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What does Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee have to do with a COSH group, specifically the Connecticut Council on Occupational Safety and Health (ConnectiCOSH)?
Last year, coal miner Scott Howard of Letcher County, Kentucky sued the Mine Safety and Health Administration for failing to “promulgate a respirable dust regulation that will eliminate respiratory illness caused by work in coal mines.” Howard alleged that this failure left him in unsafe working conditions; he filed his suit after new studies found bluck lung disease increasing among Appalachian miners. As Ken Ward Jr. reports in the Charleston Gazette, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has now ruled that “Howard could not successfully bring the lawsuit because he had not yet petitioned MSHA directly to write the regulations.”
In 1969, federal law limited coal dust in underground mines to 2 milligrams per cubic meter of air. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has long recommended that the limit but halved. The Clinton administration’s effort to tighten the limit wasn’t completed by the time the Bush administration took office, and Bush’s MSHA chief Dave Lauriski dropped the proposal. Ward notes in his Coal Tattoo blog that the decision against Howard puts the ball back in MSHA’s court, and wonders whether Joe Main, Obama’s pick to run MSHA, will be confirmed quickly and be able to speed up the process on a coal-dust rule; right now, the administration isn’t planning to even publish a proposed rulemaking until April 2011.
In other news:
The White House announced today 10 nominations for senior administration positions, including Mr. Joe Main to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health (MSHA). The biography provided with the announcement notes that he:
“… began working in coal mines in 1967 and quickly became an advocate for miners safety as a union safety committeeman as well as serving in various local union positions in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). He was employed by the UMWA in 1974 as a Special Assistant to the International President, and joined the UMWA Safety Division in 1976, serving as Safety Inspector, Administrative Assistant, and Deputy Director. In 1982 he was appointed Administrator of the UMWA Occupational Health and Safety Department, a position he held for 22 years, managing the international health and safety program and staff. “
In an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal reporting on Main’s nomination, mine worker advocate Tony Oppegard said:
“A year from today, you will see a very different agency in terms of the way it’s run.”
Here’s hoping for a speedy confirmation process [remember Senate Dem's, Bush's choice Mr. Dave Lauriski did not have a confirmation hearing] so Mr. Main can get to work.
Last week, OSHA’s area office in Wilmington issued citations to Valero Energy Corp’s Delaware City oil refinery, including four repeat* and nine serious violations of process safety management rules. Because Valero boasts that its “process safety program instills safety and reliabiity at every refinery,” how is it that they have been found with REPEAT violations of OSHA’s process safety management standard. A repeat violation means that Valero was cited previously for the same or substantially similar condition in the last three years.
OSHA conducted its inspection of the Valero Delaware City site under its National Emphasis Program (NEP) for ”Petroleum Refining Process Safety Management (PSM).” The NEP was launched in 2007 after OSHA was criticized for utterly failing to monitor in any comprehensive way employers’ compliance with the PSM standard. In fact, the Chemical Safety Board chair, Carolyn Merritt, alerted us to the matter, noting in May 2007 congressional testimony:
“…in the ten years from 1995 to 2005, federal OSHA only conducted nine [comprehensive process safety] inspections anywhere in the country, and none in the refinery sector.”
The Washington Post’s Pamela Constable reports on brickmakers in Pakistan, where a worker might toil from 4:30am to sundown, produce 1,200 bricks, and earn $3.50 for the day’s labor.
Brickmakers toil near the bottom of Pakistan’s economic and social ladder, forever at the mercy of heat, dirt, human greed and official indifference. By law, they cannot be compelled to work or be kept in bondage; in practice, the great majority are bound to the kilns by debt. The work is seasonal and families move often, but if they leave one kiln for another, their debt is transferred to the new owner. If they try to escape, they said, they are hunted down.
At least 200,000 Pakistanis, many of them children, work in more than 2,500 kilns across the country, according to studies by labor advocacy organizations. Their plight is well known and often described as a national disgrace. Human rights groups have exposed cases of kiln owners chaining or imprisoning workers; reformists have initiated programs to forgive their debts and educate their children.
Reformers have also targeted the toxic smoke from the brick kilns, but efforts to improve conditions for brick workers face an uphill battle, Constable explains. Kiln owners are often wealthy and well-connected, and workers are more likely to hear tales of those who were punished after asking for better conditions than of successful protests or court actions.
