With the Republicans' world crashing down around them, it's not surprising to see them trying to change the subject in a vain search for some real accomplishments -- any real accompishments -- even if they have to -- er, "borrow" them from a previous President-who-shall-not-be-named.

How about this? On Sunday, diesel fuel that contains just 3 percent of the pollution-generating sulfur that was in the old fuel will become available under a new Environmental Protection Agency regulation.

This is a good thing and surely worth some major bragging rights:

Like lead, sulfur generates airborne pollution that leads to severe health consequences. It also gums up the works of finely tuned pollution-control devices, making it difficult to produce cleaner-burning engines. So the new low-sulfur fuel will pave the way for new generations of diesel engines that will eventually cut lethal particulate pollution from diesel tailpipes by 95 percent.

***

The environmental agency estimates that when the current truck and bus fleets have been replaced and all are using the heavy-diesel engines that will become standard-issue next year, the new rule will prevent 8,300 premature deaths annually.

The only problem is that the diesel rule was a major environmental accomplishment....of the Clinton administration. But you wouldn't know it listening to the Bush administration take credit (while blaming Clinton for everything from 9/11 to the Korean nuclear test)-- unless you happened to be reading Felicity Barringer's NY Times article.

On Tuesday, the Bush administration embraced this signal accomplishment as its own, ignoring the 1990’s origins of the underlying regulation and the fact it became effective in the month before President Bush took office.

In a press conference at the Columbus, Ind., headquarters of Cummins Engine, a major diesel engine maker, the EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said, “Under President Bush’s leadership the pumps are primed to deliver clean diesel and a cleaner future for America.”

Like many of the regulations that took effect in the twilight of the Clinton administration, the diesel rule, covering fuel and the 7 million trucks and buses on the roads, was stayed once President Bush took office. Then the Environmental Protection Agency allowed it to proceed, and, in 2004, supplemented it with a similar rule requiring tight controls on the diesel engines in off-road equipment like cranes, tractors and construction equipment. (emphasis added)

Clinton's humorless former EPA Administrator didn't quite get the joke:

Carol M. Browner, the administrator who signed the original rule, bristled on Tuesday at the Bush administration’s proprietary attitude.

“The best they can do in environmental policy,” Ms. Browner asked, “is take credit for someone else’s work?”

I guess so.

Oh, and in case you hear any Republican candidates in the next few weeks trying to point to this as their proud accomplisment, you know what to do....

(HT Dave Meyer)

Why employers who kill by willfully violating OSHA standards shouldn't receive more serious punishment should be an issue that every candidate has to address during this political season. Unfortunately, families of those killed seem to be the only ones asking the questions.

I wrote last July about how Nevada state OSHA had inexplicably failed to issue a willful citation against Western States Equipment and Bobcat Service for the deaths of two construction workers who were killed when a 12-foot deep trench collapsed on top of them. The workers had asked to have the trench shored before they began work. Without a willful citation, OSHA can't pursue a criminal prosecution.

The family of one of the workers refuses to let the issue die:

Travis Cruz was one of two men who died when the trench they were working in, collapsed on top of them. Now, Cruz's family is pushing for new laws that will better protect workers like Travis, who they say was concerned about the safety of work site, before he died there.

"He was a very hard worker. He had asked about the trench the day before to John Winfield, and told him he felt it was unsafe. He asked about what happens if the trench would collapse, and John Winfield responded with, 'use your phone, dial 911, we'll bear you out.' And this is what happened," says Terry Cruz, Travis' sister.

Nevada OSHA defended the serious citations and the $49,000 fine against the company, but federal OSHA is apparently now reviewing the case

"My brother should be out there working on the roads. It's hard every time you drive by, you think he should be there. We should be able to wave hi to him every so often when we see him on the street. So it's really hard."

Take a walk or ride through any big city in the United States and you'll find that most of the workers in the small retail food and convenience stores, and most taxi drivers are immigrants. That's where they work when they first come to this country, and increasingly, that's where they die.

Chicago Tribune reporters Stephen Franklin and Darnell Little have written another excellent article in their series on Throwaway Lives about immigrants in the United States. This one is about workplace homicide, the leading cause of death for foreign born workers. Take a look at any Weekly Toll, the Confined Space list of workplace death. There are always a shockingly high number of retail store homicides, usually of immigrant workers.

It's tragic, and, contrary to what many people think, it's preventable:

A Tribune analysis shows that in 2005, when foreign-born workers made up 15 percent of the nation's workforce, 188 were murdered on the job, accounting for more than a third of the 564 workplace homicides, the highest ratio since the government began keeping track in 1992.

Much of this loss of life can be avoided with measures that are both well-known and not costly, experts say. But protecting cab drivers and store clerks hasn't been as big a priority as saving lives on the factory floor, they add.

"This is a terrible thing and it is fixable," says Rosemary Sokas, a workplace safety expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a former official at the research arm of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

A $500 plastic shield that separates taxi drivers from passengers can save countless drivers' lives, say experts like Sokas.

Between 1992 and 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available, 3,040 foreign-born workers were murdered on the job, according to government figures. Most of the victims were Mexicans, but the workplace homicide rates were the highest among immigrants from India, Cuba, Korea and Vietnam.

In 1998, OSHA published guidelines for late night retail workers, that included such recommendations as physical barriers (such as bulletproof enclosures), pass-through windows in late night retail, or deep service counters, alarm systems and panic buttons, elevated vantage points, clear visibility of service and cash register areas, bright and effective lighting, adequate staffing, arranging furniture to prevent entrapment and cash-handling controls, such as using drop safes.

Unfortunately, OSHA does not cite employes for not following the guidelines. In fact, OSHA rarely even investigates workplace homicides, especially in retail establishments. Large corporate chains generally follow the guidance, but not other stores.

Dr. Linda Degutis, a professor of emergency medicine at Yale University, is
a leader of the American Public Health Association, which, along with other
safety groups, has urged the federal government to take steps to try to curtail
such violence.

They want OSHA to issue a regulation laying out basic protections for these workers. If the federal government won't, then they say cities and states should step in. So, too, businesses should shoulder some of the burden, safety groups say.

"There are ways we can at least make a start," says Degutis. "Maybe we can't decrease everything, but maybe we can decrease the toll."

But getting the federal government and states to act and businesses to comply has not been easy.

Amid opposition from the retail industry, which complained about the potential paperwork and governmental intrusion, OSHA in the 1990s mulled a proposed regulation that applied to late-night workers at retail stores and cabs. Finally, the regulatory agency came up with a voluntary guideline in 1998 for late-night stores.

Charles Jeffers (sic), OSHA's director from 1997 to 2000, recalled that he didn't think the agency would be able to police grocery stores and taxi stands to see if they adhered to the regulation. But he also felt the problem couldn't be ignored.

"When we first got into this, there was a great outcry from the industry that there was nothing we could do. I just don't think it is acceptable to say the employee shouldering the risk is enough," he says.

Three states, Washington, New Mexico and Florida have passed laws addressing violence in retail stores, but they face fierce industry resistance:

In two of the three states with regulations for retail stores, industry groups challenged the laws. They lost their challenges in Florida, and a court battle over a 2004 law in New Mexico is not yet resolved. Washington is the other state with a law meant to protect retail store workers.

The logic they use in opposing the laws is remarkable:

"If it [the law]were necessary, every state would have it," says Ruben Baca, of the New Mexico Petroleum Marketers Association, which is fighting the 2004 law. "There are violent people out there, and what they need to do is put violent people away."

Well, first, if it wasn't for all the opposition from associations like yours, every state probably would have such laws, or better yet, a national OSHA standard. Second, sure we should put the bad guys away, but in the meantime, should we also take all the locks off the doors?

Sheesh!

Meanwhile, for cab drivers, a fact sheet suggesting bullet proof shields and cameras was all that OSHA has issued addressing violence. Some cities have adopted those recommendations.

