It’s not only in Qatar that workers are dying to build World Cup stadiums. It’s also in Brazil, but unlike Qatar, which uses largely very poor migrant laborers, these are workers empowered to take matters into their own hands: Builders at the Itaquerao Arena in São Paulo downed tools in protest at another death of […]
Tag: workplace deaths
The scourge of companies subcontracting labor in order to maximize profit continues. Tokyo Electric Power Company runs the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor. Rather than employ the cleanup workers its
We hardly need to cover the incredible corruption of FIFA. It’s only a matter of finding out how much money the Qatar sheiks and Russian oligarchs put in the pockets of FIFA executives to get th
So let’s say a large energy company, perhaps Chevron, has come into your community exploring for fuel. And let’s say that Chevron screws up and one of their gas wells explodes, kills a worker (subcontracted worker of course), and burns for six days. And let’s say you live near the explosion site. What would you […]
In yesterday’s post on the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, Joe B in comments pointed us out to the official MSHA statistics on mine deaths between 1900 and 2012. It’s remarkable.
On December 30, 1969, Richard Nixon signed the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act into law. The first comprehensive legislation in American history to protect the lives of coal miners, it came on
The Dallas Morning News, which has been outstanding on covering the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion and its aftermath, has a strongly damning report on the response to the disaster from the state of Texas. Which is nothing. Nothing has changed. This is the state’s response at year’s end: The Legislature, though it was in […]
After the Tarzeen fire and Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh over the past year, killing over 1200 workers in total, European companies subcontracting to those factories have stepped up and built a sy
On November 13, 1909, at the Cherry Mine in Cherry, Illinois, a coal car filled with hay for the mules who worked underground rolled down a track. Earlier that week, an electrical outage had struck th
Great news. I recently linked to the Center on Public Integrity’s excellent series on how coal miners are denied black lung benefits by Johns Hopkins doctors who always rule in favor of industry. Johns Hopkins has now suspended its black lung program and is investigating what has happened. This is excellent news for coal miners […]
The Center for Public Integrity is running a really great series about how coal miners get black lung from decades in the mines and then face a wall of denial of their claims far harder than any coal
On October 30, 1837, Nicholas Farwell, a train engineer toiling for the Boston and Worcester Rail Road Corporation fell off a train while at work and had his hand crushed by the train. Farwell sued th