Worker Safety/Comp

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MERRI OK

see osha, niosh

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SEE API BENZENE CANCER COVERUP

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https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/supreme-court-decision-in-cedar-point-4375087/#:~:text=In%20Cedar%20Point%20Nursery%2C%20the,automatically%20counts%20as%20a%20taking.

Supreme Court Decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid May Provide Businesses New Opportunity to Challenge Regulations

On June 23, 2021, the Supreme Court decided Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a case involving a California regulation that requires employers to allow union organizers to enter their property to solicit members. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the Court stood with property owners and held these unwanted intrusions constituted a “taking” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his majority opinion that allowing unions to freely come onto privately held land was a violation of property owners’ constitutional rights, even if unions “only” had fleeting access to the land. But this seemingly sweeping ruling declines to extend this logic to things like regulatory inspections overseen by state workers.This should serve as a powerful reminder that a conservative court is not a panacea to bureaucratic overreach, and regulatory reform must come through legislative and executive processes. This advisory breaks down the Court’s opinion and explores how the ruling might provide grounds for challenging other regulations.

Majority Opinion

The central issue in Cedar Point Nursery was the constitutionality of a California “access regulation” that requires farm owners to allow labor union organizers to access their property in order to “solicit support for unionization.” The regulation provides that union organizers can access an employer’s property for up to three hours a day and 120 days per year. The farmers claimed the regulation amounted to the government taking their property without compensation, which is a violation of the Fifth Amendment.

The Fifth Amendment prohibits property from being “taken for public use, without just compensation.” A typical example of a taking occurs when the government uses its power of eminent domain to seize someone’s land for the purpose of building an airport or widening a road. The Fifth Amendment requires the government to pay for that land. Government regulations can also count as takings. For example, in one famous case, the Supreme Court ruled that a New York regulation requiring a landlord to install TV cables on her apartment building was a taking, since the regulation caused a “permanent physical occupation” of her property.

In Cedar Point Nursery, the Supreme Court ruled that the California access regulation is a taking because it forces farmers to give union organizers physical access to their property. The Court explained that any regulation that physically “invades” a person’s property automatically counts as a taking. The Court also stressed that “the right to exclude is ‘universally held to be a fundamental element of the property right’” in land. Since the access regulation limits the farmers’ “right to exclude” and forces them to give union organizers physical access, it takes away enough of the farmers’ property rights to require compensation under the Fifth Amendment.

How Much Should The Government Pay?

One question that Cedar Point Nursery leaves open is what courts should do if they determine that a regulation is a taking. Since the Fifth Amendment requires the government to compensate an owner for a taking, courts usually direct the government to pay the value of the land the government took. When a taking is temporary, compensation usually equals the rental value of the property while it was taken. But in cases like Cedar Point Nursery, where the government limited the farmers’ property rights without taking their property altogether, proving the appropriate amount of compensation is difficult.Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that the compensation could total as little as $50 for a union site visit. But the majority did not address this issue, leaving it to lower courts to apply different approaches.

New Path To Challenging Regulations?

The Court’s holding that some temporary physical invasions are per se takings could make it easier for businesses to challenge other regulations that give the government or others access to private property. Indeed, one commentator called the Cedar Point Nursery ruling “acrushing blow to organized labor, which often relies on workplace access to safeguard workers’ rights.” In reality, the case is less about the right to bar unions from one’s property than about the taking of one’s property without the “just compensation” demanded by the Fifth Amendment. That right to compensation could be extended to other regulations. Examples include the Occupational and Safety Health Act (“OSHA”), which requires employers to give a government inspector and employee representative (often designated by a union) access to their premises. See29 C.F.R. § 1903.3 (2021). However, the Court’s ruling identified some important caveats that could complicate efforts to challenge OSHA and other regulations.

First, the Court said that a regulation will not rise to the level of a taking unless an owner’s property is accessed multiple times. Unlike the access regulation, where union organizers entered the farmers’ property year after year, one or two instances of property access will not suffice. Second, the Court clarified that the government may always access private property in exceptional circumstances, such as “in the event of public or private necessity.” Finally, the government may require an owner to allow access to his land in exchange for some benefit, like a building permit. The Court explained that as long as the government’s access to the property has a reasonable connection to the benefit offered, the access is not a taking. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts seems to have no problem with this course of action. He wrote: “[T]he government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits, without causing a taking . . . . [G]overnment health and safety inspection regimes will generally not constitute takings.” This comports with longstanding precedent upholding the government’s broad discretion to place reasonable restrictions on a business’s activity. Litigants who hope to use the Cedar Point Nurserydecision to challenge other regulations will need to explain why none of these three exceptions applies.

Businesses may have an opening to challenge certain regulations following the Cedar Point Nursery decision. Still, the exceptions in the Supreme Court’s ruling will likely limit its impact, as will the challenge of proving how much compensation the government owes.

Summer associate Micah Allred assisted in the preparation of this advisory.

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an 9 25

The huge Labor Day banner outside the Labor Department building with Trump’s picture and the words “American Workers First” depicts one of Donald’s most disgusting lies.

With multiple factual examples, Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times, provides proof that Trump is the most brazenly “anti-worker” president in U.S. history. With his Big Vicious and Ugly Bill, barely passed by his fawning GOP in Congress, and dozens of illegal Executive Orders, he is smashing the American Worker beyond the avarice of the cruelest Plutocrat.

Quoting liberally from his Labor Day article in The Guardian, I urge labor union leaders and rank-and-file union members to absorb its contents. This article could make American labor angry enough to mount an unstoppable movement to tell Trump, “You’re Fired,” and fire up enough convinced or electorally scared lawmakers in Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office.

The aggregated madness from this failed gambling czar, wholly devoid of empathy, compassion, truth, while betraying his own voters and his oath of office, follows:

Trump put corporate interests first by “often cutting [workers’] pay or making their jobs more dangerous.” This includes gutting regulations that protect miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the top labor watchdog – The National Labor Relations Board, whose now stalled mission is to “protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics.” Then “Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.”

“Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage construction of factories that make renewable-energy products.”

Trump is pressing to end “minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers,” and has already ended a “Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.” Trump adamantly opposes raising this frozen minimum wage for 25 million workers who would benefit from a $15 federal minimum wage. He ended a “requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.”

Tariffs and reckless, wholesale deportations are “pushing up prices and slowing economic growth.” His big tax cut for the super-rich is being paid for by “millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage” (from Medicaid). As for deportation, it is “undermining their employers’ businesses,” and I might add closing down some of them and impairing farmers from harvesting their crops.

“In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president [Liz] Schuler said: ‘We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.’”

Trump is swinging an axe to end worker safety protections, cutting OSHA staff and pushing those still working at OSHA to weaken all kinds of essential safety and health protections, ranging from coal miners to workers under extreme heat, to reducing fines for violating safety rules, and much more. He “froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.” “…a major killer among coal miners.”

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) “forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9 million lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. ‘If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs.’ ‘Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers,’” and tens of billions of withheld tax revenues annually, one might add.

IFrame Content

The list of anti-worker cruelty goes on. Tyrant Trump always says, “This is only the beginning.” He acts like an imperious dictator because that is what he is, imposing burdens and pain on the American people – in red and blue states alike. The six rogue Supreme Court Injustices, who thus far know no limits, are enabling the madman in the White House. Before his sleazy conversion, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.” UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORST IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE!

The flip side of Trump’s feverish repression of worker rights, remedies, and existing protections is that there is no chance of reforming anti-union laws, such as the notorious Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, with Trump and his congressional cronies in power.

Readers may well ask why all these attacks on workers didn’t lead unions and their allies to launch a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS and insist that the feeble, corporate-conflicted Democratic Party adopt it authentically and replace their stagnant leadership with new, vigorous leaders. That is what they should have done right after their disastrous loss to Trump, the serial law violator, abuser of women, corrupter, daily, delusionary falsehood teller, shredder of the Constitution, greedy, egomaniacal, and seriously dangerous personality.

There is still one Labor Day before the 2026 midterm elections. Can Unions and the Democratic Party save our Republic from the rampaging daily Trump outlawry and viciousness (he is now invading American cities while wrecking our country)? It should be easy, just based on his failed record. (See my letter of August 27, 2024, to Liz Shuler).

As the economy worsens amidst the chaos, consumer prices rise, unemployment rises, and Trump behaves more like Captain Queeg (the fictional, cruel, and crazy skipper in the film, The Caine Mutiny), voters for Trump are starting to ask, “Did We Vote for This?” Non-voters, in turn, should resolve to head for the polls and reject what Trump is doing. The people who are the sovereign in our Constitution must start acting like they have power.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/leaked-memo-amazon-execs-sought-to-tar-fired-employee-who-organized-coronavirus-walkout/

as Amazon grapples with coronavirus infections among workers at a growing number of its facilities, senior leaders sought to discredit the organizer of a walkout in New York this week, according to an internal memo.Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky, in notes from a meeting of top executives circulated within the company and leaked to VICE News, called walkout organizer Chris Smalls — who was fired earlier this week — “not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us vs. him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time ho…

michaels sci bk

slaugherhouse crazy # cuts/minute 140--> 170 min

dupont texas pesticide 4 kia osha fine 90K --> 230K$ (dupont sells uits safety services?!)

$ to visit 1x 165 years; fines raised in 2015 to 12K$ (walmart sec guard crushed to death, fined 7K spent millions on liars, got nearly to scotus]

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-march-2-2020/

bill 1970 unions had in-house saFETY, NOW mostly gone; burton sp CA huge, not even on committee; nader big

see massive fail on black lung

In 1974, NIOSH first called for silica exposure limits twice as strict as those in place for coal miners and other workers. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that MSHA and others began to get serious about silica in coal mines.

NPR and FRONTLINE obtained internal memos from the Clinton administration that showed alarm back then about clusters of advanced lung disease among coal miners as young as 40. MSHA sent out alerts to coal mining companies, warning about excessive exposure to silica dust and severe disease among miners. NIOSH again called for a silica exposure limit that would be twice as tough, plus separate regulation of silica, as did a Department of Labor advisory committee.

“We started a national campaign first to raise awareness,” recalled Davitt McAteer, the assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health from 1994 to 2000.

“And it was that campaign that began to try to go after the silica requirements, raise the silica standard, and start on a separate path to control silica.”

McAteer proposed a major overhaul of the dust samplingsystem, which included other loopholes that permitted excessive exposures and inaccurate measurement of coal mine dust.But the effort encountered stiff opposition from the National Mining Association, the industry’s biggest lobbying group. The group sued over some elements of the plan and won.

“And then we ran out of time,” McAteer says. “And it’s something that’s unfortunate and put a lot of lives at risk.”