Since 1998, for example, Chicago's 13,000 drivers of company-owned cabs have been required to have shields.

Now Chicago officials are finalizing a regulation that would allow drivers to replace the bullet-resistant shields with cameras, a move that probably would be well-received by drivers who have complained about the shields.

"Drivers generally don't have the shield closed because the customers hate it," says Jack Nichols, a veteran manager at Flash Cab Co. But at classes for the drivers, which are mandatory, Nichols often skips talking about safety.

In addition to being the leading cause of death for foreign born workers, workplace homicide has continuously been the second or third leading cause of workplace death for all workers nationwide. There's a myth that nothing can be done about it, and there's an assumption that even if something can be done about it, it's either not OSHA's job or there's no way, given its current resources, that OSHA can do anything about it.

It's an assumption that we need to change. Good work was done on the issue in the 1990's, and regardless of resistance from the retail industry associations, it's work that needs to be done again if OSHA is going to be serious about its mission to make all workplaces safer, whether you're working on a drill press, digging trench, building a house -- or slinging hot dogs or driving a taxi.


Related Stories

Workplace Violence: What It Mostly Is, What It Mostly Isn't, June 26, 2006
Workplace Fatalities That OSHA Ignores, October 1, 2005
New Mexico Petroleum Marketers Seek To Overturn Workplace Violence Standard, August 16, 2005
New Mexico Issues Late Night Convenience Store Violence Standard, February 1, 2005
APHA Calls for OSHA Workplace Violence Standard, January 6, 2005
Cabdriver Shot. A "Freak" Thing?, November 29, 2004
What's Henshaw Got Against A Little Violence?, November 15, 2004
Immigrants & Teens: Frontline Soldiers in the War Against Retail Crime? July 28, 2004
Workplace Violence: Fashionable vs. Unfashionable, July 18, 2004
What OSHA Investigates: Not the two biggest killers of American Workers, April 15, 2004
Seattle Cab Drivers Stage Work Stoppage Over Safety, February 12, 2004
Minneapolis Cab Driver Action Update, August 19, 2003
Minneapolis Cab Company Agrees to Put Cameras in Cabs, August 13, 2003
Minneapolis Taxi drivers call for one-day walkout over health and safety conditions, August 11, 2003

CNN Money.com has a long profile of SEIU President Andy Stern here.

The LA Times has a long article about how many products in Europe and other countries are allowed to be sold and used here.

Listen to a "podcast" by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg at a rally addressing poverty wages, brutal conditions, crippling injuries, illegal firings that workers face every day at the Smithfield hog processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C. (Note: You can listen on your computer or download it as a "podcast" onto your Ipod or other device)

Yours truly at Firedoglake about the 15,000 members of the United Steelworkers on strike at Goodyear tire.

Trust organized religion to make separation between church and state a bad thing.

This is what happened when Mary Rosati, a nun-in-training, was diagnosed with breast cancer and took her immediate supervisor and the mother superior to visit her doctor:

After the doctor explained her treatment options for breast cancer, the complaint continued, the mother superior announced: “We will have to let her go. I don’t think we can take care of her.” Some months later Ms. Rosati was told that the mother superior and the order’s governing council had decided to dismiss her after concluding that “she was not called to our way of life,” according to the complaint. Along with her occupation and her home, she lost her health insurance

Sounds like a field day for the courts. Except that, as described in a very long New York Times article today, it's totally legal because

the order’s decision to dismiss her “was an ecclesiastical decision” that was “beyond the reach of the court” because “the First Amendment requires churches to be free from government interference in matters of church governance and administration.”

Legislators and regulators are not the only people in government who have drafted special rules for religious organizations. Judges, too, have carved out or preserved safe havens that shield religious employers of all faiths from most employee lawsuits, from laws protecting pensions and providing unemployment benefits, and from laws that give employees the right to form unions to negotiate with their employers.

And it also includes most employee lawsuits, from laws protecting pensions and providing unemployment benefits, and laws that give employees the right to form unions to negotiate with their employers.

Isn't that special? Part III tomorrow. Part I yesterday revealed how religious institutions escape all kinds of regulations from child care centers to the land use regulations (as well as property tax and full tax audits.)

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health has fined Mammoth Mountain Ski Area nearly $50,000 for the deaths of three ski patrol members last April who fell into a gas vent and were overcome by carbon dioxide.

The largest of the penalties was $18,000 each for the two serious accident related violations of Cal/OSHA regulations addressing training issues. The investigation also revealed that the employer failed to properly identify and evaluate the hazards for working near the areas of volcanic fumaroles, which were known to have high levels of carbon dioxide gas. A third serious citation was issued for not having proper warning signs to indicate a potentially hazardous situation at the location of the fumarole.

In addition to the three serious violations, Mammoth Mountain Ski Area was issued general citations for not conducting proper internal atmosphere testing, not using proper engineering controls and not providing proper respirators for escape or rescue.

It was a tragic event, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:

During most of the year, the vents are harmless because the carbon dioxide fumes they emit dissipate in the air. But in winter, the volcanic gases pool and concentrate in pockets beneath the snow.

On the day of the accident, the fumarole had been covered with a layer of heavy snow, as much as 21 feet. That created a dome over the large crevasse, with poison gases trapped inside.

Some patrollers were trying to dig out a buried fence around the area when the snow around the vent collapsed. James Juarez and John "Scott" McAndrews fell about 20 feet to the bottom of the chute, where gases had accumulated.

Charles Walter Rosenthal, a patrol member and researcher for UC Santa Barbara, went in after them with several other patrollers. Rosenthal died.

What bothers me is the response of Mammoth executives.

But resort Chief Executive Rusty Gregory said that, intent on saving their colleagues and friends, ski patrol members acted "heroically" and went after them despite the rules.

"Heroes sometimes do that," he said. "This has truly broken our hearts forever. This was a huge personal loss for us."

The masks the patrollers wore, Gregory said, were designed to stabilize people injured on the mountain, not for protection against lethal gases.

"The bottom line is that our procedures for carbon dioxide occurrences or any noxious gases is that you don't enter a space where those gases exist," he added. "We lost two patrollers who fell in, and a third … who heroically jumped in to try to save them. He did what great friends do, which is to take care of other people."

Now, confined spaces are well known to health and safety professional as extremely dangerous -- not just to the original victims, but to poorly equipped, untrained rescuers as well. NIOSH has reported that a high percentage of confined space fatalities are rescuers. (more information here and here)

And it's not hard to understand why. You see you buddy passed out down in that pit, and your first instinct is to jump in and save him.

OSHA's confined space standard requires monitoring of confined spaces before entering, and a means to rescue workers without rescuers entering the space unless absolutely necessary, and unless their equipped with an air-supplying respirator.

The standard also requires training -- training workers not to jump in and try to save someone (without training, an air-supplying respirator and backup), or they'll become the next victim(s).

One of the first lessons of confined space, trench or fire, explosion or toxic gas rescue is not to become a victim yourself. We all think of firefighter as heros (and they are), but there are very strict rules for when they are alowed to attempt a rescue, and when they have to give up. As tragic as it is to know that a victim of a fire, trench collapse or confined space is probably going to die, it's more tragic to needlessly lose the life of one or two or more rescuers who aren't appropriately equipped or trained to perform the rescue.

Aspen (Colorado) Daily News agreed with the Mammoth executive:

Regulators are around to constantly push for safer work habits, and their work will undoubtedly have an effect at Mammoth. But we're not surprised and almost expect patrol members to go a little beyond OSHA-mandated caution. Patrol members themselves expect it. They realize that danger lurks in their jobs but don't dwell on it.

Yes, it's true that some jobs -- firefighting and ski patrol, for example -- are always going to be inherently dangerous, no matter how many standards, rules, regulations and training. But the standards, training and the rest are there for a reason -- to reduce the risk as much as possible while still being able to do the job. Expecting patrol members to violate the standards is not acceptable. The expectation of their loved ones is that they'll be alive at the end of the shift, and if the worst happens and they don't come home, the most they can hope is that their training, equipment or managers "expectations" weren't to blame.

