You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Occupational Health & Safety' category.
Congressman George Miller (D-CA) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) have strongly urged Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to withdraw the proposed rule on occupational health risk assessment which her Department submitted to OMB on July 7. Their letter says:
“we are deeply disappointed that the Department of Labor is working to slip through a rule that may have a profound negative impact on the health and safety of American workers.”
Following The Pump Handle’s July 8 post “Secret Rule on OSHA Risk Assessment” (and July 10 here), a front-page Washington Post article provides more details on the Bush Administration’s plan to ”reform” the system used by OSHA and MSHA to assess workers’ risk from toxic materials. In U.S. Rushes to Change Workplace Toxin Rules, Post reporter Carol Leonnig obtained a draft copy of the proposed rule, which would direct the risk assessment assumptions and procedures used by MSHA and OSHA when developing regulations to protect workers health hazards. Leonnig reports that Bush appointee, lawyer and “ethics advisor” Deborah Misir in DOL’s Office of Policy worked with a contractor to develop the new risk asssessment plan, intentionally leaving career scientists out of the process.
Well, well, it’s the same old playbook for the Bush Administration: Leave out the career staff who know most about the topic, assign a political appointee with no expertise to manage the process, and pay a hand-selected contractor to do the work. That would be bad enough, but it gets worse.
The Houston Chronicle has reporters covering the devastating crane collapse which occurred on Friday, July 18 at 1:20 pm local time. The crane was owned and operated by Deep South Crane & Rigging which has official statements posted on the company website. The Chronicle reports that the four deceased and the seven injured workers were contractor-employees at the LyondellBasell refinery. The fatally injured workers were Marion “Scooter” Hubert Odom III, 41; John D. Henry, 33; Daniel “DJ” Lee Johnson, 30; and Rocky Dale Strength, 30.
A related story in the Chronicle Failing Structures, Few Regulations, notes that 15 States and five cities have specific regulations requiring crane operators to be licensed. The Executive Director of the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, Grant Brent, says:
“Neither the city of Houston or the state of Texas has shown any interest in having any statewide licensing of crane operator, or riggers, signal persons, or crane inspectors.”
Today’s New York Times’ editorial No Friend to Workers provides just a few examples of how Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has made a sham of our nation’s worker protection laws. The examples come from a GAO report about the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division: One case involved child-labor violations but the matter was closed because the investigators couldn’t track down the employer (but GAO easily found him); another involved a worker’s complaint about his employer’s failure to pay his legally-due overtime wages. The complaint languished at DOL for 17 months, past the statute of limitations. Yep, the worker got screwed.
Lest anyone thinks this ineptitude is unique to DOL’s Wage and Hour division, I’ve my own example—a double doozy involving the combined incompetence of MSHA and DOL’s own Inspector General.
The Central Valley Business Times reports on another apparent farmworker heat death:
Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, 48, a father of two and employed by a farm labor contractor, died in Selma Thursday afternoon after working all day in a Reedley vineyard.
Mr. Ramiro complained being sick from the heat and was taken home by his foreman. He passed out there and was dead on arrival at a local hospital, the UFW says.
This brings the Central Valley’s farmworker heat-death toll to four for the summer. Abdon Felix, 42, was working in a vineyard; Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, 17, was working in another vineyard; and Jose Macarena Hernandez, 64, was harvesting squash.
In other news:
by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
What’s a little sodium dichromate, anyway? So it’s a known human carcinogen and can do a lot of other nasty things. No big deal. Not for Iraq war contractor, KBR, anyway. At the time KBR was a subsidiary of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton. So when they were given a lucrative contract to clean up and safeguard Iraqi oilfields after the Bush Mission was Accomplished in 2003, they told the soldiers and workers that the chemical, used as an antirust agent and then strewn all over the oil facilities, was a “mild irritant.” Later they admitted this wasn’t exactly accurate, so the Army tested blood and urine of over a hundred of the workers for chromium. No problem:
Starting in August, roughly 17,000 employees of the state of Utah will switch from five-day to four-day workweeks. Essential services like police and public schools won’t be affected, but an estimated 1,000 of the state’s 3,000 buildings will be closed on Fridays. The state expects to save $3 million, and affected workers will pay for fewer commutes, which have gotten pricier as gas prices have risen.
