A report released in Washington this morning highlights "The Hidden Struggles of Migrant Worker Women In The Maryland Crab Industry." The paper, by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. and the International Human Right Law Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, is focused mostly on immigration policy issues (a little outside our purview), but I wanted to note the section on worker safety.
The report looks at the hundreds of Mexican women who travel every year to the Eastern Shore of Maryland on H-2B guestworker visas to work in the crab industry. The researchers interviewed more than 40 current or former workers, and found that:
Full textWork-related injuries are common for many of the migrant workers in the Maryland crab industry. Use of sharp knives, contact with chemicals, lack of formal training, and the pace of work all contribute to injuries. ... In fact, cuts, scrapes, and rashes on the hands and arms of workers were so routine that many interviewed workers did not view them as actual injuries. When the authors asked, “Have you experienced any injuries at work?” many workers responded “No.” When asked specifically about cuts, the women universally responded affirmatively. ... Many of the injuries sustained by these workers could, and should have been prevented by following laws related to occupational safety and health.
Cross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Cong. George Miller (D-CA) is a man of tough talk and swift action. Today, along with 15 other House members, he introduced H.R. 5663 a bill to upgrade provisions of our nation's key federal workplace health and safety laws. Every year, tens of thousands of workers are killed or made ill because of on-the-job hazards, and this year the toll of death made headline news. The Deepwater Horizon disaster and the Upper Big Branch mine explosion alone cut short the lives of 40 workers, with their coworkers' and families' lives changed forever.
H.R. 5663 will modernize whistleblower protections for workers who express concerns about safety and health, raise the maximum civil penalty amount that can be proposed by OSHA for serious, willful and repeat violations, and allow for criminal sanctions against employers who knowingly violate safety regulations that contributed to the death of a worker. Deb Koehler-Fergen, whose son Travis Koehler, 26, was killed while working for Boyd Gaming at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas enthusiastically endorsed the bill.
"Employers who put workers lives at risk should be held accountable for their actions, including much stiffer penalties and the possibility of jail time."Full text
OSHA’s pending rule on construction crane and derrick safety cleared OIRA review yesterday.
The cranes rule has been a long, long time in the making and was featured as a case study in our white paper last year on the Costs of Regulatory Delay. It’s good news that this life-saving rule is finally almost set.
Update: Celeste Monforton has more on this at The Pump Handle:
Full textFirst, OIRA has completed its review of OSHA's final rule on cranes and derricks. The notation on the regs.gov website says "consistent with change," a phrase that has meaning only to those who have the secret decoder ring. Because the internal deliberations between OMB and the affected agency are considered confidential, (a policy dating back to OIRA's creation under President Reagan) we don't know whether the "change" required by OMB are good, bad or indifferent to worker protection.
As I said, this news may be mundane, or not. Once the final rule is published, we'll see how OSHA addressed the few sticky issues raised by interested parties. Looking on the bright side, it may mean that a new rule to protect workers (and the public) around cranes and derricks may be a reality very soon.
Today, the Senate appropriations subcommittee chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) will discuss "Investing in Mine Safety: Preventing Another Disaster" and hear testimony from the notorious Don Blankenship, chief executive officer of Massey Energy, owner of the Upper Big Branch disaster where 29 miners lost their lives on April 5.
Workers safety and health advocates have posted calls over the past months to “send Blankenship to jail,” perhaps under federal racketeering laws, and the FBI opened an inquiry into potential criminal charges against company officials who may have bribed federal inspectors to keep the mines running despite these repeated violations. The relevant law is in fact remarkably straightforward, and even the evidence amassed in press accounts, by definition much less than the FBI could and should uncover, provides ample support for a strong case against Don Blankenship under the Mine Safety Act itself, which incorporates the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine crafted decades ago by the Supreme Court.
Under the doctrine, a corporate executive who knew or should have known that bad actions are happening, and who is a position to stop those activities, is potentially liable criminally under “public welfare” statutes like the Mine Safety Act, the hazardous waste laws, and the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Press accounts indicate that not only did Blankenship know that his mines were catastrophically unsafe, but actually did the opposite of correcting those conditions: he created such pressure to produce coal that workers were afraid they would be fired if took the time to correct blatant safety hazards.
Full textCross-posted from The Pump Handle.