A favorite saying of one of my many girl children is "you can't be too thin and you can't be too rich."

(We're pretty sure she doesn't really belong to us. She was probably a princess who was switched in the hospital, taken from her real aristocratic parents by an evil witch and doomed to spend a dreary life with the slightly broke parents she has now, neither of whom will ever be accused of being too thin.)

But I digress. The government of Spain, it seems, disagrees with the first part of the above sentence.

Some of the world's top models may be about to be kicked off the catwalk after a recent ban on super-thin models from runways in Spain.

The ban on "skinny" models performing in shows, instituted by Madrid Fashion Week organizers after a model died during a show in South America last month, sent shivers around the world of haute.

But many people in and out of the fashion world believe the new ban is long overdue, and should have been considered even before 22-year-old Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos reportedly died of heart failure after stepping off a runway during Fashion Week in Montevideo.

Now a fierce debate has broken out across the blogosphere (well, at least in two blogs) about whether the Spanish government's actions were justified, and (of special interest to Confined Space readers) is whether or not the pressure to maintain a clearly unhealthy weight should be considered a work-related hazard. And if it is, shouldn't OSHA get involved?

In this corner we have Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon who calls Spain's action "entirely sensible" and while it may raise "free speech" concerns,

the truth of the matter is this is basically a necessary protection for the workers so that their employers can’t demand they sacrifice their health in order to keep their jobs.

Meanwhile, over in the other corner, we have Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise who has serious misgivings, despite the fact that she's a pro-labor feminist and a civil libertarian. But

The policy is clearly an infringement on the free speech of fashion designers. Design is a form of expression and a fashion show is an aesthetic undertaking. Designing clothes for aesthetic effect is a creative undertaking. If a designer envisions her creations being worn on a certain shape of body, that's her prerogative. Even if we think her aesthetics are indecent or her politics are blinkered and decadent, we should respect her right to realize her creative goal.

***
Restricting the aesthetics of fashion shows is an infringement of First Amendment rights. Don't tell me that fashion show free speech is trivial. I won't argue too strenuously that fashion shows make an important contribution to public discourse, but censorship is censorship. The only question is whether the benefit to the workers is sufficient to offset this infringement.

She admits, however, that Amanda has a point,

A designer's right to design clothes for emaciated models doesn't necessarily guarantee her right to hire actual people to wear these clothes under dangerous conditions.

How to resolve the problem. Turn to me, of course (as well as a few others who have failed to take up her challenge.) Lindsay asks

How you create labor policies to protect workers from a race to the bottom in competitive industries? How do you balance free expression with the worker's right to be safe on the job? Is there a difference between a safety standard that theoretically protects every worker vs. a standard that can only be expected to benefit the industry on average?

Good questions.

Well, I've contemplated this for a week, waiting for some kind of divine intervention, which hasn't arrived. So, uncharacteristically left with nothing brilliant to say, I'm going to instead ask a few questions and make a few not-so-brilliant observations. And I'm going to pass this along by inviting you, kind readers, to join the discussion. That's why God made comment links.

So, is forced anorexia in order to be a fashion model be considered an workplace health problem, and, if so, what should OSHA (or anyone else) do about it?

The whole point of the Occupational Safety and Health Act is to prevent employers from forcing workers to choose between their jobs and their lives. OSHA regulations are a floor; employers are not allowed to negotiate weaker protections for their employees, even if they provide hazard pay.

I'm trying to imagine OSHA citing a modeling agency for encouraging (forcing) models to attain or maintain an unhealthy body weight, assuming you can define that.

And the remedy would be? Firing them unless they gain more weight? Supervising their ingestion of X calories /day (along with a camera in the bathroom)?

On the other hand, OSHA could theoretically stop an agency from retaliating against an employee for exercising her health and safety rights. On the other hand, the whole process of choosing models is so subjective it would be hard to prove.

Although I'm not holding my breath waiting for any OSHA standards or major enforcement actions in this area (or any other), it's an interesting issue that crosses into a variety of areas such as occupational health, women's rights, public health, job discrimination, the power of the advertising and fashion industry and, of course, wise parenting.

I'm trying to think of another situation where a worker's chief qualification also presents a deadly threat to their health. Are there scenarios that might related?

Should OSHA require medical examinations of all fashion models, and full pay if they're forced to eat? One thing that comes to mind is OSHA's respirator standard. Respirators are sometimes required to protect workers from exposure to toxic chemicals when the exposure can't be prevented through more effective means such as ventilation. The problem with respirators is that they can themselves be a health threat for workers with respiratory or heart problems. OSHA therefore requires medical examinations before workers can wear respirators. You fail the respirator medical exam, you can't do the job. Of course, this isn't exactly the same thing (plus it's possible to use more expensive "supplied air" respirators that don't put a burden on the lungs or heart.)

Lindsay also raises this issue:

If anorexia is a work-induced disease, it seems perverse (and possibly illegal) to make women who suffer from the disease unemployable. It would set a very bad precedent to start making people unemployable because of medical/psychiatric conditions that don't affect their ability to do their job.

Which brings to mind a provision that OSHA has in some of its chemical standards called "Medical Removal Protection." If a worker has been overexposed to the point where they're having measurable health effects that can be helped by time away from the exposure, OSHA guarantees them time off with pay and benefits, until they're recovered or until enough time has passed to make it clear that they will never recover. The problem with applying that to fashion models is that the disease that removes them from work is that exact attribute that makes them so attractive to their employer and the public.

And I'm not sure how it relates exactly, but it brings to mind the famous debate in the 1980's when Johnson Controls refused to hire women to work in (higher paying) areas where they might be exposed to lead (which can cause birth defects) unless they could prove that they could not have children -- essentially saying that if you want to work here you have to have yourself sterilized.

That, of course, ended up being an equal opportunity issue (as well as an OSH problems.) What about men, the courts asked? Reproductive hazards generally affect both genders, if not in the exact same way, and women have just as much right to put themselves at risk as men. The answer, of course, was to make the workplace safe for everyone.

Again, I'm not sure exactly how that case relates, but it does raise another interesting question. What about male models? The emaciated male isn't very fashionable I guess.

And as long as we're talking about fashion models, let's fantasize a bit (not that way). OSHA, as those of us who have been in this field for a long time know, is really just a crutch, an aid that can be useful in gaining safer workplaces. But we also know that the best way to get anything in a workplace, including safer working conditions, is a strong, educated and well organized union. So let's imagine fashion models worldwide forming a union and refusing to emaciate themselves anymore. Complete solidarity -- no one mounts the runway who isn't a healthy weight.


Finally, here's another story that's not really related, except that it does deal with the female image and workplace problems. Thin women don't have all the problems: it's not just thin women that have workplace And the, of course, there's this, but that's another story:

It seems that someone at the Lusty Lady, a San Francisco nude dancer club booked an entire night of "BBW" entertainment - big, beautiful women - and the clientele reacted by walking out.

The counterman wrote up the customers' objections - "I came for fantasies, not nightmares" being one of the more printable ones - and sent them off in what he thought was a confidential e-mail to the club's board of directors.

However, one board member, who worked as a Lusty dancer, took offense and plastered a printout of the e-mail on the dressing-room mirror for all the entertainers to see.

Talk about an ugly situation.

"Those same BBW girls had to come in, see it, then go out and perform," said Lorellie, a dancer, board member and designated PR rep for the club, who like many of the entertainers goes by just the one name.

"It sort of became a guy-versus-girls thing," Lorellie said. "Some said, 'Fire him.' Others said, 'Fire her.' "

Instead, the Lusty board suspended them both.

Then, after talking over the situation with no fewer than three lawyers, the board fired the dancer for making the e-mail public and reinstated the counterman - who already had decided to move on.