It’s a smart way to save energy, but how will workers deal with the new 7am – 6pm workdays? For anyone doing a job that’s very demanding, either mentally or physically, longer workdays might cause excessive strain. For the many parents (and caretakers of elderly relatives) who’ve carefully scheduled their routines around the hours of a school, day care, or babysitter, rearranging schedules will be challenging. The success of Utah’s plan depends largely on how supportive and flexible the state is in addressing these kinds of concerns.
Other states are investigating shorter work weeks and telecommuting, without taking such drastic steps. Daniel Petty reports for Stateline.org (via SEJ Tip Sheet):
Read the rest of this entry »
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Congressman George Miller (D-CA) are demanding answers from Labor Secretary Elaine Chao on her mysterious proposed rule on risk assessment. I reported earlier this week that the Secretary’s office sent a proposed rule to OMB on July 7 entitled “Requirements for DOL Agencies’ Assessment of Occupational Health Risks.” Although this proposal might sound innocuous, past experience at so-called “regulatory reform” of risk assessment tells us to be very wary of plans to “improve” the risk assessment process. In layman’s terms, it means workers’ health gets screwed.
Kennedy and Miller’s letter to Secretary Chao asks for a briefing within a week about the proposed regulation, and asks for:
- a copy of the proposed rule
- the legal authority under which the Department expects to promulgate this regulation
- the reason that this proposed rule was not listed in the Department’s Regulatory Agenda (which was published in May 2008 )
A screenshot of OMB’s webpage on which this proposed rule appears is here.
Thanks to the Senator and Congresman for taking their oversight responsibilities seriously.
In the New York Times, David Tuller describes the on-the-job violence nurses face, and efforts to make their workplaces safer:
Three years ago, an enraged patient — 6 feet 4 inches and 275 pounds — smacked another patient, bit a health aide, threatened to kill [psychiatric nurse Karen] Coughlin and lunged forward to strike her. He was restrained before he reached her.
“I really thought that my life was in danger,” she said. “It was probably the most terrified I’ve been in my 24 years of nursing.”
In recent years, nurses like Ms. Coughlin have sounded the alarm about workplace violence, most of it committed by patients. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of all nonfatal injuries resulting from workplace assaults occur in health care and social service settings.
Nurses and other personal care workers bear the brunt of such attacks, with 25 injuries annually resulting in days off from work for every 10,000 full-time workers — 12 times the rate of the overall private sector, according to the bureau. The most dangerous settings are psychiatric units and nursing homes, where patients are often confused, disoriented or suffering from mental ailments, as well as emergency rooms, where long waits for care can anger patients, and the people with them.
Hospitals’ security strategies include stepping up camera surveillance, security staffing, and employee training.
In other news:
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA’s webpage today, and my paranoia about end-of-the-term mischief by the Bush Administration kicked into high gear. The item is listed as a proposed rule submitted to OIRA for review on July 7 titled:
“Requirements for DOL Agencies’ Assessment of Occupational Health Risks” (RIN: 1290-AA23) (Link here, select DOL) or (screenshot)
Whenever the term risk assessment is uttered by the Bush Admininstration, I know they are up to no good. Recall their earlier effort at a major overhaul of agency’s risk assessment procedures; this was a proposal that was long on new one-size-fits-all requirements for agencies involved in health, safety and environmental protection, but woefully lacking in details about the alleged problem it was designed to fix. More importantly, it would have added new steps to the rulemaking process, making a dysfunctional system more so, and creating administrative obstacles for health protective rules. Thankfully, a failing grade by the National Academy of Sciences forced OMB to junk it.
This mysterious draft proposal at OMB makes me wonder whether this is the White House’s plan B for so-called “reforms” to agency risk assessments. Let’s see: they couldn’t impose their requirements agency-wide, so why not target specific agencies? What better place than those pesky rules to protect workers’ from dangerous contaminants?
The United Steelworkers, North America’s largest private sector union with 1.2 million members, and Unite the Union, the largest labor organization in the United Kingdom and Ireland with 2 million members, signed an agreement to create the world’s first global union called Workers Uniting. The announcement was made at the USW’s 2008 Constitutional Convention.
