With fire season upon us and the now annual plumes of smoke everywhere, pouring into our lungs and making us forget what summer in the Northwest used to be like, the Washington Farm Bureau is making s
On July 2, 1888, the London matchgirl strike began. In the pantheon of dangerous work, we probably don’t often think of making matches. To some extent, this is because the match market has colla
On May 16, 1910, the federal government created the U.S. Bureau of Mines to investigate the terrible conditions that killed thousands of miners a year and to attempt to regulate those conditions. It w
Today is the 50th anniversary of OSHA. For years, it has not been a functional agency, the ultimate example of corporate capture and budget cuts. In 2013, it would have taken OSHA inspectors 129 years
OSHA is just a nearly non-functional regulatory agency at this point. In 2012, it had enough inspectors to inspect every workplace in America….once in every 129 years. Things have not improved s
The only time the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has even come close to living up to its potential was when Eula Bingham led the agency in the Carter years. Once Reagan got to town, he
The nation’s treatment of front line workers, from meat packers to grocery store workers, has been an atrocity in the age of COVID. We call them “heroes,” something they certainly di
Josh Eidelson on how corporations are intimidating employees to not reveal COVID infections. In the past few months, U.S. businesses have been on a silencing spree. Hundreds of U.S. employers across a