It shouldn’t be long now before Labor Secretary Hilda Solis releases her semi-annual regulatory plan for new worker health and safety rules. This document is required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act and Executive Order 12866, and is supposed to be published every April and October. The Labor Secretary’s most recent regulatory agenda wasn’t issued until […]
Injury Control & Violence
Safety blitz at WV Massey Energy mine, 20 instances of aggravated misconduct
The Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Adminstration (MSHA) issued a news release yesterday reporting on the results of an inspection at Inman Energy’s Randolph coal mine, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. MSHA chief Joe Main said: “the conduct and behavior exhibited when we caught the mine operator by surprise is nothing short of outrageous. […]
“Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living” was the rallying cry of community organizer Mother Jones (a.k.a. Mary Harris Jones, 1837-1930) to fire up workers as they demanded better working conditions and labor rights. The motto still resonates today, especially this week when workers, human rights, and public health advocates commemorate International […]
Those who work to prevent death, disease, and disasters often have a thankless task – if they do their jobs well, people rarely notice. But two OSHA inspectors recently saved workers’ lives in a very visible way, and the agency wrote about it on their blog, (Work in Progress). Trench collapses are an all-too-common occurrence, […]
Earlier this month, Yale University student Michele Dufault was killed by lathe equipment at the school’s chemistry lab. It appears that she was working alone late at night and her hair got tangled in the machine. Richard Van Noorden of Nature News puts the tragedy in context: Around the United States, laboratory directors and safety […]
Earlier this month, in my post “CDC’s NIOSH says WHAT about asbestos???” I reported on the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s (NIOSH) new treatise on asbestos, and my dismay with the agency’s characterization of the mineral as a “potential occupational carcinogen.” NIOSH’s current intelligence bulletins are supposed to convey the most up-to-date scientific […]
by Elizabeth Grossman When the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 of the 126 workers on board and critically injuring three, the ruptured Macondo well – located nearly a mile beneath the sea surface about 50 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana – unleashed what has been called the largest accidental […]
by Ellen Smith, Mine Safety and Health News While Congress looks for sources of funding, they may want to just ask mining companies to pay their overdue bills. A one-day snapshot by Mine Safety and Health News found operators owing $55 million in delinquent penalties. The Civil Penalties Special Report reveals coal companies owe the […]
[Updated 4/21/2011 below] [Updated 4/25/2011 below] Deep in the Bitterroot Mountains of the Idaho panhandle, mine rescue teams are working around the clock to locate Larry “Pete” Marek, 53. Marek and his brother were working in Hecla Mining’s Lucky Friday silver mine on Friday afternoon (4/15) when the roof collapsed. His brother Mike escaped, but […]
In much of the reporting I’ve seen on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the plant workers are an anonymous, if much-praised, group. The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi digs deeper to tell us more about who some of these workers are, and what their experiences can tell us about occupational health and safety in Japan. He […]