Legal
kkrisberg | April 21, 2015Last November, a roof section larger than a football field collapsed at the Woodgrain Millwork in Prineville, Oregon. Luckily, no one was harmed. However, mill workers, who spoke of a variety of workplace hazards, say they had alerted management to the leaky roof long before the collapse, reported Amanda Peacher for Oregon Public Broadcasting.
In 2004, Woodgrain, a global company with manufacturing facilities across the U.S., bought the 14-acre Prineville mill. Noting that each of the 23 former mill workers interviewed for the story described a “roof riddled with leaks,” Peacher writes:
Peggy…
kkrisberg | April 17, 2015In just a year, electronic cigarette use has tripled among American teens. And considering that no one really knows what the related health impacts are and any regulatory framework is lagging far behind the growing popularity of e-cigarettes, public health advocates say it’s time for action.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data from the 2014 National Youth Tobacco Survey finding that current e-cigarette use among high school students, which is defined as using at least once in the prior 30 days, nearly tripled — from 4.5 percent in 2013 to 13.4…
kkrisberg | April 10, 2015Today, nearly every state in the country has a law that bans texting while driving. But do these laws make a difference?
A group of researchers took on that question, comparing crash-related hospitalizations among states with a texting-while-driving ban and states without such a ban. And they found some encouraging results: Texting bans were associated with a 7 percent reduction in crash-related hospitalizations among all age groups, especially among those ages 22 to 64. To conduct the study, which was published in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers examined…
kkrisberg | April 7, 2015Americans increasingly want to know that their steaks were humanely raised or their produce was organically grown, but what about the people who picked that produce or cared for those cows? Where’s the concern for the workers behind our food? Reporter Stephen Lurie explored that question in an article published last week in Vox. He writes:
Organic and environmentally sustainable certifications lead consumers to supposedly wholesome products, but they hold no guarantees about the wholesomeness of the companies that produce those goods. Sitting down to a farm-to-table meal at a chic restaurant…
kkrisberg | March 31, 2015For years, advocates have been calling on policymakers to reform the nation’s outdated chemical safety laws. Today, two such bills stand before Congress — one that advocates say better protects the public’s health and another that advocates warn is a dangerous step backward.
Introduced in the Senate earlier this month within just days of each other, each bill takes aim at the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which was enacted in 1976 and hasn’t been updated since. Under TSCA, which doesn’t require chemicals undergo health impact testing before being released into the marketplace,…
cmonforton | March 26, 2015I’ll be looking to the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. to keep me apprised of the upcoming trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. The trial is scheduled to begin on April 20. That's just a few weeks after the 5th anniversary (April 5) of the massive coal dust explosion that killed 29 mine workers at Blankenship’s Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia.
Ward reports this week on Blankenship’s appearance on March 24 before a US magistrate. He plead not guilty (again) to three felony counts, including a conspiracy to thwart federal mine safety inspections. Ward explains…
kkrisberg | March 25, 2015In a joint investigation from the Texas Tribune and Houston Chronicle, reporters looked into workplace safety at oil refineries 10 years after an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, left 15 workers dead and injured another 180. Unfortunately, reporters found that “though no single incident has matched the 2005 devastation, a two-month investigation finds the industry’s overall death toll barely slowed.”
In the four-part series, reporters chronicle what went wrong at the Texas City refinery, explore the aftermath and talk with survivors, and analyze data showing where and how…
kkrisberg | March 17, 2015In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that improved air quality in southern California had a direct effect on children’s respiratory health. The findings point to the effectiveness of smart public health policy — in other words, even as southern California experienced increases in traffic and commerce, aggressive air pollution policies resulted in cleaner air and healthier kids.
Published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study concluded that air quality improvements in the southern California communities studied were associated with significantly…
kkrisberg | March 10, 2015The same day that NPR and ProPublica published their investigation into the dismantling of the workers’ compensation system, OSHA released its own report, “Adding Inequality to Injury: The Cost of Failing to Protect Workers on the Job.” The agency writes that the failure of employers to prevent millions of work-related injuries and illnesses each year coupled with changes to workers’ compensation systems is exacerbating income inequality and pushing many workers into poverty. The report states:
For many injured workers and their families, a workplace injury creates a trap which leaves them…
kkrisberg | March 6, 2015In Boston, you’re never too far away from a Dunkin’ Donuts. In fact, the Massachusetts-based company inspires a fiery sense of loyalty in many Bostonians. It’s kind of hard to give up the city's ubiquitous fast food staple, but Paul Drake is committed.
“As somebody who’s pretty poor at fasting, it’s been hard,” said Drake, executive director and lead organizer at Massachusetts Interfaith Worker Justice. “Here in Boston, there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts on every corner…it’s easy to see the convenience that is fast food. But it’s actually been a really good teaching moment for me — I do this work every…
kkrisberg | March 3, 2015The public health literature is pretty clear when it comes to income status and poverty and their profound effects on health, disability, disease and life expectancy. But what about income inequality? Does a rising gap in wealth and resource distribution affect people’s health too?
