A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but I’ve decided to throw off the shackles of retirement and start full time work at the Education and Labor Committee in the House of Representatives tomorrow morning. That means that this will be my last regular Confined Space post. As I said in…
Twitter! Right Now!! Do you follow me on Twitter? Why not? Turns out I’m one of the “12 Workplace Safety Influencers to Follow Right Now,” according to the Corvex Safety blog: Jordan Barab, a former OSHA Deputy Assistant Secretary, is now the author of Confined Space: Newsletter of Health & Safety & Labor Issues. (Link to newsletter here).…
I hope you’re all doing something to commemorate Workers Memorial Day — even if your own personal moment of silence and commitment to do more this coming year to ensure that workers come home safe and healthy at the end of the workday. Last night I was interviewed on Houston’s KPFT “Voices at Work” radio…
Even bloggers need vacations. I’ll be away from Confined Space World Headquarters for the next couple of weeks, spending more time with my family in a warmer climate. Of course, I’ll have my laptop with me in case OSHA leadership decides to take advantage of my absence to make any newsworthy announcements. And who knows?…
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…
I try to write about a lot of things, but can’t get to everything. Happily, there are a lot of others out there writing about workplace safety and providing valuable resources for workers and employers. And Twitter isn’t just a tool for the Mad King to display his lack of wisdom; it’s also a useful…
I was on WTOP Radio at noon today to talk about OSHA’s removal of the list of workplace fatalities from the home page of the website. Here’s the tape. The first question was cut out, but it was something like “Why did OSHA pull the fatalities off the home page and what were they replaced…
Sometimes blogging is like shouting into the wind. All you hear are echos of your own voice. Then silence. But, then sometimes you actually get a response. I’ve felt like I’ve been shouting into the wind for months, ranting about the evidence-challenged ATF statement over a year ago that the 2013 fire at West Fertilizer…
Since I restarted this blog last month, I’ve mostly focused on policy and political issues, because, well….we’ve been overwhelmed by daily attacks by Congress and the Trump administration that undermine workplace safety standards and OSHA’s budget. But ultimately, we’re only fighting the policy and political issues because working people are getting hurt and killed every day in the…
Introducing Confined Space 2.0. I was hoping to wait a bit longer to start this up, but with crippling budget cuts being proposed, Bannon’s plans to deconstruct the administrative state (to be replaced by the corporate state), repeals of recently issued OSHA regulations and “regulatory reform” initiatives in the White House and Congress that would…