half of those suffering aren’t getting adequate care. Some avoid seeking care because of the stigma sometimes associated with it, or because they fear having treatment on their record will prevent redeployment. Another problem is an insufficient supply of healthcare providers with expertise in war-related mental disorders, which leads to long waits for treatment.
Over the next two years, the economic costs associated with veterans’ PTSD and depression are likely to range from $4 – 6 billion.
Senators Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and Patty Murray (D-Washington) say that the Veterans Administration’s mental health director, Dr. Ira Katz, tried to cover up the rising rate of veteran suicides and should resign.
In other news:
For more than two years, the Cook family has waited for answers about the coal-truck crash that took the life of Chad Cook, their son and brother. Their long ordeal began immediately after 25-year old Chad’s death, when an MSHA inspector decided that the fatal crash occurred on a public road and therefore would not be investigated. The State followed MSHA’s lead, and Chad’s death was chalked up as a motor-vehicle accident, not deserving of workplace safety agencies’ resources. Too bad none of them told the Cook family.
About a year later and as a last resort, Mrs. Gay Cook contacted Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette to ask his advice on how to get information from MSHA or the State. Curious as he is, and with a map and camera in hand, it didn’t take the reporter long to determine that Chad Cook’s death occured on mine property on a private road used exclusively by mine operator(s), and therefore should have been investigated by both MSHA and the State. Now, one year later, MSHA has issued its investigation report, the most sorry excuse for an investigation I’ve ever read. Read the rest of this entry »
Pork plant in illness probe wins worker safety award
Safety award to Massey mine where two miners were killed
First, I thought these were bad April Fools’ jokes or maybe an article from the ONION. But no, these headlines are no joke. A pork packing house in Austin, MN, a worksite where at least 12 workers have developed an autoimmune disorder, is receiving the Award of Honor from the American Meat Institute for its worker safety and health program. (This is the plant with the ”blowing brains” table,” where workers used compressed air on pig skulls to harvest the brains, resulting in aerosolized brain matter which caused them to develop severe neurological symptoms.)
Worse yet, is the recognition to Massey Energy’s Aracoma Alma mine, where Mr. Don Bragg, 33 and Mr. Ellery Hatfield, 46, died in January 19, 2006 in an underground mine fire; Massey announced it’s receiving a safety award from MSHA. Just one year ago, this very same MSHA, issued a record-setting $1.5 million penalty against Massey for its ”reckless disregard for safety” in the disaster which killed Bragg and Hatfield.
Last month, five fishermen died when their boat, the Alaska Ranger, went down off Unalaska Island. They joined the more than 400 killed since 1999, when a Coast Guard panel warned Congress that weak regulations allow unseaworthy boats to continue fishing. Congress has failed to solve the problem, the Seattle PI’s Daniel Lathrop and Levi Pulkkinen report:
Records show that on at least 10 occasions since 1971, the Coast Guard has told Congress and the public that fishermen are dying because of unseaworthy boats, and that a legislative fix is needed to improve safety. But Congress instead opted for voluntary safety programs supported by the fishing lobby.
Meanwhile, the fishing industry, which grosses roughly $10 billion annually, has spent heavily on lobbying Congress. And senators and representatives from Washington state — home to 85 percent of the Bering Sea fishing fleet — have netted their share of industry dollars while sitting on committees where change could be made, or blocked.
In other news:
The story barely received a blurb in the U.S. press (Thurs, 4/10/08). Inside a refrigerated truck designed to transport seafood, a group of 121 Burmese women, men and children were suffocating inside, just hoping to make it to their destination—work–a job–in the resort towns on the Andaman coast of Thailand. According to the Asia Times, the truck was following a route taken by tens of thousands of Burmese, seeking jobs in Thailand’s fisheries industry, construction sector and rubber and palm oil plantations. The UN-affiliated Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims (ANROAV), coodinated by Jadish Patel (APHA/OHS awardee), urges the worldwide community of workers’ rights advocates to condemn the economic, social and political environment in Burma which makes illegal migration necessary for these workers. When this truck was seized, 54 of the migrant workers had perished, including 37 young women.
