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worker safety

The True Dangers Of Long Trains

Just before 5 a.m., Harry Shaffer’s wife called to him from across the living room, where he’d fallen asleep on the couch, exhausted from installing an aboveground pool. Did he hear that sound, that metallic screeching from up the valley? She opened the door of their double-wide trailer and walked outside as Shaffer closed his eyes. A moment later came a thunderous crack of splintering lumber. Debris shot through the living room. Shaffer opened his eyes again to find a hulking train car steps from where he lay. It had shorn off the roof, exposing the murk of the pre-dawn sky. He jumped up and ran outside and saw the garage next door in flames.

Amazon Expects Employees To Operate Like Fast-Moving Machines

For Sean Carlisle (a pseu­do­nym) a 32-year-old grad­u­ate stu­dent and native of California’s Inland Empire, the last three years at his local Ama­zon ful­fill­ment cen­ter have been an edu­ca­tion. As a stu­dent of urban plan­ning, he stud­ies how built envi­ron­ments shape a community’s behav­ior. As a pick­er, he packs items at a break­neck pace amid stacks of inven­to­ry and snaking con­vey­or belts while del­i­cate­ly prac­tic­ing strate­gies to raise his cowork­ers’ polit­i­cal consciousness.  Amazon’s logis­ti­cal infra­struc­ture is designed to make humans per­form with machine-like effi­cien­cy, but Sean is try­ing to make the work­place a bit more human, advo­cat­ing for stronger work­er pro­tec­tions and cor­po­rate account­abil­i­ty in his community.

Capitalism Vs. Safety, Health: An Old Story Again

The US president recently ordered meatpacking employees back into workplaces plagued by coronavirus. He did not order employers to make their slaughterhouses safe. GOP-proposed legislation exempts employers from lawsuits by employees sickened or killed by coronavirus infections at workplaces. The GOP is mostly silent about requiring employers to maintain safe or healthy workplaces. Employers across the country threaten workers who refuse to return to jobs they find unsafe. They demand that employees return or risk being fired. Job loss likely means loss of health insurance for employees’ families. Being fired risks also losing eligibility for unemployment insurance. Employers are now going to extremes to evade the costs of safe and healthy workplaces.

Violence Escalating At Retail Stores Over Wearing Face Masks

Retail workers at chains, including Kroger, Waffle House, and Costco, are increasingly caught in the crossfire when it comes to enforcing store or state policies on personal protective equipment. Some shoppers refuse to wear masks or face coverings for political reasons.  In some cases, confrontations between store workers and customers have resulted in deadly violence. Masks have become increasingly politicized during the coronavirus pandemic.

Blankenship Gets Maximum Sentence: One Year In Prison, $250K

By Ken Ward Jr. for Charleston Gazette-Mail - Former Massey Energy Co. CEO Don Blankenship, who rose from humble beginnings in Mingo County to become the wealthy and powerful chief executive of one of the region’s largest coal producers, will serve one year in prison and pay a $250,000 fine for a mine safety criminal conspiracy, a judge decided Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Irene Berger sentenced Blankenship to the maximum penalty allowed for his conviction for conspiring to violate federal safety and health laws at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine, where 29 workers died in an April 2010 explosion.

Philippines Factory Fire: 72 Workers Need Not Have Died

By Irene Pietropaoli in The Guardian - The factory was required to have a raft of permits from different bodies including a business permit from the local authority, a fire permit from the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) and a certificate of compliance from the Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE). It should also have had a special permit for the welding that caused the fire. But the factory either ignored or was allowed to circumvent many of the safety procedures. Regarding the welding permit, Kentex’s lawyer says the work was done by a third party and “we relied on their manifestation of being experts and authorities in their line of work, we already assumed that they would secure all necessary permits and requirements for them to do their jobs and execute the agreement to fix our shutter doors”.

