New Mine Safety Chief: The Change We Needed
Today, the U.S. Senate confirmed Joe Main—by unanimous consent—as the new leader of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
Main is a longtime advocate for safety and health in the mining industry. He worked 22 years as director of Occupational Health and Safety for the Mine Workers (UMWA). That’s a huge change from the Bush-era head of MSHA, coal-industry lobbyist Richard Stickler, who came under fire for failure to enforce mining safety laws.
Labor FY 2010 Budget Will Protect Workers. What a Concept
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told two congressional committees this week that the Department of Labor’s fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget will
restore capacity in our worker protection programs, which have languished for years.
Appearing in separate hearings before the Senate and House Appropriations committees’ Labor, Health and Human Services and Education subcommittees, Solis said the department’s budget—including a 10 percent increase for worker protection programs—will fund three priorities:
- Renewed capacity of programs that protect workers’ safety and health, pay and benefits;
- New and innovative ways to promote economic recovery and the competitiveness of our nation’s workers; and
- Carrying out programs in a way that is accountable and transparent to the public and our stakeholders.
OSHA, MSHA Move on Bush-Stalled Health and Safety Rules
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is moving forward on several new workplace safety measures that languished for years under the Bush administration. The move follows last week’s unveiling of the Obama administration’s Labor Department budget that boosts OSHA’s funding by $51 million and includes the hiring of 160 new safety inspectors.
According to the Labor Department’s regulatory agenda released yesterday, the safety agency will move on several rules stalled under Bush’s OSHA, including rules to protect workers from exposure to dangerous substances and chemicals such as silica (which can cause serious respiratory disease), diacetyl (a flavoring additive linked to “popcorn lung”) and beryllium (a light metal that can cause lung damage, especially to metal and dental workers).
Labor Department Budget Strengthens Worker Protection Enforcement
The Obama administration today unveiled its plan to fulfill a promise to make America’s workplaces safer and protect workers’ rights.
During the Labor Department’s first-ever online discussion about its budget, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said the department’s fiscal year 2010 budget, which totals $104.5 billion, will:
- Promote a “green” economic recovery;
- Begin to restore worker protection programs;
- Ensure that programs are transparent and accountable; and
- Promote diversity and stakeholder inclusion in every aspect of the department’s work.
As an example of the importance of worker protections, the budget allocates $1.7 billion in discretionary funds for worker-protection programs, a 10 percent increase from the prior year’s budget.
Workers Memorial Day 2009 Materials Ready Now
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For many of America’s workers, going to work can literally be deadly. The most recent edition of the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect shows that an average of 15 workers a day were killed on the job and each day, another 11,000 workers were injured or made ill in 2007. Overall in 2007 (the latest figures available), 5,488 workers died from workplace injuries and 4.0 million were hurt or made sick by their jobs.
Recent studies have shown that the workplace injury reports may miss as many as two out of three workplace injuries, meaning that the real toll of workplace injuries is much higher than reported.
On April 28, to honor those killed and injured on the job and to call for improved workplace safety, workers in the United States and around the world will mark Workers Memorial Day. The theme of this is “Good Jobs. Safe Jobs. Give Workers a Voice for a Change.”
After Eight Years of Bush, Can OSHA be Fixed?
The Bush administration left a lot of wreckage in its wake. The crumbling economy, the home foreclosure crisis and a broken health care system are getting most of the recent headlines and calls for immediate repair.
But for the men and women who get up and go to work every day—and want to come home alive and without injury—there is something else the Bush administration trashed that needs fixing and fixing fast—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
BushWatch: Job Safety and Health Took Big Hits
This is our second look back at eight years of BushWatch. Today we review an area where outgoing President George W. Bush’s actions have a daily, and maybe deadly, impact on men and women who go to work every day—job safety and health.
Whether it was via regulation, legislation, executive order, policy decision or inaction, Bush repeatedly carried out the wishes of Big Business—less enforcement, weaker safety laws, lighter penalties or no regulation at all.
If there was any doubt whom he served, Bush erased that when he ended decades of practice and refused to name union representatives to serve on job-safety study and advisory groups, which also include academic, professional and management representatives.
Here are just some of the lowlights. For the complete accounting, go to BushWatch and click on Health and Safety in the top box.
Black Lung Disease on the Rise
In September 2007, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) confirmed what doctors and occupational health specialists had been seeing when examining X-rays of coal miners’ lungs during the past several years. After years of decline, the rate of deadly disease had doubled and was appearing in younger and younger miners. (Click here to read our coverage of the NIOSH report.)
Black lung disease, also called pneumoconiosis, is caused by breathing in coal dust. It slowly robs victims of their ability to breath. At the time, health care experts were puzzled by the spike in black lung cases.
The basic facts suggest, as Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts said that September, either the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) was not enforcing the safety rule that set a limit on how much coal dust could be in a mine’s atmosphere (two milligrams per cubic centimeter) or the permissible level was too high, or a combination of the two.