In a video news release featuring USW Int’l President Leo W. Gerard and Unite the Union’s General Secretary Derek Simpson, the two trade unionists describe the power of the two institutions coming together with a shared “vision of a world where workers globally unite.”
The Chipotle restaurant chain’s corporate philosophy is ”Food with Integrity”:
“we can always do better in terms of the food we buy. And …we mean better in every sense of the word—better tasting, coming from better sources, better for the environment, better for the animals, and better for the farmers who raise the animals and grow the produce.”
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and others wants to know how Chiptole’s philosophy translates to the farmworkers who pick the tomatoes used in the restaurant’s burritos.
For PBS, Bill Moyers’ Journal and Exposé: America’s Investigative Reports went to the Charlotte Observer to learn more about their excellent series on injured poultry workers, The Cruelest Cuts. Reporters actually stumbled on the story in 2005, when they were reporting on avian influenza. Poultry workers told them that, yes, an avian flu outbreak would hurt them, but they were more concerned about on-the-job injuries. Observer reporters started filing Freedom of Information Act requests for more than 800 inspection files, looking at publicly available records, and tracking down workers who’d agree to be interviewed. Jaime Hernandez, a former worker at the Columbia Farms plant that reported a streak of seven million safe hours, also spoke on camera for PBS:
My job focused on the meat, getting it off the bone, at first grab it and cut it, that is piece after piece after piece. Because of the pain and such, I got these little balls in my hand. I had surgery, and after that, I asked if I could go home to rest. And they said no, that I needed to be at work, even if I didn’t do anything, just sitting in the office. And I said, but I don’t feel well, I’m dizzy, it hurts, things like that. They said you have to be at the plant so they can pay you, because if you aren’t, you can lose your job.
The reporters learned that poultry plants go to such extreme lengths to keep workers from missing entire shifts because plants reporting high rates of serious injuries may be targeted for inspection. As a result, the official figures miss thousands of debilitating injuries, and unsafe conditions persist.
You can watch the PBS show here and read the Charlotte Observer series here.
In other news:
The State of Rhode Island’s efforts, which began in 1999, to force lead-paint manufacturers to clean-up contaminated homes received a mortal blow when the State’s Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s 2006 decision. (Full decision from 7/1/2008) This early ruling was a result of the longest civil jury trial in Rhode Island history, with the decision going against the defendants Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries, and Millennium Holdings, holding them liable for creating a public nuisance by selling lead-based paint.
The R.I. Supreme Court said:
“We do not mean to minimize the severity of the harm that thousands of children in Rhode Island have suffered as a result of lead poisoning. Our hearts go out to those children whose lives forever have been changed by the poisonous presence of lead. But, however grave the problem…public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm.”
This tells me that we need some better laws so that we can hold peddlers of dangerous products accountable for their actions. As David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz masterfully document in their paper “Cater to the Children” and their book Deceit and Denial, the lead industry knew by the 1930’s the adverse health consequences that would be caused by their actions, but they didn’t care and greed won out. The R.I. Supreme Court’s decision gives a free pass to the lead industry’s despicable behavior.
Did Brush Wellman, the world’s largest producer of beryllium products, hire Hill and Knowlton, the public relations giant behind Big Tobacco’s campaign to fool the public about the hazards of smoking, to help Brush refute reports of beryllium’s toxicity? Brush says no, but we have the smoking guns — memos and invoices — that say otherwise. Keep reading for the details.
Beryllium is a remarkable metal. It is stiffer than steel, lighter than aluminum, and causes lung disease at incredibly low levels of exposure. And it causes cancer in humans. This lightweight metal is has long been employed in nuclear and defense operations, and is now being used is bicycle frames and other consumer products. There is no evidence of a safe exposure level. The question that needs to be asked is whether beryllium should be banned in non-defense applications.
There is a national discussion underway right now on the hazards of beryllium. The National Academy of Sciences will soon issue a report, requested by the Air Force, on protecting Defense Department personnel exposed to beryllium. The EPA has announced that it is revising its beryllium risk assessment document and is holding a meeting in July for public input into the process. And OSHA is moving at a glacial pace to replace the current outdated workplace exposure standard (it is sixty years old and even the beryllium industry acknowledges it is inadequate), although no one pretends anymore that this administration will actually issue a new standard.