One of the nation’s top advocates for miners’ health and safety, Tony Oppegard, sent a scathing letter last week to the Deputy Solicitor of Labor (SOL), Ronald G. Whiting, mincing no words about their pitiful performance. Oppegard’s letter concerned a particular case involving a worker who was fired for complaining about safety, but its content speaks volumes about SOL’s “consistent and undistinguished record” of turning its back on workers who exercise their statutory rights. As Oppegard foretells:
“If SOL is going to continue to insist that a discrimination case be a clear-cut winner before it will represent the miner, coal miners will continue to file less and less discrimination complaints with MSHA and the mines will become even less safe. Instead, coal miners will either perform unsafe work in the hope of keeping their job and pray they don’t get injured or killed, or they will quit their job and hope they’re lucky enough to find another. Unfortunately, SOL seems to have no idea that oftentimes the right to refuse unsafe work is the non-union coal miner’s only remedy to protect his safety, and that it is rarely invoked frivolously.”
The first story about the death of Mr. Ricky “Mud Puddle” Collins came on Thursday afternoon (3/27) in an AP story Massey Miner Killed in Logan County. The short news clip mentioned a miner employed at Massey Energy’s Freeze Fork Surface Mine in Logan County, who we later learned was Mr. Collins, 43, of Dan’s Branch, WV. The article said he:
“died while working on a trailer at a railroad crossing near Stollings in Logan County Thursday,” but
“MSHA is not investigating the accident because it did not occur on mine property.”
A new UK law now in force should make it easier to prosecute companies accused of causing death because of negligence. BBC News explains:
Under the new offence of corporate manslaughter, employers may face large fines if it is proved they failed to take proper safety precautions.
The old law was criticised for making it too hard to bring prosecutions.
Proof is no longer needed that a single senior official was to blame, only that senior management played a role.
It also lifts government bodies’ immunity to prosecution. Some worker advocates say it doesn’t go far enough, though, and predict that individual senior managers will still not be held responsible for health and safety failings that result in deaths.
In other news:
No, not V-8 the vegetable drink, but C8, the common name for ammonium perfluorooctanoate, an ingredient in Teflon and other non-stick products. Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette reports today on the levels of perfluorooctanoic acid in the blood of about 69,000 residents living near the DuPont Co.’s Parkersburg, WV plant where C8 was manufactured. The results are posted on the West Virginia University’s Health Science’s center website. The median C8 blood-level was
“more than five times the U.S. general population.”
The highest median blood-concentration levels (i.e., 132 ppb) were found among residents who get their tap water from the Little Hocking Water Association in Ohio. Ward’s story indicates the median level in the general U.S. population is 5 ppb.
On March 27th, South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism announced a prohibition on the use, processing or manufacturing, of any asbestos or asbestos containing products. The regulation’s objectives are:
- To prohibit the use, processing or manufacturing, of any asbestos or asbestos containing product unless it can be proven that no suitable alternative exists, in which case a phase-out plan may be approved.
- To prohibit the import or export of any asbestos or asbestos containing product provided that the importation is purely for transit through the country. Any person transporting asbestos or asbestos containing material through the country will be required to register with the Department and provide certain information on an annual basis.
- To prohibit the import of any asbestos or asbestos containing waste material other than from a member of the Southern African Development Community for the sole purpose of safe disposal locally, subject to the submission of certain information annually.
- The use of asbestos or asbestos containing material for research purposes will be allowed if the research is not being undertaken to produce another asbestos containing product. The researcher will need to notify the Department of their research and will have to provide a report on the amount of asbestos used and the outcome of the research on an annual basis. The Minister may review the permission on an annual basis.
The press release notes, “In publishing these regulations, South Africa joins more than 50 other countries that have put the health of its people first.” The United States, of course, is not on that list.
The Department of Labor’s Inspector General (IG) issued a report yesterday about the Utah Crandall Canyon mine, saying:
“MSHA was negligent in carrying out its responsibilities to protect the safety of miners.”
The investigation was carried out in response to a request from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and documented in an 80-page report entitled: “MSHA Could Not Show it Made the Right Decision in Approving the Roof Control Plan at Crandall Canyon Mine.” The August 2007 underground mine disaster killed nine men, including Mr. Gary Jensen a federal mine inspector who worked out of MSHA’s Price, Utah office.
This was one of the first-class quotes from former OSHA Assistant Secretary Jerry Scannell (1989-1993) during today’s hearing on workers’ safety and health before the Senate HELP Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety. His comment came in response to discussions about OSHA’s and the Department of Labor’s Solicitor’s Office’s practices of reducing penalties, even in cases of serious violations. Mr. Scannell said he often felt pressure from inside and outside the agency to settle inspection and fatality-investigation cases by using ”discount factors” to reduce monetary penalties. He recalled wondering, “What are we, a discount house?” and avoided doing it.
The breakneck pace of high-rise construction on Las Vegas’ famed Strip comes at a terrible price: Since the end of 2006, nine construction workers have died in workplace accidents. In a special two-part series, the Las Vegas Sun’s Alexandra Berzon explores why these deaths are happening and what the state OSHA’s response has been.
Berzon’s first article, “Pace is the new peril,” begins with the story of 46-year-old Harold Billingsley, who worked on the CityCenter development, a casino and six adjacent high-rises that together amount to the most expensive private commercial development in this country’s history:
In response to a recommendation from the Department of Labor’s Inspector General, MSHA released data on 40 additional deaths which occurred (mostly) in 2007 at U.S. mining operations but were deemed not “chargeable” to the mining industry. The information, which includes 5 deaths in late 2006 and 35 in 2007, involved miners, contract workers, a mine owner, children of mine operators, and trespassers onto mine property. Of the 40 deaths, 30 were classified as “natural causes,” based on autopsy reports with notations such as “acute cardiac dysrhthmia,” “acute myocardial infarction,” “atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” “pulmonary thromboembolism,” “ischemic heart disease.” The remaining 10 deaths included two suicides and eight fatal injuries involving individuals not authorized to be on the mine property such as former employees and apparent burglers.
Workers repairing the Qarmat Ali water injection plant in Iraq were told that the orange substance strewn around the facility was only a mild irritant – but after two-and-a-half months of exposure to it, many workers felt ill. Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe:
But the chemical turned out to be sodium dichromate, a substance so dangerous that even limited exposure greatly increases the risk of cancer. Soon, many of the 22 Americans and 100-plus Iraqis began to complain of nosebleeds, ulcers, and shortness of breath. Within weeks, nearly 60 percent exhibited symptoms of exposure, according to the minutes of a meeting of project managers from KBR, the Houston-based construction company in charge of the repairs.
Now, nine Americans are accusing KBR, then a subsidiary of the oil conglomerate Halliburton, of knowingly exposing them to the deadly substance and failing to provide them with the protective equipment needed to keep them safe.
KBR claims it should be protected from employee lawsuits under the Defense Base Act. Since KBR hired the workers through two subsidiaries, though – a move that let them avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll taxes – they may not qualify as an employer, and may be ineligible for that protection.
In other news:
I recently started a new job, and since I don’t know the surrounding neighborhood well yet, I’ve been taking different routes through it every morning on my way to the office. Yesterday, steps from the White House, I approached a small construction site, shuffling to escape the unmistakable roar of a jackhammer on concrete. But then something stopped me in my tracks. The morning sunlight shining brightly down on the workers revealed the swirling clouds of dust emanating from the trembling sidewalk.
The Senate HELP Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, chaired by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), will hold a hearing on Tuesday, April 1, 2008 entitled “Serious OSHA Violations: Strategies for Breaking Dangerous Patterns.” The subcomittee has not yet released a witness list, but I’d expect to hear something about some of the bad actors profiled in the “Dirty Dozen” report, prepared in 2006 by the National COSH.
With the six-month deadline approaching for issuing citations and monetary penalties, OSHA announced today 13 willful and 25 serious violations against RPI Coatings, the employer of five workers who died in early October at the Excel Energy Cabin Creek Station hydroelectric plant near Georgetown, Colorado. The penalty amount proposed by OSHA against RPI Coatings is $845,100.
The deceased workers were part of a contract maintenance crew who were applying a specialized epoxy coating onto the inside of a 3,000 foot-long (and 4 foot-wide) pipe. A fire erupted inside the pipe, starving the atmosphere of oxygen. The five men were Anthony Aguirre, 18, Donald Dejaynes, 43, Gary Foster, 48, Dupree Holt, 37 and James St. Peters, 52 (previous post here).