The dancer has filed a grievance against the club through the Service Employees International Union Local 790, which represents all the Lusty workers and managers. She hopes to get her job back.

Everyone has agreed to mediation to try to settle the matter.

Moral of the story: Fat or thin, fashionably nude or fashionably dressed, go get yourself a union.

UPDATE: Lindsay sums it up over at Majikthise.

The more you peal down the layers of tragedy from 9/11, particularly of the tens of thousands who worked on the World Trade Center rescue and cleanup following the 9/11 attack, the more depressing it gets. Aside from the mounting evidence of serious health effects being suffered by the veterans of the "pile," more and more information is coming out about the thousands of undocumented immigrants who are now experiencing 9/11-related health problems, but who are not getting help, and who remain under continued attack due to their immigration status.

One was Jose Moncada, an immigrant from Honduras who worked for a contractor retrieving human remains and removing toxic debris.

Working on the pile for 10 days, Moncada breathed in thick dust, grainy asbestos and foul-smelling gases driven by an angry downtown wind. Now, five years later, he suffers from a hacking cough, nosebleeds, wheezing breath and life-threatening respiratory illnesses that also trouble thousands of legal U.S. residents who worked there.

***
Moncada said fires were still burning on the streets when he showed up to volunteer in September 2001. "No one asked for papers or anything," he said. He worked with others who spoke Spanish.

***

Two years later, Moncada started to feel tired. Then he felt pain.

"My nose hurts every time I breathe," he said. "My vision is very bad. My breathing is very bad. A doctor gave me Tylenol and Advil.

"I don't want to speak to anybody. I want to stay home. I feel depressed. I can't sleep very well at night. Every day I wake up and I do nothing. I don't know what is happening to my system, my body."

Anti-immigrant activists have little sympathy:

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes immigration increases, expressed regret for illegal immigrants who fell sick after working at Ground Zero but said they should not have been allowed to enter the country illegally.

"It tells us how harmful it is to have a policy that winks at illegal immigration and gives status to illegal aliens," Krikorian said. "If they present themselves to authorities, they should be sent home. It makes people squeamish to say this because of what happened. But this is a result of the ridiculous situation we've put ourselves in."

Carmen Calderón, coordinates the Sept. 11 immigrant outreach for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, which has been spearheading an effort to reach out to the victims of the cleanup.

when a backlash developed against the huge wave of illegal immigration, "they changed the DMV laws, and a lot of asbestos workers lost their licenses because they couldn't get a picture ID," Calderón said. "A lot of them are sick now, without work. They've lost their insurance. They lost their incomes. They lost everything."

***
Workers were paid about $19 an hour, toiling for up to 16 hours a day. They were given buckets, mops, rags and little protective equipment as they cleared away glass, metal, dust and waste from downtown buildings that were not destroyed, advocates said.

"The ladies were smaller, so they put them in the air ducts, huge pipes," Calderón said. "They crawled in to wipe down the pipes with no masks, no gloves, nothing, not even a change of clothes."

NYCOSH estimates that thousands of immigrants from China, Honduras, Russia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico worked at the site.

"For low-income immigrant communities where health insurance is scarce . . . this disaster magnified an already desperate situation," Calderón said. "Their choice is concrete. Do I pay my rent? Do I buy medicine? Do I put food on the table? These choices are obviously choices that some victims of Sept. 11 have to make."

Others have moved or gone back home.

NY Times editors aren't too happy about the National Labor Board's Kentucky River decision to radically expand the definition of "supervisor," taking away the right to join unions for millions of nurses and others.

The Times recognizes the need to bar true managers from organizing,

But responsibilities like making out a schedule do not amount to management. If they did, interns would be the only non- managers in many of today’s workplaces.

Companies facing unionization drives have long found it convenient to discover that employees who are basically rank-and-file workers are actually managers. That seems to be the case with the nurses. The board’s decision opens the door for possibly millions of health-care workers and other professionals to be disqualified from the option of union protection.

This is one more step curbing the power of organized labor since President Bush came to office. The administration’s philosophical vendetta against unions has come at a time when their power is already on the wane. Membership has fallen to 7.8 percent of the private work force in this country, from over a third in the 1950’s. Far from balancing the scales, the anti-union drive comes when workers are already at a historic low in bargaining strength. Despite a growing economy and rising productivity, hourly wages adjusted for inflation have declined 2 percent since 2003. Corporate profits, meanwhile, are at their highest share of gross domestic product since the 1960’s.

We are getting closer and closer to a work force with no benefits and no substantive protections. Some unions succumbed to corruption and contributed to their own decline. But their role in giving common workers a voice is essential to a functioning society.

The stock market is doing well, as is the corporate war against workers, thanks to Wal-Mart and the National Labor Relations Board -- according to Paul Krugman in today's NY Times:

If you want to see how the war against wages is being fought, and what it’s doing to working Americans and their families, consider the latest news from Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart already has a well-deserved reputation for paying low wages and offering few benefits to its employees; last year, an internal Wal-Mart memo conceded that 46 percent of its workers’ children were either on Medicaid or lacked health insurance. Nonetheless, the memo expressed concern that wages and benefits were rising, in part “because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases.”

The problem from the company’s point of view, then, is that its workers are too loyal; it wants cheap labor that doesn’t hang around too long, but not enough workers quit before acquiring the right to higher wages and benefits. Among the policy changes the memo suggested to deal with this problem was a shift to hiring more part-time workers, which “will lower Wal-Mart’s health care enrollment.”

And the strategy is being put into effect. “Investment analysts and store managers,” reports The New York Times, “say Wal-Mart executives have told them the company wants to transform its work force to 40 percent part-time from 20 percent.” Another leaked Wal-Mart memo describes a plan to impose wage caps, so that long-term employees won’t get raises. And the company is taking other steps to keep workers from staying too long: in some stores, according to workers, “managers have suddenly barred older employees with back or leg problems from sitting on stools.”

And of course, employers who exploit workers need not worry too much about unions anymore. Not only do are workers protections against intimidating an firing organizers deteriorating, but, thanks to the NLRB, millions of workers have lost their right to organize.

The Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board, which is responsible for enforcing the law, has just declared that millions of workers who thought they had the right to join unions don’t. You see, the act grants that right only to workers who aren’t supervisors. And the board, ruling on a case involving nurses, has declared that millions of workers who occasionally give other workers instructions can now be considered supervisors.

As the dissent from the Democrats on the board makes clear, the majority bent over backward, violating the spirit of the law, to reduce workers’ bargaining power.

So what’s keeping paychecks down? Major employers like Wal-Mart have decided that their interests are best served by treating workers as a disposable commodity, paid as little as possible and encouraged to leave after a year or two. And these employers don’t worry that angry workers will respond to their war on wages by forming unions, because they know that government officials, who are supposed to protect workers’ rights, will do everything they can to come down on the side of the wage-cutters.

I think it's time for them to leave. First step, November 7.

An Department of Labor Inspector General audit of Mine Safety And Health Administration complaint process shows that MSHA is slow to investigate complaints about life-threatening conditions. And miners concerned about safety conditions may want to think twice about whether extra weekend or holiday pay is worth it.

Between Jan. 1, 2005, and March 30, 2006, the inspector general found, in 56 of the 410 hazardous condition complaints, it took at least two days before the district office was notified. The complaints could cover such unsafe conditions as significant levels of methane or unstable roof supports.

The majority of the delays occurred because the complaint was received on a weekend or holiday. But for 12 of the complaints, it took longer than three days -- and as many as 11 days -- as the mines continued operating.

The report also found inconsistency between MSHA regional offices. According to the auditors,

the nation's 11 regional coal districts were "neither consistent nor complete" in how they handled the most serious complaints. In at least one instance, similar methane levels were labeled an "imminent danger" in one mine, but not in another.

Part of the problem is that MSHA hires contractors to handle complaints, and according to the report, MSA

had neither provided effective training and operational guidance to, nor monitored the performance of, the contractor used to receive complaints filed with MSHA headquarters.

