California | The Pump Handle

California Expanding the right to know: California workers gain additional access to workplace toxics information as new hazards emerge

October 13, 2014 Elizabeth Grossman

“If the California Public Health Department had been able to find out that my company was using a chemical that was killing people, I might never have gotten so sick that I had to have a lung transplant,” Ricardo Corona told a California Judiciary Committee last April, testifying in favor of California Senate Bill (SB) 193 that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on September 29th.

California Occupational Health News Roundup

July 30, 2014 Kim Krisberg

McDonald’s ruling could be a major turning point for the fast food worker movement; federal commission clarifies rules for pregnant workers; miners with black lung may have been wrongly denied benefits; and a new OSHA whistleblower partnership is launched to support commercial carrier workers.

California New analysis offers a small snapshot of the toxic nature of oil and gas extraction

July 3, 2014 Kim Krisberg 1Comment

Crystalline silica, hydrofluoric acid and formaldehyde. Those are just three of the dozens of air toxic chemicals that oil companies have used thousands of times in southern California in just the past year.

California Searching for safer chemicals – but safer for whom? New EPA flame retardants report highlights the dilemma

June 25, 2014 Elizabeth Grossman 2Comment

When a widely used chemical is identified as an environmental health hazard and targeted for phase-out and elimination, among the most challenging questions for those involved with making such a chemical are: What to use instead? and Will the replacement be safe? The US Environmental Protection Agency’s report identifying alternatives to the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) illustrates how difficult those questions can be to answer.

California Assistant fatally burned in UCLA professor’s lab, not an obstacle in receiving NIH grants

June 23, 2014 Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH 3Comment

A UCLA chemistry professor’s website announces his lab’s award of an NIH grant. I wonder if we’ll also see an announcement explaining the settlement of the criminal charges against him for the work-related death of Sheri Sangji?

California Where you live may be hazardous to your health: Two reports show “place matters”

June 4, 2014 Elizabeth Grossman

Where you live may be hazardous to your health. This is the conclusion of several new reports including one by the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Reform that shows who lives in US communities most vulnerable to hazardous chemical exposures and the CDC’s latest examination of health disparities.

California Is California keeping people safe at work? Labor advocates say no

May 14, 2014 Elizabeth Grossman 1Comment

California’s workforce has grown by about 22 percent in the last 20 years but the number of safety inspectors for the 17 million people employed in the state’s 1.34 million workplaces has decreased by about 11 percent. This leaves California’s workforce – the largest of any US state – with the lowest number of inspectors per workers of any state with its own occupational safety and health plan for private-sector workers. California has so few workplace safety inspectors that it would take 173 years to inspect each workplace in the state just once.