To help advance the national discussion on beryllium, we’ve posted a case study of the beryllium industry’s thirty-year campaign to stop stronger beryllium standards on DefendingScience.org, the website of the George Washington University School of Public Health’s Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy.
Update: 7/1 (4:00 pm): The link is fixed! It was two reps of the National Association of Home Builders, four staff of OMB and one from the Dept of Labor’s Solicitor’s Office. Hmmm…no one from OSHA attended the meeting.
On June 18 we reported here that OSHA had submitted to OMB’s Office of Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) its proposed rule on crane safety. Today, I noticed on OIRA’s site that on June 26, someone met with OMB staff about OSHA’s crane safety proposal, but the link is broken — you get this message. It’s a mystery for now the names and affiliations of the participants. A person at OMB, who confirmed that a meeting on June 26 took place, told me that he would get the link fixed.
Earlier this month, William Scott Hill, 33, of Staffordsville, KY was killed while cutting trees to prepare for a surface coal mine for the Premier Elkhorn Coal Company (TECO Energy). Mr. Hill was employed by Gopher Contracting of Jackson, KY. His death on June 3 reminded me of other fatalities involving tree cutters working at mining operations, including Lawrence Payne, 32, who was killed in March 2004 and William S. Woods, 44, who was killed in December 2004.**
Just as I was reading about Mr. Hill’s death, OSHA sent an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on June 19 to OMB concerning tree care operations. The OSHA notice states that about 58 fatalities occur each year during tree-servicing operations, and an ANSI standard (Z133.1-2006) might be an appropriate model for an OSHA standard. But wait! Why don’t we seriously consider a rule to protect workers involved in tree cutting which could be used by both OSHA and MSHA.
Remember the excellent Charlotte Observer series on poultry workers? If you missed it the first time, it’s well worth a read. After a 22-month investigation, reporters conveyed a grim picture: poultry-plant workers suffer high rates of crippling injuries, but fear losing their jobs if they complain; companies cover up the problems, and OSHA lets them off easy.
Tonight on PBS, Bill Moyers’ Journal and Expose: America’s Investigative Reports “go inside America’s poultry industry, which employs almost a quarter million workers nationwide, to show the reality of working conditions and to investigate how official statistics showing a drop in workplace injuries may have been the result of deceptive reporting.”
DC folks can watch the show on WETA at 9pm tonight; others should check local listings.
Back in March, a Boston Globe article by Farah Stockman broke the news that workers who’d been cleaning up the Qarmat Ali water injection plant in Iraq had been exposed to something that they were told was only a mild irritant – but which was, in fact, the dangerous substance sodium dichromate. After that report, Senator Byron Dorgan began investigating the situation, and chaired a Democratic Policy Committee hearing last week on the experiences of soldiers assigned to guard the plant. Stockman reports on the hearing testimony:
“These soldiers were bleeding from the nose, spitting blood,” said Danny Langford, an equipment technician from Texas brought to work at the Qarmat Ali Water treatment plant in 2003. “They were sick.”
“Hundreds of American soldiers at this site were contaminated” while guarding the plant, Langford said, including members of the Indiana National Guard.
Langford is one of nine Americans who accuse KBR, the lead contractor on the Qarmat Ali project and one of the largest defense contractors in Iraq, of knowingly exposing them to sodium dichromate, an orange, sandlike chemical that is a potentially lethal carcinogen. Specialists say even short-term exposure to the chemical can cause cancer, depress an individual’s immune system, attack the liver, and cause other ailments.
This hearing is “one among several organized to hold contractors accountable for alleged malfeasance in Iraq.”