Beginning in December 2006, I’ve written five blog post commenting on the content of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) regulatory agenda for worker health and safety rulemakings. Most of my posts [see links below] have criticized the Labor Secretary and senior OSHA and MSHA staff for failing to offer a bold vision for progressive worker protections. Now that the Obama & Solis team have been on board for more than a year, I’m not willing to cut them any slack for being newbies. Regrettably, as with the Bush/Chao agendas, my posts today will question rather than complement the OSHA team (and any bigger fish up the food chain) who are responsible for this plan.
I’ll start with the good news from OSHA’s reg agenda. In the month of July, OSHA projects it will issue two final rules, one on cranes and derricks in construction and another to revise the OSHA 300 log with a column to record musculoskeletal disorders. The first is a rule that has been in the works for 7 years and long overdue (here, here, here, here, here, here, here.) The second will simply reinstate a change in injury recordkeeping requirements that should have taken affect in early 2001, but was axed by OSHA officials under direction from the Bush/Chao Administration.
Now, the reg agenda items that have me perplexed. We’ve heard the Secretary Solis and Asst. Secretary Michaels talk about green jobs, and we know that construction workers are a large part of that workforce. But, construction workers continue to get short-shrift at OSHA when it comes to mandatory H&S protections.
Full textAs the Pump Handle noted earlier this week, OSHA submitted its draft final rule on construction cranes and derricks to OMB on Friday of last week. It’s good news that the process is now moving along.
The cranes and derricks rule has been a long saga, and it was one of the case studies in our report last year on the costs of regulatory delay.
By OSHA’s estimates, 89 people are killed and 263 are injured each year in construction crane incidents. The existing safety standards for the use of cranes, derricks, and other heavy machinery at construction sites are now almost 40 years old and are in dire need of updating to account for changes in technology and construction practices. Beginning in the mid-1990s, industry itself began petitioning OSHA for stronger and more comprehensive regulations, and in 2004 a committee of industry, labor, and government representatives reached agreement on a draft proposed rule. That’s the rule that is now a bit closer to finally becoming a reality.
The rule requires operators, inspectors, and assembly and disassembly workers to be certified, and it also helps account for many of the technological changes that have occurred since 1971. OSHA estimates that the new rule could cut the death and injury rate by more than half.
The regulatory delay in the cranes rule has had a cost in human lives. It's long past time we got this one right.
Full textAbout a year ago in this space, I wrote a piece taking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to task for its unhinged reaction to the Environmental Protection Agency’s then-nascent efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. As an example of the bombast, I included a link to a speech made by Chamber board member Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy, in which he denied climate change, compared those who disagree with him with Osama Bin Laden and called them communists and atheists, accused environmentalists of “taking over the world,” and much more.
Apparently, such outrageous rhetoric doesn’t disqualify someone from being on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. You know what else doesn’t disqualify a coal industry honcho ? Operating a dangerous mine. It was in a Massey mine that 25 coal miners died earlier this week, after a methane explosion – the same mine, ThinkProgress notes, that had been cited for more than 3,000 safety violations in the last 15 years. Fifty-three of those violations were issued this past March.
The anti-regulatory crowd is fond of asserting that, left to their own devices, markets are self-correcting, and that abuses will be punished in the marketplace. The long history of mining deaths in the United States – more than 1,000/year through the first half of the 20th Century, then gradually down to about 30 a year between 2000 and 2005, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and not counting black lung disease – argues otherwise, of course. But the argument persists. Perhaps the Massey disaster will test the theory.
It’s too soon to know what caused this week’s disaster – whether it was the product of Massey negligence or something else. But one thing we know for sure is that Massey’s safety record is, as the AP put it, “spotty.” And to think, until this week, Don Blankenship was best known for his political extremism.
Full textGranite, like most natural stones, contains radioactive material. While this isn’t much of a concern for a person who spends a few hours in a kitchen with granite countertops every day, new research by David Bernhardt, Linda Kincaid, and Al Gerhart suggests that the workers who fabricate those countertops might have reason to worry.
When they cut granite slabs to fit a room and to have nice edges, corners, and cut-outs for sinks and appliances, workers’ saws can create a lot of dust, and that dust can contain uranium, thorium, and other radioactive materials. If the dust isn’t properly controlled and the workers are not wearing the right protective equipment, they can inhale the dust, where it can cause real damage to the vulnerable tissues in their lungs. Based on limited sampling and some conservative assumptions about control equipment and exposure duration, Bernhardt, Kincaid, and Gerhart suggest that stone cutters could potentially be exposed to radiation levels many times greater than recommended exposure levels for the general public.
