A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
Admit it. If they could, Trump and most Republicans would like to just get rid of OSHA, EPA the Consumer Product Safety Commission and any other agency — or law — that protects workers, consumers or the environment. This is all part of Steve Bannon’s goal of “deconstructing the Administrative State” — making sure that…
They say that those who forget history are forced to repeat it. But when it comes to workplace and environmental disasters, that’s not exactly true. Because while the politicians and their corporate supporters are doing the forgetting, it is the workers, the environment and surrounding communities that ultimately pay the price when the inevitable —…
President Trump frequently boasts about “eliminating more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.” This is supposedly a good thing for the American people, even thought most regulations are actually “protections,” protecting workers and consumers from health and safety hazards, exploitation, bad food — and being ripped off by their employers. And…
The New York Times, in another rather questionable Front Page article, The Trump Effect: Business, Anticipating Less Regulation, Loosens Purse Strings, today discusses the rapture felt by American business resulting from Trump’s anti-regulatory policies. According to Times reporters Binyamin Appelbaum and Jim Tankersley, because of Trump’s “regulatory pullback,” A wave of optimism has swept over American…
Washington Post reporters Lisa Rein and Andrew Ba Trim published an excellent front page article today chronicling Donald Trump’s largely successful effort to shrink the federal government: “By the end of September, all Cabinet departments except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January — with…
Buried in paragraph 6 of an article on Page 11 of today’s New York Times — right next to an article on new corporate loopholes provided by the Republican Tax Deform bill — are statistics noting that about 48 million Americans get sick from food-borne diseases each year, according to the Food and Drug Administration. “Of…
Just what you needed One more thing to keep you up at night. One of things we complained about at OSHA was how slowly the wheels of government work, especially the regulatory process that’s used to improve protections for workers and the environment. On the other hand, we now console ourselves in these days of corporate…
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.…
Less than half a year after workers finally received long overdue protections against deadly beryllium dust, the Trump administration has officially proposed removing many of those protections from construction and shipyard workers. OSHA announced today “a proposed rule that would modify the agency’s recent beryllium standards for the construction and shipyard sectors.” The proposal would send…
But as the ….government has promoted the [chemical] sector’s rapid growth, it has struggled with its impact on the environment. The chemical industry has quashed calls to strengthen oversight and force companies to publicly disclose what substances they produce. Local environmental bureaus are often politically feeble and understaffed. — New York Times, June 13, 2017…