A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
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…
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…
The New York Times takes another look at Obama administration worker protections that are being “revisited” in the early months of the Trump administration. Most of these stories — the Administration’s attempt to roll back the Beryllium rule’s coverage of construction and maritime industries, the delay in enforcement of the silica standard and proposed elimination…
Probably hoping no one would notice, OSHA today subtly buried an “Update” deep in its website, announcing that it intends to propose a delay in requirements of its new recordkeeping standard. The target of this latest rollback is a rule issued last year to “Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses” which simply requires employers already covered by…
President Trump and Labor Secretary Acosta need you to do something for your country. On March 13, President Trump signed an “Executive Order on a Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch” directing the head of each agency to submit a “proposed plan to reorganize the agency, if appropriate, in order to improve the efficiency,…
The Trump administration today — Workers Memorial Day — initiated its first real OSHA regulatory rollback — a proposed weakening or elimination of worker protections from deadly beryllium dust. While it’s not clear what is actually in the proposal that OSHA submitted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review yesterday, knowledgeable observers think its a weakening or elimination…
Today is Workers Memorial Day, a day set aside around the world to remember those killed on the job — and commit ourselves to fighting to protect workers from preventable death injury and illness on the job. As the AFL-CIO summed up in its Death on the Job report, 4,836 workers were killed on the job…
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank makes no secret about disliking Donald Trump. Instead of “draining the swamp” as he promised his supporters, Trump has become the “Swamp Monster” for his extreme secrecy (keeping White House visitor logs hidden), populating his administration “with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are making policy for the industries that…