Our coverage of BP this week examined the company’s role in the industry, comparing it with other oil giants in terms of production, spills and worker-safety violations. One thing we had to leave out was worker fatalities. That’s because of a quirk in how OSHA, the federal agency charged with protecting workplace safety, keeps track of the information: OSHA lists deaths according to the company that employed the dead workers, not by the company responsible for their deaths.
New BP CEO Bob Dudley isn’t happy with me. Well, not just me—all of the reporters who dug into BP’s past safety problems and raised questions about the mistakes the company made on the road to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. And he’s also mad at the environmentalists and scientists who raised the alarm in the wake of the spill, and the American politicians who relentlessly bashed BP and even the other oil company CEOs who not so subtly threw BP in front of the bus.
Plans to fix the embattled whistleblower program within the Occupational Safety & Health Administration hit another snag as the union representing the affected employees has filed unfair labor practice charges over being frozen out of deliberations.
This week Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, called Anita Hill and left a message on her answering machine inviting her to apologize for testifying during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. The call brought back, with surprising immediacy, those 1991 hearings. For those too young to remember, the hearings may be little more than a paragraph in a history text. But it’s hard to overstate their importance.
U.S. airline officials said Tuesday that voluntary industry moves to step up outside audits, refine pilot training and increase data-sharing have significantly boosted safety among the nation’s commuter carriers.
A national study of physician wages conducted by UC Davis Health System has found that specialists are paid as much as 52 percent more than primary-care doctors, even though primary-care doctors see far more patients.
In June the ESPN Zone restaurant in Baltimore’s trendy Inner Harbor shopping and entertainment district closed after workers were given just a week’s notice and state regulators were given only one day notice. In a class-action lawsuit filed Monday naming ESPN Zone’s owner Disney, five workers allege this was a violation of the WARN Act, which requires at least 60 days notice—or 60 days severance pay—in the case of mass layoffs at companies with 100 or more employees.
Defense attorneys for Joshua Turnidge on Tuesday accused the state of participating in a “cover-up” to hide Oregon State Police Senior Trooper William Hakim’s alleged negligence in handling the bomb that killed him and another police officer.
Two people are recovering from burns suffered at a Bertie County, N.C., chicken processing plant Monday. The plant continues its work, but the company in charge is saying very little.
Could your desk job be fatal? Those who sit for hours at a time – even if they regularly work out at the gym – are at an increased risk for an early death, according to research reported in Men’s Health.
