Coshnet's Blog

Senator Maggie Carlton, chairwoman of the Nevada Senate Labor Committee, has introduced legislation to take the state OSHA program out of its home in the Business and Industry Department, in an effort to strengthen the agency. Nevada's OSHA program has been under scrutiny due to a rash of construction deaths in the past year. Carlton said that she was hoping to distance OSHA inspectors from political pressure, allowing them to do their job of protecting worker safety.

Andrew Schneider of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who has done a fabulous job of covering a variety of worker safety and health issues, reports that Ronald Kuiper, a victim of diacetyl exposure, died a day before a jury awarded him $7.5 million. But, Schneider argues, government agencies including the FDA and OSHA have done little to protect the public from the harmful effects of diacetyl.

Schneider reports that Kuiper had contacted him and thanked him for getting public attention to the issue, but said he was frustrated at the lack of federal action. As Schneider explains:

A new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that whistleblowers who point out illegal activities under a wide range of federal laws are often unprotected from retaliation. OSHA is responsible for investigating whistleblower complaints under 17 federal laws. The GAO report found that inadequate tracking of complaints and insufficient resources resulted in weak protections for whistleblowers, with only one in five complaints upheld.

Stephen Dixon, a 61 year old sanitation worker in Queens, died of a heart attack on the job this morning, according to the New York Times. He is the eighth NYC sanitation worker to die on the job in the past six years.

Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, Local 831 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was quoted in the Times as pointing to several sanitation workers who had been killed in job accidents in recent years: