The feds grant billions in contracts to shipbuilders with serious worker safety lapses; Texas lawmakers want to undo an Austin initiative that protects construction workers; Chevron agrees to highest fine in Cal/OSHA history after refinery fire; and Democrats hope to ban a dangerous pesticide after EPA fails to act.
Remarks about safety for cyclists at the Tour de France have a familiar ring to those about workplace safety.
Five-part series investigates worker safety and lax accountability at nuclear facilities; workers at port trucking companies in Southern California report conditions mirroring indentured servitude; seventh journalist murdered in Mexico since beginning of 2017; and a new farmworkers union is born in Washington.
The first six months of the Trump administration nine coal miners have been fatally injured on the job. That’s one more than all of 2016.
Tesla’s investment in solar, auto, and battery technology is helping in the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources. The question is whether the firm will accomplish it on the high road of labor rights and worker safety.
Congressional lawmakers propose protections for undocumented farmworkers; the Trump administration takes aim at workplace civil rights enforcement; federal legislation would provide benefits for gig economy workers; and poultry workers get nearly $600,000 in back wages.
Environmental justice and labor groups in California were relentless in their demand to make refineries safer. Their years of effort paid off with an announcement last week by the state of new refinery safety regulations.
A historical look at the ‘radium girls’ and their legacy of worker justice; OSHA’s website for receiving injury and illness logs not accepting submissions; California farmworkers sickened by pesticide after Trump’s EPA reverses course on a probable ban; and former Walmart employees file class-action lawsuit for pregnancy discrimination.
Injury Control & Violence
A well-known secret: The “reverse business case” threatens worker health and safety
Accounting professors have confirmed what we always suspected: companies which are scrambling to meet or just beat Wall Street analysts’ profit projections have worker injury rates that are 12% higher than other employers. The recent research indicates that frantic efforts by “benchmark-beating” employers – increasing employees’ workloads or pressuring them to work faster, at the same time that these employers cut safety spending on activities like maintaining equipment or training employees, to meet the profit projections – are the likely source of increased injuries and illnesses.
Injury Control & Violence
Nation’s largest wireless infrastructure provider linked to two worker deaths in eight days
In an eight-day period, two workers lost their lives at communication towers. Their deaths reminded me of the grave hazards in the industry and the subcontracting model that can shield firms from responsibility for the hazards they create.