Mine dust loopholes

documents reveal how Amazon risked lives to prioritize speed and explosive growth

ProPublica

120

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/22/american-petroleum-institute-oil-workers-radioactive-nobel-rollingstone

https://www.thedailybeast.com/apple-and-google-named-in-lawsuit-over-congolese-child-cobalt-mining-deaths?ref=home

world’s biggest tech firms have been named in a U.S. lawsuit brought byCongolese families who say their children were killed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops, and electric cars.The Guardianreports that Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Teslahave all been named as defendants in the lawsuit filed on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The companies are accused of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children. The families say their children were working illegally in mines that produced battery-grade cobalt used in products made by the tech giants. The families claim children were paid as little as $2 a day, and say some were killed in tunnel collapses while others were paralyzed or suffered life-changing injuries from accidents. Cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable lithium batteries. The companies haven’t commented on the lawsuit, but a spokesperson for Glencore—the company that owns the mines— said it “does not tolerate any form of child, forced, or compulsory labor.”

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NB how big data is driving workers eg amazon and koch ga-pac

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-safety-crisis-at-koch-industries-georgia-pacific/

no lnx

The safety crisis at Koch Industries’ Georgia-Pacific

Written by Christopher Leonard / ProPublica August 8, 2019

This story is adapted from the forthcoming book “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.”

This story was co-published with Fortune.

In March of 2014, Jim Hannan joined a group of executives at Georgia-Pacific to discuss a burgeoning crisis.

Hannan was CEO of Georgia-Pacific, reporting to Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, which had bought the paper and pulp company in 2005. Hannan, a longtime Koch employee, had been doing a stellar job by some standards — the maker of Brawny paper towels and Quilted Northern toilet paper was paying down debt and delivering higher profits. But there was a hitch: The workplace was becoming more dangerous.

In 2013, two Georgia-Pacific employees had been killed on the job. Injuries had continued to rise, and Hannan was upset. During the meeting, Hannan berated his leadership team. “The last six months is unacceptable,” he said, according to notes taken by someone who observed the meeting.

Hannan suggested that the future of the company was on the line.

“If we can’t keep safe, why invest?” Hannan asked.

Senior managers and executives at Koch were aware of the growing safety problem for years, company documents obtained by ProPublica show.

“What happened?” Hannan asked in the 2014 meeting, according to the notes. All divisions of Koch industries operate using Charles Koch’s philosophy called Market-Based Management. MBM, which at Koch Industries is used to address all business questions from sales to safety, should have been solving this problem. But it was not.

Indeed, the dangers only got worse. When Hannan held the meeting in early spring, no workers had yet died that year. By the end of the year, six Georgia-Pacific employees were killed on the job. Accidents kept rising in the years after. More worrisome, the accident rate also increased during that period, meaning that each employee faced a higher chance of being hurt on the job, according to internal Koch documents.

One internal Koch presentation showed that Georgia-Pacific’s safety record in 2016 by one measure ranked in the bottom half of U.S. paper and pulp companies. Most important, Georgia-Pacific’s safety record was worse than its major competitors’, including Weyerhaeuser and Pratt Industries.

The story of Georgia-Pacific’s safety crisis, revealed in internal corporate documents obtained by ProPublica, interviews with executives and workers, and Koch’s own data, shines a rare light on the inner workings of Koch Industries, one of the nation’s largest and most secretive corporations. The company is adept at making brilliant investments, streamlining operations and boosting profits. But in the shadow of this success, work has become more dangerous for many Georgia-Pacific employees.

Asked a series of detailed questions about its safety record for this article, Koch Industries and Georgia-Pacific did not dispute the numbers and internal documents, in some cases providing updated figures. They declined to make any employee available to comment on this article or to address specific questions about what might be driving the rise in injuries.

But Georgia-Pacific points out that it has taken measures to fix the problem. It invested billions in modernizing equipment, much of it aimed at making the factories safer. It taught employees safety procedures, and it enforced the rules strictly, the company said.

In its quest to fix the crisis, however, Georgia-Pacific stopped short of one thing: slowing down production and risking profits.

Instead, Koch’s leaders “turned to the MBM® framework to help,” Hannan wrote in the July 2016 issue of Koch Industries’ internal newsletter.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/dying-on-the-job-how-workers-get-hurt-when-businesses-keep-deadly-secrets/

omg

...

Unfortunately, at the same time, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reduced its workplace safety inspectors to the lowest level in its 48-year history, diminishing its capacity to investigate workplace deaths, illnesses and injuries.And it reversed a rule that would have provided more information about workplace dangers nationally. It decided to stop requiring large employers to electronically report injury and illness data. OSHA still requires employers to document this information, but they don’t have to tell anyone.

The Frank Leasure case illustrates how this decision endangers workers. The USW Health and Safety Department conducts what it calls learning events, also known as accident investigations, at USW job sites, shares information about the problems it finds and publishes online hazard alerts that recommend methods to prevent recurrence.

These hazard alerts don’t blame and shame. They don’t name the company where the incident occurred or the victim. They describe what happened and then recommend ways to prevent similar injuries and deaths. They’re intended to help local unions and employers identify and eliminate similar hazards in their workplaces.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/how-radical-republicans-and-the-trump-administration-are-killing-american-workers/

dc report

Reuters reporters Julia Harte and Peter Eisler have assembled a powerful investigative article on how “the Trump administration’s plan to weaken the beryllium rule offers a case study in the renewed power businesses can wield in the regulatory process.”

OSHA’s standard to protect workers from the disabling and deadly effects of beryllium exposure was issued in the waning days of the Obama administration. Exposure to beryllium dust causes chronic beryllium disease and lung cancer.Symptoms include difficulty breathing/shortness of breath, weakness, fatigue, loss of appetite, weight loss, joint pain, cough and fever. Over time it may lead to disability and death.

OSHA had been working on a new standard to update its seriously outdated beryllium standard for 20 years, and it was an agreement between the main beryllium producer Materion and the United Steelworkers that enabled OSHA to push the new standard over the line before Trump took office. The labor-industry agreement reduced the Permissible Exposure Limit, added “ancillary provisions” requiring exposure monitoring, training, medical surveillance and other provisions, and covered general industry (e.g. manufacturing) worker. OSHA also added protections for construction and maritime workers who are mainly exposed during the process of abrasive blasting using ground coal slag to remove rust and paint from ships and other structures.

The Trump administration’s plan to weaken the beryllium rule offers a case study in the renewed power businesses can wield in the regulatory process.

Exposure to beryllium dust has devastating health effects on exposed workers like Wardell Davis who was an abrasive blaster with a Norfolk, Va., shipbuilding contractor:

Then 24 years old, with no high school diploma, Davis had for years bounced between part-time jobs. The contractor, he says, promised better pay for the grueling labor of blasting the hulls of U.S. Navy ships with coarsely ground coal particles to remove rust and paint. He recalls the fog of dust created as workers fired the crushed coal – a residue from coal-fired power plants – against the ship bottoms from high-powered hoses, moving through the tented blasting area in respirators and protective suits.

A year later, Davis found a better job with a plumbing and heating company. He became a father, but still found time to hit the YMCA most days for a swim, a lifelong passion. Then, in 2011, he began struggling to hold his breath under water; soon, he couldn’t hold it at all. He was dogged by a persistent cough, sweats and nausea.

In 2014, doctors at Norfolk’s Sentara Hospital found a “black foreign material” in his lungs. Davis successfully filed a disability claim for “pneumoconiosis/silicosis and/or interstitial fibrotic disease caused by exposure to abrasive blasting dust.” Four years and three biopsies later, Davis survives on a single lung.

Unable to work, he lives on disability payments, and has brought suit against abrasives manufacturers and safety equipment providers he alleges failed to protect him. They deny responsibility for his failing health.

“If I ever would have thought that this would have happened to me, I would’ve never ever worked there,” he told Reuters, his words punctuated by coughs. “Ever.”

The Reuters article describes the fierce industry opposition to the part of the standard that covered construction and maritime industries, not because the regulated industries themselves had strong objections (they could use safer alternatives to coal slag), but because the sellers of coal slag feared devastating effects on their sales as shipyards and construction sites moved to safer alternatives for abrasive blasting.

In June 2017, OSHA issued a proposal rolling back protections for construction and maritime workers. As I wrote then:

Today’s proposal keeps the new PEL, but removes the “ancillary provisions” for construction and shipyard workers. The ancillary provisions would have required employers to provide exposure monitoring, regulated areas (and a “competent person” in construction), a written exposure control plan, personal protective equipment (PPE), and work clothing, hygiene areas and practices, housekeeping, medical surveillance, medical removal, and worker training for construction and shipyard workers exposed to beryllium from abrasive blasting using coal slag compounds that contain beryllium.

Without the benefits of the air testing and health monitoring requirements, the exposure limits for beryllium – are meaningless.

As the Reuters article explained, the new proposal ignored the benefits of the rule and significantly weakened protections:

The protections would cost affected industries nearly $12 million a year, or about $1,000 per worker, according to the 2016 cost-benefit assessment. That analysis, a mandated component of the rule-making process, put the savings to society from averted deaths and illnesses at nearly $28 million, yielding a net economic benefit of about $16 million a year.

Without the benefits of the air testing and health monitoring requirements, the exposure limits for beryllium “are meaningless,” said David Michaels, who headed OSHA for seven years under Obama.

“If there’s no air testing or disease surveillance, there’s no way to know how much exposure workers are getting or who may be getting sick,” said Michaels, who now teaches at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

The changes were unprecedented in OSHA’s almost 50-year history. According to Deborah Berkowitz, OSHA’s former chief of staff, now working for the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit workers rights group, “Never in OSHA’s history has the agency decided to roll back worker protections for a carcinogen.”

And as I explained in the article, OSHA’s “argument ran against decades of OSHA protocol, which held that if significant risk of exposure to a hazardous substance cannot be completely eliminated, “ancillary provisions” are necessary beyond existing protective equipment, said Jordan Barab, former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA under Obama.”

Who Was Behind The Attack on Worker Protections?

All of the above is fact. But why did OSHA decide to upend these protections? And here we get to the ability of powerful business concerns to reduce badly needed worker protections.

Leading the charge to weaken worker protections was Congressman Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), chair of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections until Democrats took over the House of Representatives this month. Byrne had met with two abrasive manufacturers Mobile Abrasives Inc and Harsco Minerals, who were members of an industry group, the Abrasive Blasting Manufacturers Alliance (ABMA). Byrne wrote to the White House Office of Management and Budget, asking them to weaken the worker protections.Much of Byrne’s letter was taken word-for-word from comments submitted by the ABMA’s lobbying firm, Squire Patton Boggs.