A coal miner from eastern Kentucky filed a law suit yesterday requesting a federal court judge to compel MSHA to issue a health standard to prevent miners from developing black lung disease. The Petition for Writ of Mandamus (Howard v. Chao) argues that Congress intended, through the Federal Coal Mine Health & Safety Act of 1969 (amended 1977), MSHA to promulgate regulations to prevent new cases of coal workers pnuemoconiosis, progressive massive fibrosis and other illnesses related to miners’ exposure to respirable coal mine dust. Despite evidence over the last 12 years that the current permissible exposure limit is inadequate to prevent black lung disease, including a NIOSH criteria document which recommended a 1.0 mg/m3 limit, the petitioner argues that MSHA has failed to fulfill its duties under the Mine Act. The Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center filed the petition on behalf of Mr. Scott Howard*—one heck of a brave man for putting his name (not John Doe) on this case. He is a coal miner (has been since 1979) and is directly affected on every shift by an inadequate coal mine dust standard.
It’s national Sunshine Week—an effort “to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.” A great way to celebrate the public’s right-to-know what its government is doing, is by sending a FOIA request to your favorite local, state or federal agency. In that spirit, I faxed a FOIA request to OSHA today.
My request stems from an exchange of comments on work-related motor vehicle fatalities following my March 7 post “When the Road is Your Workplace”. I learned that the Rhode Island Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (RICOSH) had actually petitioned OSHA in 2002 for a motor vehicle and traffic safety rule. It made me wonder, how many other worker-safety advocates have petitioned OSHA in recent years to address occupational hazards?
On OSHA’s latest regulatory agenda, the agency noted it would complete the required SBREFA report for a draft rule on beryllium in January 2008, and it did (121-page PDF here) This report stems from the December 6 meeting between OSHA, the Small Business Administration and small entity representatives, as required by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act . This 1996 law requires OSHA (and EPA) to share a draft of proposed regulations to a group of small business owners (i.e., companies with 500 or fewer employees) so they can suggest changes to it or to the agency’s preliminary economic analysis. The comments, recommendations and resulting changes to the pre-proposed rule are documented in a SBREFA report.
I highlight below some of the items I found most interesting in the report.
On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the toll on members of the military is substantial: at least 3,988 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq and 29,395 more have been wounded. iCasulties.org estimates the total number of Coalition force fatalities at 4,298 and Iraqi Security Force fatalities at 6,727.
What these numbers don’t reveal is the toll on wounded soldiers, their families, and their communities. Veterans suffering from debilitating injuries and mental health problems often have to fight to get the care they need from a system ill-prepared to provide it; meanwhile, mental and physical hardships contribute to economic problems and even homelessness, making the return to health even more difficult. In some horrifying cases, PTSD-suffering veterans turn their guns on family or community members. Here are a few of the articles from the past few months about war’s toll on veterans and those around them:
New York Times: The Plight of American Veterans
The American Prospect: What Happened to Mental Health Care for Vets?
NPR: Private Attorneys Fight for Disabled Veterans
New York Times: When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly
Washington Post: Soldier Suicides at Record Level
AP: Pentagon Reports Increase in Harassment
AP: New Generation of Homeless Vets Emerge
USA Today: Army Task Force Finds Gaps in Brain-Injury Care
NYT: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles
McClatchy: Payments Vary Greatly for New Veterans with Mental Illness
NPR: Army Dismissals for Mental Health, Misconduct Rise
AP: Wounded Vets Also Suffer Financial Woes
In other occupational health and safety news:
Despite the excellent presentations by USMWF’s Tammy Miser, the Chemical Safety Board’s William Wright and NFPA’s Amy Spencer, the image that remains in my head from last week’s congressional hearing on combustible dust was Ranking Member Howard “Buck” McKeon’s performance. After the aforementioned witnesses made common-sense appeals in support of an OSHA standard modeled on National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards, Congressman McKeon (R-CA) made unconvincing claims that such rules are so very complicated. Surely, no simple small businessman could ever be expected to comply with them.
I say: “Phooey!”
Yesterday we learned that former Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) passed away at age 90. His former colleague, Sentor Edward Kennedy issued a statement, saying:
“He was the conscience of the Senate, who never shied away from the difficult fights, and never apologized for standing up for workers.”
