A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
OSHA today released the text of its partial rollback of the Obama administrations “electronic recordkeeping” rule that requires some employers to send detailed information about injuries and illnesses to the agency.
A new Reuters investigative piece describes how industry influence has gotten OSHA to weaken worker protections from exposure to beryllium.
Good news! Good News! Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh thinks it’s perfectly reasonable for American workers to expect to come home safely at the end of the day, even if they work in the entertainment industry. Sort of. So he claims in his response to a written question from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Unfortunately, “expecting”…
Allow me to be blunt: Judge Brett Kavanaugh lied about the SeaWorld case during his Senate Confirmation testimony last week and he showed very little understanding of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Being as Judge Kavanaugh is a great girls basketball coach in the crime-ridden streets of Bethesda, Maryland, however, these facts probably won’t…
Georgetown Professor of Law Lisa Heinzerling has always been a fresh voice in defending workplace, environmental and consumer protections against the onslaught of complaints from Republicans and the business community about allegedly job-killing regulations. So in an otherwise depressing week listening to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, it was a breath of fresh air to hear…
Poison Food, Poisoned Workers: Eyal Press of The Intercept writes about chronic health problems that have plagued Jessica Robertson since she began working as a part-time U.S. Department of Agriculture poultry inspector at a turkey processing plant, most likely from peracetic acid which is used to remove bacteria from the carcasses of chickens and turkeys. USDA had ignored…
Every day we read about how EPA or OSHA announced their intention to roll back this protection, or failed to act on that long planned initiative. And every day a little bit of our spirit dies. But don’t despair: Seattle, WA — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must ban a widely used organophosphate pesticide linked to…
OSHA proposed last week to roll back parts of the “Electronic Recordkeeping” regulation that the Obama administration issued in 2016. The rule would have required certain employers to electronically send worker injury and illness information into OSHA. OSHA then intended to publicize the (non-confidential) information on its website. In a somewhat amusing, but Orwellian press…
And in our continuing series of posts about why Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court would be a disaster for workers: The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Kavanaugh’s dissent in the SeaWorld case that we wrote about last week (here). Bob Egelco writes that “The appeals court ruling in SeaWorld vs. Perez stands as an illustration…
Steve Bannon may have moved out of the West Wing, but he left his goal of “deconstructing the regulatory state” behind. And we all may pay the price. As I wrote a couple of weeks, we just passed the 5-year anniversary of the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster that incinerated 47 persons when an un-manned runaway “bomb-train” derailed…