Granite’s radiation problem is not new, and the Marble Institute of America, one of the industry’s main trade associations, was quick to commission its own study to challenge the worker exposure research. The MIA-commissioned study questioned Bernhardt et al.’s sampling techniques and statistical analysis. And the MIA, for its part, argued that it is standard practice within the industry to use wet-cutting techniques (which would limit dust but weren’t used when Kincaid and Gerhart did their sampling). But by the MIA’s own account, over 25 percent of stone fabricators don’t use those techniques.
Full textOn Tuesday, the White House announced the appointment of Dr. David Michaels to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). An epidemiologist and a professor at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services, Michaels will bring substantial expertise and experience to the job. Besides being an active health research – he studies the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals – he has also written impressively on science and regulatory policy. His book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, offers extensive evidence of how regulatory entities spend millions of dollars attempting to dismantle public health protections using the playbook that originated with the tobacco industry’s efforts to deny the risks of smoking. He is also an experienced public health administrator, having served as the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health in the Clinton Administration.
The appointment is good news because OSHA can use all of the help it can get. In 1993, Tom McGarity and I published Workers at Risk: The Failed Promise of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which explained how OSHA has fallen short of its statutory responsibility to protect American workers. I wish that I could say that the situation has improved since then, but, if anything, OSHA is in worse shape today than in the early 1990s.
Workplace injuries and fatalities have declined since OSHA has been in business, but the rate of decline has leveled off and the absolute number of injuries and fatalities remains high. Consider, for example, that in 2005, employers paid $48.3 billion in “direct costs” for workplace injuries -- that is, payments for medical expenses and lost wages -- according to the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, the nation’s largest workers' compensation insurer. This number, of course, does not measure the additional havoc wrought on individuals and their families when a worker is seriously injured or killed in a workplace accident.
American workplaces are dangerous for a number of reasons, including too few OSHA inspectors and a statute that authorizes only small penalties even for more egregious violations. For example, penalties are capped at $70,000 per incident even for “willful violations,” which involve situations where an employer demonstrates “plain indifference to the law.” Plus, OSHA has been way too willing to cut deals and let employers off the hook. The average penalty for enforcement cases involving fatalities in FY 2007 was just $10,133. That’s right, employers paid an average of $10,000 in fines for an accident in which an OSHA violation led to a workers’ death.
Full textThis post is co-written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz.
Just as the traditional media finished a breathless cycle of reporting on how prospective Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had renounced her claim that a “wise Latina” would make different decisions than a white man, an article in USA Today reminded us of the need for many more wise Latinas in the corridors of power in Washington. According to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workplace deaths of Hispanics have increased by 76 percent since 1992, even though total fatalities in all jobs nationwide dropped by almost 10 percent.
What explains these tragic figures? Admittedly, there are simply more Hispanic workers in the United States today.
And the jobs involved are the meanest and the dirtiest. In 2003, 42 percent of workers in the meat and poultry industry, which includes dangerous meatpacking jobs, were Hispanic. These jobs also attract undocumented immigrants with few other options for employment. Twenty-six percent of workers in the meat and poultry industry were foreign-born noncitizens in 2003. BLS data show that other dangerous industries such as construction, transportation and warehousing, natural resources and mining, and agriculture are where the most Hispanic workers are dying on the job. And, while companies are required to provide employees with safety training, they often fail to make adequate efforts to deal with language barriers. OSHA has some materials available online in Spanish, but workers laboring for a subsistence wage are unlikely to look these instructions up on their Blackberries from the job site. Undocumented workers are far less likely to complain to federal and state officials about job dangers, further isolating them from outside intervention to correct workplace hazards.
Under the leadership of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis—a wise Latina if there ever was one--the Obama Administration is beginning to address these problems. The President’s FY 2010 budget requested $564 million for OSHA, which is $51 million, or 10 percent more than that agency received in FY 2009. This funding will pay for 160 new enforcement staff, many of whom will be bilingual. Overall, the Department of Labor expects to hire nearly 1,000 new employees, restoring worker protection staffing to FY 2001 levels. Unfortunately, however, this comparison omits the depressing context that OSHA funding has remained essentially flat in constant dollars since the agency was created in the early 1970’s. A strong trend away from heavy manufacturing and toward safer service industry jobs has translated into a steady reduction of workplace injuries and deaths despite OSHA’s steadily weakening capacity to enforce the law. Hispanic workers have not benefited as much as the average worker in terms of decrease in fatality rate.
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