The plot thickens further:

A former Former Patton Boggs senior partner Mark Cowan, a lobbyist who served on Trump’s Labor Department transition team, also became involved. On March 7, Cowan, who served as deputy head of OSHA under former President Ronald Reagan, attended a meeting at the Labor Department, where Squire Patton Boggs lobbyists asked agency lawyers about OSHA’s plans for the beryllium rule. Cowan later wrote an essay arguing that, thanks to existing safety rules, the workers “were never threatened by beryllium exposure to begin with.”

On May 15, Harsco employees and Cowan attended another meeting at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Seventeen days later, OSHA announced a second delay in the rule’s implementation. And on June 27, OSHA announced its proposal to revoke the safety requirements entirely.

Both Byrne and Robert Wittman (R-Va.), then-chairman of a House subcommittee overseeing Naval programs and infrastructure had received significant campaign contributions from the Shipbuilders Council of America and the Associated Builders & Contractors.

The abrasive blasters and the other industry associations argue that existing protections are sufficient, and no abrasive blaster has ever been diagnosed with beryllium-related disease.

But not so fast, say Harte and Eisler. It turns out that:

No one is officially checking for such illnesses, say dozens of occupational health specialists and worker safety advocates interviewed by Reuters. The symptoms of berylliosis – shortness of breath, a persistent cough, fatigue – are similar to those of some other diseases. As a result, diagnosing the malady requires a specific blood test that just a few laboratories in the country perform, said one of the labs, the National Jewish Health Advanced Diagnostics Laboratories. They cost about $300 per person, the lab says.

The nonprofit Center for Construction Research and Training, a research arm of North America’s Building Trade Unions that has partnered with OSHA to educate construction workers about health hazards, has researched beryllium exposure. In a series of studies, it found airborne beryllium concentrations of more than 40 times the new permissible exposure limit during coal slag abrasive blasting operations. Other studies by groups including the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found beryllium-related health problems in various construction trades.

Lee Newman, a beryllium researcher at the University of Colorado, Denver, said he has treated construction trades workers who did demolition work and went on to develop berylliosis. Berylliosis “definitely” afflicts such workers, he said.

“To say otherwise is to ignore the published science on the subject,” Newman said.

Conclusion: Deconstruction of the Regulatory State Faces Obstacles

So the Trump administration’s war on workers proceeds as they continue to ignore the fact that – in the words of former OSHA head David Michaels—regulations don’t kill jobs; they keep jobs from killing workers.

OSHA has suspended enforcement of ancillary protections for shipyard and construction workers, but the agency has not yet issued its final revised beryllium standard. In order to weaken worker protections, agencies have to summon strong and convincing evidence that the reasoning for the current protections were either wrong, that conditions have changed. Worker advocates believe that OSHA’s arguments in the proposal were weak, but weak evidence hasn’t stopped Trump administration agencies from weakening protections for workers, the environment or consumers before. Following issuance of the weakened standard, labor unions and other worker advocates will undoubtedly sue the administration.

Meanwhile, the time has passed when the Trump administration can get away with ignoring their mandate without answering for their deeds.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the new chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, said in response to Reuters’ questions that the panel will investigate whether OSHA has “valid economic or scientific rationale” to eliminate the beryllium rule’s shipyard and construction provisions. The Virginia Democrat noted that OSHA has routinely included such provisions in other health standards, including a rule on toxic silica dust. By killing those provisions for beryllium, he said, “the Trump administration has created a double standard.”

And as we wrote last week, the White House has approved OSHA’s rollback of the Obama administration’s recordkeeping standard. Because of the government shutdown, we don’t know yet exactly what it says, but with a new Congress, it’s unlikely that OSHA will get away with that without defending itself before Congress.

The battle to protect workers is far from over. In fact, it’s just heating up. Stay tuned.

818 map

https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/fatal-workplace-injuries-are-on-the-rise-in-the-us

Between 2015 and 2016, fatal workplace injuries increased by 7%, an alarming statistic.The 5,190 workplace deaths in 2016 weren’t all in one career sector or geographical area, either. Some of it is a 23% increase in workplace violence, now the Number Two cause of workplace fatalities in 2016. Overdoses on the job are on the rise, too, with a 32% increase in 2016, and an increase of about 25% each year in fatalities since 2012. Injury Claim Coach has pulled 2015 and 2016 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and organized it into a series of visualizations that tell the story.

What kind injuries are we talking about?

In 2015, the BLS listed workplace fatalities grouped into six categories, with transportation incidents taking the lion’s share at 43% of the total.

...many charts and maps

May. 30, 2018

Pesticide safety

California sued to prevent the EPA from suspending the Worker Protection Standard, which requires safety training for agricultural workers handling dangerous pesticides.Read more

Result: The EPA backed down two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, announcing it would implement the standard after all.

WINNER: CALIFORNIA

capt 2/17

http://www.propublica.org/series/workers-compensation

safety standards are at risk of being rolled back at the bidding of offshore oil drilling companies—and we need your help.

The Well Control Rule, finalized in 2016, requires real-time oversight of risky drilling operations and precautionary failsafe measures to stop a spill when things go wrong. Last year the Trump administration began rewriting the rule, which the fossil fuel industry regards as a “burden.”

With the Trump administration’s ongoing push for more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and its proposal to open virtually every mile of coastline to new oil and gas rigs, now is not the time to tinker with offshore safety and environmental standards.

https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2018/interior-moves-to-erode-key-protection-standard-on-offshore-oil-and-gas-drilling?_ga=2.47805924.253773879.1532379284-1627324521.1532379284

aPRIL 27, 2018

Washington, D.C. —

Only a week after the anniversary of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the Department of the Interior today announced its intended rollback of protection standards enacted to prevent another Deepwater Horizon tragedy. The well control rule, finalized under President Obama in 2016, requires real-time oversight of risky drilling operations and precautionary failsafe measures to stop a spill when things go wrong. Interior officials began re-writing the rule after President Trump issued an executive order last year calling for offshore drilling controls — regarded as a “burden” by the fossil fuel industry — to be rolled back.

On a stakeholder call today, officials from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement emphasized the number of provisions affected, not the substance of the protections they provide. While details will be clear once the proposal is issued, this rule change is clearly designed to take regulators out of the process rather than increase any oversight.

The following is a statement from Steve Mashuda, Managing Attorney for Oceans at Earthjustice:

“History has already taught us the lesson that when the oil industry drills, it spills. The administration’s attempt to erode commonsense safety and environmental protections designed to prevent another tragedy on the scale of Deepwater Horizon is deeply troubling. With Interior’s ongoing push for more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and its proposal to open virtually every mile of coastline to new oil and gas rigs, now is not the time to tinker with safety and environmental standards. Americans deserve better than this dangerous and unnecessary race to expose our coastal communities and treasured marine environments to the risk of devastating oil spills. Our energy future lies in clean renewable energy, not at the bottom of the ocean — and not at the bottom of the regulatory barrel.”

The draft rule will now be sent to the Federal Register to be published next week, and agency officials will accept public comment on the proposal for 60 days.

https://www.ecowatch.com/deepwater-horizon-investigation-trump-2561729233.html

Deepwater Horizon Anniversary: Trump Administration Ignores Advice on Preventing Explosions, Injuries, Blowouts

The Trump administration is ignoring advice from the bipartisan commission that investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster as officials move to repeal offshore drilling safety regulations adopted in its aftermath.

Friday is the eighth anniversary of the explosion that killed 11 oil workers and caused more than 210 million gallons of oil to flow uncontrolled into the Gulf of Mexico for more than three months, killing thousands of marine mammals and birds.

"Deepwater Horizon was a deadly reminder that offshore drilling is dangerous. Refusing to learn from this disaster threatens workers, wildlife and coastal communities," said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Trump's plans to get rid of safety rules dishonor the dead and ramp up the risk of another catastrophe."....

see sugar high temp dangerous for workers

https://voicesfromtheheartland.blogspot.com/2013/04/bush-administration-responsible-for-no.html

Friday, April 26, 2013

Bush Administration Responsible for No Oversight of West, Texas, or Other Fertilizer/Chemical Storage Facilities by EPA

“Perry reworked the language and helped to get it added to the spending bill in a conference committee. Under the new amendment, the DHS would have nominal authority to regulate the chemical industry but also have its hands tied where required.”

What Phillip Perry, VP Cheney's son-in-law, did was to add language the chemical industry wanted to an appropriations bill rider that moved the task of regulating and oversight of chemical plants from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Another day, another group that has bought and paid for Republican members of Congress. This time it is the chemical industry which is only being highlighted after the West, TX, fertilizer plant blew up last week while storing large amounts chemicals that should have set off red flags. EPA is no longer in charge of regulating these plants while the Texas Department of Health who had the authority seems pretty worthless as they took the owner's word with no inspections.

Seems chemical manufacturer's thought giving DHS authority for regulation and oversight with little money provided by Congress would allow them to operate as they chose without no regard to safety. As we saw in West, Texas, the lack of oversight blew up in their face with a plant storing chemicals that were way over the limit allowed in unsafe storage units with no markings so fire department officials didn't know what was in the storage tanks. Because of not knowing what was stored, the volunteer fire department used water instead of foam which is used to fight chemical fires. The owner of the facility has already been sued.

This picture is from the site of the West, Texas fertilizer storage facility the night of the explosion where 10 of the 13 killed were volunteer fire fighters, one was a paramedic, and one was from Dallas search and rescue -- all first responders who died because of lack of oversight and inspections of this plant:

[pix of rubble]

With Chris Hayes connecting the dots on MSNBC with this video, it shows what happened which eventually led to the West, Texas, fertilizer plant exploding.

Summary of the Chris Hayes video:

Let’s recap: The Bush administration’s own cabinet secretaries come up with a plan to regulate these chemical plants. It’s stymied byPhil Perry once. The Bush administration sides with the chemical industry when it’s brought before Congress. And then, basically in a backroom maneuver, Perry does the chemical industry’s bidding by moving the oversight of this from the EPA, which the chemical industry hates, to DHS, which the chemical industry thinks they can more easily manipulate.

Now, fast-forward six years. The West Fertilizer company is storing more than 13-hundred times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by DHS. And it does appear now, that not only did DHS literally have no idea that the West Fertilizer company was storing ammonium nitrate. But according to Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up.

Everyone in America should watch this video which connects the dots which all lead back to the Bush Administration, Phillip Perry, and the chemical industry:

Bush and the West explosion: The untold story of deregulating chemical plants

Collier Meyerson, @youngcollier11:26 PM on 04/25/2013

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/23/8-years-bp-oil-spill-sick-cleanup-workers-waiting-louisiana-court

Years After BP Oil Spill, Sick Cleanup Workers Still Waiting for Day in Court

On the eighth anniversary of the BP oil spill, Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré stood in front of the New Orleans Federal Court House and called “bullshit” on the court’s handling of claims made by those who participated in the cleanup efforts.