In other news:
Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday, Firedoglake hosted an online discussion on David Michaels’ Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health – and David was lucky to have the chat hosted by Jordan Barab, whose wonderful Confined Space blog provided so much inspiration for The Pump Handle. In his introduction, Jordan not only did a terrific job summarizing the lessons contained in the book, but added some telling details from his own decades of experience promoting workplace health and safety. Here he is describing the demise of the long-awaited OSHA ergonomics standard:
Updated (6/19/08) below
Just before last year’s holiday season, Charles Budds Bolchoz, 48; best friends Karey Renard Henry, 35, and Parish Lamar Ashley, 36; and company owner Robert Scott Gallagher, 49, lost their lives in a violent explosion at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville, Florida (previous posts here, here). The firm manufacturered Ecotane®, a gasoline additive “methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl” (i.e., MMT® or MCMT), which increases the octane rating of gasoline. Both OSHA and the CSB began their investigations, with CSB providing several updates in the early weeks of their work.
Now that the six months anniversary of the four worker’s deaths is here, I wondered what the workers’ families, co-workers and the community have learned from OSHA’s investigation. (Under Section 9(c) of the OSH Act, OSHA has six months to issue citations.)
Mr. Robert Carey, 45, an athracite coal miner from Shamokin, Pennsylvania was killed on Monday by falling rock/coal at the Harmony Mine. So far this year, 26 workers at U.S. mining operations have died on-the-job. Just this past Sunday, former MSHA chief J. Davitt McAteer had an Op-Ed in the Charleston Gazette entitled: ”Enough: No More Mining Deaths.” He wrote:
“It is time to stop killing our children, husbands, brothers and sons in the name of mining.”
The 26 deceased men were working at mining operations in the following states: Alabama (2), California (2), Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky (3), Missouri, Nevada (2), New York, Pennsylvania (4), Texas (2), Virginia, West Virginia (4), and Wisconsin. Seventeen of the 26 deaths occurred at surface mining operations.
The New York Times reports this week that Charles M. Smith, the Army official responsible for overseeing the Pentagon’s multi-billion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years after the Iraq invasion, says he was removed from his job for refusing to pay the company more than $1 billion in charges for which it lacked credible records.
Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.
Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.
KBR (formerly Kellog, Brown and Root) was, until last year, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil company previously led by Vice President Dick Cheney. There are questions not only about whether it has been charging the government fairly for its services, but about whether it is providing safe conditions for troops and other workers – see past stories about shoddy electrical work and chemical exposures.
In other news:
Updated below ( 6/18/08 )
Earlier this month I wrote in “Crashing Cranes, Deaths and the White House’s Edict” about the inexcusable inaction by the US Department of Labor and OSHA to address the decades-old problem of crane-related deaths. I am not alone in my disgust at this regulatory system, which yet again is failing to protect our nation’s workers. I’m pleased to report that two parties familiar with an attempt at crane safety rulemaking have strongly expressed their own dissapointment with OSHA’s failure to act. First are members of the negotiated rulemaking committee (NegReg) who prepared in 2003 a draft rule for OSHA. Second is the independent facilitator who was hired by OSHA to bring this group of affected labor-, employer-, and manufacturer- groups together to prepare the consensus document.
by revere
Originally posted at Effect Measure
You know any post that starts out . . .
Gerardo Castillo, 30 years old, had worked at the Blommer Chocolate Co. for 9 years. His family wanted him to quite ever since an explosion in a roaster killed a fellow worker and injured another. He was fearful himself, but he stayed on . . .
is going to end badly. You’d be right. Continuing with our post . . .
DuPont was busted a couple of years ago by U.S. EPA for failing to report information about adverse health effects associated with exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA or C8), the chemical used to make Teflon and other non-stick surfaces. Now it seems that DuPont is dutifully submitting information to EPA’s TSCA 8(e) docket and we can thank the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward for trolling through the docket to find items of public interest.* Ward recently reported on an analysis conducted by DuPont which identified 19 cases of carcinoid tumors among DuPont employees; 6 of the cases were among workers at the Parkersburg, WV Washington Works plant.
In the submitted report to EPA, the DuPont official wrote:
“Six cases of this rare tumor type among approximately 5,000 workers at the Washington Works plant introduces the possibility of a cancer cluster…”
Last week James Delayo, New York City’s chief crane inspector, was arrested on the charge of taking bribes to let cranes pass inspection. According to officials, these accusations aren’t directly related to the two deadly crane accidents that killed a total of nine people during the last three months. William K Rashbaum provides details in the New York Times:
The charges against Mr. Delayo include third-degree bribe-receiving and first-degree tampering with public records, both felonies for which he could face up to seven years in prison. Among the charges was the accusation that he had provided a copy of the crane operator’s exam to a crane company, for which an official involved in the case said Mr. Delayo was paid about $3,000. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing, said Mr. Delayo also provided the answers.