I had the unforgettable opportunity to watch Senator Metzenbaum in action at numerous congressional hearings on worker safety and health topics. Whether the topic was right-to-know, protections for hazardous waste clean-up workers or inadequate OSHA penalties, he was always well-prepared and GRUMPY. I don’t know if his ornery disposition was just his public persona, but it surely sent the message to senior OSHA officials that Senator Metzenbaum took serious his oversight responsibility.
My experiences tell me that journalists play a critical role in public health improvements; my evidence is anecdotal, but my examples continue to mount. Take Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette and his coverage of the toxic substance ammonium perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8. It’s the chemical used to make Teflon non-stick surfaces. Recently, Ward wrote about a mortality analysis of workers in a 3M facility in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. What’s noteworthy about Ward’s story is not so much the study’s findings, but rather, that he does the yeoman’s work to monitor the EPA’s TSCA 8(e) docket. What do you know—something interesting was submitted by 3M in late February 2008: “Mortality of Employees of an Ammonium Perfluorooctanoate Production Facility.”
On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released a report on the Crandall Canyon mining disaster that claimed nine lives in Utah last August. (Celeste’s posts on the disaster are in our August archive.) A Salt Lake Tribune editorial opines that “Most damning is the revelation that the coal company ignored a direct order from an MSHA inspector and continued to carve coal from a barrier pillar that served as a roof support in the mine.” The SLT’s Robert Gehrke focuses on what MSHA did wrong:
Mine Safety and Health Administration officials yielded to pressure from officials with the mining company, appear to have sped up approval of mining in Crandall Canyon and backed off on safety enforcement actions, records obtained by the committee appear to show.
“MSHA missed significant flaws in [the company's engineering] analysis, dismissed critical findings by MSHA’s own engineer and did not submit the plans - which proposed one of the most hazardous mining operations ever intended - for review by MSHA’s expert technical staff,” stated the report by the committee, chaired by Sen. Edward Kennedy.
In other news:
A group of state legislators in West Virginia introduced a bill earlier this year to strengthen the State’s laws to protect mine workers who raise concerns about unsafe working conditions. The lead sponsors were Delegate Bill Hamilton (R) who represents the region where the now-abandoned Sago mine and State Senators Jon Blair Hunter (D) and Randy White (D). (I wrote earlier about their effort here.) Several weeks have now passed, and are any of us surprised to learn that the bill was killed in the WV legislative committee?
Nathan Fetty of Mine Safety Project of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and Environment names names of the State Senators who killed the bill. Read the rest of this entry »
That’s the word from Georgia’s Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, John Oxendine, during his announcement that the State will impose new safety requirements to prevent combustible dust explosions. The Commissioner’s new rule comes one month after a deadly explosion at the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, which killed 12 and severely injured scores of other workers, including 11 who remain in critical condition from the severe burns they suffered in the blast. (More on the burn victims and the long recover ahead for them here.)
The new safety requirement which were issued as emergency rules will apply to every industrial facility in Georgia that creates combustible dust as part of their production process. Thousands of companies will have to comply with the requirements including chemical manufacturers, food-product producers, and timber/wood-working mills. (See the Chemical Safety Board’s list of dust-explosion events here to understand the the diversity of potential combustible dust hazards.)
Read the full story here about Georgia’s new rules, including where Commissioner Oxendine says:
“…he was acting independently of OSHA because, “We felt like we could not rely on OSHA.”
Woosh! That’s quite an on-the-record statement.
The scene was an icy morning in western Maryland, along the Garrett County and Allegany County lines. Mr. Dwight Samuel Colmer, 41, a truck driver with Western Maryland Lumber Company was hauling a load of coal just before 11:00 AM when his truck began to slide. The State of Maryland’s “Motor Vehicle Accident Report” says:
“…hit guard rail, and overturned to the passenger side. Driver was ejected and crushed under the dump truck and died from the injuries.”
The report indicates the incident occurred on a public road called Bartlett Street. Is this a work-related fatality?
Well, it depends on which agency you ask.
(Updated 3/7/0 
OSHA announced yesterday that it sent letters to about 14,000 employers across the country, letting them know that their work-related injury rates are higher than the national average. The Agency’s news release does not mention any company names, but an OSHA spokesperson told me that the list of employers will be posted on OSHA’s website tomorrow. (Update 3/7: here’s the link to the zip file.)
