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.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail’s pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., […]
Beau Griffing remembers how proud his mom Kristine, 52, was of the work she did at the Eaton Corporation’s Kearney, Nebraska facility. He told a local reporter how she loved taking him and his siblings to the plant to show them where she worked. “She provided so much for us,” Beau Griffing said. “She wanted […]
Mr. Mitt Romney spoke this weekend at the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual convention and kicked off his remarks applauding the gun-lovers group’s defense of the 2nd amendment to the Constitution. “This fine organization is sometimes called a single-issue group,” Romney said. “That’s high praise when the single issue is freedom. I love my freedom […]
The US Chamber of Commerce had a quaint little game on its website last month, complete with a YouTube video with fake sportscasters. The PR campaign called “Regulatory Madness” keyed off the annual NCAA’s basketball tournament we know as March Madness. The cutesy idea was for business people to use the Chamber’s pick of the […]
Earlier this week, Lizzie Grossman reported here at The Pump Handle on revisions to OSHA’s Hazard Communication standard which align the agency’s 30 year old rule with a globally harmonized system for classifying and labeling chemical hazards. In “Moving from Right-to-Know to Right-to-Understand,” we learn how the changes stem from a 2002 United Nations resolution […]
The $109 billion transportation bill passed last week in the Senate has a title that doesn’t even mention roads or highways. It’s called the ”Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act” (MAP-21) The 74 Senators who voted in favor of the bill (S. 1813), including 22 Republicans, described their support in terms of […]
Federal OSHA proposed a $283,000 penalty against an employer responsible for staffing a Hershey’s chocolate packaging facilty in Palmyra, Pennsylvania for willfully violating workplace safety regulations. The agency’s action followed a formal complaint lodged by workers at the plant, many of whom were foreign students employed under the State Department’s J-1 visa program. A few […]
The topics for my blog posts sometimes come from unusual places. This post is one of these. It popped in my head as I watched Natalie Portman announce the nominees for best actor during Sunday night’s Academy Award broadcast. The snippet featuring Demián Bichir in “A Better Life” reminded me of a worker-fatality report that […]
On July 27, 2011, just a few miles from my home in San Marcos, TX, Mr. Margarito Guardado Resinos, 34, and Mr. Nelson Pineda were working together to erect a pre-engineered steel building frame on property owned by Thermon Manufacturing. The workers were employed by Jetka Steel Erectors of Katy, TX, a firm hired by […]