U.S. Labor Department leaders on Monday explained the details of the administration’s FY2012 budget request in a live webchat, discussing the $583 million requested for OSHA and the $384 million for MSHA. While bitter funding battles have yet to be fought in Congress, the proposal stakes DOL’s position on regulatory and enforcement action.
From his first day in office, new Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker has been aggressively applying huge jolts of what Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”—forcing the acceptance of unpopular policies upon a disoriented and demobilized population. But apparently Walker thinks the threat of layoffs was proving insufficiently intimidating. On Friday, he revealed that he’s ready to call the National Guard if public workers (specifically, prison guards) stay home in protest of what may be the most draconian anti-union legislation ever offered in the United States.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is punishing employers at the expense of reducing workplace injuries, Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, said today at a congressional hearing. “It has become an administration more focused on punishment than prevention,” said Walberg, chairman of the a member of the committee who was elected last year.
When it comes to providing a safe workplace environment for congressional staffers and employees, Congress is faltering, according to a report compiled by the agency responsible for workplace issues in the Capitol.
With new whistleblower rules coming to Wall Street, the industry’s lobbyists have mounted a furious behind-the-scenes effort to constrain the reach of the new protections.
A lawsuit by 14 former and current members of the armed forces alleges that Pentagon brass ignored claims of sexual harassment, assault and even rape by military colleagues while on active duty.
After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops, the military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs — and the results have sometimes been deadly. By some estimates, well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury or some combination of those. The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex problems, following the lead of civilian medicine. As a result, psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military than in any previous war.
Annual sales revenue in the nation’s restaurant industry tops $515 billion, but few of the 10.3 million workers in the industry earn a living wage. Few have health insurance or proper safety training, and many experience wage theft and discrimination.
Charles L. Marshall is best known for helping Tinker Air Force Base recover from a fire at its logistics center in 1984. Hazardous materials had to be properly removed and disposed, and asbestos and chemicals cleaned away so the building — for national defense emergencies — could be rebuilt as quickly as possible.
Workplace safety officials are investigating a deadly accident Friday morning at a Tulare County, Calif., pistachio processing factory that previously had a 2 million pound recall due to a salmonella scare. According to the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA), a man was doing maintenance inside a pistachio auger, which separates the hull from the nut, when another worker turned on the machine.
