A company showered by media love and political largesse despite its horrible record.
One study showed that temps in construction and manufacturing suffer twice the rate of injuries as directly-employed workers. Clearly, OSHA needs to be updated to keep up with corporate chicanery.
Business groups opposing the new OSHA rules argued that current exposure levels were sufficient to protect workers.
Nationally, at all workplaces, one employee is killed on the job every other hour. Twelve a day. These are not all accidents. Too many are foreseeable, preventable, avoidable tragedies. With the approach of April 28, Workers Memorial Day 2017, the USW is seeking in America what workers in Canada have to prevent these deaths. That is a law holding supervisors and corporate officials criminally accountable and exacting serious prison sentences when workers die on the job.
In 2014, the last year with full statistics, 899 construction workers nationwide died from workplace injuries. The reason: loss of union strength and decline in OSHA funding. President Trump's anti-union and anti-federal spending polices promise to only make the situation worse.
The explosion at the Tesoro refinery on the outskirts of Anacortes killed seven workers. Four years later, no one has been held publicly accountable for their deaths. Refinery owner Tesoro agreed to pay millions to families of the dead, but the company continues to fight government accusations that it willfully put its workers in harm's way.
The explosion at the Tesoro refinery on the outskirts of Anacortes killed seven workers. Four years later, no one has been held publicly accountable for their deaths. Refinery owner Tesoro agreed to pay millions to families of the dead, but the company continues to fight government accusations that it willfully put its workers in harm's way.
A new report put out by Public Citizen found that in 2010, healthcare workers (including hospital staff) reported 653,900 workplace injuries and illnesses. That’s approximately 152,000 more (a 432 percent higher rate) than the industry with the second highest number of injuries—manufacturing—even though the healthcare sector is only 134 percent larger than the manufacturing sector.
The creation of OSHA proved to be one the greatest victory in American history for workplace health but OSHA’s ability to protect workers has severe limitations due to underfunding. The explosion at the West Fertilizer plant in Texas on April 17 that killed at least 14 people demonstrated the agency’s very real limitations. There are so few OSHA inspectors that it would take 129 years to inspect every workplace in the country at current staffing levels.
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