In a commentary published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, two researchers posit that growing income inequality is a contributing factor to poorer health among American workers. In “Squeezing Blood from a Stone: How Income Inequality Affects the Health of the American Workforce,” authors Jessica…
kkrisberg | February 27, 2015“Established by the state.” Those are the four words at the center of an upcoming Supreme Court case that could strip affordable health insurance coverage from millions of working families and result in billions of dollars in uncompensated care costs.
The case is known as King v. Burwell and at its core is the question of whether residents who live in states with federally administered health insurance marketplaces, versus state-run marketplaces, are eligible to receive insurance subsidies. The plaintiffs in the case claim that those four little words in one section of the entire Affordable…
kkrisberg | February 24, 2015It’s a toxic chemical that made headlines when it was linked to deaths and injuries among popcorn factory workers, and federal regulators are well aware of its dangers. But, unfortunately, diacetyl is still hurting workers. In “Gasping for Action,” reporter Raquel Rutledge at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes about diacetyl, a chemical that tastes like butter and is used in food products and e-cigarettes, and the dangers it continues to pose to workers who breath it in, particularly coffee workers. She writes:
Coffee roasters sometimes add it to flavor coffee. High concentrations of…
kkrisberg | February 20, 2015While silicosis-related deaths have declined, it remains a serious occupational health risk and one that requires continued public health attention, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the Feb. 13 issue of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), researchers noted that while annual silicosis deaths have dropped from 164 in 2001 to 101 in 2010, dangerous silica exposure has been newly documented in occupations related to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and the installation of engineered stone countertops. Overall during the 2001-2010 time…
kkrisberg | February 17, 2015In 2010, New York City health officials launched a new food safety tactic that assigned restaurants an inspection-based letter grade and required that the grade be posted where passersby could easily see it. So, did this grading make a difference? A new study finds that it has, with the probability of restaurants scoring in the A-range up by 35 percent.
To conduct the study, researchers with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene examined data from more than 43,400 restaurants inspected between 2007 and 2013. A restaurant’s score is based on how well it complies with local…
kkrisberg | February 10, 2015NPR reporter Daniel Zwerdling reports on the failure of hospitals to protect nursing staff from preventable and often debilitating injuries, writing that nursing assistants and orderlies suffer three times the rate of back and musculoskeletal injuries as construction workers. In fact, federal data show that nursing assistants experience more injuries than any other occupation. Zwerdling starts his piece with the story of Pennsylvania nurse Tove Schuster:
While working the overnight shift, (Schuster) heard an all-too-common cry: "Please, I need help. My patient has fallen on the floor."
The…
kkrisberg | January 28, 2015Will Uber change how we work? It’s a question Farhad Manjoo explores in a New York Times article about the company, which runs an on-demand car service using private drivers and a mobile app. Manjoo writes:
Just as Uber is doing for taxis, new technologies have the potential to chop up a broad array of traditional jobs into discrete tasks that can be assigned to people just when they’re needed, with wages set by a dynamic measurement of supply and demand, and every worker’s performance constantly tracked, reviewed and subject to the sometimes harsh light of customer satisfaction. Uber and its…
kkrisberg | January 16, 2015Food safety is at the top of the list for local restaurant inspectors in Rockaway Township, New Jersey. Recently, however, inspectors tested out the feasibility of adding a new safety checkpoint to the menu — the safety of restaurant employees. The effort was a success and one that organizers hope will ultimately lead to safer working conditions for food service workers statewide.
“Workers need a voice,” said Peter Tabbot, health officer for the Rockaway Township Division of Health. “This is a small way that we can help provide a bit of that voice.”
The new occupational health and safety…
kkrisberg | January 14, 2015With agriculture ranked one of the most dangerous industries in the country, many Americans might be surprised to know that it’s still perfectly legal for farms to officially employ children. For years, advocates have been working to address this gaping loophole in the nation’s child labor laws, often citing children’s increased vulnerability to workplace-related injury, illness and exploitation. A new study confirms those concerns, underscoring the need to better protect the children and youth working in American fields.
Published in the February issue of the American Journal of Public…
kkrisberg | January 13, 2015BuzzFeed reporter David Noriega investigated work-related fatalities among Latino construction workers, finding that the risk of dying on the job is on the rise for such workers, who are losing their lives in greater numbers and at disproportionate rates than others in the industry. He writes:
After the housing bust bottomed out in 2010, the fatality rate among Latino construction workers rose by nearly 20%. For non-Latinos, the fatality rate has dropped by more than 5%.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), between 2010 and 2013, the number of deaths among Latinos in…