Thousands of workers BP hired to clean up the spill that polluted the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 have claimed exposure to oil and the dispersant has made them sick and still have not had their day in court. “It’s a crying damn shame we’ve allowed this in America,” Honoré said.

...

the eighth anniversary of the BP oil spill, Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré stood in front of the New Orleans Federal Court House and called “bullshit” on the court’s handling of claims made by those who participated in the cleanup efforts.

“Guess who don’t have their life back? The people who did the cleanup, the people who have to go home and get public assistance to stay alive, and it’s had an impact on their family,” Honoré said on April 20 at a rally aimed at seeking justice for cleanup workers.

Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré at April 20 rally in New Orleans.*

Honoré joined cleanup workers and their supporters calling for federal judge Carl Barbier to reverse his decision to delay hearing remaining cases of cleanup workers indefinitely. They gathered before delivering a petition with 25,000 signatures seeking justice for the cleanup workers.

The petition states: “The Plaintiff Steering Committee walked away with $700 million; the Claims Administrator, in charge of processing the first round of payments to victims, walked away with $155 million dollars.” So far only $60 million has been paid “to a small fraction of the injured people who helped in the cleanup or lived in the designated zones.”

Jonathan Henderson, an environmental advocate.*

Jonathan Henderson, founder of Vanishing Earth, an environmental watchdog organization, helped compile the numbers cited in the petition from court filings and the medical claims settlement administrator, Garretson Resolution Group Status Report. He said he believes that justice delayed is justice denied. “People end up dying. They give up hope and they stop fighting. Time is what wears people down,” Henderson said.

Judge Barbier, the federal judge handling BP oil spill-related cases, made a controversial ruling in 2014 that affected a cleanup workers’ class action suit by siding with the oil company's interpretation of a medical settlement agreement. Barbier ruled that those spill workers who hadn’t been diagnosed by a doctor before 2012 were not entitled to settlement payments in the class action suit.

Two recent scientific studies offered mounting evidence of the potential harms resulting from the oil dispersants, Corexit 9500 and Corexit 952, applied to break oil into smaller droplets during cleanup efforts in the 2010 spill.

A study by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences found that BP oil spill workers exposed to either forms of Corexit were more likely to experience a range of health symptoms such as coughing or burning in the lungs, eyes, nose, or throat.

In addition, a study from the Uniformed Services University, a federal government-run medical and health sciences school in Maryland, found that almost 2,000 members of the U.S. Coast Guard reporting exposure to oil dispersants experienced negative health issues, including “lung irritation, skin rash, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea,” more often than those who avoided dispersants or only had contact with oil.

I asked BP via email if the company would still use the same types of dispersant if there were another major oil spill but have not received a response. In the past the company has said the use of dispersants was approved by federal environmental agencies and the Coast Guard.

Nalco Environmental Solutions, Corexit’s manufacturer, donates to political action committees, according to public documents listed by the Center for Responsive Politics. A report by the center indicates that Nalco's spending on lobbying the year of the spill increased dramatically. Payments in 2010 included $160,000 to Ogilvy Government Relations to lobby on Nalco’s behalf on “issues related to the use of Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.”

Honoré likened the use of dispersant in the Gulf to the recent alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria and drew comparisons to the United States’ response: “We were poised to start World War lll over what the Syrians did to their own people, but here, we still haven’t held BP accountable.”

“These people are suffering from chemicals that our own government allowed a foreign company [BP] to put in our waters and poison our people,” Honoré said.

According to The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune: “Nearly one million gallons was dropped by air, and another 770,000 gallons was injected into the damaged wellhead about a mile under the water's surface. It was the first time dispersants had been used on a large scale and in proximity to people.” The unknown impacts of this approach essentially turned the Gulf Coast into a giant petri dish.

Capt. Joseph Brown, BP oil spill cleanup worker.*

At the April 20 rally, Capt. Joseph Brown spoke of seawater mixed with oil and dispersant getting into his boots and on his legs while working on a boat laying containment boom to keep spilled oil away from Gulf wetlands. He says that not only did this work impact his health, but it sickened his wife too, whom he says was exposed to the chemicals on his dirty clothes.

George Barisich, fisherman who worked on the BP oil spill cleanup.

When George Barisich, a third-generation Louisiana commercial fisherman, found he couldn't fish after the spill, he used his boat to assist in the cleanup effort. He said the oil and dispersant damaged his lung capacity and memory. He also asserted that not only did BP fail to inform workers of the potential hazards of Corexit, the company forbade workers from using respirators and threatened to fire workers who complained.

The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) lays out standards and training for when oil spill cleanup workers should wear respiratory protection. In June 2010, a couple months into the spill, OSHA posted a worker education and training booklet that outlined how to deal with exposure to Corexit and other potential risks of oil spill cleanup. For Corexit, it recommended workers “avoid prolonged breathing of vapors. Use with ventilation equal to unobstructed outdoors in moderate breeze,” among other precautions.

...

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https://www.ecowatch.com/deepwater-horizon-investigation-trump-2561729233.html

Deepwater Horizon Anniversary: Trump Administration Ignores Advice on Preventing Explosions, Injuries, Blowouts

The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling made a series of recommendations in its January 2011 report to President Obama. Only the most significant ones—including a well-control rule that would have prevented the explosion and blowout preventer rule to seal compromised wells—were adopted. They are now being targeted for significant rollbacks by the administration, which is expected to publish revisions in the near future.

Commission co-chairs Bob Graham and William K. Reilly wrote to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke almost a year ago, shortly after President Trump ordered an expansion of offshore drilling and more industry-friendly rules to govern it, urging restraint in his deregulatory zeal.

"The Commission members hold the unanimous view that weakening or rescinding the Well Control Rule would aggravate the inherent risks of offshore operations, put workers in harm's way, and imperil marine waters in which drilling occurs," they wrote in a May 8, 2017 letter, in which they called that rule "the most broadly important measure to come out of what the Commission learned."

Offshore incidents—including fires, explosions, injuries and the loss of well control (also known as blowouts)—have all steadily declined since 2014, according to data from Bureau of Safety and Environment Enforcement, which was created in the wake of the 2010 disaster. Better regulations and inspections adopted after Deepwater Horizon seem to be paying off, despite the Trump administration's stated desire to rescind them.

Yet the annual number of offshore oil spills (those spilling more than 2,100 gallons of oil, chemicals or drilling mud) has remained high since 2010, when Deepwater Horizon was among nine offshore oil spills. From 2012 through 2017, there was an average of more than 20 serious offshore spills per year, the bureau's data showed. From 2000-2009, spills averaged 17 per year.

That number could dramatically increase in the coming years as the administration tries to expand drilling in almost every U.S. ocean. Based on its draft 2019-2024 outer continental shelf oil and gas program and our analysis of historic federal spill data, oil spills could increase to more than 100 per year. This does not account for catastrophic oils spills like the Deepwater Horizon or a weakening of regulations.

Aging offshore drilling infrastructure and an oil industry more concerned with profits than public safety are likely factors in the high number of annual spills.

As The New York Times reported last month ("Trump Rollbacks Target Offshore Rules 'Written with Human Blood'"), small oil companies backed by private equity firms have bought up older offshore wells in the Gulf and are pushing hard to make them more profitable. These companies had much higher rates of offshore safety violations than the industry average and have publicly pushed the Trump administration to roll back offshore drilling safety regulations.

"Offshore drilling can't be made safe, but they can make it much more dangerous. This is pure greed coupled with an administration that is reckless and willfully ignorant," Sakashita said. "The legacy of Deepwater Horizon shouldn't be just ecological destruction. We need to learn from it."

The spill left the seafloor coated in oil and dispersant chemicals to this day. Studies show dolphins, sea turtles and some fish species are still experiencing problems due to the spill. Yet the Trump administration continues to permit offshore fracking and seismic oil surveys that harm sperm whales and other imperiled specie

...

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http://extras.denverpost.com/oil-gas-deaths/

Clling the vast oil and gas reserves in Colorado is a dangerous job. Oil and gas companies say they work hard to educate their employees about job hazards and promise to keep their workers safe.

“If there are areas where we need to improve, you can be damn sure we’re going to do it,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a pro-industry trade organization.

“I’m pretty confident that the oil and gas industry probably does some of the best work on safety.”

But a year-long Denver Post investigation shows that there is little consequence when companies let that promise lapse.

A national legacy of encouraging oil and gas development — for energy security, for jobs, for the economy — has created a regulatory vacuum.There is an entire federal agency devoted to mining safety, for instance, but nothing comparable exists for oil and gas. While OSHA has created specific safety standards that companies in other industries must follow, oil and gas businesses successfully beat back such regulations for themselves.The standards — recommendations, really — that OSHA mostly uses to judge safety violations on oil and gas worksites were written by the American Petroleum Institute.

Debate about the industry in Colorado typically focuses on its environmental toll or its potential threat to public health.

Meanwhile, 1,333 workers died in the nation’s oil and gas fields between 2003 and 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The nationwide death toll in 2014 of 144 was the highest in more than a decade. By another measurement — the number of worker deaths per active drilling rig — 2014 was the second-most lethal year in Colorado in a decade, according to a Denver Post analysis. There was about one death per every 12 rigs that year.

Oil and gas worker fatalities by rig count

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there were 51 deaths in Colorado related to the oil and gas industry from 2003 to 2014. Because of worker privacy issues, the BLS would not release years for all of those deaths. Nationally, 1,333 oil and gas workers were killed in the same 12-year time frame.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/black-lung-epidemic-2538494787.html

New Black Lung Epidemic Emerging in Coal Country

In a study released this month by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), federal researchers identified more than 400 cases of complicated black lung in three clinics in southwestern Virginia between 2013 and 2017—the largest cluster ever reported.

However, the actual number of cases is likely much, much higher as the government analysis relied on self-reporting. An ongoing investigation from NPR has counted nearly 2,000 cases diagnosed since 2010 across Appalachia.

NPR investigative reporter Howard Berkes, who has been closely following the epidemic explained to Pittsburgh's NPR news station:

"In the study that NIOSH just produced, they looked at three clinics in southwestern Virginia which serves coal miners from Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia. And they identified and confirmed 416 cases of the disease in the previous few years. The study ended about a year ago. That's an astonishing number. NIOSH itself in its own accounting of that disease, found less than 100 cases in the same timeframe nationwide. And here in just three clinics in southwestern Virginia, there are four times as many cases. NPR has been surveying black lung clinics across Appalachia, and our count is up close to two thousand cases in the same timeframe that NIOSH had previously identified only 99. NIOSH itself now recognizes that this as the worst cluster of this disease ever documented. NIOSH has referred to it as one of the worst industrial workplace disasters in American history. It also marks what is a sharp increase in the disease from the 1990s, when researchers believed that it might actually become extinct."

