cmonforton | July 6, 2017I felt a little like Claude Rains (as Capt. Louis Renault) in the film Casablanca. He's the actor with the famous line "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here." On Sunday my neighbor asked me: “What do you think about all those coal miners with black lung?”
“Shocked, shocked,” I was tempted to say, but I’m not the least bit shocked.
My neighbor was referring to the latest story by NPR’s Howard Berkes about nearly 2,000 cases of progressive massive pulmonary fibrosis (PMF) diagnosed in the last six years among Appalachian coal miners. Two thousand cases is a hefty number…
lborkowski | July 5, 2017The Congressional Budget Office’s initial score of the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” calculated that 22 million people, 15 million of them Medicaid beneficiaries, would lose health insurance by 2026. For Medicaid recipients, though, the picture worsens steadily after that ten-year window, due to per-capita caps on how much the federal government would contribute. At the request of Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Bernie Sanders and Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, CBO has also estimated Medicaid spending for the post-2026 decade under current law vs the BCRA. They…
kkrisberg | June 30, 2017At the Center for Public Integrity, a five-part investigative series on safety at the nation’s nuclear facilities finds that workers can and do suffer serious injuries, yet the Department of Energy typically imposes only minimal fines for safety incidents and companies get to keep a majority of their profits, which does little to improve working conditions. Reporters estimated that the number of safety incidents has tripled since 2013.
For example, in 2009, the chair of a safety committee at Idaho National Laboratory told high-ranking managers that damaged plutonium plates could put workers…
cmonforton | June 30, 2017It is maddening to read yet again about a worker being killed in a trench cave-in. These deaths are completely preventable by using some pretty cheap equipment. The death of Donald “DJ” Meyer in December 2016 is especially tragic. The 33 year-old is survived by his son Ashten, 8. The youngster’s mother died unexpectedly two years ago.
I learned this week that OSHA has thrown the book at Meyer’s employer. They issued citations against Arrow Plumbing for six willful and eight serious violations and proposed a $714,142 penalty.
Arrow Plumbing was responsible for making certain its excavation…
lborkowski | June 30, 2017Kim Krisberg has already ably described how the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” would gut Medicaid while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest, so I want to emphasize a few key points that are worth bearing in mind.
The Congressional Budget Office score of the Senate bill finds that over the next 10 years, 22 million people would lose coverage (relative to keeping the current law), and 15 million of those people would be losing Medicaid. The worst of the Medicaid cuts would come after 2026, though, as the per-capita cap on the federal share of spending rises much more slowly…
kkrisberg | June 30, 2017In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, nearly 200 people have died from opioid-related overdoses in the first five months of this year. That means that this one U.S. county is on pace to lose more than 700 people to fatal overdoses by the end of 2017.
Terry Allan, health commissioner at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, and colleagues across the county have spent years building and scaling up a multifaceted response to the opioid addiction and overdose epidemic that includes getting people into treatment, changing clinical prescribing habits, preventing deadly overdoses, and dealing with the often-…
cmonforton | June 27, 2017I had one ear tuned this morning to the webcast of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s appearance before a subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee on his Department’s FY 2018 budget request. You never know what bumble bee might be in a lawmaker’s bonnet or how they might use their time to gush about Department-funded pet project in their home State. That's why I tuned in.
Two moments during the hearing were most memorable to me. The first involved Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander (R) who expressed dissatisfaction with the Administration’s slow pace of nominating individuals for top jobs at…
kkrisberg | June 23, 2017The House and Senate health care bills are overflowing with proposals that will strip Americans of access to quality, affordable health care. But perhaps the cruelest part is what they do to children — the most vulnerable and powerless among us. Children can’t show up at the ballot box to protect their health and so it truly is up to the rest of us.
Right now, after decades of hard work, the U.S. has achieved near-universal insurance coverage of its littlest residents. About 95 percent of U.S. kids have health insurance. Unfortunately, the House and Senate proposals to replace the Affordable…
cmonforton | June 23, 2017The first six months of the Trump administration has been particularly deadly for coal miners. Nine workers at U.S. coal mines have been fatally injured in the first six months of 2017. Five of the nine deaths occurred in West Virginia. In all of 2016, eight workers were killed on the job at U.S. coal mines.
Some might want to attribute the increased number of coal mine deaths to President Trump's anti-regulatory agenda and more business friendly policies particularly for the coal industry. I don't know that to be the case. As far as I know, there are not any Trump officials micromanaging the…
kkrisberg | June 22, 2017This is the harsh reality of the Senate health care bill: it provides tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, while taking away access to timely medical care from the poorest, most vulnerable Americans. You’ve probably been hearing this point a lot about the GOP’s repeal-and-replace efforts, and it’s easy to relegate it to partisan hyperbole. But the sad truth is that, well, it’s the sad truth.