And one more issue of great concern to miners. Both the Mine Safety and Health Act and the Occupational Safety And Health Act give employees to opportunity to file confidential complaints to prevent retaliation by employers. At least in theory...

The inspector also found "several instances" in which information that could identify the miner reporting the hazard was inadvertently conveyed to the mine operator, which could discourage others from reporting.

Summary and Full Report can be found here.

For those of you who received the mailing, Blogger generated the wrong link for "Why Unions Are Good For Nurses And Your Health"

Try here.

Sorry about that.

Responding to the NLRB's Kentucky River decision that takes away bargaining rights for millions of American nurses and other workers, Sarah Solon at the DMI Blog explains why unions are good for nurses -- and women. And it goes far beyond just the wages and benefits that most people think of when they think of unions:

When I say "unions are good for nurses," here's what I mean: unionized nurses and charge nurses make around 13% more than non-unionized nurses, union contracts mandate safety in the workplace, union contracts mandate lower nurse-to-patient ratios which have been shown to greatly increase patient care, union contracts increase pay and increased pay has been shown to ameliorate the nursing crisis at certain hospitals that have raised their nursing compensation packages...the list goes on and on.

The kicker with union contracts and nurses is that 92.3% of nurses are women. Of these nurses, "72% of nurses don't feel safe from assault in their workplace, up to 95% of nurses reported having been bullied at work, and up to 75% of nurses reported having been subjected to sexual harassment at work." 35% of nurses who participated in a given study left their jobs because of verbal abuse from a physician - the primary cause of the bullying and harassment of nurses at work. And let's remember that nurses work in hospitals and other health-care facilities - where their patients long-term health, in not their life, is on the line. Given the huge importance of the tasks nurses must accomplish during their shifts, it's completely unacceptable that "at least 70 percent said blowups with physicians [the most common form of verbal abuse of nurses] increases errors, and nearly as many said it decreases productivity on the job."

The workplace horrors of harassment and bullying are far too prevalent among nurses, and union contracts include provisions for protection from these abuses, many of which are only exacerbated by gender issues. United American Nurses contracts, for example, "put nurses on safety and health committees and purchasing committees, giving nurses an equal say in safety policy and requiring hospitals to buy the safest products available. Contracts commit employers to measures that prevent violence and enforce zero-tolerance on hostile, abusive or disrespectful behavior - from anyone." And in one of their specific contracts, "Nurses at Fairview Hospitals in Minnesota ratified language requiring the hospitals to prevent violence and verbal abuse through patient risk assessments, an annual course on de-escalation, behavior management, physical protection and a trained response team."

Oh, and by the way, your life may depend on it. A recent study shows that 20,000 people die each year because they have checked into a hospital with overworked nurses and union contracts mandate lower patient-to-nurse ratios,

Even the Washington Post, never known as a particular friend of labor (as you may be able to tell) is outraged by Tuesday's Kentucky River NLRB decision that may take away the rights of millions of workers to join unions:

The decision exacerbates a legal environment that makes organizing workers unduly difficult. In other recent cases, the labor relations board has narrowed the definition of workers who may organize, excluding graduate students who work as teaching assistants and disabled people who work full time but whose contracts could be said to be rehabilitative. In industries where the right to organize is not yet disputed, employers nonetheless block attempts to establish unions by firing workers who favor them; although this is illegal, the penalties are too small and tardy to serve as a deterrent.

Critics of unions are right that they can bring disadvantages. They can impede innovation and slow the introduction of new technology. But in an age of growing inequality, the decline of unions also has disadvantages: De-unionization explains about 15 percent of the increase in wage inequality among men over the past quarter-century, according to David Card of the University of California at Berkeley. In sum, the costs and benefits of unions vary from industry to industry, which is all the more reason why workers should be free to decide whether to join one.

We write a lot hear about the weakness of OSHA's penalties, even where a worker is killed due to willful disregard of safe working conditions by the employer. Once in a while, however, OSHA and prosecutors seem to understand that these deaths are not "just one of those things. It still happens far too infrequently, and the penalties still aren't quite enough to put the fear of God into employers who cut corners on worker safety. Nevertheless, we need to collect these cases and make sure that prosecutors across the country are aware of them when workers are killed on the job.


On August, 2005 28-year-old AT&T; trainee Paul Charles Hurt was electrocuted while working on a joint pole — which combines power lines and phone lines -- near Lopez, California. An investigation found that he had not been wearing properly insulated safety gloves.

Earlier this week criminal charges were brought against the company, two misdemeanor charges alleging negligence and willful violation of a standard that led to Hurt's death.

The company faces up to about $1.5 million in fines and probation.

Most criminal prosecutions involving businesses claim an individual or individuals are responsible, not the entity, said Deputy District Attorney Steve von Dohlen.

In the case against AT&T;, prosecutors believe the criminal charges recommended by the California division of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fit the alleged crimes and that the company needs to address standards or practices.

"We feel that's an appropriate charge here because that was a serious incident -- serious because a man died," von Dohlen said.

***

Von Dohlen said the incident appeared to have been a failure by the company overall and not individual employees.

As in other cases where the company is charged with a crime instead of any individuals, it's hard to see what the point is. Clearly the fine can be higher than fines that result from typical OSHA citations, and then there's the stigma of being convicted of a crime. Otherwise....

AT&T may face probation that could require the company to change or adopt certain safety standards. If probation were violated, a judge could order additional fines against the company, up to the maximum of the original offense.

In 2005, Cal-OSHA recommended 49 criminal referrals to local prosecutors, with 11 of them being filed.

This was not the first time a court has convicted a company on criminal charges for the death of an employee. Last November, Far West Water and Sewer Company was convicted of negligent homicide and aggravated assault and fined $1.77 million. The president of the company was also found guilty by a jury of two counts of negligent homicide and two counts of endangerment, and sentenced to four years of supervised probation for one of the negligent homicide convictions and another four years for one of the aggravated-assault convictions. He was also fined $50,000 sentenced to teach 840 hours of safety classes.

In 2005, a Michigan judge found Lanzo Construction criminally responsible for the death of an employee in a trench collapse and put Lanzo "on probation." In that case, "probation" meant that the company could not receive any state government contracts until 2013.

Seems just stopping immigrants from entering the country isn't as simple as it sounds. The result has been severe labor shortages in the fields.

As the border tightens, Mexican workers who once spent part of each year in American fields without a work permit fear that if they go back to Mexico, they will be trapped behind the border, farmers say. Instead, they stay in the United States, taking year-round jobs that pay more and are less backbreaking than farm work, such as cleaning hotels or working in construction in cities on the Gulf Coast devastated by last year's hurricanes.

***

The problem is now reaching crisis proportions, food growers say. As much as 30 percent of the year's pear crop was lost in Northern California, growers estimate. More than one-third of Florida's Valencia orange crop went unharvested, Regelbrugge said. In New York, apples are rotting on the trees, because workers who once picked the fruit have fled frequent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, said Maureen Marshall, an apple grower in Elba.

Not only that, but it's causing headaches for the Republican party:

Some food growers, who as a group tend to vote Republican, now find themselves fighting hardest against leaders in their own party.

"So many of the farmers here are conservative, but they're finding themselves kind of at odds, not so much with Republicans in this area but with Republicans on the East Coast who have no idea what's going on in the San Joaquin Valley and California," said Daniel Jackson, a California fruit grower. "Something could happen in Washington, D.C., tomorrow, and all the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley would be out of work."

Ricchiuti has a framed photo of President Bush and first lady Laura Bush on his office wall and a pile of "Re-Elect Arnold" signs supporting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) at his processing plant. But he grew agitated when he talked about the GOP's handling of immigration.

"What's wrong with the Republican leadership?" he demanded. "They control the House and the Senate. I would have thought it would be a slam-dunk.

