Forty years on, where are OSHA’s friends? When painful budget cuts are threatening and every proposed rule is derided as a “job killer” — a particularly poor word choice when the context is American occupational safety, still no beacon for the world — there seem to be few who will stand up for this agency.
It is no secret that on-the-job accident frequency declined in the past few years. Partially driven by workforce reductions, injuries have declined, although the severity of those reported injuries continues to climb as wage replacement and medical costs increase. However, OSHA officials worry that employers underreport injuries and are investigating companies in industries that may habitually underreport.
Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the airline pilot celebrated for his “Miracle on the Hudson” landing in 2009, has spoken out against a House Republican’s legislative amendment, describing it as a “giant step backwards” for aviation safety. The amendment by Rep. Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania would complicate the Federal Aviation Administration’s efforts to draw up industry-wide standards to relieve pilot fatigue and to bolster pilot experience requirements. It would do so by requiring the agency to tailor regulations to different segments of the aviation industry rather than establish across-the-board safety standards.
With the one-year anniversary of a Raleigh County mine disaster that killed 29 miners approaching, a top labor official said there has been significant progress in mine safety, but tougher laws are still needed.
Women who work rotating shifts may be somewhat more likely to experience shifting menstrual cycles according to a new study that raises the possibility of work schedules affecting fertility.
The worries about radium grew slowly, almost entirely driven by the health problems among the dial workers, the young women painting watch faces with luminous paint. The paint, called “Undark” by their employers at the U.S. Radium Corporation, gained its glow from the element radium. The workers had almost coincidentally began falling ill shortly after Curie’s triumphant American tour.
On Black Friday 2008 at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, Long Island, 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour was killed by a stampede of shoppers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Wal-Mart for one serious violation of the General Duty Clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and fined the company $7,000. The company challenged the citation — at the cost of around $2 million, OSHA estimates. Last Friday, Chief Administrative Law Judge Covette Rooney of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission upheld the citation and penalty. Now seems like a good time to delve into what this General Duty Clause is, and what OSHA’s use of it might mean for future workplace-safety enforcement.
After over 12,000 current and former adult film performers who tested for HIV and other STDs at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation’s (AIM) HIV Testing Clinic in Sherman Oaks had their privacy breached when their personal data collected from AIM was published illegally on a Wiki-leaks type website earlier this month, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), which has separately been spearheading a workplace safety campaign to require the use of condoms in porn, harshly condemned the release of such personal patient data, yet also noted that the privacy breach underscores the vulnerability of AIM’s entire clinic business model.
As the entire adult world knows by now, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) revealed yesterday that it had fined both LFP Video Group LLC and producer Mark Zane’s Forsaken Pictures for alleged violations of the California Health Code—and so the group that had “dropped the dime” on the two companies, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), held a news conference about it this morning at 10:30 alongside the Hustler Hollywood store.
The federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration is probing the death of a man who fell off the roof of the city-owned Asylum building while clearing snow nearly seven weeks ago.
