OSHA Delays Full Silica Enforcement For One More Month
You won’t see it in a press release, but yesterday OSHA announced another 30 day delay in full enforcement of the Silica standard for many employers. Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary Tom Galassi sent a memo to Regional Administrators yesterday outlining the policy that will take effect on September 23: During the first 30 days of enforcement,…
Houston, We Have A Fox-Chicken Problem…
While the new headlines are all about Hurricanes, health care, North Korea and tax “reform,” chickens around the country are getting more and more nervous as the foxes quietly move into the government agencies that are supposed to be protecting them. Over at the Labor Department, Justin Miller in the American Prospect writes about how…
Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Battle to Protect Workers: Short Stuff
In Memorium, Adrienne Markowitz: The health and safety movement has lost another of its legends. Adrienne Markowitz, former safety and health Director of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union died of breast cancer last week. As her obituary describes “She worked with, and for, the New Jersey teachers union, identifying threats from mercury,…
Disabled, Used Up and Discarded: And Conditions for Poultry Workers May Get Worse
Normally, I’d say anyone with half a brain and a bit of a moral compass would see this as a problem in need of a humane solution: When Oscar arrived in Alabama from Miami, he had hoped to apply the mechanical engineering skills he’d learned in Cuba to his new job at a poultry processing…
Weekly Toll: Workers Age 19 to 60 Won’t Be Coming Home
Worker Dies in Industrial Accident at Northern Idaho Mill ATHOL, Idaho (AP) — Authorities say a worker at a northern Idaho lumber mill died in an industrial accident on Friday. The Kootenai County Sheriff’s office says the 45-year-old man was fatally injured while trying to clear a broken piece of wood from a machine at the Merritt Brothers…
Photo of the Week
OSHA Alliance: Protecting Workers or Protecting the Chemical Industry?
OSHA may have strong principles about not issuing press releases that might embarrass companies that endanger or kill workers, but they’re gung-ho about press releases publicizing their cozy relationships with industry associations, especially where those relationships are actually helping those industry associations fight off regulatory activity in another state that would protect workers and consumers.…
Undercover: Working and Dying as a Temporary Employee
OK, stick the kids in front of the TV, send your spouse out with friends and sit down for a little while to read this amazing article by Toronto Star Reporters Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy. Mojtehedzadeh went to work undercover as a temporary employee at Fiera Foods, an industrial bakery in Toronto where a worker…
OSHA to the Public: ‘You Can’t Handle The Truth!’
OSHA has engaged in a furious flurry of press activity over the past month. Well, “furious” by Trump-OSHA standards. By anyone else’s standards, it’s still pathetic. OSHA has issued an astonishing total of six press releases since the beginning of August. This is, of course, practically nothing compared with the more than 50 large cases…