"Certain Republicans are very closed-minded," he continued. "They're prejudiced, and they're concerned about people taking their jobs. Well, you know what? You won't do those jobs. You might stick your head up the grapevine once or twice, but you won't do it a third time."

Some of you old-timers may recall February 2005 when I wrote about the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the death of Denise Bogucki who was crushed against the nose of a plane in September 2003. The NTSB report essentially blamed Bogucki for her own death, stating that she had chosen to use the incorrect equipment to push back an airplane from a gate, causing the accident that pinned her against a plane.

The union objected, saying she had been using the only equipment available, and that she shouldn't have been working alone. Virginia OSHA cited the company, Northwest Airlines, and Northwest -- essentially admitting that there was a problem -- instituted changes, including requiring two people for pushbacks.

Several weeks after the report was released, the NTSB, citing "new information,"decided to take a second look at the Bogucki's death "due to new information."

Now, a year and a half later, Bogucki's mother, Jeanne Earley, is still waiting for that report.

"It's never going to end for me," said Earley, an executive assistant in the airport's administrative office. "But it would be nice to have this part of it over with and settled once and for all."

It doesn't help that a September issue of a Northwest newsletter referred to two recent accidents that resulted in "potentially life-threatening injuries" while doing the same job Bogucki was doing when she was killed.

Safety board spokesman Keith Holloway said last week that the investigation of Bogucki's death would be complete "before the end of the year, if not sooner." He added that the agency is not investigating the recent accidents.

Earley's heard it all before. About this time last year, the agency said it would finish by the end of 2005.

"I don't know if they're afraid to address it because of big business," she said. "We're just the little guys, and they're dragging her through the mud again."

The union is upset too

"It's like there's no value to human life," said Bob Bennek, safety and health director of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Air Transport District 143, which includes Norfolk.

"You would think a fatality would get some type of resolution sooner than this," Bennek said. "The family deserves to have a resolution."

As for the other accidents where ground crew employees were injured, Airline spokesman Roman Blahoski says they weren't related. And although Northwest made changes after Bogucki's death, they are contesting the OSHA citation.

"Our investigation showed it to be an accident and not the result of a violation of OSHA standards," Blahoski said.

The two recent accidents mentioned in the Northwest newsletter also occurred "during the push-back of an aircraft." The newsletter said two employees "suffered injuries, one of which was serious."

Blahoski said the accidents, which occurred over the past few months, were different from Bogucki's because they injured ground crew members, not the driver of the push-back tug.

He said an internal investigation concluded that proper procedure was not followed in one case and that the other is still under review. (emphasis added)

Of course, experts who investigate the root causes of "accidents" generally will ask "why" procedures weren't followed and usually find that there are understandable reasons. (For example, understaffing, improper equipment, or the job just can't get done by following the rules.) And numerous "accidents," even if they appear "unrelated," generally mean that there's something seriously wrong with the management safety systems in the workplace.

Bennek, the machinists union's health and safety director, would like to see the safety board issue recommendations for making push-backs safer, including specifying push-back tractor designs, tow bar lengths and inspections criteria.

"They could make some findings that could forever change the industry," he said.

Meanwhile, Bogucki's mother waits:

Jeanne Earley checks a federal investigators' Web site daily, hoping for closure three years after her daughter was killed while working at the airport.

Every day, she longs to see that the inquiry has ended and to know, finally, what really happened.

Every day, she is disappointed.

This afternoon, George W. Bush’s National Labor Relations Board, in a party-line 3-2 decision, took away bargaining rights for millions of American nurses and other workers.

The Board's findings were contained in its long-awaited Kentucky River decision which focused on whether certain nurses, called charge nurses, should be considered “supervisors” who are excluded from having the right to organize unions.

The origin of the supervisory exclusion was the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which amended the National Labor Relations Act. The original National Labor Relations Act gave all employees the right to form unions and required that employers recognize certified employee unions and bargain in good faith. The Taft-Hartley Act, however, excluded supervisors, defined as

any individual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment.

However, even the anti-union authors of the Taft-Hartley act made it clear that it did not intend to deny coverage to professional employees, lead workers or others whose jobs do not include major managerial responsibility to hire, fire and discipline other employees. Yet, the Republican-appointed majority today ignored that context, essentially finding favorable definitions for in the dictionary, rather than from clear Congressional intent.

NOTE: If this is all too confusing, just check out Stephen Colbert's hilarious here.

The current problem stems from a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that found that the NLRB’s analysis of the supervisory status of six registered nurses at a Kentucky nursing facility was flawed. The Board is therefore required to come up with a better definition of "supervisor." The problem is that some nurses act as "charge nurses," who are allowed to decide which patients will be seen by his or her colleagues. And despite the fact that charge nurses can’t discipline other employers, hire or fire, they could be considered management by an overly broad interpretation of the law.

And why are nurse unions such a big deal? Check out a few of these headlines from the past few days:

Strike Looms As Nurses Rally At Temple Hospital

PHILADELPHIA -- Nurses rallied at Temple Hospital Monday as the threat of a strike looms. Their contract with the hospital runs out at the end of the month, and workers believe the nurse-to-patient ratio is too high.

The issue is something Temple University Hospital nurses are now threatening to strike over. They said some units are so understaffed that patients’ lives are at risk.

Kaua'i nurse strike enters 12th week

Kaua'i, HI -- Wilcox Hospital nurses entered their 12th week on strike yesterday with new negotiations, and with demonstrations on O'ahu and Kaua'i.

Both sides say the key issue in the strike is the nurses' insistence on a system that would call in more nursing help when the needs of patients increase. Wilcox Hospital and its parent, Hawai'i Pacific Health, insist staffing is and should be a management function.

Union asks nurses at UMass to OK strike

Boston, MA -- The union representing about 850 registered nurses at UMass Memorial Medical Center's University Campus in Worcester has asked its members to authorize a strike, a sign that a nine -month contract dispute is worsening.

The union said its members are angry over the hospital's demands for concessions on pensions, health benefits, wages, paid days off, and layoff language. Negotiations began in January and little progress has been made, though the contract expired in April.

The decision makes an interesting read, particularly the section written by the two Board members who dissented, Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh. The decision focused on the words highlighted in the definition of a "supervisor" above. Liebman and Walsh point out that the legislative history of the act distinguished between real supervisors "vested with such genuine management prerogatives as the right to hire or fire, discipline, or make effective recommendations with respect to such action " and "straw bosses, leadmen, set-up men, and other minor supervisory employees."

They pointed out that the the Republican-appointed Board majority focused on the individual dictionary definition of the words, rather than the context within which they were intended. In other words, "assign" was not intended by Congress to mean asking a nursing assistant to cover patients A, B and C, but it must be seen in the entire context of the terms used in the law, meaning "authority to determine the basic terms and conditions of an employee's job, i.e., position, work site, or work hours."

They point out that back when the term "straw boss" was in use, it was

A term applied to a worker who takes a lead in a team or gang, usually small in number, including himself, performing all the duties of the other workers in the gang. His supervisory functions are incidental to the production duties he performs.

In fact, most nurses and other professionals who work with assistants or as team leaders reoutinely play a role in assigning parts of a day's work.

Similarly, the term "responsibility to direct"

refers to the general supervisory authority delegated to foremen overseeing an operational department and the accountability that goes with it, in contrast to the kind of one-on-one task direction

such as asking an assistant to empty a bed pan or take a temperature. In other words, when the original law was passed, Congress sought to make a distinction between "indiviuals with 'essential managerial duties' and those with only 'minor supervisory ' duties."

Walsh and Liebman note that unlike real supervisors, charge nurses do not have the ability to hire, fire or discipline, nor do they have any formal role in the employee grievance process. In addition, they spend the vast majority of their time in line work "a fact that strongly tends to estbalish their status as s minor supervisory employees."

But those are just legal issues. As we have learned over and over again, simple legalities are not the issue for this administration; crushing labor unions is.