Support The Injured Colombian Workers

On February 16, 2015, 20 injured workers from the Colombian petroleum industry joined the injured Colombian General Motors workers in the tent encampment in front of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota that the GM workers have occupied for the last 3 ½ years. Many of their wives accompanied them, bringing the total number in the encampment up to around 30. Disabling injuries are increasingly a problem in Colombia, where protections have become more lax and healthcare has been privatized (leading occupational healthcare insurers to deny coverage by claiming that worker’s injuries are non-occupational). Companies such as General Motors, Halliburton (oil sector), Coca Cola, Drummond Coal and others, realizing that they were not going to be required to follow labor laws have increasingly exposed workers to conditions which resulted in disabling injury and then get rid of the problem by getting rid of the worker, a practice which is illegal on the books but in wide practice in Colombia.

Oil Strike Is About Lives Of Workers

In an oil refinery, like the one where I work, stuff leaks all the time. Sometimes dripped oil just makes a black spot on the ground. Sometimes 500-degree gas flows out, ignites and explodes. These powerful blasts can maim and kill. I’ve seen it. The first time was in 1998, four years after I started work at a refinery in Anacortes, which was first owned by Shell but later became Tesoro. It happened at the adjacent refinery, owned at that time by Equilon. An explosion killed six workers. For a lot of us, that was our first experience with a refinery catastrophe with multiple fatalities. It shocked you to the core. Then, five years ago, at my refinery, a massive explosion killed seven of my friends.

Gulf Coast Refineries: Texas’ Ticking Time Bombs

The United Steelworkers aren’t just on strike because of wages. They’re concerned about safe practices, because workers are in constant danger from a corporate culture that does not care for their safety. In Deer Park and Pasadena, Texas, refineries line the ship channel, processing everything from sweet crude to diluted bitumen from tar sands oil. The area makes up the largest network of petrochemical plants in the world. Plant operators act as the last line of defense against industrial disasters, and they are fearful of the results of company decisions to cut costs at the expense of safety. “It’s like working around a bomb,” said one LyondellBasell employee while sitting outside of the Pasadena plant’s gates. The plant itself has not been inspected since 2010, when OSHA found sufficient violations to justify a fine.

Work Is Killing Workers

The crush of work these nurses face also exemplifies a hidden side of the recent economic recovery: in industry after industry, speedups are turning work into a hazard, with increasing numbers of injuries and dangerous levels of stress. While 18.6 million people remain underemployed, millions of others are working more hours, and more intensely, than ever. This is especially true in certain industries, from oil refineries to retail to publishing, where federal data shows labor productivity has risen at double or more the national rate. A 2010 survey of people registered with Monster.com found that 53 percent of respondents had taken on additional duties since the start of the recession because co-workers had been laid off—almost all of them without any additional compensation. A 2010 report from the Center for American Progress and the Hastings Center for WorkLife Law found that overwork was a particular problem among professionals: 14 percent of women and 38 percent of men were working more than fifty hours a week. But it has become common in industrial occupations as well. "When time and a half for overtime was established by federal law, that was really a job-creation measure, so it would cost less to hire a new worker," says Mike Wright, the United Steelworkers' director of health and safety. "But starting in the late 1970s, the cost of benefits exceeded that extra pay cost, and it became cheaper to work your existing workers harder."

Railroad Suspends Union Officer For Citing Safety Concerns

J.J. Giuliano has been local chairman of the Selkirk unit of Albany, N.Y., Local 770 since 2003. Keeping his members safe is Giuliano’s top priority, and along with the leaders of the other trades at Selkirk, he sat on the shop’s safety committee. “For 10 years we made recommendations to management and for 10 years not one of them was funded by the company,” Giuliano said. “I stayed on because I wanted to look out for my guys. But at a certain point we were letting the company get away with avoiding solving safety problems.” In September 2013, Giuliano was done with the charade. He sent a letter to the plant superintendent telling him that he was quitting the committee. He listed 21 safety violations that threatened the health of IBEW members, public safety or both that had repeatedly been brought to the company’s attention and never fixed.
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