Black lung disease, also known as coal workers' pneumoconiosis, comes from exposure to coal mine dust. Ever since the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which was passed in response to the deaths of 78 miners in West Virginia and implemented stricter safety standards, cases had been declining and virtually eradicated by the 1990s....

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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-brings-back-coal-miner-jobs-deaths-soar

Newsweek

Coal miner Rodney Osborne was towards the end of a double shift at the Gateway Eagle Mine in West Virginia in June when the 32-year-old was crushed to death by a rotating drill. A subsequent investigation revealed that Osborne, who had been working at the Boone County mine for just five months, had not received adequate safety training on the device.

The state's junior senator, Shelley Moore Capito, said she was heartbroken by the news of Osborne's death, then reminded her constituents that "West Virginia coal miners like Rodney selflessly put so much on the line to ... power our state."

Osborne was not the only miner who paid the ultimate price. In all, 15 miners died since President Donald Trump took office in 2017—up from eight in all of 2016.

This is the dirty secret of Trump’s much-touted effort to help the coal industry. The president has been quick to celebrate the 771 workers that were hired in 2017, but the administration's push to support the dirtiest of fossil fuels has been accompanied by a surge in deaths of the workers who procure it. The 2017 death toll was the highest since 2014—when there were roughly 60,000 more miners at work in America.

Mining advocates put some of the blame on the president, whose support for mine owners has led to relaxed safety enforcement, scores of inexperienced new miners and inconsistent commitment to training programs and courses. In the meantime, Republicans in the House want to cut mine safety budgets further, and Trump, who says he supports coal miners, has been silent on a Senate bill that would shore up miners' pensions.

“When you look at the Trump administration policies and his ratcheting back of regulations ... this administration has no moral compass about ethics,” said Joe Main, who ran the Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Barack Obama. “Companies now think we have a less aggressive sheriff in town.”

Trump’s support for coal is part of a larger economic vision of deregulation—one that he says is responsible for the stock market’s recent boom and higher gross domestic product.

“The stock market is way up (because) we took off restrictions and we took off regulations,” he said on January 16.

But for coal miners, those restrictions and regulations can be the difference between life and death.

A majority of the 15 victims were new to their job site and seven deaths involved miners with one year or less experience at the mine where they died, data show.

“There’s been a whole new generation of people hired into coal industry, younger workers who haven’t had the benefit of enough training,” said Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America. “But companies are resistant to taking time to take them off production to train them.”

The results can be deadly—and not only for new workers.

In May, Luches “Big Lou” Rosser, 44, was traveling on an electric locomotive deep in a West Virginia mine when his head hit a steel beam, killing him. The official investigation into his death found that Rosser, a husband and father of three, hadn’t been properly trained on the machine. He knew how it worked, but was never briefed on safety procedures.

“Showing someone how to push a button isn’t a training,” said Smith.

In July, Andrew Oxenrider, a 28-year-old with seven years on the job, exited his Caterpillar D9L bulldozer on the slope of a refuse bank. Oxenrider had not been trained in proper parking procedures for that model, and the bulldozer rolled backwards, killing him before falling to the bottom of the embankment.

And then there's the case of Osborne, who disabled his drilling machine's emergency shutoff system so he could make a minor alignment adjustment—only to get pinned between the cutter head and the coal seam, suffering "fatal crushing injuries," state investigators revealed.

State officials issued seven citations to Rockwell Mining, including two that carry a $10,000 fine. But so far, the Trump administration's mine safety agency has only recommended education.

Coal mining is inherently dangerous, with zero margin for error even under the best conditions. The average height of a mine tunnel is about three and a half feet, so miners crawl or duck-walk while avoiding big, mobile electrical equipment. Even a small lapse in safety can be catastrophic.

“I have been to too many mine explosions and funerals,” said West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat. “Too many miners have died for us to get to where we are today. We can not go backwards on safety.”

Last year’s death count suggests a step back. For the first seven months of the Trump administration, the top position at MSHA remained vacant. Congressional aide and White House adviser Wayne Palmer was finally put in charge of the agency in late August, but he had no experience in mining or mine safety.

Under Palmer's oversight, MSHA proposed changing language about when safety inspections must be done at metal and non-metal mines. Instead of mandating the inspection before laborers enter a mine, operators could do the check "as miners begin their work," a wording that allows mine owners to start a shift before an inspection, putting miners in potentially dangerous situations.

The National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, an industry group that spent $300,000 to lobby for the rule change and featured former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski as the keynote speaker at its annual convention, was pleased with the new language, writing that "it appears that MSHA is willing to listen to the industry."

In the fall, Trump finally appointed David Zatezalo, a retired coal mining executive, to run the Mine Safety and Health Administration, but Zatezalo has a questionable commitment to miners’ welfare, advocates say.

His Rhino Eastern Eagle mine in West Virginia, for example, was hit with multiple violations in 2010 and 2011. All together, Rhino mines have been issued more than $2.1 million in fines for 162 workplace safety or health violations since 2000.

Now Zatezalo runs an agency charged with creating training initiatives, monitoring accidents, and, most important, carrying out safety inspections at mines several times a year. Critics say he is a pawn of industry.

“He’s a former coal operator, he’s not a mine safety advocate,” said Tony Oppegard, a mine safety lawyer.

This week, Zatezalo told Newsweekthat the Trump Administration is committed to the health and safety of America’s miners. "At MSHA, our focus is on ensuring that every miner is able to return safely to their loved ones at the end of every shift," he said. "To ensure the health and safety of miners, MSHA will continue to conduct inspections, and vigorously emphasize safety enforcement, education and training."

Such inspections and training are mandated by federal laws, but miner advocates are not convinced that Zatezalo will aggressively enforce them.

“[Zatezalo] might call the district manager in Barbourville, Kentucky and tell them how he wants the agency to run,” said Oppegard. “Influential mine operators might also call MSHA directly and say, ‘Your inspector is giving me a hard time,’ the head would then call the district manager and say, ‘Lay off.’ That kind of stuff happens. It really does.”

Main, the former MSHA director, said it is likely to get worse.

“If the perception of the industry is these guys are backing off, it won’t play out well for safety,” he said. “Word gets around the industry, and you know what’s going to happen there.”

Smith already sees alarming changes at MSHA, such as emphasizing a more-lenient safety check system called “compliance assistance," which was a key program under President George W. Bush. If a compliance assistant visits a mine and notices a safety or health violation, he or she does not have the authority to issue a citation or fine, the way an official inspector would.

They’re essentially tourists in a mine, said Smith.

If such assistants see “something going on in a mine that’s bad or wrong, they can only ask the company to fix it,” he added. “The company can easily say, ‘No we don’t think it’s a problem’ and that’s the end of it. There’s no enforcement.”

MSHA responded to the recent surge in deaths by increasing the size of its compliance assistance plan, a voluntary program for mine operators. Advocates say compliance assistance is typically most popular with deregulation Republicans.

“You know one administration, a Democratic administration, is interested in enforcement and wants to do enforcement. And a Republican administration wants to do compliance assistance,” Celeste Monforton, a former MSHA official and occupational health researcher, told *Ohio Valley Resource* as mining deaths were on the rise last year.

MSHA still uses official inspectors to carry out its mandatory inspections of all underground mines four times a year and all surface mines twice a year, and compliance assistance programs existed under Democratic presidents, as well. But the Trump administration has further dulled its teeth.

In the past, for example, all compliance assistants were to be accompanied by miners' representatives, but that is no longer the case, Smith said.

Compliance assistance is “a complete waste of time,” added Oppegard. “You can directly link the reliance on this method of inspection with an increase in mining disasters and fatalities.”

Annual miner deaths did increase twice during the Bush administration and were higher than under his successor, Barack Obama, who, in 2009, brought total miner deaths down below 20 for the first time in American history.

Manchin expressed his own concerns, telling Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta in a letter in September that MSHA inspectors were being instructed to remove their Representative Status credentials. Without the credentials, inspectors are not allowed to issue violations or remove miners from unsafe conditions.

"By separating the MSHA inspector from his or her credentials, one is essentially removing the ability of that MSHA inspector to issue an order to remove miners from the unsafe area and issue a violation which, particularly in the event of an imminent danger, can prove perilous," Manchin wrote.

He also questioned why miners' representatives were no longer able to walk with compliance assistants. "This is particularly alarming because, no one is better suited to spot inconsistencies or unsafe conditions that the very people who work at the mine day in and day out," Manchin wrote.

In the midst of the current mine safety crisis, Congress has proposed to cut MSHA’s coal enforcement budget by $11 million or 7 percent in the next fiscal year, leaving the agency with its lowest budget since FY 2013. Trump originally proposed to leave MSHA’s budget largely untouched but to reduce staffing by 42 positions.

“The proposed budget cut is absolutely a move towards reducing the inspectors in the coal industry,” said Smith, adding that the plan will result in an agency staffed by “inexperienced inspectors.”

“It takes five years to take an inspector up to speed,” Main added. “These are things that are really important to the life of a miner.”

Main said he worries about long-term leadership trickling out of the agency. “I was struggling to keep the agency functioning with the budget we had. Any additional cuts would hamper its ability to keep working,” he said.

On-site injuries are only one aspect of the job. Sustained exposure to coal dust leads to a number of respiratory diseases, such as black lung disease, a progressive illness with no cure. More than 76,000 miners have died of black lung since 1968.

Last month, Trump announced that MSHA was reconsidering rules intended to protect miners from breathing in the dust that causes black lung. And in his first days as president, Trump eliminatedan Obama-era rule blocking coal companies from dumping waste into streams. Miner advocates say these rule changes and others are all about appeasing mine owners, not workers.

“They’re receiving a lot of complaints from coal operators that these rules are wasteful and useless, but that’s just false,” said Smith.

MSHA says it is still taking comments about these rules, which went into effect in 2014 and aim to lower the concentration of respirable coal mine dust in the air, but Oppegard believes there’s only one reason to revisit them: “To raise the amount of dust miners can breathe in up again or to create other loopholes where operators could violate the standard.”

Smith added that such air quality rules don't get in the way of industry profits and are simply necessary.

“All of these regulations exist because someone was killed at work,” he said. “All those laws and regulations are written in a dead miner’s blood.”

Manchin disagrees, claiming that there are just too many environmental rules. “Some of the stuff doesn’t make sense and makes it hard for people to do their job,” he said.

Manchin is most upset with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who he says refuses to fund the pensions of 117,000 retired coal miners and dependents, who are at risk of losing their retirement funds due to the declining coal industry.

A Senate bill has 21 co-sponsors, but McConnell won't move it and Trump hasn't pushed the issue, Manchin said.

“We’re not talking big numbers here,” said Manchin. “Most pensions top out at $500 or $600 each month.”

Manchin added that Trump has been a sympathetic ear on the issue, but has not acted. To Joe Main, that means Trump's rhetoric about caring for coal miners is empty.

