Green and labor groups Monday offered up a seven-item wish list for Congress to pass in the lame-duck session beginning this week. The list includes familiar items aimed at renewable energy and efficiency standards as well as energy industry worker health and safety.
Though its final report is two months away, the presidential commission investigating the gulf oil spill is beginning to confirm what we already suspected and feared. The April blowout on the Deepwater Horizon was not some unfortunate occurrence. It was the result of a series of bad decisions by companies less concerned about safety than about finishing a project that was over budget and 38 days behind schedule.
The day after one of the rescued Chilean miners was celebrated on national TV running the New York Marathon, two other Chilean miners were killed and at least five injured in a dynamite explosion at an illegal mine not far from the site of the famous rescue in the Atacama desert.
The controlled burns of floating oil after the BP well disaster contained minimal levels of hazardous dioxins, according to reports by the Environmental Protection Agency that found the risk to clean-up workers and nearby communities is small.
The U.S Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced Friday that the agency is co-sponsoring a summit in New York City with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institute for Occupational Safety (NIOSH) to address Latino and Immigrant worker safety hazards and rights.
OSHA released a Safety and Health Information Bulletin on health hazards posed to workers by occupational exposure to certain chemicals used to add flavor and aroma to food and other products. Occupational Exposure to Flavoring Substances: Health Effects and Hazard Control explains that the food flavoring diacetyl, as well as some diacetyl substitutes, can burn the eyes, cause soreness in the nose and throat, and irritate the skin and produce a severe lung disease that has disabled or killed workers.
This week, the National Labor Relations Board alleged that a Connecticut company acted illegally when they fired an employee after she bad-mouthed her supervisor on Facebook. The labor board charged that the company wrongfully denied the employee union representation during an investigatory interview, as well as “maintained and enforced an overly broad blogging and Internet posting policy.”
More than two weeks after the scissor lift accident on the football practice field that killed student Declan Sullivan, University of Notre Dame leaders remain tight-lipped about the investigation. They are releasing no details about the ongoing investigation: who is assigned to it, what investigators are examining, how long the task might take or how the results will be released.
OSHA has cited Fortune Plastic and Metal Texas LLC with six alleged serious and six alleged repeat violations following a safety and health inspection at the company’s worksite in Dallas. Proposed penalties total $125,000.
A subway motorman caught on cell phone video texting while driving a train has turned himself in to transit officials.
