Today, on Workers’ Memorial Day, it is important to remember that these tragic events are preventable, and workers deserve for them to be prevented.
The story in the evening newscast is as blunt as it is brief: “local man killed during workplace fall”, or “worker crushed by machine.”
The head of Mine Safety and Health Administration is telling members of the Senate the government will now go directly to federal court to shut down mines that habitually ignore safety.
In addition to familiar topics such as cranes and derricks, diacetyl, beryllium and crystalline silica, OSHA’s spring 2010 regulatory agenda contains some new, high-priority items – a proposed Injury and Illness Prevent Program standard and a move to modernize the agency’s injury and illness reporting systems.
U.S. legislators and federal regulators are “celebrating” Workers Memorial Day by pushing more austere workplace safety laws, which could actually increase the danger faced by working Americans.
The AFL-CIO’s 19th annual workplace safety report, “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect,” also reports that in 2008, along with the 5,214, workers killed, another 50,000 workers died from occupational diseases, while at least 4.6 million workers were reported injured, unreported injuries could push that total to as many as 14 million workers.
The memorial list reads like a cross-section of working-class Massachusetts: a plumber in Quincy, a fisherman in Plymouth, a carpenter in Cohasset.
Two days after a memorial service for the seven workers killed in an explosion at an Anacortes, Wash., oil refinery, the head of the federal agency that oversees worker safety said Washington state has a solid program for inspecting dangerous workplaces.
A former Massey Energy Co. employee told a Senate panel Tuesday that he quit because he was “scared” the mines he worked in were unsafe.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited Lowe’s Home Centers Inc. in Cincinnati with $40,000 in proposed penalties for continually failing to document and report employee injuries and illnesses.