“I don't think I’ve ever heard the president talk about this pension,” he said. “These are people who produced the energy for this country to grow, they’re owed healthcare and a darn pension.”

Trump’s efforts to prop up the coal industry are bucking decades of decline for the mineral, mostly due to a drop in global demand. Even with hundreds of new miners hired last year, the solar and wind industries still employed nearly three times as many people as the coal industry. Half of America’s coal-fired plants have shuttered since 2010 and since Trump took office at least 17 plants have announced they’ll be closing shop. Coal isn’t cost-competitive with cheaper natural gas and it faces new competition as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline.

Coal is a leading source of carbon emissions, and many nations are weaning themselves off the pollutant to fight climate change, even as officials in the United States deny some realities about global warming. Exports of coal fell 23 percent in 2015 and another 32 percent through the first half of 2016, though domestic production is slightly up, thanks to a growing economy under Trump.

“I’m the one that saved coal,” the president said in a year-end interview. “I’m the one that created jobs.”

But on the homefront, Trump’s call to end the “war on coal” appealed to his base: wealthy, anti-regulation industry leaders and blue-collar workers nostalgic for a past they likely never knew. Trump’s support for coal countered Hillary Clinton, who was widely misquoted during the campaign that she would intentionally “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Trump carried eight of the top nine coal-mining states in the 2016 election

Trump Administration, Which Wants More Offshore Drilling, Shuts Down Study Into Its Safety

The Trump administration, which is trying to expand offshore oil drilling, has issued a stop-work order on an independent study aimed at making the process safer.

The Interior Department's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) ordered the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to halt its study on Dec. 7.

"The National Academies are grateful to the committee members for their service and disappointed that their important study has been stopped," the organization said Thursday.

The intention of the 2016 study was to review and update BSEE's offshore oil and gas operations inspection program to enhance safety. The program was established after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill that killed 11 people and gushed an estimated 3.1 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest man-made oil spill in history.

NASEM said that within 90 days, the stop-work order will either be lifted and work on the study can resume, or the contract to perform the study will be terminated.

BSEE spokesman Greg Julian said the study "was paused ... to allow time to ensure that there are no duplicate efforts."

But Sierra Club's Kelly Martin said the move was in line with the Trump administration's push for a major expansion of offshore drilling.

"I think this is an example of Trump demonstrating he wants to open up federal waters to more drilling at the expense of people on the planet," Martin told the Associated Press. "He is much more supportive of corporate polluters than protecting people's safety."

The Center for Biological Diversity similarly tweeted: "Can dangerous offshore oil drilling be made safer? Trump and Co. don't even want to know. Hostile to science and public safety, they're pushing for more offshore drilling and shutting down study into its safety."

This is the second NASEM study halted by the Interior Department in the last four months. In August, a study on the potential health effects for people living near surface coal mining sites in Central Appalachia was stopped pending a review of contracts by the department. The National Academies said it has not received any update on the status of that review and the study remains on hold.

“Given how important this study is to the citizens and communities surrounding these surface mining sites in Appalachia, the National Academies believe the study should be completed and are exploring options to do so. Some private donors have expressed an interest in funding the completion of the study," NASEM said.

Companies Use Little-Known Trade Associations to Lobby Against Accountability

Federal contractors are pushing back hard on the EO, with two trade associations leading the charge: the Professional Services Council (PSC) and the HR Policy Association (HRPA).

The PSC, with 370 member companies, calls itself "the leading advocate and resource for the federal professional and technical services industry." The HRPA represents more than 360 corporations in the U.S., many of them federal contractors, and describes itself as "the lead public policy organization of chief human resource officers."

Both associations have taken strong stands in the media, congressional testimony, and lobbying asserting that the EO is unnecessary because, according to the PSC, there is "no evidence of a widespread problem of pervasive, repeated or willful violations of labor laws by federal contractors." In HRPA's words, "The Order simply seeks to solve a problem that does not exist."

The PSC concedes that there are "instances" where contractors have violated labor laws, and some of these "may well have been intentional." But "the laws involved are so complex and challenging to execute that many companies, sometimes at the direction of the government itself, take actions that result in honest mistakes." These "honest, administrative errors," the PSC asserts, "make up the vast bulk of ‘violations.'" And existing accountability mechanisms are more than sufficient to deal with cases where there has been "nefarious intent."

Yet a closer look at the companies whose senior executives sit on PSC's and HRPA's Boards of Directors undermines these assertions. By CMD's count, at least ten firms (or their subsidiaries) whose officials sit on these boards have histories of labor law violations which would be reportable under the EO, including numerous violations that occurred even after the order was signed in July 2014.

Company Track Records Illustrate the Need for Change

Key examples of violations which would be reportable under the EO include:

DuPont (HR Policy Association Board):4 workers died after a gas leak on November 15, 2014 at its LaPorte, Texas plant. OSHA cited DuPont for 1 "Repeat" and 9 "Serious" violations and issued a fine of $99,000. A follow-up inspection in January 2015 found that DuPont continued to violate safety rules, and OSHA fined the company an additional $273,000, and found 4 "Serious," 3 "Willful," and 1 "Repeat" violations. The LaPorte violations are under contest by the company. Just months before the LaPorte accident, a chemical leak from a tanker truck exposed workers to hazardous chemicals at DuPont subsidiary DuPont Chamber Works' Deepwater, New Jersey plant. OSHA cited the company for 11 violations, including 8 "Serious" and 2 "Repeat" violations and initial penalties of $120,300. The violations are under contest by the company.

Honeywell (PSC & HR Policy Association Board): Several Honeywell Inc. production facilities have each been cited for serious violations over the last three years. At a Hopewell, VA plant, the company was cited for 7 "Serious" violations in three separate inspections. These violations are under contest by the company. The nearby Chesterfield plant was cited for 1 "Serious" violation and 9 "Other-than- Serious" violations in three separate inspections. Honeywell's Golden Valley, MN facility was cited for 6 "Serious" violations in three separate inspections. A separate Golden Valley facility owned by a Honeywell subsidiary, Honeywell Aerospace, was cited for 1 "Serious" violation, as was a facility in Chickasaw, AL owned by another Honeywell subsidiary, UOP.

BAE Systems (PSC Board):A worker drowned in an April, 2013 incident at a Mobile, AL shipyard owned by a BAE Systems subsidiary, BAE Systems Southeast Shipyard Alabama LLC, and OSHA officials cited the company for 1 "Serious" violation and a $7,000 fine. In two inspections since the incident, OSHA cited the Mobile shipyard for 3 additional "Serious" violations. Recently, in January 2015, OSHA cited BAE Systems in Norfolk, VA for 1 "Other than Serious" violation. Since 2013, another BAE subsidiary, BAE Systems Norfolk Ship Repair in Norfolk, VA was cited for 1 "Serious" violation in each of two separate inspections. Finally, another BAE subsidiary, BAE Systems Southeast Shipyard Jacksonville, in Jacksonville, FL was cited for 1 "Serious" violation in a 2014 inspection, as were other subsidiaries in Nashua, NH and Charleston, SC.

AECOM (PSC Board):An employee of an AECOM subsidiary, AECOM Technical Services Inc., was killed on March 30, 2015 when he was struck by a 1,200 foot pylon at a Sunoco site in Marcus Hook, PA, and the AECOM subsidiary was cited for 2 "Serious" violations and a $14,000 penalty, the maximum allowed. The case remains open, pending abatement of violations and penalty payment. Another AECOM subsidiary, URS Federal Technical Services, was cited for $62,900 in penalties and 18 "Serious" and 1 "Other-than-Serious" violation of multiple OSHA standards following a January, 13, 2015 inspection at a Barstow, CA facility. These violations are being contested by the company. AECOM subsidiary Cleveland Wrecking Company has been cited for multiple violations since an employee died in a 2012 accident in Bakersfield, CA in which the company was citedby CalOSHA for 1 "Serious" and 4 "Other-than-Serious" violations and fined $12,250. Subsequently, it was cited for 1 "Serious" and 2 "Other-than-Serious" citations at a site in Antioch, CA and for 2 "Other-than-Serious" citations at a site in San Diego, CA.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/13026/dupont-rakes-federal-dollars-despite-history-hazards

Four workers were tragically killed when an insecticide leaked into a building at DuPont's LaPorte, Texas plant in November 2014. After two workers were overcome by toxic fumes, another responded to a distress call and was overwhelmed. His brother, too, died attempting to aid the fallen. Three others were injured.

OSHA officials blasted DuPont in the strongest terms, stating those who died "would be alive today, had their employer taken steps to protect them." Yet, just months later, the same plant was cited by OSHA for even more safety violations. Now,DuPont—which with its subsidiaries has held multiple federal contracts over recent years totaling millions of dollars—is part of a corporate coalition trying to block rules that would ensure federal contractors abide by health, safety, and labor laws.

President Obama's Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order aims to protect hard-working Americans by requiring companies with an ongoing history of violating safety and labor standards to clean up their acts and comply with federal health and safety laws before being rewarded with taxpayer dollars. DuPont and its subsidiaries, whose history of OSHA violations as of January 2016 includes dozens of "Serious" citations, multiple "Repeat" and "Willful" citations, and more than $500,000 in penalties since 2013, are exhibiting exactly the type of behavior the new rules were created to discourage.

With millions in federal contracts at stake, federal contractors have pushed back hard against the new rules through little-known trade organizations like the Human Resources Policy Association (HRPA), which has attacked the executive order in congressional testimony, media statements, and lobbying efforts. A DuPont executive sits on HRPA's board of directors.

HRPA complains that holding regular OSHA violators to account is an effort to "create a black list" and "intimidate companies." The organization also claims that the rules "seek to solve a problem that does not exist" as its member companies "have a long standing commitment to complying with all federal and state employment and labor laws."

But as the records of DuPont and its subsidiaries show, pervasive safety problems with federal contractors are all too real.

Four Tragic Deaths Follow "Serious Failures" by DuPont

On November 15,2014, operator Crystal Rae Wise collapsed when 20,000 pounds of gaseous methyl mercaptan, a gas used in insecticide production, leaked into the enclosed space where she was working at the the LaPorte chemical plant. Other employees were killed and injured by the toxic fumes in the building trying to rescue her and each other. OSHA documented what went wrong in a

OSHA issued DuPont one "Repeat" violation and nine "Serious" violations for what it called "serious failures," including failing to train its employees properly, along with a $99,000 fine. Investigators found a "Repeat" violation because the company didn't teach the employees how to use the plant's ventilation system. OSHA had found similar problems involving inspection and training failures following the death of a DuPont worker at its Belle, West Virginia plant in 2010.

"Four people lost their lives and their families lost loved ones because DuPont did not have proper safety procedures in place," Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels said of the horrific incident at the LaPorte plant, but the violations are being contested by the company.

