A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues
One of the first actions of the Republican Congress after Trump’s election was to repeal OSHA’s recently issued “Volks Rule” that allowed the agency to cite companies for continuing failure to accurately record injuries and illnesses. Now an article by Will Evans at Reveal shows how real workers are suffering because of automaker Tesla’s failure…
Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and Tesla is a seriously strange and driven guy. Sometimes that can be amusing if the strange guy is your next door neighbor or crazy uncle. But when he owns a major car company, it can result in workers getting hurt or killed. Last May we wrote about a report…
Fewer than half of all employers required to send their injury and illness information into OSHA last year sent in the information. “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was expecting about 350,000 summaries to be submitted by Dec. 31, the agency numbers provided to Bloomberg Environment March 7 show. Instead, employers required to participate submitted…
Workplace safety and health surveillance and recordkeeping sound boring, but good data about who’s getting hurt, sick or killed — how and why– are vital to determining the need for safety and health protections, funding and where to put resources for inspections, standards and other strategies to keep workers from getting sick, injured and killed…
Yesterday was that bi-annual event that all red-blooded Americans celebrate: the release of the new federal Regulatory Agenda; in this case the Fall 2017 version. President Trump took the occasion to participate in a photo op: cutting a ribbon of red tape in front of a humongous stack of paper representing the Code of Federal…
After multiple delays, OSHA has finally announced that employers who are required to keep OSHA injury and illness records must send summary information in to the agency by December 15, fifteen days after the deadline announced last June, when the agency proposed to delay the reporting deadline from July 1 to December 1. The rollout has been plagued…
The Incredible Disappearing Security Breach: Hard to know what to say about this. Remember that alleged security “breach” in OSHA’s website that’s collecting injury and illness data from employers covered by OSHA’s recordkeeping requirements? That’s the same database that was supposed to be up in February, with a submission deadline of July 1. It was…
The House of Representatives continued to wage its never-ending war on working people yesterday when the House Rules Committee voted to add 58 mostly anti-worker amendments to an already un-labor-friendly FY 2018 Labor-HHS Appropriations budget bill. That bill, you may remember, slashed the OSHA and MSHA enforcement budgets and eliminated the Susan Harwood Training Grant…
Who’s running OSHA now? Alexandra Berzon of the Wall St. Journal reports that OSHA cut back its reporting of workplace fatalities at the urging of the Chamber of Commerce. (Click here if WSJ link doesn’t work.) Under the Obama administration, “they saw this as a way to scare employers straight,” said Marc Freedman, executive director…
OSHA announced yesterday that it was temporarily shutting down a portal for employers to report injuries and illnesses while the agency investigates a “potential compromise” of a company’s electronic data. Apparently the cyber-sleuths at Homeland Security came up with something: The Homeland Security Department informed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Aug. 14 that…