A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
Check out my commentary on The Century Foundation’s website on EPA’s foot-dragging on banning the use of methylene chloride as a stripper — and the needless deaths it’s causing. Another gift to the American people by Scott Pruitt. To see for myself how appropriate the labels were, I headed down to my neighborhood hardware store…
Michaels to Musk: Manage safety at Tesla and production will fall into line: Former OSHA head Dr. David Michaels has penned an article in the Financial Times calling on the safety-challenged automaker Tesla and its owner Elon Musk to learn the lessons of the safest companies. Musk has been plagued by production and safety problems, but…
The workplace safety movement lost two of its heroes over in March — one fairly well known (enough to get an article in the NY Times) and one not so well known except to the people he worked with and the workers he worked for. Samuel Epstein (1926-2018): Sam Epstein was warmly remembered by those…
Methylene chloride kills. We wrote about 21-year old Kevin Hartley last June. He died last April 29 — Workers Memorial Day — while when he was overcome by methylene chloride while stripping a bath tub. Seventeen workers have died from over-exposure to methylene chloride between 2000 and 2015, and probably at least as many consumers.…
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.…
We read the painful stories in the Sunday papers so you don’t have to. Today a story about the corporate takeover of the Environmental Protection agency. It’s common for pundits to ridicule the Trump administration and Congress for pretty much zero major accomplishments over the past six months aside from a new Supreme Court justice.…
Attached here is an article I wrote for Law 360 about OSHA’s painfully slow process for issuing standards that protect workers, and how the Trump administration is trying to make it even slower. OSHA’s law, court decisions and OMB Executive Orders have already slowed the process to a crawl, but Trump’s Executive Order requiring one…
Seventeen workers dying between 2000 and 2015 isn’t enough to convince the methylene chloride industry that more is needed than just labels on a can to prevent the needless deaths of worker stripping bathtubs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed ban of methylene chloride as a paint stripper is a “blatant and raw power grab” of authority…
On April 28, while thousands of Americans were commemorating Workers Memorial Day, 21 year old Kevin Hartley was hard at work stripping a bathtub. Co-workers found Kevin unconscious and rushed him to the hospital where he died later that afternoon of cardiac arrest. Harley’s death wasn’t caused by a rare congenital disorder or a freak accident. He…
Representatives of the construction industry, as well as general industry have petitioned Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to reopen the silica standard, workplace safeguards that would save over 600 lives and prevent more than 900 new cases of silicosis each year. This means that for every day implementation of the standard is delayed, almost two workers will die…