As the chief inspector, Mr. Delayo had responsibility for overseeing the inspection of all cranes, including tower cranes, the type that collapsed in the two recent fatal accidents. The allegations against Mr. Delayo made it easy on Friday for him to be seen as a symbol for the failures that have plagued the Buildings Department for years. In fact, as he made his way to a cab after court, he was accosted by a street sweeper who dropped his broom and demanded to know if he felt responsible for the crane collapse. He did not answer.
In other news:
OSHA’s Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke flopped and fumbled during CBS’s 60 Minutes “Is Enough Done to Stop Explosive Dust?” which aired last night. Correspondent Scott Pelley pressed Foulke to explain how the 50 OSHA inspectors who have been trained to identify combustible dust hazards will be able inspect the estimated 30,000 worksites with this dangerous volatile hazard.
“We’re not gonna get in every work site every year. It would be physically impossible from a monetary standpoint and on a personnel standpoint to get in every facility once a year. Or even every five years.”
Foulke said his Agency expected to inspect only about 300 of these workplaces this year. Pelley remarked:
“If you do 300 a year, it’ll take you 100 years to inspect all those places that you’ve identified.”
With Foulke’s dumbfounded look, I seriously thought he might have asked, “is that a problem?”
Do you know of any cases of Parkinson’s disease among workers at flavoring companies?
David Egilman, MD, Clinical Associate Professor, Brown University, is aware of two cases of Parkinson’s disease in men in their fifties who were flavorists at a large flavorings company. The plant alone had 15 “flavorists.” (The average age of onset for Parkinson’s is 60 and it is a relatively rare disease.) Dr. Egilman is making an appeal to see if others are aware of a possible disease-exposure relationship. As Pump Handle readers know, workers are typically the canaries for the rest of us. If you know of similar cases in flavoring-exposed workers, contact Dr. Egilman at degilman@egilman.com
Set your wristwatch alarms or your VCR for this Sunday (June 7) at 7:00 pm (EST) to watch CBS’s 60 Minutes and a hard-hitting story on OSHA and its failure to protect workers and communities from combustible dust explosions. CBS’s correspondent Scott Pelley interviews Carolyn Merritt (former Member of the US Chemical Safety Board), Tammy Miser (whose brother Shawn was killed in an aluminum dust explosion), Edwin Foulke (OSHA Asst. Secretary), and at least one EXPERIENCED but UNDISCLOSED speaker.
Many thanks to the CBS crew who pursued and persisted with this story: David Gelber, producer; Joel Bach, associate producer; and Rachel Kun, researcher.
The human rights group Amnesty International has released a report criticizing forced labor and dangerous working conditions in Brazil’s sugar cane industry, which feeds the country’s booming ethanol industry. Eduardo Simoes and Inae Riveras report for Reuters (via Gristmill):
Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state.
In November 2007, inspection teams found 831 indigenous cane cutters working in poor conditions, also in Mato Grosso do Sul, while over 1,000 people “in conditions analogous to slavery” were released in June from a sugar plantation in Para state.
“We’ve been receiving accusations of rights violations against workers in the industry that range from precarious working conditions to threats against union leaders,” Tim Cahill, Amnesty’s Brazil researcher, told Reuters by phone.
Although inspections and prosecutions have increased in the Sao Paulo state, where 60% of cane production occurs, limited resources and a large number of companies make enforcement challenging.
In other news:
The 65 or so high school seniors of Tygarts Valley High School shared a moment of silence during their graduation ceremony last night (The InterMountain reports) to mourn the death of Adam Lanham, 18, who died on Friday, May 30 at ICG’s Sentinel Mine. The young coal miner was a 2007 graduate of Tygarts Valley High School, and reportedly was pinched between the mine rib and a coal scoop. News reports (here) state that the “red hat” (apprentice) miners’ father and two brothers also worked at the Sentinel Mine.