Around this time last year, OSHA made a similar announcement and sent letters to employers (about 14,000). I did a little examination of that data and identified some familiar company names: Lowe’s, Home Depot, United Parcel Service, Wal-Mart, and Harley-Davidson. I also noted that the highest percentage of letters (23 percent) were sent to residential nursing care facilities. Does anyone want to make a prediction about how the recipients of OSHA’s letter last year, faired in this year’s assessment?
When the data becomes available tomorrow, I’ll let you know. Or look for yourself and report back here.
In Forbes (via Gristmill), Megha Bahree reports on child labor in India. Children chisel stones, weave carpets, and work in fields for low wages, with little time off. Bahree notes that there’s a particular demand for cheap labor and small, nimble fingers in crops that require manual pollination, like Monsanto’s high-tech cotton. The biotech giant tries to keep its farmers from using illegal child labor, but problems persist. Bahree begins her story with a visit to a cotton field where Jyothi Ramulla Naga — “who says she’s 15 but looks no older than 12″ — earns 20 cents an hour:
At the edge of where Jyothi is working, a rusting sign proclaims, “Monsanto India Limited Child Labour Free Fields.” Jyothi says she has been working in these fields for the past five years, since her father, a cotton farmer, committed suicide after incurring huge debts. On a recent December morning there were teens picking cotton in nearly all of a half-dozen Monsanto farms in Uyyalawada, 250 miles south of India’s high-tech hub Hyderabad. Last year 420,000 laborers under the age of 18 were employed in cottonseed farms in four states across India, estimates Glocal Research, a consultancy in Hyderabad that monitors agricultural labor conditions. Of that total 54% were under the age of 14 and illegally employed.
In other news:
The State of Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services recently released a report on work-related lead poisoning over the last 12 years (1995-2006). I was shocked to read that 94 percent of the workers (289 men) with blood-lead levels above 25 ug/dL were employed in the mining industry. A follow-up story by Elizabeth Bluemink of the Anchorage Daily News reports that most of the adult blood-lead laboratory results came from the Red Dog lead-zinc mine near Kotzebue, Alaska. Although there is no MSHA standard to protect miners from lead poisoning, Teck Cominco Alaska Inc. has some sort of lead-poisoning prevention program with routine blood-lead testing.
OSHA’s Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke is expected to travel to Port Wentworth, Georgia today, more than 3 weeks after a horrific combustible dust explosion at Imperial Sugar took 12 workers’ lives. Another 11 workers remain in critical condition at a burn treatment center in Augusta. Apparently, pressure from Congressman Jack Kingston (R-GA) and Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) convinced Mr. Foulke that a trip to the Dixie Crystals’ community is appropriate. It is, afterall, a workplace disaster on par with the January 2006 Sago disaster which also claimed the lives of 12 men, and arguably more devastating because scores of other workers remain critically injured. I wonder why we expect to see MSHA’s top officials at the scene of mine disasters (e.g., Crandall Canyon, Sago, Quecreek) but we don’t wonder where is OSHA’s Foulke?
For the first time, beginning on April 29, it will be unlawful for employers in the mining industry to expose workers to asbestos concentrations higher than 0.1 fiber (per cubic meter of air) over an 8-hour shift. MSHA published today a new exposure limit for asbestos to replace a 2.0 fiber limit which has been on the books since 1978 when the agency was created. Other U.S. workers, in contrast, began getting protection from an OSHA asbestos standard in 1971 and it was revised several times over years—from 2 fibers, to 0.5, to 0.2 and 0.1—-to make it more protective of workers’ health.
But, and this is a big BUT, there is still a vast difference between OSHA’s asbestos standard, and the one issued by MSHA. This new standard for U.S. mine workers is ONLY an exposure limit, it does not have any of the additional protections afforded to other asbestos-exposed workers, such as protective clothing, hygiene facilities and medical surveillance. Don’t let anyone in the Administration get away with suggestions that mine workers now have a federal workplace health standard on asbestos that is equivalent to every other worker in the country. It is not.
The Charlotte Observer’s excellent series on poultry workers began by detailing the injuries workers suffer and the way company officials dismiss their complaints (highlighted in a previous roundup), and continued with a look at the inadequate regulations, inspections, and fines for poultry-processing plants.