The same plant was inspected again in January 2015. DuPont, which chalked up $34.7 billion in annual revenues and paid its CEO Ellen Kullman $14.3 million in 2014, had failed to clean up its act, so OSHA enrolled the company in its "Severe Violator Enforcement Program."

"We have concerns about the safety culture," Dr. Michaels told the Texas Tribune in July 2015 as OSHA issued another 4 "Serious," 3 "Willful," and 1 "Repeat" violation, and $273,000 in penalties on top of those issued in 2014. "We expect chemical facilities where highly toxic materials are used to have a culture that focuses on ensuring worker protection. It appears to have broken down." These penalties are also being contested.

History of Dangerous Violations

...

jim h

When you come across a corporate lobbying group claiming to be pushing "Responsible Alternatives to Such-and-Such," you can rightly assume that it's really pushing something totally irresponsible, as well as malicious, self-serving, and even disgusting.

That's the case ofARAWC – the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers' Compensation. Mother Jones magazine reports that this is a front group funded by hugely-profitable retail chains and other corporate behemoths that want to weasel out of compensating employees who suffer injuries at work. By law, corporations in nearly every state must carry workers' comp insurance, but the ARAWC lobbying combine is pressuring legislators to allow the giants to opt-out of the state benefit plans and instead substitute their own, highly-restricted set of benefits.

What a deal! But it's a raw deal for injured workers. In Texas, which already has this write-it-yourself loophole, more than half of the corporate plans – get this – pay nothing to the families of workers who're killed in job accidents! Similarly, under an ARAWC-written opt-out provision that a Tennessee senator sponsored this year, employers wouldn't have to cover artificial limbs, home care, or even funeral expenses of on-the-job accident victims.

Also, theTennessee bill lets a company simply walk away from maimed workers after just three years, or after paying only $300,000 in expenses.Corporations always claim to "value" their employees – and this tells us exactly how little that value is.

By the way, the CEO of ARAWC also happens to be the head of "risk management" at the mingiest of workplaces: Walmart. And that's what this opt-out scam amounts to – corporate profiteers hoping they can manage to escape paying for risking the lives of America's workforce.

"Walmart, Lowe's, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers' Comp," www.motherjones.com, March 26, 2015.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/arawc-walmart-campaign-against-workers-compensation

Walmart, Lowe's, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers' Comp

By Molly Redden | Thu Mar. 26, 2015 11:47 AM EDT

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Walmart, Lowe's, Safeway, and Nordstrom are bankrolling a nationwide campaign to gut workers' comp

Nearly two dozen major corporations [1], including Walmart, Nordstrom, and Safeway, are bankrolling [2] a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care—the benefits collectively known as workers' compensation.

The companies have financed a lobbying group, theAssociation for Responsible Alternatives to Workers' Compensation (ARAWC), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee. Richard Evans, the group's executive director, told an insurance journal in November that the corporations ultimately want to change workers' comp laws [3] in all 50 states. Lowe's, Macy's, Kohl's, Sysco Food Services, and several insurance companies are also part of the year-old effort.

Laws mandating workers' comp arose at the turn of the 20th century as a bargain between employees and employers: If a worker suffered an injury on the job, the employer would pay his medical bills and part of his wages while he recovered. In exchange, the worker gave up his right to sue for negligence.

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ARAWC's mission is to pass laws allowing private employers to opt out of the traditional workers' compensation plans that almost every state requires businesses to carry. Employers that opt out would still be compelled to purchase workers' comp plans. But they would be allowed to write their own rules governing when, for how long, and for which reasons an injured employee can access medical benefits and wages.

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In recent years, companies have used that freedom to severely curtail long-standing benefits.

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Two states, Texas and Oklahoma, already allow employers to opt out of state-mandated workers' comp. In Texas, the only state that has never required employers to provide workers' comp, Walmart has written a plan [4] that allows the company to select the physician an employee sees and the arbitration company that hears disputes. The plan provides no coverage for asbestos exposure. And a vague section of the contract excludes any employee who was injured due to his "participation" in an assault from collecting benefits unless the assault was committed in defense of Walmart's "business or property." It is up to Walmart to interpret what "participation" means. But the Texas AFL-CIO has argued that an employee who defended himself from an attack would not qualify for benefits.

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"It creates a race to the bottom."

A 2012 survey of Texas companies with private plans found that fewer than half [5] offered benefits to seriously injured employees or the families of workers who died in workplace accidents. (The state plan, which Texas companies can follow on a voluntary basis, covers both.) Half of employer plans capped benefits, while the state plan pays benefits throughout a worker's recovery.

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Businesses can save millions of dollars [6] by opting out and writing plans with narrow benefits, putting pressure on their competitors to do the same. "It creates a race to the bottom," says Michael Clingman, a workers' advocate in Oklahoma, which passed an opt-out measure in January 2014. The state's oil and gas industry [7], along with major retailers, such as the craft store chain Hobby Lobby [8], pushed hard for the change—with help from a lobbyist, Steve Edwards, who now heads ARAWC's legislative strategy. Dillard's, a department store chain with 10 locations [9] in Oklahoma, took advantage of the change by requiring workers to report injuries before the end of their shift [10] to be eligible for workers' comp. Walmart and Dillard's declined to comment for this article.

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Now, ARAWC wants to take the Texas and Oklahoma model nationwide. Tennessee, where Lowe's, Walmart, and Kohl's each have about 20 locations, is the only state where the group has pushed legislation so far. But ARAWC is already considering its next targets. "ARAWC hopes to see some neighboring states take up legislation this year and we're ready to assist those legislatures as well," Evans, the group's executive director, writes in an email.

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Conservative Southern states where ARAWC's corporate funders have major operations—including [11] Florida, Georgia, and Alabama—are on the group's shortlist. And ARAWC has already hired [12] lobbyists [13] in North and South Carolina. The group has written model legislation [11], but ARAWC intends to work closely with lawmakers to adapt its model [3] for individual states.

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"This piece of legislation is designed as a cost-saving measure for the employer. Anywhere they save a dollar, it costs the employees a dollar. It's just a shift in costs."

When ARAWC targets a state, it moves aggressively.In Tennessee, the group has spent more than $50,000 [14] deploying lobbyists to push its legislation. Evans says that state Sen. Mark Green, who introduced the opt-out bill, was already working on the legislation before ARAWC started pushing for it. But a February blog post [15] written by an executive at Sedgwick, an insurance company that helped found ARAWC, suggests the group played a more active role. In the post, the executive boasts that ARAWC "secured a highly respected bill sponsor"—presumably Green—to introduce the bill, which the group "assisted in drafting." When Green emailed me to set up a phone call, he CC'ed an ARAWC lobbyist. (In the end, Green declined to be interviewed.)

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Green's proposal, which supporters are calling the Tennessee Option, bears many of the hallmarks of the Texas and Oklahoma system: It allows businesses to place strict spending caps on each injured worker and to pick and choose which medical expenses to cover. "We took the best of both and put it together to make it work for Tennessee businesses," Green told an insurance trade magazine [16].

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The bill as introduced [17] does not require employers to pay for artificial limbs, hearing aids, home care, funeral expenses, or disability modifications to a home or a car for injured workers. All of these benefits, notes Gary Moore, president of the Tennessee AFL-CIO Labor Council, are mandated under the state's current workers' comp system.

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"This piece of legislation is designed as a cost-saving measure for the employer," Moore says. "Anywhere they save a dollar, it costs the employees a dollar. It's just a shift in costs."

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Green has discussed [18] adding funeral benefits and rehab training to the bill when the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee meets on March 30 to debate the legislation. Evans, in his email, says that the amendments may also address disability benefits. If the committee approves the measure, the full Legislature, which is dominated by the GOP and has already made business-friendly changes [19] to the state's workers comp system, is likely to approve it too.

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"We're out there saying, 'Well if you guys do such a great job, why don't you allow us access to your data?' And we are met with complete stonewalling."

Under the current system, employers must cover a worker's medical expenses for as long as he needs treatment. Green's bill would allow companies to stop paying lifetime benefits [16] after three years or $300,000, whichever comes first.

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"It's the people who are hurt more severely and have ongoing issues who notice a big difference," says Rick Levy, the legal director for the Texas AFL-CIO. Those people, he says, "are going to find this to be a disaster." Mary Elizabeth Maddox, a Tennessee workers' compensation attorney who represents both employers and employees and opposes Green's bill, recalls a case in which a workplace accident paralyzed a 23-year-old man and confined him to a wheelchair. He sued her client, the employer. "For him, $300,000 is not going to go very far."

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ARAWC acknowledges that its goal is to slash health care spending. The group's Tennessee proposal, it boasts in a fact sheet, would "lower costs to employers" and allow businesses to "require more accountability from injured workers" by choosing their doctors and forcing them to stick to the company doctor's treatment plan to retain their benefits.

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Green and Evans, ARAWC's executive director, have [20] insisted [16] that the Texas businesses providing their own coverage have superior medical care and higher rates of employee satisfaction. Evans reiterated this in his email to Mother Jones: "We just want employers and employees in other states to have access to this great program."

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Workers advocates' counter that there is scarce data to back that up. "It's a complete black box surrounding what happens to the workers in these companies," Levy says. Evans, he notes, is the top lobbyist [5] for Texas Alliance of Nonsubscribers, a coalition of Texas businesses, including Walmart, that opt out and write their own plans. Max Koonce, the head of risk management [21] for Walmart, is also ARAWC's CEO [14]. Lobbyists for the Texas Alliance of Nonsubscribers have helped defeat [22] legislation [23] requiring opt-out companies to report how much they pay in wage replacement and medical benefits to injured employees.

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"I anticipate if we pass this, the Tennessee option will become the US option."

"They have a lot of nerve, the Richard Evanses of the world, saying that they're doing this for the worker, when year after year, we're out there saying, 'Well if you guys do such a great job, why don't you allow us access to your data?'" Levy continues. "And every session we are met with complete stonewalling."

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Oklahoma's Legislature took four years to create its opt-out system. ARAWC hopes to achieve the same thing in Tennessee in a single legislative session [8]—and then it's on to the next state. In his interview with the trade journal, Green said he hopes the Tennessee model [16] goes nationwide: "I anticipate if we pass this, the Tennessee option will become the US option."

COC attacks:

worker safety

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Since 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson first introduced an occupational health and safety bill to Congress, the U.S. Chamber has opposed government oversight of how companies treat their workers. In the 1990s, the U.S. Chamber worked with congressional Republicans to introduce legislation that would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to spend at least half of its budget on “consultation” with businesses, rather than enforcement (which was already low), and it unfortunately helped make history in defeating an ergonomics safety rule. Today it continues to push back against OSHA interpretations and rulemakings.