Liebman and Walsh provide describe the chilling implications of the decision:

Today’s decision threatens to create a new class of workers under Federal labor law: workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees. Into that category may fall most professionals (among many other workers), who by 2012 could number almost 34 million, accounting for 23.3 percent of the work force.

The AFL-CIO’s Tula Connell points out in Daily Kos what this means for individual workers,

Sandra Falwell, a staff nurse at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., sometimes directs the work of less skilled or less experienced employees. Yet she's not part of hospital management. She does not have the ability to hire or fire employees, evaluate their performance or make other decisions regarding their work.

Under today's ruling, Falwell--and hundreds of thousands of workers like her--now could be classified as supervisors, and so cannot belong to a union. And not only nurses: journalists, building trades workers, port employees and many, many, others may now be considered supervisors under U.S. labor law and so barred from joining unions.

We’ll soon see what effect this ruling has on the ability of health care workers professional workers and others to organize. The Democratic members of the Board are pessimistic:

The result could come as a rude shock to nurses and other workers who for decades have been effectively protected by the National Labor Relations Act, but who now may find themselves treated, for labor-law purposes, as members of management, with no right to pursue collective bargaining or engage in other concerted activity in the workplace.

Indeed, supervisors may be conscripted into an employer’s anti-union campaign, while their pro-union activity is now strictly limited. The majority’s decision thus denies the protection of the Act to yet another group of workers, while strengthening the ability of employers to resist the unionization of other employees.

Nathan Newman notes that the Kentucky River ruling clears the field from more employer mischief and harassment of workers:

And the new expansive definition of "supervisor" means that more workers will be given nominal supervisory responsibilities to undermine their right to unionize-- and lock every union vote in endless delays as companies litigate who is and who is not a supervisor.

Even if the workers "win", the election will probably be delayed long enough to kill the union drive. And here are the dynamics when large numbers of workers are declared to be supervisors-- it means that friends in the workplace immediately are turned into enemies as supervisors are told to spy on their friends or lose their jobs. Instead of a union being about workers challenging the power of top management, it is turned into an internal workplace civil war.

This isn’t good new for anyone who’s ever planning on being a patient in a hospital either. Nurses unions are known to be strong advocates of increasing nurse-patient staff ratios and other measures that improve patient outcomes. Research shows that that increased nurse-staff ratios mean fewer hospital fatalities, fewer heart attacks, shorter time spent in the hospital, and fewer patient-safety errors.

Things are already bad enough in the U.S. A 2002 Government Accounting Office one quarter of the civilian American workforce — 32 million workers — were without collective bargaining rights.

The largest groups without rights were about 8.5 million independent contractors; 5.5 million employees of certain small businesses; 10.2 million supervisory/ managerial employees (including 8.6 million first-line supervisors); 6.9 million federal, state and local government workers; approximately 532,000 domestic workers; and 357,000 agricultural workers.

And as is increasingly common in George Bush’s United States, US laws are out of sync with international human rights. A 2000 report by Human Rights Watch(HRW) found that U.S. labor laws were grossly out-of-compliance with international human rights norms and failed to protect workers’ rights to organize unions and bargain collectively. The effect, according to HRW is that

Big chunks of the labor force are defenseless against employer reprisals if they try to exercise freedom of association. If they protest abusive working conditions, employers can fire them with impunity. If they seek to bargain collectively, employers can ignore them. Protection of the right to organize and bargain collectively, a bedrock requirement of international labor rights norms, is denied these workers.

What Happens Now?

The decision, according to the Washington Post, will undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court again:

The decision is likely to be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, which has twice rejected prior Board decisions for failing to give adequate consideration to such issues as a supervisor's use of independent judgment and the assignment or direction of staff. In those cases, the Board found that nurses who direct other employees in their patient care duties are not supervisors. The court sent the issue back to the board for more work.

It should be noted that the NLRB only took away these workers’ right to organize, not their ability to organize. In other words, instead of being protected by the NLRA – the right not to be fired for organizing activities, for example – these workers are being taken back to the law of the jungle that existed before the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. Indeed, the famous Detroit sit down strikes of 1936-37, although they occurred after the Wagner Act was passed, did not use the NLRB’s protections, which most employers were ignoring anyway. In other words, to coin a phrase, “the workers united, will never be defeated” even if current interpretations of the law don't currently favor them.

And unions, like the California Nurses Association are not giving up.

Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro said the decision "provides employers a road map to exclude hundreds of thousands of RNs from their rights. It forces RNs to choose between protecting their patients and keeping their job." DeMoro said there will be "a comprehensive response to this disgraceful decision."

Initially, she said, CNA/NNOC will:

• Put employers on notice in all CNA/NNOC-represented facilities that the RNs will strike if the employer seeks to exploit the ruling. More than 30,000 CNA/NNOC members have already signed strike pledges to do just that.
• Hold protests or other public events with RNs Thursday, October 5 in Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, and Bangor, Me. as a beginning wave of actions in response to the decision.
• Work with the AFL-CIO and AARN on legislation in Congress to overturn the decision.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney stated that

Today’s decision is the latest in the Bush-appointed NLRB’s legal maneuvering to deny as many workers as possible their basic right to have a voice on the job and improve their living standards through their union. Over the last several years, the NLRB has chipped away at that right by limiting the eligibility of disabled workers, teaching assistants, temporary workers and others to join unions. Now, at the very time middle class workers need more help, not less, the NLRB is taking a broad swing.

Sweeney promised that

Over the next week, working people will be coming together in the streets in cities across the nation to make sure everyone knows the Bush Administration is slashing workers’ right to have a voice on the job.

And according to Change To Win Chair Anna Burger:

By narrowly defining several broad phrases of the National Labor Relations Act, the Bush appointed majority has created a blueprint for eliminating the right to union representation for most professionals and from millions of leadpersons and employees who are currently represented. Contrary to what the Bush majority says, this decision is not legally required, but is another in a growing string of decisions that further narrow the right to organize.

Those that see reclassifying employees as supervisors as an easy way to deny workers their rights, will find many employees unwilling to trade their rights for a sham title. They will also find that these working women and men do not stand alone.

What effect will this decision have on the upcoming election, amidst revelations that the Bush administration has known all along how bad things are going in Iraq, while the "family values" party is caught with its proverbial pants down defending child molesters?

We'll see, but sometimes I think that many Americans are so tired of politics and politicians and suspicious elections that they don't realize how much politics can affect their daily lives, particularly the one-third or more of their lives while at work. The Kentucky River decision should serve as a reminder to all nurses, professionals and anyone else who might be caught in the Bush ant-worker web that voting counts. It counts for staffing ratios in health care institutions, it counts for the ability to bargain about wages and benefits, it counts for safe workplaces, and most of all, it counts for respect.

Too bad we have to learn these lessons the hard way.

for Blogger Or Worse?

25 years today and still going strong...


And what could be worse than being married to a blogger?

You think ergonomics is boring. Well, check this out:
Live, from Kalamazoo Michigan, Ergo Elvis, the troubador of pain, that hunk a hunka hurtin' tendon. Right here.

There are 3 songs in the video, performed in 2001 at a United Auto Workers Black Lake teaching facility:
1) The Work-a-rena
2) Ouch, I'm Tender (my favorite)
3) The Battle Hymn of the Ergonomic, aka, Ergonomics Forever.

First, there's some interesting stuff over at Workers Comp Insider, a blog you should all bookmark and visit now and then.

First, they review an article in the Washington Times reporting

on the high number of injuries experienced by federal air marshals, claiming that 2,100, or nearly half the total work force, had been sidelined due to injuries. Many are quitting the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAMS) due to a variety of illnesses, such as deep vein thrombosis and barotrauma, a decompression sickness that causes ruptured eardrums and sinus conditions. Over about a three-year period, nearly 2,500 workers comp claims were filed. Many workers are also reporting that they are being fired or demoted because of this. The issue is significant enough to come to the attention of Congress.

