There are a lot of labor stories in my blogging queue right now. Let’s just deal with them all at once. 1. Do we need a new legal framework for food workers? Jacob Gersen and Benjamin Sachs say we do and they are correct: Take farm workers who witness the processing of infected (or “downer”) […]
Tag: workplace deaths
Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy and one of the most detestable and immoral people living in the United States, was finally indicted for a few of his many crimes yesterday. Don Blankenship, the l
The coal industry has never cared about keeping workers alive. It still doesn’t. And even when the companies are fined for their horrible workplace safety, some just refuse to pay, as this excel
On the whole, American work has become significantly safer since the establishment of OSHA in 1970. There are two basic reasons for this. First, OSHA made American work safer. Second, and probably more important, most dangerous labor in the United States has either been mechanized or outsourced. This has the advantage of saving American workers’ […]
It’s hardly shocking that the difficult conditions of modern work would lead to a rise in workplace violence as people, who often have access to high-powered weapons, snap. The workers who exper
Excellent Dallas Morning News expose on dangerous work in the Texas construction industry. More workers die here than in any other state. On average, a Texas worker is 12 percent more likely to be kil
REI (PDF) which works through North Face, another company who has their clothing made in factories where workers die.
Worker deaths in the energy industry have risen dramatically over the past five years because of the oil and fracking booms. That’s not necessary though. Better worker training would cut down on
Colin Long’s Jacobin essay on visiting the Tarzeen and Rana Plaza factory disaster sites is all worth reading, but the important part of the article is his discussion of the aftermath. For very
One big victory for corporations in recent years is keeping OSHA fines so low that their trivial cost makes fixing safety problems not worth the effort. Of course this has a predictable cost: Twenty-eight-year-old Daniel Collazo was nearly done with his shift cleaning machines at the Tribe hummus plant in Taunton, Mass. when other workers […]
North Dakota, thanks to an oil industry that continues to shirk on workplace safety. According to the AFL-CIO, the most dangerous U.S. state for workers is North Dakota, which the report calls “
I have a piece up at Bill Moyers’ site connecting the exploitation that led to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 with coal companies exploitation of labor and degradation of nature today: In recent ye