The Senate’s “draft” health care bill, released this morning, proposes sweeping changes to the Medicaid system, which now provides health coverage for 76 percent of poor children, 60 percent of children…
cmonforton | June 22, 2017Tesla held its annual stockholder meeting this month, and co-founder/CEO Elon Musk was asked to speak about worker safety problems at their plants. He briefly mentioned the topic in his prepared remarks, but was probed later about it by a stockholder. The question came from @sunabeepdeep who asked:
"What changes are being made to address worker safety?"
Public attention on working conditions at Tesla’s manufacturing plant in Fremont, CA was prompted most recently by a May 18 story in The Guardian. Reporter Julia Carrie Wong spoke to current and former employees who described intense…
garrettbrown | June 20, 2017With the whole world literally involved in global supply chains – how to keep track of working conditions and workers’ rights in global supply chains? There is a comprehensive “one stop” way – and then a several-other-stops method for the more ambitious.
The one-stop shopping is to sign up for weekly notifications from the UK’s Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. The staff of this non-profit organization in London scours the internet every day for the latest reports from companies, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on all aspects of global business. Their concise…
lborkowski | June 19, 2017We’ve written extensively (e.g., here, here, here, and here) about the problems with Congressional Republicans’ healthcare legislation, which would gut Medicaid and make it far harder for older people to afford individual health insurance plans, all in order to fund tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest. But the process by which Republicans are trying to pass their bill is equally alarming, and potentially disastrous for the future of the US legislative process.
An imperfect but useful status quo
Passing major legislation should involve extensive consideration of proposals’ likely impacts.…
kkrisberg | June 16, 2017Despite glowing reviews from the House GOP about their health care bill, the people that actually crunch the numbers say it’ll likely mean millions more uninsured and higher premiums for people in poorer health. Now comes more bad news: it’ll also result in more than 900,000 lost jobs and billions in lost state revenue.
A new report from researchers at the Commonwealth Fund and George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health calculated the impact of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which House Republicans passed in May, on employment and economic activity in every…
cmonforton | June 16, 2017The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit against one of President Trump’s deregulatory efforts. Executive Order 13771 (EO) requires an agency to rescind two regulations for each one it wants to adopt, and have the action's combined incremental costs total no more than $0, regardless of the benefits. When the President announced it in January 2017, I called it the "one step forward, two steps back" edict.
A lawsuit filed in February by Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Communications Workers of America argues that the EO…
lborkowski | June 16, 2017Because there’s so much at stake as the Senate considers the American Health Care Act, here are some important articles on healthcare legislation:
Andy Slavitt in the Washington Post: The Senate’s three tools on health care: Sabotage, speed and secrecy
Dylan Scott at Vox: Senate Republicans are closer to repealing Obamacare than you think
Elena Marks in the Houston Chronicle: The American Health Care Act: a civic and moral failure
Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic: How the American Health Care Act Would Affect Mental-Health Coverage
Emma Sandoe at her personal blog: How the HIV outbreak in…
kkrisberg | June 14, 2017At the Guardian, Krithika Varagur interviewed workers inside the Indonesian factory that manufactures clothing for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, finding poverty wages, anti-union intimidation and unreasonably high production targets. The story includes interviews with more than a dozen workers, who asked that details about their identities be changed to avoid being fired. Varagur writes:
Alia is nothing if not industrious. She has worked in factories on and off since leaving her provincial high school, through the birth of two children, leading up to her current job making clothes for brands…
cmonforton | June 13, 2017[This post is dedicated to Doug Larkin. Doug was the co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. He suffered in recent years with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and passed away yesterday.]
Dallas-based OxyChem imports about 300,000 pounds of asbestos each year. Yes, asbestos. The deadly mineral that most Americans think is banned (it's not) and responsible for about 15,000 U.S. cancer deaths annually.
OxyChem is likely the largest asbestos importer in the U.S. The company is required under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to report its asbestos imports to the EPA.…
kkrisberg | June 13, 2017Last year’s emergency Zika funding is about to run out and there’s no new money in the pipeline. It’s emblematic of the kind of short-term, reactive policymaking that public health officials have been warning us about for years. Now, as we head into summer, public health again faces a dangerous, highly complex threat along with an enormous funding gap.
“The Zika threat will get worse,” said Claude Jacob, chief public health officer at the Cambridge Public Health Department in Massachusetts and president of the National Association of County & City Health Officials (NACCHO). “And the…
cmonforton | June 8, 2017The phrase used in human resource circles is an “absence control program.” It's a program in which employees receive demerits company-determined infractions such as an absence or being late for a shift. If a worker accumulates too many demerits or "points," s/he is fired.
I worked at a restaurant job in the 1980’s with this kind of program. Many absences such as having car trouble or calling in sick were considered excused absences by our managers so many of us never received any "points."
But what I’ve been learning lately about these programs illustrates how some of them completely…