May 27, 2016 Kim Krisberg 2Comment

“In my darker hours when I’m sleeping at night, that’s where I go.” Those are words from Eric Blank, senior director for public health systems at the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), talking about the enormous difficulties that public health labs faced in confronting the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. Now he fears that without emergency federal funds and in the face of new funding cuts, Zika virus will force the nation’s critical public health lab network into that same scenario — or into something even worse.

May 24, 2016 Kim Krisberg

A ‘hidden’ workforce of foreign workers at a Tesla plant in California; Illinois legislators pass a domestic workers bill of rights; Congress uses a spending bill to weaken safety rules for truckers; and lawsuits over workplace leave policies spike way up.

May 17, 2016 Kim Krisberg 1Comment

Hardly a day goes by lately without another story on companies like Uber and their model of classifying workers as independent contractors while treating them more like traditional employees and sidestepping traditional employer responsibilities. It’s a model that has serious implications for workers’ rights and wages. However, there’s another form of employment that may be even more damaging to hard-fought labor standards: subcontracting.

May 16, 2016 Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH 2Comment

The FAA updates its website daily with aircraft safety incident reports linked to ownership data. MSHA promptly posts injury, illness, and close-call incidents reported by every US mining operation. OSHA’s plan for 2018 to post annual injury data for a fraction of US workplaces is just the agency trying to keep up with the times.