And then there's this piece about the hazards faced by night workers

Diane Pfadenhauer of Strategic HR Lawyer features a post discussing the perils of the graveyard shift. According to a cited article, night workers are 20 percent more likely to have a work-related injury than day workers, and are also prone to higher

And while you're surfing the internets, check out Cervantes over at Staying Alive who points out that while "homeland security" is the talk of the day, our emergency rooms (which would probably be important in the event of a terrorist attack) are falling apart:

In 1986, Congress passed legislation affirming that everyone had a right to critical care in hospital emergency departments, putting an end, in theory (only), to the wallet biopsy which used to determine whether you got your compound fracture pinned. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to anybody to provide money for this purpose, so many hospitals responded by simply closing their EDs.

Well, five years after 9/11, the House of Representatives has finally passed legislation covering chemical plant security by sticking it onto a must-pass homeland security budget bill.

In a largely party-line vote last Friday, the House of Reprentatives voted 221 to 186 not to strip some of the most harmful provisions from the bill. Earlier in the year, House and Senate committees passed much stronger bills (H.R. 5695) and Senate (S. 2145).

But as the Philadelphia Inquirer editorializes:

It's an underhanded tactic to accomplish industry's bidding, but representatives folded with rationalizations such as: "It's better than nothing," and "It's time to quit talking and get something done." The American public deserves better than this illusion of security.

The two-page rider reads like a custom order from chemical manufacturers, who only recently dropped rigorous opposition to any mandatory security regulation.

The bill will establish some kind of standards for 34,000 facilities where chemicals are made or used, and the Homeland Security Department will have the authority to inspect plants and even shut them down.

But there's little assurance that the standards will have any teeth. The rider says, "The secretary may approve alternative security programs established by private sector entities" - in other words, the very voluntary measures the industry has been pushing all along. Secretary Michael Chertoff should be proactive in creating stronger requirements.

Gone is a provision in the House bill requiring high-risk facilities to consider and, when economically and technologically feasible, to use safer chemicals or processes to protect surrounding communities. The appropriations rider also exempts water- and wastewater-treatment plants, which use and store highly toxic chlorine, from oversight.

The Senate bill specifically protected states' rights to impose stronger security requirements, as New Jersey has done. The rider leaves it to judges to sort out state and federal jurisdiction.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents 133 chemical manufacturers who encompass approximately 85% of chemical production capacity in the United States, couldn't have been more pleased.

“ACC would like to thank Congress for their work in accomplishing our shared objective of passing meaningful chemical security legislation this year. This measure represents significant progress in the effort to secure America’s chemical industry, an essential part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

“While this bill is not a home run, Congress came through in the last inning to deliver essential chemical security legislation.

According to Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA),

“There are night clubs in New York City that are harder to get into than some of our chemical plants. Yet the Republicans acquiesced to the wishes of the chemical industry behind closed doors to negotiate the weak, inadequate language contained in this conference report.

Markey had four main problems with the bill:

• It exempts all but high-risk facilities from doing any kind of risk assessments and site security plans.
• DHS is prohibited from disapproving a facility’s security plan because of the absence of any specific security measure (i.e. broken fences, cameras, etc.)
• Exempts even high-risk facilities that are regulated under other laws from being regulated for security by DHS, no matter how weak those laws are. For example, water treatment plants are exempted because EPA regulations cover many of their operations. Nearly 100 of them each put 100,000 or more people at risk.
• It doesn't give states the right to pass stronger protections.

In addition, the bill sets no deadlines by which DHS must approve or disapprove plant security plans, doesn't require security exercises or involve plant workers in the development of security plans.

Saturday was supposed to be Kentucky River Day. That's the day that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) releases its feared "Kentucky River" decision which, if they rule in a way that makes their benefactors happy, will remove collective bargaining rights from millions of American nurses and other workers.

The decision will determine whether nurses can be considered "supervisors." Supervisors, traditionally considered to be employees who could hire, fire and discipline other employees, are not allowed to join unions, according to American labor law. The current problem stems from a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that found that the NLRB’s analysis of the supervisory status of six registered nurses at a Kentucky nursing facility was flawed. The Board is therefore required to come up with a better definition of "supervisor."

The problem is that some nurses act as "charge nurses," who are allowed to decide which patients will be seen by his or her colleagues. And despite the fact that charge nurses can’t discipline other employers, hire or fire, they could be considered management by an overly broad interpretation of the law.

But its not just nurses who are at risk. There are a variety of professional and other occupations where line workers are given some authority to give instructions to other workers. AFL-CIO organizing director Stewart Acuff,

300,000 nurses could be affected by the rulings and up to 1.5 million other workers. "Team leaders and gang leaders in ports, lead men in mines, lead men in docks at manufacturing facilities and warehouses, engineers, people who oversee apprentices in trades—almost every senior worker does this to some extent."

The decision was supposed to be overnighted on Friday to the parties in the case. That would have guaranteed a Saturday announcement -- a perfect day for getting no press, which is what the Bushies usually do when they have bad news to announce.

But apparently someone at the NLRB in a rush to get to Happy Hour Friday afternoon forgot to drop the decision in the mail. Oops. That means it apparently went out today, guaranteeing lots of press tomorrow when it's announced.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE: The California Nurses Association wonder if it was more than just a simple boo boo:

"It's hard to imagine that the Bush administration 'inadvertently' missed a FedEx deadline. It raises a natural question. Did the corporations who have pushed for the decision receive advance notice while the NLRB withholds it from the labor movement, the millions of workers and patients who will be affected, and the general public?" asked Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of CNA/NNOC which represents 70,000 RNs in 44 states.

"If the problem were just 'deadlines,' maybe they should have used a unionized firm, UPS, instead," she added.

Indeed.

This is one of the ironies of the law here in the United States.

Roanoke, VA contractor John Edward Callahan has been accused of hiring homeless men to rip out cancer-causing asbestos without giving them proper training or protective equipment.

This is obviously a very bad thing to do. Neither Callahan, nor his firm, Environmental Construction, had the necessary training or license to do the job. If he's convicted on all five counts of violating the Clean Air Act, Callahan faces up to 25 years in prison and a fine of up to one and a quarter million dollars. And he would deserve every day and every dollar of the penalty.

Of course, if Callahan had knowingly killed the workers and been charged under the Occupational Safety and Health Act instead of the Clean Air Act, he would have faced a total of only six months in jail, although statistically, it's highly unlikely that he would ever have had criminal charges brought against him.

Anyone else think something's wrong with this picture?

Lead exposures in the general environment and in the workplace (thanks to OSHA) have come down substantially over the past few decades. But not far enough, according to a new study:

Among adults, elevated levels of lead exposure have been found in recent years to raise the risk of high blood pressure and kidney disease. But now comes news that levels long considered safe for adults are linked to higher rates of death from stroke and heart attack. The latest study was published in the Sept. 26 issue of the American Heart Assn.'s journal, Circulation.

The authors speculate that lead exposure may stress the kidneys' ability to filter blood "alter the delicate hormonal chemistry that keeps veins and arteries in good tone."

The problem for workers is that OSHA's lead regulation considers up to 40 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to be safe for adults (and the Centers for Disease Control says that 10 micrograms is safe for women of childbearing age), but the study found that:

those with 3.6 to 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood were two and half times more likely to die of a heart attack, 89% more likely to die of stroke and 55% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease. The higher the blood lead levels, the greater the risk of death by stroke or heart attack.

So what should OSHA do?

Paul Muntner, an epidemiologist at Tulane University and one of the study's authors, says the findings suggest strongly that the federal government should revisit the limits of lead exposure it considers safe for adults. In total, about 120 occupations — including roofing, shipbuilding, auto manufacturing and printing — can bring workers in contact with high levels of lead.

I guess no one told him that OSHA has pretty much gone out of the regulation business -- unless forced by the courts.