In the final section of our new report “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” we end on a high note. We profile a number of new laws at the state and local levels to improve working conditions for Americans and protect them from serious health and safety hazards.
The public health community needs to break its silence about the CIA’s sham vaccination program that’s being used as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan.
Injury Control & Violence
A different kind of Texas-style justice: Two nights at Austin’s Workers Defense Project
It’s Tuesday evening and as usual, the small parking lot outside the Workers Defense Project on Austin’s eastside is packed. The dusty lot is strewn with cars and pick-up trucks parked wherever they can fit and get in off the road. I’ve arrived well before the night’s activities begin, so I easily secure a spot. But my gracious guide and translator, a college intern named Alan Garcia, warns me that I might get blocked in. It happens all the time, he says.
Education
‘An issue that affects all of us’: Young workers center takes on wage theft in the Rio Grande Valley
For six months, Jorge Rubio worked at a local chain of tortilla bakeries and taquerias in the cities of Brownsville and San Benito, both in the very southern tip of Texas. Rubio, 42, prepared the food, cleaned equipment, served customers. Eventually, he decided to quit after being overworked for months. On his last day of work, his employer refused to pay him the usual $50 for an 11-hour workday.
The newly unveiled granite memorial in Whitesville, WV is a visible reminder of the 29 miners who were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine, but the truest measure of our recognition of their sacrifice is what we do in their memory to protect the living.
Child Labor
Congress and White House decided to turn their back, but child labor on U.S. farms hasn’t disappeared
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.
In the fall of 2011, a new Texas statute took effect against employers who engage in wage theft, putting in place real consequences for employers found guilty of stealing wages from workers. It was a big step forward in a state where wage theft has become as common as cowboy boots and pick-up trucks. It was especially good news for workers in El Paso, where wage theft has become so rampant that workers rights advocates have dubbed it an “epidemic.”
APHA Annual Meeting
Chinese factory-fire victim turned activist to be honored by world’s largest public health group
Yuying Chen transformed from a 15 year old girl who worked in a factory making toys for export, to a woman empowered by a workplace disaster, to an internationally recognized human rights leader. She will receive the American Public Health Association’s International Health & Safety Activist’s award at the group’s annual meeting to be held October 27-31, 2012 in San Francisco.
Injury Control & Violence
Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren’t members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country.
Injury Control & Violence
House Republicans say ‘nay’ to new mine safety reforms, no questions left about which side they’re on
Not a single Republican member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee voted in support of a resolution calling for the Committee to “consider and report legislation to improve safety and whistleblower protections for miners, and increase accountability for dangerous mine operators.” The 29 families of the Upper Big Branch miners now know who is standing with them and who is against them.