The second annual report on US worker health and safety offers a review of activities and new policies at the federal scene, and a recap on the best reporting about it by the nation’s journalists.
Now that the Presidential election is over, it’s time for the Labor Department to kick into high gear expand workers’ rights and ensuring workers’ lives and health are protected. Here’s my wish list of tasks for the Labor Department to accomplish in the next 6 months:
The NBC News affiliate in California’s Bay Area released last week a multi-part investigative series entitled “Children in the field: American kids pick your food.” Congress and the White House embrace the fiction of family farms, but children working on farms tell a different story.
Open government groups, like the Sunlight Foundation, wrote to Labor Department officials asking them to re-post on its website documents related to a recently withdrawn proposed regulation on child labor.
It was bad enough when the Obama Administration withdrew a proposed rule to protect the most vulnerable workers in our country—children employed on farms—-but somebody told the Labor Department staff to delete all evidence of the proposal from the Labor Department’s website.
by Elizabeth Grossman Next month will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth. Given the last two centuries’ stratospheric advances in technology and the past century’s progress in human rights policy, one would think that child labor, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and the export of hazardous industrial refuse to poor countries and communities […]
For U.S. workers, the risk of dying on the job is highest if you are employed in agricultural, fishing or hunting. These jobs are not just a little riskier than the average job, they are nearly 8 times more life-threatening. The fatality rate for all private sector workers is 3.5 per 100,000 workers; in agriculture, […]
by Elizabeth Grossman Bananas in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Belize, and the Philippines; broccoli in Guatemala; carpets in India, Nepal, and Pakistan; cocoa in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Cameroon; coffee in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, and Panama; cotton in Egypt, Brazil, China, Uzbekistan, and Turkey; electronics and toys in China, clothing in China, […]
After two teenagers’ legs were severed while they were working near a grain auger, I wrote last month about the White House’s role in holding up a proposed Labor Department rule to address hazards for young workers. After a 9-month delay by the White House, the Labor Department released the proposed rule last week and […]
By Elizabeth Grossman While the rest of the country has been experiencing an epic heat wave, in the Pacific Northwest where I live, thus far the summer has been unusually cool. One consequence of the cool weather is a slow-to-appear local tomato crop, made evident to consumers by some remarkably high prices. A pint of […]