In other news:
At a Queens, New York waste transfer station, investigators read the signs of a tragic story: Harel Dahan, 23, descended a ladder into a stinking well that caught runoff water from the recycling yard, and was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. His father, Shlomo Dahan, 49, went down after him but was also overcome by the fumes. Rene Francisco Rivas, 52, tried to help the two men but met the same fate. A firefighter wearing protective clothing and enclosed breathing apparatus retrieved the three workers’ bodies from the well.
Shlomo Dahan’s company, S. Dahan Piping and Heating Corporation, had been contracted by the Regal Recycling Company to vacuum out the well, and Rivas was a Regal employee. The New York Times’ Robert D. McFadden notes that OSHA fined the plant $1,500 in 2006 after a worker was crushed to death by a wheel loader, and identified several serious violations at the facility in an inspection conducted earlier this year.
In a follow-up Times article, Ray Rivera points out that this kind of scenario – where one worker is overcome by fumes, and other workers die trying to save their colleague – is all too common, especially in the waste management and sewage industries:
Two recent studies add the knowledge about the risks associated with on-the-job exposure to pesticides. University of Ottowa researchers analyzed 35 studies on parental occupational exposure to pesticides and childhood leukemia, and found that children whose mothers were exposed to pesticides at work while pregnant have twice the risk of developing childhood leukemia.
Researchers at France’s national institute for health research have helped confirm the link between occupational exposures to pesticides and Parkinson’s disease, which has been found in other recent studies, too. They found among the main groups of pesticides (fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides), the association was strongest for insecticides. Men exposed to organochlorine insecticides, which are highly persistent in the environment, had more than double the risk of Parkinson’s as men without exposure.
In other news:
We are approaching day 160 of the Obama Administration, yet the Solicitor of Labor is not yet in place, neither are the Assistant Secretaries for most other DOL agencies, including Employment Training Administration, MSHA, OSHA, VETS and Women’s Bureau. Attorney Patricia M. Smith was nominated by President Obama on March 19 to serve as the Solicitor, and her confirmation hearing on May 7 seemed quite tame. I’d not imagined that I’d be writing this blog post 8 weeks after that Senate proceeding, with her nomination stuck in Committee. The slow pace of the Solicitor of Labor’s nomination got me thinking about how this Administration’s appointment process for DOL officials compares to G.W. Bush’s first term. Here are a few facts to ponder:
- G.W. Bush’s Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, was confirmed on January 29, 2001; Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was confirmed on February 24, 2009.
- G.W. Bush’s OSHA chief, John Henshaw, was nominated on June 12, 2001 and confirmed by the Senate on August 3. A nominee to head OSHA has not yet been announced, but Jordan Barab was selected by Secretary Solis to serve as acting OSHA chief.
- G.W. Bush’s MSHA chief, David Lauriski, was nominated on April 3, 2001 and confirmed on May 9, 2001. A nominee to head MSHA has not yet been announced.
I’ve often suspected that some federal agencies apply very broad definitions to the exemptions provided under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Now, thanks to one diligent journalist I can judge for myself whether the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is an offender.
Ellen Smith of Mine Safety and Health News requested records from MSHA and the Solicitor’s Office (SOL) about its legal determination that the haulage road on which coal-truck drive Chad Cook, 25, died, was under MSHA jurisdication. MSHA had made a gross error in 2005-2006 when it concluded that the road was private property. (In November 2007, the senior officials reversed themselves, but it was too late to get justice for Chad Cook.) Smith made her FOIA request for the legal determination in August 2008, and MSHA responded 7 months later. They provided a four-page memo written by SOL, but redacted certain portions under FOIA Exemption 4. This exemption is allowed to protect
“trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential.”
Friday (6/19) was the final day for participants from OSHA’s public hearing on its proposed cranes and derricks rule to submit comments to the agency; by my count, seven organizations responded. The Edison Electric Institute offered the lengthiest document (94 pages), and it was peppered with provocative language, such as
“…these and many other vexing questions arise from OSHA’s convulated proposed regulatory scheme.”
the rule “…would de-stabilize settled principles [and] would be highly ill-advised….could stimulate more litigation…and [create] an avalanche of state and local laws.”
What is EEI’s objection?