For the company House of Raeford Farms, which it cited for dozens of hazards, OSHA proposed fines totaling $205,000, but dropped that to $47,000 following negotiations with the company. That included penalties of just $3,500 after a chlorine gas leak killed one worker, and $13,560 after a worker died from falling into an augur that lacked a safety cover.
At the national level, workplace safety inspections at poultry plants are at a 15-year low, and the federal government has made it easier for companies to hide injuries associated with repetitive trauma. An ergonomics initiative launched by U.S. Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole in 1990 culminated with OSHA issuing an ergonomics standard in January of 2001 – but businesses lobbied hard against it, and Congress and President Bush repealed the standard.
In other news:
That’s the headline from an editorial in today’s Savannah Morning News, laying responsibility for the broken workplace safety regulatory system on the Secretary of Labor’s desk. The words of editorial page editor, Tom Barton, sound like those I’ve heard before when a workplace disaster strikes a town. Journalists, community leaders, and family member victims are appalled to learn that OSHA and MSHA don’t work as well as our civics books would lead us to believe. It’s not until the deaths, injuries and heartbreaks hit your own backyard, do people care enough to figure it out.
I don’t agree with everything that Mr. Barton writes, such as seeming to agree with Imperial Sugar officials who use the lack of OSHA penalties (only $315 in fines over the past seven years) as evidence that the firm had a “superb” safety record. But I couldn’t agree more with Barton when he says: Chao and Foulke have “been asleep at the switch - perhaps fatally so.”
Read the full Savannah Morning News editorial below:
Read the rest of this entry »
There are a number of memorable quotes in the Center for Study of Responsive Law’s newly released report “Undermining Safety: A Report on Coal Mine Safety.” In one section, report author Christopher W. Shaw discusses the mining industry’s lobbying for “targeted inspections” (a la the OSHA model) instead of the current requirement for mandatory quarterly inspections. The AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer Richard L. Trumka—a former coal miner—derided the notion of making MSHA more like OSHA:
“OSHA reminds me of an 18-year old Mexican Chihauhua dog that’s lost its teeth and hides behind the furniture going ‘bark, bark, bark’.”
Ouch! for the chihauhua lovers out there, but Trumka doesn’t mince any words about his views on OSHA’s relevance.
In the Washington Post, Petula Dvorak describes the jobs of social workers in the nation’s capital:
As guardians watching over thousands of the city’s imperiled children each year, social workers confront armed drug dealers, push past stoned parents, shrug off cockroaches, sit on urine-soaked couches and hug kids covered in scabies. …
Often, the most seasoned caseworkers have been with the agency just five years. According to a 2003 General Accountability Office study, the average tenure of caseworkers nationwide is less than two years, mainly due to low salaries, high caseloads, the risk of violence, low pay and insufficient training. In the District, a caseworker’s annual salary averages about $40,000.
Last year, Kentucky passed a law requiring new safety measures for social workers after social services aide Boni Frederick was fatally beaten and stabbed while on the job (Occupational Hazards has a summary). In other news: Read the rest of this entry »
OSHA’s Regional Office in New York announced the successful resolution of a retaliation case filed by a worker who was discharged by his employer after he expressed concerns about entering a workspace which had just been “bombed” with an insecticide. The case began more than two years ago at a residential housing complex in Flushing, NY, called Second Housing Co. Inc., and was resolved under a consent order in which the employer agreed to pay more than $66,000 in back wages to the worker.
Kudos! to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) for providing an update on their investigation of the devastating explosion at the Imperial Sugar/Dixie Crystals refinery near Port Wentworth, Georgia. As I’ve noted in previous posts, because the CSB makes it part of their business to provide regular update for the public—even if they don’t have much at all to report—their effort increases the likelihood that worker and environmental safety and health issues will be covered by the press. In turn, it means that these critical public health topics stay in the public’s and policymakers’ consciousness.
At today’s press briefing, we learned that there may have been a history of dust explosions at the refinery, with at least one occuring about three weeks ago. The Associated Press reports that company officials and the CSB confirmed that the previous (much smaller) explosion was associated with a build-up of dust in the refinery’s rooftop dust-collection system. The AP story says “a metal fragment caused a spark when it got sucked into a dust collector and ignited the dust inside it.” A spokesman for Imperial Sugar said that no one was injured in the earlier incident and it caused minimal damage.
Today, the CSB’s Stephen Selk, P.E., offered a primer on dust explosions.