An animation created by the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards shows us the speed at which the USDA is proposing for its inspectors to find fecal contamination on poultry carcasses.
It really is a chemical world, which is bad news for people with asthma. According to a recent report, at this very moment from where I write, I’m surrounded by objects and materials that contain chemicals that are known or suspected asthmagens — substances that can act as asthma triggers if inhaled.
Since 2000, major regulatory activities by OSHA do indeed slow down during a Presidential election year compared to the year preceding it.
In the final section of our new report “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” we end on a high note. We profile a number of new laws at the state and local levels to improve working conditions for Americans and protect them from serious health and safety hazards.
In our new report “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety,” we devote one section to key activities by the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress.
Injury Control & Violence
A different kind of Texas-style justice: Two nights at Austin’s Workers Defense Project
It’s Tuesday evening and as usual, the small parking lot outside the Workers Defense Project on Austin’s eastside is packed. The dusty lot is strewn with cars and pick-up trucks parked wherever they can fit and get in off the road. I’ve arrived well before the night’s activities begin, so I easily secure a spot. But my gracious guide and translator, a college intern named Alan Garcia, warns me that I might get blocked in. It happens all the time, he says.
During the last seven Presidential election years, OSHA has an interesting record of issuing new rules on worker safety issues despite the heated national campaigns.
Drug Safety
Medical marijuana progress under Obama not what advocates had hoped; recent crackdown puts patients in the middle
For years, Peter Rosenfeld was looking for an effective way to treat what doctors had diagnosed as severe and intractable migraines. He’d heard of medical marijuana, but thought it was a joke — that it was just a way for people to justify their marijuana use. Today, he’s a passionate advocate for medicinal marijuana and one of many advocates disappointed at recent federal actions.
Injury Control & Violence
Worker falls 70+ feet to his death at ConAgra mill, another at a Pepisco plant, manlifts involved in both cases
Three multi-national corporations. Three workers dead from manlift incidents. Preventing more deaths from manlifts requires comprehensive fatality investigations.
President Obama offered high praise to his regulatory czar on the day Mr. Cass Sunstein announced his resignation. It’s disappointing neither are bold enough to address the grave limits of cost-benefit analysis.