ICG’s website makes no mention of the young man’s death. The company says:
“We care about the health, safety and well-being of our employees, and we do our very best to protect our miners and provide them with a safe working environment.”
Maybe ICG’s “very best” is just not good enough.
On Friday, May 30 it was a crane collapse in NYC where Donald Leo, 30, and Ramadan Kurtaj, 27 were killed and Simeon Alexis, 32, was seriously injured. On Saturday, May 31 it was a crane collapse at the Wyoming Black Thunder mine which seriously injured ironworkers Andrew Milonis and Frederico Salinas. These incidents are in the wake of the mid-March New York collapse which killed six workers: Wayne Bleidner, 51; Brad Cohen, 54; Clifford Canzona, 45; Aaron Stephens, 45; Anthony Mazza, 39; Santino Gallone, 37; and Ms. Odin Torres, 28, a visitor from Miami. And there have been many other similiar “accidents.”
OSHA acknowledges that as many as 82 workers are killed each year in crane “accidents,” and that the 1971-based crane safety standard is outdated (here). Just a year ago, OSHA chief Edwin Foulke claimed his Agency was making significant progress on a Cranes & Derrick rule (here). An OSHA spokeswoman says the Agency “believes its standards are sufficient” (according to ABC News report), however “the cranes and derricks rulemaking is a top priority.” Confused?
It’s business as usual at the nation’s top workplace safety agency, and now, an edict from the White House will further stall any progress on a new crane safety rule.
For Memorial Day, news stories highlighted the importance of hearing, remembering, and responding to the stories of those who’ve served our country. The San Diego Union-Tribune profiled “four seemingly ordinary people who led extraordinary lives” in past wars; in the Washington Post, Edward G. Lengel suggests that a failure to listen to World War I veterans signaled an unwillingness to hear horrific tales. In the New York Times op-ed section and Outposts blog, respectively, Helen Benedict urges us not to overlook the nearly one-third of female veterans who say they’ve been sexually assaulted or raped while in the military, and Timothy Egan says we all need to feel the impacts of the current Iraq conflict, rather than having it be “so out-of-sight, so stage-managed to be painless and invisible.”
The Washington Post profiled two groups of people who heard stories of veterans not getting the services they deserve – and responded by volunteering their time and skills to fill the gaps. Volunteer buglers are playing taps at military funerals, and private mental health counselors are donating free services to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems.
In other news:
How do you best teach workers about safety? How do you change people’s attitudes?
The Workers’ Comp board in Ontario, Cananda, and many safety instructors along with them, believes that gruesome pictures or videos work best. Like driving by the scene of a car accident, it is hard not to look. Perhaps by showing a horrific accident, workers will be more careful or take more precautions. The Ontario Worker Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) produced a series of five short (30 second) videos for different industries each showing an “accident” which occurs and then saying how this could have been prevented.
Earlier this year, a group of worker advocates sent a petition to MSHA Chief Richard Stickler asking for rulemaking to improve the training miners receive about their statutory rights. The petition called for significant changes in the way in which all workers employed at U.S. mining operations learn about their rights, including the right to refuse unsafe work and to express concerns about hazards. (Previous post here) The petitioners asked MSHA to consider changing how miners’ rights training is conducted, specifically having someone other than the miner operator or his representative cover this part of the training.
Not surprisingly, MSHA’s Stickler sponded to the petition saying “new regulations are not necessary.” Some of the assertions he makes to support his position are dismal, at best.
For the third time in eight months, workers from the Getchell gold mine* near Winnemuca, NV have seen a co-worker killed on-the-job. First was Mr. Curtis L. Johnson, 36, a roof-bolter, who was killed on August 28, 2007, when part of the mine collapsed on him. Next was Mike Millican, 43, who was killed on January 26, 2008 when a haulage truck backed over him. Then, Kenny Barbosa, 28, was killed on April 21, in another fall of ground. Thanks to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Alan Maimon** for drawing my attention to these workers’ deaths. Sadly, and as usual, all of them were preventable! (Maimon’s full story here.)