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Companies lobby against worker protections through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, thereby opposing popular safety measures without sullying their brand names. When they are successful, this enables the companies to skimp on expenditures to protect their workers, thereby burdening employees with additional safety risks and future costs of health care.

The U.S. Chamber has consistently opposed efforts by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to make workplaces safer for workers. Many of these battles involve fine details of regulation writing and rule-making, and are often hashed out away from widespread public view. For example, the U.S. Chamber opposes OSHA’s attempts to require the disclosure of workplace injury data – the nature of the injury, and when and where it occurred. The U.S. Chamber has long opposed rules to limit workers’ exposure to silica, one common cause of injuries in the workplace.

One of President George W. Bush’s OSHA heads, Edwin Foulke, was a member of the U.S. Chamber’s Health and Safety Committee, during which time he testified before Congress promoting so-called voluntary compliance programs for companies – a far weaker alternative to OSHA enforcement and one often pushed by the U.S. Chamber.

The U.S. Chamber has expended a lot of resources fighting against standards to improve ergonomic safety, one of the most common hazards in worker health. Perhaps most notoriously, at the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term, the U.S. Chamber pushed for the overturning of a thoroughly studied rule to protect millions of workers from work-caused musculoskeletal disorders, helping lead to the only time Congress has ever overturned an agency rule. Then in 2010, it fought against OSHA simply adding a column to federal surveys for employers to record when a worker’s injury is musculoskeletal in nature. The rule would simply provide the public and employers with a more accurate count of how many musculoskeletal injuries are occurring, but even that was too much for the U.S. Chamber to stomach.

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http://www.propublica.org/article/osha-struggles-with-tower-climbing-deaths

Update: After a Tower Climber Falls, Stand Down Called for on AT&T Projects

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The 1970 law assumed that the relationship between companies and the people they hired for dangerous jobs would be straightforward, employer to employee.

No one planned for industries like tower climbing.

Tower climbers, the roughly 10,000 workers who build and maintain the nation’s TV, radio and cell towers, aren’t hired directly by the corporations that rely on their labor. They’re subcontractors, sometimes separated by a daisy chain of other contractors from the companies that ultimately pay for tower projects.

Experts say this tiny field is emblematic of a fundamental change in the way U.S. companies deal with risky work �� and in OSHA’s ability to hold companies accountable when workers are injured or die.

Over the past decade, considerable attention has focused on the out-sourcing of U.S. jobs to foreign countries with lower safety standards and wages. Much less noticed has been the trend of companies out-sourcing their dirtiest, most perilous work within the U.S.

Since 2003, tower climbing has ranked among the most dangerous jobs in America, compiling an average annual death rate more than 10 times that of construction work. Almost 100 climbers have been killed on the job, 50 of them on cell sites.

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Across America, people are dying for work. It's not because they're unemployed. It's because they work for corporations that don't care if they die.

Every day, 12 workers die on the job in America -- often because a corporation has defied regulations or ignored standard safety procedures. Many more die prematurely from work exposure to toxic materials.

If corporations are people, as Mitt Romney and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court claim, then their privileges as humans come with the responsibility to act humanely. Corporate-people must fulfill their obligations to workers and communities. Profit can't be their sole raison d'etre. That's not how it is with flesh-and-blood people. If it were, then society would condone profit-motivated murder, like killing a parent for insurance money. Now that they're people, corporations have an even greater duty to prevent deaths on the job. And if they don't, they must be held accountable in criminal court the same way a money-grubbing son would be if he murdered his parents for the life insurance.

Workplace explosions get all the attention. Three that occurred two years ago next month killed 47 workers. Within 18 days, seven died at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash.; 29 in Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia and 11 on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Writing about industrial homicide in the American Criminal Law Review last year, Jane F. Barrett, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and director of its environmental law clinic, said of these explosions:

"In all of these cases, safety procedures were bypassed or standard operating procedures were ignored due to pressures on plant personnel to save time and/or money."

There it is -- the profit factor. Making money trumping worker survival. Occasionally, people accept risk when personal gain is held out as a possibility. But in the workplace, corporations take the gains while imposing the risks on workers. Barrett put it this way:

"And in all cases, the brunt of the consequences was borne by those who did not share in the economic rewards of the corporate non-compliance (with regulations)."

In 4,500 such instances each year, the worker's death is quick and the cause obvious. In many more cases, however, the deaths are slower, and the reason -- workplace exposure to toxic substances -- less evident. Workplace exposure causes more than 40,000 premature deaths annually from conditions like cancer and neurological disease.

Beryllium, primarily used in weapons production, is one of those deadly substances. It causes a lung disorder called chronic beryllium disease (CBD). It is so toxic that no safe level has ever been established. Finally, this year, decades after studies established the inadequacy of the 60-year-old "taxi cab standard" that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) used for worker exposure to beryllium, a more stringent level may be set. The exposure level suggested in February by my union, the United Steelworkers, and Materion Brush, the only U.S. producer of pure beryllium metal, is 90 percent lower than the current limit.

The taxi standard was set by two scientists riding in the back of a cab in New York in 1948 as concern rose about CBD suffered by workers using beryllium and by residents of surrounding communities. Over decades, industry executives concerned about compliance costs and government officials who feared slowed weapons productionobstructed imposition of stricter exposure limits.Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson admitted it in 2000, telling a reporter:

"Priority one was production of nuclear weapons. . .[the] last priority was the safety and health of the workers that build these weapons."

That's treating workers like collateral damage. It's not human. Or humane.

Similarly, mining industry officials delayed publication of two studies establishing a connection between deadly lung cancer and exposure to heavy diesel exhaust in mines. In an attempt to suppress the information that could lead to costly regulations protecting workers, the industry began challenging the research in 1996. With litigation and other measures, the mining industry succeeded repeatedly in postponing publication until this month.

Sustaining deadly exposure to improve profit margins -- that's not humane.

As it stands now, corporate-people who commit industrial homicide are cited and fined. This is not effective. Over the past decade, the federal government repeatedly fined BP tens of millions for violations, including the highest fine in OSHA for an explosion at its Texas City refinery in 2005 that killed 15 workers and injured 170. That didn't change BP's behavior. Five years later, the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and seriously injured 17.

Similarly, Massey had been cited and fined for years for flagrant and chronic mine safety violations. In 2006, two miners suffocated while trying to escape a fire in a Massey mine. Four years later, 29 workers died in Massey's Upper Big Branch mine.

The only way to make a difference is to hold accountable those executives and managers who are the actual flesh-and-blood of corporate-people, the executives and managers who determine corporate culture, who decide to violate standards and risk workers' lives in exchange for profits. Professor Barrett, in her law review article, described how it could work:

"Personal accountability, which creates a risk to an individual that he might go to jail as a result of decisions he makes, can change behavior and drive deterrence."

A real threat of prison time would focus the CEO mind on worker safety.

Barrett recommends a Seaman's Manslaughter Law to protect land-based workers. The Seaman's law criminalized misconduct and negligence by ship operators that led to the death of sailors or passengers. Those convicted, including corporate executives who ran the shipping businesses and condoned the recklessness, faced 10 years in prison.

The authors of this law had it right. Corporate-people -- that is boards of directors, CEOs, managers and supervisors -- who believe their own freedom is at stake will be far less inclined to gamble with workers' lives to save a buck.

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WASHINGTON -- A panel of federal judges ruled Thursday that a Kentucky miner who was fired two years ago after alleging unsafe conditions at his mine deserves to keep his job, delivering yet another legal victory to a highly public coal-industry whistleblower.

Charles Scott Howard lost his job at Cumberland River Coal Company, a subsidiary of energy giant Arch Coal, in May 2011. Managers informed him he was being let go because he was no longer fit to work due to an on-the-job injury. But Howard had lodged a litany of safety complaints against the company in the run-up to his layoff. An administrative law judge ruled last year that letting Howard go amounted to discrimination under the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act.

Cumberland River appealed that decision, arguing that putting Howard back on the job would actually endanger him, due to his injury, and undermine safety law. The panel of appellate judges, however, didn't buy it.

The company, the judges wrote Thursday, "has no viable safety argument in this particular case." The ruling (below) likely marks the final word in Howard's saga, assuring he can continue clocking in at his mine in eastern Kentucky. He'd been working at the mine for 7 months under reinstatement as the appeal pended.

"This means Scott doesn't have to look over his shoulder, worrying he could lose his job at any time," said his attorney, Tony Oppegard, who served as Howard's co-counsel on the appeal, along with Wes Addington, of the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, and Lynne Dunbar of the U.S. Labor Department. "His safety activism has not diminished one iota since he went back to work. He's been standing up for safety on a regular basis for the last seven months, and he'll continue doing that."

A spokeswoman for Cumberland River parent company Arch declined to comment.

As HuffPost reported in a 2011 profile of Howard, the miner has butted heads with management for years over dangerous conditions in Kentucky mines, often being punished, fired or blacklisted for raising his concerns. Howard filed half a dozen whistleblower complaints against Cumberland River in roughly as many years, and he once aired video of dangerously faulty seals at a company mine at a public hearing on mine safety. Boasting a long, successful record in court, Howard has been reinstated to his job twice by judges.

"It's a struggle just to work and earn a living," said Howard, 53. "I just can't stand to see lives put at risk."

Raising safety issues in a mine has a way of slowing coal production, potentially putting a worker at odds with management. At one point, his activism seemed to bother managers so much that the company entered into an agreement to pay Howard his full salary -- plus overtime -- if he agreed to stay off mine property.

His outspokenness on allegedly unsafe working conditions has come with its own risks, judging from court documents. In July 2010, he suffered a head injury while underground and had to be hospitalized. According to last year's ruling by the administrative law judge, doctors determined that Howard was in fine enough shape to go back to work, but one neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Robert Granacher, suggested Howard not be allowed to work at certain heights.

After Granacher's suggestion, a supervisor "decided that she would further clarify what the height restriction required," and "from that point forward, [Cumberland River] and Arch worked to keep Howard from returning to work," according to the the 2012 decision. Granacher later changed his report to recommend that Howard not be allowed to work at all. The judge called Granacher's actions "questionable."

According to court documents, an Arch manager also told a workers' compensation attorney working on Howard's case that the company was hoping to get a "resignation" from the miner. The same manager said in a deposition that she was told by Arch that Cumberland River "did not want Howard back" at the mine.

Oppegard, Howard's lawyer, said coal companies often worry that one miner's assertiveness on safety issues will spread to others.

"They think a safety activist has some kind of contagious disease, that he'll infect other miners with safety activism," said Oppegard. "They don't want other miners to know about their safety rights. The thing they fear more than anything else is having another Scott Howard at their mine."

Howard said he plans to work at Cumberland River for as long as he can.

"I'll stay there until I retire," Howard said. "It's the last place I'll ever work."

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stumbled on b2 osha TB

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1315-2004Aug14.html

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