More than three years after the blast at BP’s Texas City refinery killed 15 workers and injured many others, an independent monitor reports that the company has made “substantial progress” in safety at its U.S. refineries, but that it still has many improvements to make. Kristen Hays reports for the Houston Chronicle:
Much of the progress in the last year has involved developing various safety implementation and monitoring plans, process safety reviews, and appointing groups of managers to oversee them. These plans include detailed internal audits of safety and operations at U.S. refineries, programs for training managers in process safety, and ensuring open communication between workers and managers by requiring on- and off-site managers to regularly visit the plants.
However, the report says “more focused attention” is needed in several areas, such as:
• Overtime hours remain so high that they could compromise worker performance despite a revised overtime policy aimed at reducing worker fatigue.
• Refinery management needs to ensure all safety issues are reported to all corporate levels, not just those identified in audits.
• More clarity is needed for roles and responsibilities of process safety support staff outside of refineries.
The Chronicle also provides an update on the litigation related to the blast, and reports that the American Petroleum Institute has updated its guidelines for operating pressure relief systems and other equipment blamed in the explosion.
In other news:
At a recent Senate hearing, former OSHA Assistant Secretary Jerry Scannell (1989-1993) described the pressure he often felt, especially from lawyers 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?” Reporter Andy Pierrotti with WSPA-TV (Spartanburg/Greenville, SC) has found exactly the same “discount house” mentality through his investigation of SC-OSHA. His story is entitled “Discounted Lives.”
Pierrotti assembled record from the last four years to demonstrate how SC-OSHA, reduce assessed penalties in order to settle cases against the employers responsible for the workers’ deaths. He also relays the shock of family members after learning how already nominal fines become meaningless through the settlement process.
A fair number of people have “Ah-ha!” moments, but how many actually take those nuggets of brilliance and pursue them?
One man –an inventor of sorts who I came to know because of the Sago disaster—has done just that. While watching the rescue efforts at the WV Sago mine unfold on television in early January 2006, this man used his knowledge as a former Navy submariner to design and develop a tracking system for underground miners. His “Ah-ha!” moment and now application was recognized this month by Popular Science magazine as one of the top-ten inventions for 2008! (PopSci article here)
Announcing the award, the magazine editors note:
“The world needs help…but the solutions may well end up coming from the garages and basements next door. As the winners of PopSci’s 2nd annual Invention Awards demonstrate, invention–even world changing invention–can happen anywhere there’s an idea and an endless drive to see that idea made real.”
Congratulations to Russell and Jay Breeding and Mike Millam of InSEeT System, who have shown (not just talked about) their commitment to workers’ health and safety.
For the Christian Science Monitor, Marilyn Gardner writes about pregnant women who stay on the job until the day their babies are due (or even until the minute they go into labor) and start working again soon after their babies’ births, because they’re unable to take more time off. The Family Medical Leave Act allows new parents 12 weeks of leave - but it’s unpaid leave, and the requirement only applies to companies with 50 or more employees. Gardner explains:
Call it the American way of maternity. Eighty percent of pregnant women who work remained on the job until one month or less before their child’s birth, according to newly released Census data for 2003. In 1965 that figure was 35 percent.
Most women work until close to their due date for two reasons: They need the income and they want to use their maternity leave after the baby arrives. …
Europeans take a different approach. In France, expectant mothers receive six weeks of maternity leave before the birth and 10 weeks after. They are required to take at least two weeks before and six after. In Finland, women receive 17.5 weeks of maternity leave. They can begin as early as eight weeks before their due date or as late as two weeks before the expected date. Other European countries offer similar policies.
And speaking of the Family Medical Leave Act, this year is its 15th anniversary. The Washington Post’s Nancy Trejos looks at some of the changes to the law that workers and employers are pushing for.
In other news:
By Olga Naidenko
After lead, asbestos, aromatic amine dyes, Minamata disease, Bhopal, and fluorochemicals, we presumably have learned something about worker safety, especially when it comes to large-scale production in cutting-edge chemical industries. So here comes the test: can we use this knowledge to ensure worker safety in the up-and-coming nanotechnology industry?
An international survey published in the May issue of Environmental Science and Technology addressed precisely this question: are nanomaterials firms and laboratories installing adequate, nano-specific environmental health and safety (EHS) programs, engineering controls, personal protective equipment, exposure monitoring and product stewardship programs?
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: